Yeah, Boof is pretty hot, so is *Kevin?*
Clockwise: Square Circuit Board Cufflinks in Blue, Jessie and Megan of Techcycled, Blue Square Circuit Board Necklace, Red Circuit Board Heart Necklace, Circuit Board Ring in green.
Techcycled is a collective of women engineers who also make jewelry out of circuit boards. All of their pieces are packaged in jewelry boxes and come with a information card on their history.
Pieces are $30-$55. Available at Fractalspin.
Fractalspin just added some hilarious gifts in time for Valentine’s Day–plush venereal diseases by Giant Microbes. Choose from chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis.
If you don’t feel like sharing a disease, there’s also sperm and egg plushies for a more traditional gift.
Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%. — ROLLINGJUBILEE.ORG
Once I read about rollingjubilee.org and realized how brilliant it was, I laughed alone in my office for like, two minutes straight. Then I went straight to PayPal and sent them funds courtesy of Fractalspin.
Aka “Pitbull in a Tutu,” Charlotte won third place at Wicker Park’s Boo-palooza, and we took home a sweet gift basket of dog delishiousness.
She then had a vet appointment and then amused many people over in Retailland (Logan and Elston strip mall), even while in traffic in the car. Hooray.
Check out these photos of all the cool stuff that came in her gift basket.
I got her when she was a puppy from Chicago Bully Breed Rescue, or CBBR as they call themselves, a rescue and fostering nonprofit.
Barack Obama is in my Facebook friend feed, and so I noticed that he updated his cover photo to this:
I’m sure it’s probably to highlight some speech, or whatnot, but it’s a terribly-composed photo and it looks like he has a bizarro bow tie or something.
So, I made a quick photoshop that made him look much cooler:
Hooray.
He hides behind layers of avatars as a general rule (“Seven,” A faux-ly named Facebook account, etc) but the man behind the Chicago record label Chocolate Industries makes his personal tastes very well known, indeed. Take Push Button Object‘s IDM with a hard dose of hip hop, Half Dozen album. Co-released with IDM stalwart Schematic, it is IDM that takes the scenic route. It feels like hip hop, ala Merck via its Machinedrum releases. And then it goes straight local hip hop with releases by Chicago-natives The Cool Kids. To make a long story short, the man knows what he likes, and when it has that sticker of his brand, you will be assured it’s genuinely something he loves and wants to share with the world.
Now we arrive at Personal Space, Chocolate’s latest take on electronic soul in the form of a guest-curated compilation. Complete with the sound of a needle hitting the record, it’s definitely retro, but the soul factor seeps through, and the “electronic” part seems a given… it’s future-forward considering the time it was released, and it transports you to a time and place that, frankly, is one in which I wouldn’t mind owning a swinging bachelor pad, complete with the highest level hi-fi available.
And here’s the thing: it’s got SOUL. I hate to be the bearer of bad news to some, but to those of you that are die-hard fans of Deadmau5, Daft Punk, and that ilk exclusively, you’re missing the point. You’re being played.
Personal Space is educational, and it’s real. It comes from the heart of someone who knows things and wants to share. Sit down and listen, and imagine yourself in the space it creates. Let it move you, let it inspire you, and go from there.
Oh, and yes: the Reader knows what’s up.
Anyone in the music industry who has to perform live understands the need for audio adapters–you just can’t get around this fact. Because of that, and because I was getting so tired of loaning adapters to the musicians and DJs I’d play alongside with, I created the Electronic Musician’s Emergency Adapters as an attempt to fix this for more people. Granted, there are people who have already created their own “first aid kit” along these lines, and that makes me happy.
However, when I find a particularly creative approach, I can’t help but share it. Yes, you’re looking at a makeup case full of audio adapters. Yes, that’s a mirror in there. This is James D. Garcia‘s solution and I find it hilariously useful and awesome. He had a day job that involved managing a warehouse full of beauty supplies, so this made sense: just as professionals within beauty have tool boxes, so do workers in the audio sciences.
There is exactly one line of dialog in this, and it kinda is totally true.
However, they all have the same problem I do.. the laptop scrunch. Let’s all agree to go back to multi-screen-iverse land and make our backs happy.
Ha! Finally someone is taking bread clips seriously!
I made a mixed-media work a while back from bread clips in the theme of Space Invaders, since I’ve been collecting them for quite a while.
“Bread Intruders”
Here’s the proposal:
A publication in this month’s BMJ Case Reports, a peer-reviewed publication of the British Medical Journal, offers a “proposal for phylogenic plastic bag clip classification”. Contributing authors include John Daniel of the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (HORG).
Proposal for phylogenic classification advances bread clip science