OHAI! LOOK! Another Republican who doesn’t *get* Twitter, the Internet – or even Dictionaries

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On Wednesday March 27, 2016, MSNBC talking head Jose Diaz-Balart had on some slimeballs from the #NeverTrump ‘movement,’ namely Rory Cooper. In a clip, Rory used what I would call a bad choice of words, and used the term “Ground Zero” to refer to upcoming efforts – specifically in California – to halt The Donald’s stomp to the Republican nomination this Summer. Now I’m no Drumpf apologist, far from it – I’m on the polar opposite side of the political spectrum, easily. But for a supposed “communications” strategist, that’s a term you shouldn’t use, especially not in #NeverTrump language. It’s simple: The Donald is associated with New York City real estate aka buildings. The Donald absolutely crushed G.W. Bush’s broheim Jeb! at Republican debates for his brother who “kept us safe [after 9/11]” – see here and here and here. Ted Cruz repeatedly berated Trump for his “New York values”…Continue Reading
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Internet Bitch

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Those who follow the Life and Times of Nick Normal know I’ll be returning to NYC within the month. In my mind it’s “business as usual” upon my return. By that I mean I know better what I want from the city and what to expect – having lived there for nearly 5 years already, and I don’t consider myself not living there now, simply away on sabbatical. There aren’t many things to surprise me there anymore; it’s more about coming to terms with living in a city of constant activity, and thriving on that energy and escalating it whenever possible. However every now and then there are phenomenons you simply never knew about which are consistent in their delivery and message. My love for Queens notwithstanding, I’ll admit usually these phenoms reside in Brooklyn. Meet ninjasonik! Go figure as soon as I return to NYC they go on tour,…Continue Reading

live on the internets

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You can watch me work today, painting a wall in the Location One gallery. Will take a few hours and I’ll enjoy a few breaks on the screen for ya. Image to the right shows my paint bucket and basic tools strewn about. I’ll probably lower the angle a bit so you get a bit of roller in the face. [livestream here]
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internet coincidence

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So I just had a weird case of internet coincidence. Where I work, we have presented a few talks by Mike Godwin, who is currently a research fellow at Yale University. Anyhow, I was trolling through some of our archives, saw his name and that led me to look up something-or-other related to him; I don’t think I found what I was looking for, but I did find a wikipedia entry about an adage – Godwin’s Law – that he coined in 1990. The law states: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. My first reaction was, ‘Cmon, Bollocks!’ I’ve been on the nets for a looooooong time now, and while I can admit seeing a good number of discussions and threads break down to this language and verbal assaults, I can’t say it’s a predominant aspect of online threads.…Continue Reading

Friends, Cardinals… how we think the internet

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so last night I went over to visit my friends Josh and Ashley at Ashley’s house on Carlsbad off South Gravois. we sat on their upper porch for a few hours talking about crime in St. Louis, our run-ins with petty criminals, and attempted to call just about everyone in our mobile phones to offer an extra ticket to the Cardinals vs. Marlins game last night at Busch Stadium. There weren’t any takers. They don’t know what they missed, because it was one of the best baseball games I have seen, ever. Chris Duncan hit a first-pitch pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game 2-2 and began a four-run rally to put the Cardinals up 5-2! All four runs that inning were spectacularly played! And Duncan’s home run was a firecracker. The instant you heard the crack of the bat you knew it was…Continue Reading

An Astroturfing Amazon Executive Blocked Me on Twitter After I Asked if They Could Survive on Minimum Wage

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(This blog was drafted ~one month ago — I’ve attempted to get the person at the heart of this story time to reply before publication, but they have not commented thus far.) First a tour of LIC! I’ve lived in Long Island City for 14+ years. I was originally attracted to its town-like feel, with its immediate proximity to the ‘big city’ of Manhattan just across the Queensboro Bridge. At the time I moved here other than the “Cititower” the next tallest building — at a whopping twelve storeys — was the historic clocktower at the foot of the borough’s namesake bridge (a clocktower it should be noted that developers wanted to demolish, but have since resigned to building a 68-storey tower looming over the clocktower after the clocktower gained landmark status). The neighborhood was filled with two or even one-storey warehouse buildings; buildings in the neighborhood that were five or six storeys high were tall — like…Continue Reading

Intel 4004 CPU backup assets

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Last June I stumbled upon some high-res Intel 4004 CPU shots circa 1971 that were stored on MIT’s servers; the shots have since gone missing from MIT (booooo!) but thankfully the Wayback Machine captured all of them and have backups online (possibly served from Canada): https://web.archive.org/web/20160312132053/http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/2009-4004/i4004-schematic.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20160312131926/http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/2009-4004/4004-masks-composite.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20160312131920/http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~mcnerney/2009-4004/4004-composite-photo.jpg Thank you Good Internet for being good when you are good.

Yet Another Blog Post about the Geographic Center of NYC

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OK so I was tipped off to contemplating this phenomenon – where is the geographic center of the five boroughs of New York City? – when someone passingly mentioned needing a convergence spot later this year for a project I’m involved with. I had considered this question before, but never with such tools-precision or concern for logistics – planning for something takes a lot more strategy than simply thinking about something. I did some googling and of course there are other sources that have drilled down into the subject, from news sites to blogs like this one. For starters there’s this New York Times article from nearly 11 years ago (seek to the final Q&A for the relevant text). It makes an interesting distinction between the population center and the geographic center – noted as “on Stockholm Streetbetween [sic] Wyckoff Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue.” Basically in front of the…Continue Reading

Hackers 20th Anniversary Party

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This whole post is really just an excuse to embed – and re-watch, and re-re-watch – the Wipeout XL gameplay video at the end. That said, The year was 1995. Dial-up internet was slowly seeping into homes across the country, floppy disks were the primary mechanism of storing digital information, and Rollerblades were en vogue. It was also the year that Hackers was released in theaters, after which the world would never be the same again. Hackers – the movie – recently celebrated it’s 20th anniversary in style in NYC. Here are some images including one of yours truly: see the full photoset here. The game being played was Wipeout XL for the PS1 – back then known solely as “PlayStation.” The track was Talon’s Reach which you can see at the 3:00 mark in the video below (after opening sequence, class & team selection, etc). “Improve reaction time! Red…Continue Reading

take a tour of Cayuga Park, #SanFrancisco

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I recently took a tour of Cayuga Park, a public park in the southern part of San Francisco, and gandered jaw-dropped at the wooden sculptures of parks worker Demetrio Braceros. Here’s my recap for the Everyhere Logistics blog. UPDATE: Knowing how these things could potentially disappear, I’ve decided to reblog/archive the original post below. It was one week ago today that we launched our Kickstarter campaign to explore America’s creative diaspora. A contingent of the team was holed up in the Outer Mission of San Francisco processing updates to all our accounts (like us on Facebook! follow us on Instagram and Twitter!). Already eyeballs-deep in Kickstarter page refreshes and a deluge of social media updates (including intra-likes, retweets, and hearts), the team was starting to fade; three cups of Ritual coffee only went so far. Then suddenly, the Internet went down. The router lay buried behind a mountain of ephemera…Continue Reading

From #Ferguson to #Everyhere, subscribe to the We Live Here podcast | #StLouis

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I was not surprised but unaware-and-thus-surprised to hear of St. Louis Public Radio’s production, We Live Here, formed in the aftermath of the issues swirling around Ferguson, MO. We Live Here explores the issues of race, class and history that led to the emotional eruption in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson. STLPR reporters Tim Lloyd and Emanuele Berry, along with editor Shula Neuman, will shepherd the entire newsroom on a year-long exploration of the issues and conflicts that got us to this point. I say “not surprised” because of course it made sense to develop a podcast and program around the issues that lead to protests in Ferguson; but I say “unaware-and-thus-surprised” because as a St. Louisan who lives afar now, but stays tuned in, I hadn’t even heard of the podcast until I was back in the Lou and dialed in to 90.7 KWMU. The…Continue Reading

down the Bookmobile rabbit hole

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The Reanimation Library is a long-term “project-in-residence” at Proteus Gowanus. The project-library describes itself as “an independent presence library.*” The asterisk leads you to the following text: *Presence library is a mistranslation of the German word for reference library, Präsenzbibliothek. In addition to being a non-circulating collection, the library encourages IRL encounters with actual books and actual humans. Non-circulating books are simply books that must be used on-site in the space that provide them, but in Reanimation’s case the “collection of books … have fallen out of routine circulation and been acquired for their visual content.” Basically, in all likelihood your local library won’t have these books on their shelves, or even in their “stacks.” (That said, the book is actually quite common in NYC-area libraries, but once you’re outside the boroughs’ influence you’ve got to go quite far to find it.) I’d estimate the collection to be at least…Continue Reading

plenty of orange to go ’round

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the Internet Archive has upload 2.6Million – and counting – images from books dating from 1500 to 1922, effectively expanding the public domain. Collage artists also should rejoice. The metadata is pretty expansive too. Not precise, or accurate, but expansive. For example a search of the word ‘orange’ returns these results. Click back up to the user photostream for the unfiltered archive. Wow. via BBC

cover photo with @boxysean | #fame

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Proof that I go outside, here’s a paparazzi photo of me with Sean McIntyre (whom I also posted about yesterday) discussing his all-seeing counter-surveillance watchr project, snagged from the ITP homepage. (Do ppl still say ‘homepage’ – Did I just say ‘ppl’?) The photos on that site load from some database; I probably could have viewed the source code, used wget to snatch all the JPEGs, browse the files and find the image without the navigation overlay, but that’s not nearly as fun as hitting Ctrl+R 400 times until the image you want loads and hitting ‘Print Scrn.’ (Ys srsly.) (OH forget it here’s the image) Of note: I’m not saying the database is biased or anything, but that image of Hannah pops up a LOT more often than mine. Modern internet connex are great; I remember when big-size background images took 5-10 seconds each to load. Nowadays things are…Continue Reading

POSHSPLOSION!

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Isn’t the Internet a wonderful place: PS – I made this.

a thing or two about Irish handball courts

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(above photos found on teh Internets) All the handball courts around NYC and by extension across America owe tribute to the sport of Gaelic Handball whose origins date back to the 13th and 14th centuries in Ireland, and whose rules were standardized in the 18th century. (above two photos from Flickr) Of course various forms of a “hand ball” game date back to BC, with various forms being found around the globe. But the modern version you might see played at a site such as the West 4th Street Court Facilities (two pictures above) are particularly indebted to their Irish cousin-sport. I never knew! Until I had discussions with West Kerry-based artist Andrew Duggan about his exhibition which is imminently ending (tomorrow!) at the Irish Arts Center on Manhattan’s west side. A site-specific video artist, I can only hope this video gets another NYC screening, because it really has a…Continue Reading

LOTS more CRASS content – got some Punks up in arms

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[full photoset on my Flickr] So the CRASS art exhibition is up at Andrew Roth Gallery in the Upper East Side (until March 18), and it has some people up in arms (namely, the “Godfather of Hipsterdom”, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of VICE and now of Street Carnage acclaim – I actually want to say thank you Gavin for tracking down some of this content, namely the videos below, it’s really good stuff.). I guess, specifically, the “commercial” angle of the gallery has some people upset – frankly, I don’t care. I didn’t go there to buy anything, not only because I know I can’t afford it, but because I wouldn’t want to buy anything they had. I went there to see things I had never seen before and would probably never get the chance to see again, because in the 80s and most of the 90s (when I “grew up“)…Continue Reading

to ALL of YOU from me (and Google Blacklist)

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If you’re looking for a last-minute gift card idea, might I recommend the Google Black Christmas card generator – constructed from words that google’s instant search will not recognize or filter results for. While bringing up issues of censorship and content filtering (and I did find myself scratching my head to some of these words), there are of course other search engines, and the Internet remains largely unfiltered (at least in my country). full list of filtered words is available at 2600

World Maker Faire megapost recap

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SO! The World Maker Faire is over. Sad but true. I didn’t snap off as many pictures as the Bay Area faire because this time around in Queens I was offered the opportunity to be an area manager. A completely different perspective on the faire, and it was completely worth it. I had over 100 projects directly under my belt, along with my cohort co-manager Tyler. We were given Zone A, or the New York Hall of Science itself. Around 4 acres of interior space spread out over 3 floors with half-floors and mezzanines and halls and corridors, it was definitely a challenge. We didn’t have bicycles or forklifts or other vehicles to get around, and expected variables like wireless internet or even electricity were challenging at times. But we pulled it off, and we rocked it, frankly. The weather outside was nice all the way through – on the…Continue Reading

St. Louis in 3D

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Having just uploaded an anaglyph video myself to Vimeo, someone put it in a 3d channel, that I looked at and clicked to watch this video, only to be surprised that it’s my hometown of St. Louis, MO! Pretty nifty. And yes indeed viewing 3d over the internet does work – maybe it’s a monitor refresh-hertz thing, but I found if I’m a certain distance from the screen the glasses translate the image correctly; move forward or back and they didn’t seem to work as well. Probably something with how the eye perceives, then flips, and how the brain is cross-wired. ISN’T SCIENCE GRAND!

DIY satellites, craft vans, loundbang and anaglyph AV projections – the 5g5s-th Dorkbot NYC

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One of the more diverse and eclectic dorkbot presentations in recent memory (look at what was parked outside versus what you saw inside!), the May 2010 installment – officially labelled the 5g5sth installment – featured homemade satellites, craft vans, computer-assisted composition and live music, and finally anaglyph audio-visual projections. As always Dorkbot NYC is held at the incredible Location One non-profit gallery and performance space; and big-ups to Levi for running the show! Song Hojun made a special presentation, in town from South Korea. His project, the Open Source Satellite Initiative seeks to plant a homemade satellite in low-orbit, and talk back via blinking (in morse code) super LEDs: Nick Didkovsky presented some JMSL-language computer composition software that he wrote, which creates unpredictable scores, some of which were performed live by loudbang: Julia Vallera is a Parsons MFA candidate and converted a Ford Tuscany van into her current social practice…Continue Reading

cookie memery (and other laughs)

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I don’t know why… I just don’t know why, but shit like this is sooooooo funny to me. It’s so ludicrous, so ridiculous, and downright geek. It hurts: Anyhow, now that that’s over with, here are some other visual web-laughs that have been stirring about: Conspiracy of the school and paper conglomerates! LOL!: Leave it up to Fenway: the FIRST jpeg published on the internet: click for larger version, this chart is AWESOME: I love the “learn to speak European”:
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recent delicious bookmarks, May 3 through May 15

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These are my bookmarks for May 3 through May 15: pictures of boomboxes – yes! WiiSpray.com – genius retro NES gaming device – does it have video output? LOL! Art-O-Mat closing – LIC arts space closing at the end of May Magic Eight Ball CGI – All signs point to ME! Queens Art Express – art around, through, in, Queens London Shop Fronts – it is what it is Apple Bans BitTorrent Software | TorrentFreak – Next, Apple plans to ban computers from being used, for anything. top-10-vintage-batman-toys-for-your-inner-boy-wonder – yes. yes they are. plus minus gif – is there a purpose to this gif? Paypal uses it, now CNN, and other big sites. what does it MEAN? What is in the Diseases Database? Diseases Database – disease database. not lots of information here, more links than anything. Welcome | MagCloud – another POD, maybe better than lulu Fffvvound’s Blog –…Continue Reading
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recent delicious bookmarks, April 28 through May 2

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These are my bookmarks for April 28 through May 2: NYFA Current – Art News for artists and all those who support them – sorry I missed this. Make: Online : Amazing miniature midtown Manhattan – manhattan in miniature play him off, keyboard cat – another. cowboys collapse – i love how the players keep their helmets on. instinct! Play him off, keyboard cat – internet. so weird. Cow-Ard Kenobi – http://www2.b3ta.com/host/creative/55741/1218725891/coward.jpg FREE "DANGER" SIGNS – INDUSTRIAL SIGNAGE – good find Pentagon uses Facebook, Twitter to spread message – Army brass are on the tip CSS Tools: Reset CSS – I guess this is one of the more popular reset codes (I still like the Yahoo one) hipster blog – it's only getting better and better NYTimes art review by Holland Cotter – I should try and go see this, or rather, I missed this! internet balls – break it…Continue Reading

goodbye *sniff* GeoCities

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By this time I’m certain everybody whom this news is important to has heard that GeoCities will be closing down later this year (reports Yahoo!, who owns GeoCities). With the closing of GeoCities there is the little death of a piece of the Internet. GeoCities has been around since 1994 and I think I was one of the first 3,000 people to sign up, I shit you not. Way before Tripod or Angelfire I was dumping data on my GeoCities account, in an early attempt to organize net-connected music and counter-culture activists in the St. Louis scene. I was a freshman in high school and actively involved with anarchist and socialist circles in St. Louis, and used the birthing Internet as a way to connect with like-minded thinkers and activists all over the country; I set up a page for the St. Louis chapter of the Industrial Workers of the…Continue Reading