Accidental art

RIP John Baldessari

A small collection of artworks by John Baldessari, an amazing artist who died yesterday. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, A Brief History of John Baldessari is worth watching too.

Painting of hand-lettered text: Tips for Artists Who Want To Sell. Generally speaking, paintings with light colors sell more quickly than paintings with dark colors. Subjects that sell well: Madonna and child, landscapes, flower paintings, still lifes (free of morbid props dead birds, etc.), nudes, marine pictures, abstracts, and surrealism. Subject matter is important: it has been said that paintings with cows and hens in them collect dust while the same paintings with bulls and roosters sell.
Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell. 1966–1968. “John Baldessari never touched this painting. He did not paint it. He did not write the text.”

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RIP Joe Frank

One of the great radio voices is gone. This is from Time- Old from a collection of Hearing Voices on PRX.

If billions of years preceded our existence on Earth, billions of years will surely follow after our existence as well. So that our life here is like one flash of a strobe light. The wink of an eye. And if your life is merely a microscopic blip in the vast dimension of time, is its importance to you just an illusion?

Also worth a listen: Dreamers on Unfictional

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Mapzen Exit Interview

I gave an “exit interview” to the Civicist blog, talking about the Mapzen shutdown.

The code and data were always designed to outlive the company … basically we were always working on open geo primarily, and a lot of that work feels more durable than any particular company.

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Introducing smol-slowtv

This year for xmas I made Raspberry Pi video players for everyone in my family, so they could share my love for BergensBanen minutt for minutt HD:

When the Pi boots up, it updates its time using ntpdate, pulls down any updates from this git repo, then plays back starting from a specific timestamp based on the current UTC time. This allows for a communal slow TV viewing experience.

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Another big Twitter day

You may have heard that today the FCC voted against Net Neutrality rules. During the deliberations Republican Commissioner Michael O’Rielly said:

Clearly there are cases today, and many more that will develop in time, in which the option of a paid prioritization offering would be a necessity based on either technology or needs of consumer welfare. I for one see great value in the prioritization of telemedicine and autonomous car technology over cat videos. (1:43:20 into the C-Span archive)

My response on Twitter seems to have struck a chord:

This is now more popular than my previous big day on Twitter and sadly they’re both about things breaking on the Internet.

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The digital hippies want to integrate life and work—but not in a good way

WeWork as the new company town:

In WeWork’s future, the hastily privatised public space is returned to citizens. However, it comes back as a commercial service provided by a lavishly funded data company, not as a right. Meetup’s civil society will keep on talking, inside WeWork’s buildings. But the struggle against alienation will now consist of applying even more data analytics and nudging to the tortured souls of overworked cognitive workers, who, in escaping alienated workplaces in the comfort of makerspaces and face-to-face meetings, have discovered that the workplaces have colonised their non-work lives instead.

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On Behalf of Life

I helped build a website with the Other EPA encouraging you to submit a Public Comment on the EPA’s draft 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, which presently has no mention of Climate Change.

The deadline to submit your Public Comment is tonight, 11:59pm ET!

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Never Use Futura

Khoi Vinh on the book Never Use Futura:

I’m so happy to see this new book by designer, writer, and historian Douglas Thomas all about the typeface Futura which, it’s worth noting, predated Helvetica by three full decades—and it looks as beautiful and timely as ever.

Futura is probably my favorite typeface that ships with macOS by default. It’s one of the few bundled with an OS with more weights than just Regular and Bold.

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