Tag Archives: blogs

The Daily Shaka

By Ed Fladung | March 4, 2010

Hey I’m on The Daily Shaka, a newish surfy blog that has an interesting concept and implementation. Shaka is a blog aggregator. The blog curator collects surfy rss feeds from around the web and displays a summary of the most recent post of each blog. Basically, instead of having to twittle with an rss reader or bunch of bookmarks, you can make Shaka your homepage for surf blogginess and you’ll always be served with the fresh, hotness. In addition, there’s always a featured blog that has a visual carousel appearance and a pay-it-forward karmic kick to it. The new featured blogs are chosen by the last featured blogger. So Jamie Watson of Pineapple Luv was featured, and she chose me. And so now I’m up on the featured blog spot for a few days, and I’ve submitted a blog for the feature that I’ve been gigging on lately. You’ll have to wait to see what blog I’ve chosen, it’s a good one, maybe you haven’t seen it yet.

Go check out The Daily Shaka. and thanks Jamie for the nod!

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Bookmarks for July 31st

By Ed Fladung | July 31, 2009
  • Nick Drake – River Man
    your inspiration for today. beautiful video by Tim Pope.
  • Apple: Secrecy Does Not Scale – Anil Dash
    is Apple slowly self-immolating when it screws over iphone developers with all this secrecy garbage? maven indie iphone devs are fleeing the platform in packs. is the iphone's golden years over?
  • Custom Letter — LetterCult
    holy crapola. so much juicy good typography here. loving it. inspiration for days. [via @Nybe]
  • Scientists Are Concerned About Cancer in Animals
    new nasty, virulent forms of cancer are being discovered in wild animals, that are the result of heavy carcinogenic environmental contamination. are human beings really the top of the evolutionary chain? How did cheap crap from Wal Mart become the thing we collectively care about most? [via @jimmoriarty]
  • Isolator
    my new favorite app. when you need to concentrate on something your doing in a particular application (like writing a blog post in Safari or designing something out in photoshop) just hit the command keys for this app and it hides all your other app windows and the dock and presents your current working window on a black background. hit it again to return the windows. should be built into Mac OS X.
  • Minimal Mac
    one my new favorite blogs. tons of tips on reducing the visual clutter on your desktop (both the virtual and analog ones). less is more.
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Bookmarks for July 15th

By Ed Fladung | July 16, 2009
  • Legendary Surfers: Mike Hynson
    an exhaustively awesome article about The Endless Summer's co-star Mike Hynson. great read.
  • scout & catalogue
    Bre was a creative director at a fashion retailer. when the market crashed in October or so, Bre and her man (originally from Vallarta) decided to move to Mexico, something similar to what I did. She just set up a blog, but it's got all the markings of an intimate, well-designed portrait of her experience in a new culture, in a strange land. go check it out.
  • 2 or 3 things I know
    a curated blog of beautiful things. lots of nice arty things. precious things.
  • The blue and the green | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine
    wicked optical illusion: "You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color." – I still don't believe it.
  • Rodrigo Fuenzalida : Graphic Design & Typography
    a couple of free, nicely designed fonts from a Venezuelan graphic designer. nice stuff!
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Bookmarks for July 1st

By Ed Fladung | July 1, 2009
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Bookmarks for June 19th

By Ed Fladung | June 19, 2009
  • I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel on Vimeo
    1000 frames per second video. ultra slow motion. skip to the 2 minute mark to see the block of jello bouncing (shot at 2500 fps). so amazing. I'd love to see this camera used on a fatty Teahupoo wave from inside the barrel.
  • Al Jazeera English – Focus – Iran on the brink?
    if there is only one article you read about what's happening inside iran right now, politically, read this one. amazing! Mark Levine walks through the different power structures in the government and the potential scenarios for dealing with the protests.
  • Food, Inc. Movie Site and Trailer – Hungry For Change?
    Great trailer, for what looks to be a great movie. That most people won't want to see, because the truth hurts too much. Incidentally, they used to say "you are what you eat". and us gutter punks would chime back "if you are what you eat, then we're all dead meat!" and stick up our two fingers and make the screw face like Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. The early 90s were a bright, young, innocent time. Now the refrain goes something like "if you are what you eat, than were all highly processed food products" or even "if you are what you eat, then we're all full of shit." that last one is more true than most people know.
  • Asia Times Online :: Divine assessment vs people power
    a huge article on the internal power struggle going on in Iran right now. This is just about election results. It's about a failed system of government and their attempts to stay in power: "As much as corporate media – from anywhere – has been rendered mostly irrelevant. Iranians are deploying an absolute non-stop, 24/7 thriller; a guerrilla communication redux, an ultra-raw version of history in the making via blogs – this is a nation of young bloggers – YouTube and Twitter, battling by all means necessary ultra-slow or shut down Internet, jammed phone lines going in and out, blocked chats, blocked SMS."
  • Nathan Bransford – Literary Agent: Query Letter Mad Lib
    This is an explicit how-to recipe on the proper way to put together a "query letter" for contacting potential literary agents. good advice, wish i found it first before sending out a bunch of queries. oops.
  • On Assignment: Covering Tehran – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com
    images from the Iran election protests taken by 28-year old Newsha Tavakolian, a Times freelanc photographer. These images have a very different feel from the ones we've been seeing from Getty and AP. much more intimate.
  • AgentQuery :: Find the Agent Who Will Find You a Publisher
    trying to find an literary agent to help you publish your blog book? this is a great resource.
  • Shane Lavalette: A Quiet Heaven in Vrindavan, India | GOOD
    beautiful photography by Shane Lavalette taken in India. very quiet photos. something not normally in unison with India. Shane is also the editor/curator of wicked zine Lay Flat.
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Bookmarks for June 8th

By Ed Fladung | June 8, 2009
  • Ayalon on speech: The new "axis of pragmatic forces" | Israel Policy Forum
    amazing analysis of Obama's middel east speech by Isreal's Mahjor General Ami Ayalon. a great read. – Ayalon: We are witnessing the beginning of new American diplomacy in the Middle East whereby it will no longer appear to be very, very pro-Israel, but, as was obvious in the speech, it will be more balanced. Israel has to now understand that this president really believes that there is a common denominator of moderate Arabs, Americans and Israelis. It is a new phenomenon in Middle East diplomacy because we have long believed that the US and Israel represented one side of the conflict and the Arab world and Muslims the other side. But unlike previous administrations where the world was divided by an axis of evil, particularly that of President Bush, Mr. Obama divides the world by an axis of pragmatic forces. [ via TPM]
  • Castles In L.A. | SurfingMagazine.com
    oh snaps! new movie from Taylor Steele and Dustin Humphrey: "“This is my passion project,” said Taylor Steele who was sporting a solid gash in the head from stitches he picked up during a recent trip to India. “These trips and these movies [Sipping Jetstreams and Castles in the Sky] are the films that we get to see the world in a whole new way. We take risks in making them. Travel long distances on a whim. Say yes when strangers invite us over for tea. That’s what makes them so special."
  • YouTube – Bookcast: Author Don Thompson and his new book
    Author Don Thompson in an interview with National Post talks about his book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art" – if you don't catch the shark reference, about Damien Hirst. [via @longdrivesouth]
  • View Master: Diorama Photography by Lori Nix, Jonah Samson and Grace Weston
    very cheeky sex-driven diorama photography from Jonah Samson. Love the top one, of the swimming pool.
  • Seth Godin's Blog
    Amazing reading on entrepenurship, marketing yourself and generally how to navigate the choppy waters of transitioning business to the internet. Godin's blog posts are prescient, witty and full of good advice. on publishing: "Mark this down as another job for the new economy: someone who can collate, amplify and leverage the work of writers and turn it into cash. I don't believe that there's one solution, not this time. But I'm confident that around the edges and deep into niches, there's money being made."
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Bookmarks for June 6th

By Ed Fladung | June 6, 2009
  • Horticulture Jamming | GOOD
    your word for the day: "Horticulture Jamming". yes, two words, whose counting? awesome concept.
  • SO MUCH PILEUP
    wickedly awesome graphic design artifacts and inspiration from the 60s to 80s. rediculously cool stuff here. [via Le Joy]
  • Ritz and Oreo go retro: idsgn (a design blog)
    beautiful new minimal packaging. i love how everything comes around.
  • Brand New: Bing sets New Record in Horizontal Scaling
    Microsoft's new search engine "Bing" has the fucking worst logo I have ever seen. When I saw it for the first time, my eyeballs started to twitch uncontrollably and my hand inexplicably reached for the nearest steak knife and plunged it into my eye socket.
  • the secret life of ants
    amazing video (6:37) of an excavation of an ant city. i'm pretty sure one of these days some scientist will prove that ants (and probably bees as well) have a collective consciousness (hive mind).
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Bookmarks for May 28th

By Ed Fladung | May 28, 2009
  • Hell Green
    Japan photography trip blog from Shortstraw cohort Elle. I kinda wish I was in Japan, right about now. with the Greenroom Festival coming up.
  • 100 Abandoned Houses
    haunting and beautiful collection of abandoned houses in the Detroit area. from the "about" page: "For years the area had signs advertising the redevelopment that was about to take place. It finally began to happen, with the construction of the new ballpark for the Tigers, and Ford Field for the Lions. New condos, and town homes began to appear amidst the rubble of burned out mansions turned apartments. Some of the houses were so large they became “loft condos”. As the entertainment district flourished, and Brush Park began to transform into something new, I realized the other approximately 135 square miles of Detroit was largely ignored. The excitement about Detroit’s “rebirth” took center stage, while much of the rest of the city was becoming largely abandoned" [via Good]
  • Introducing Typekit « The Typekit Blog
    all browsers will soon support a wide range of fonts. but using fonts on the web (in most cases) is a direct violation of the font's copyright, as linking to a font gives the viewer a direct way to download the font . It's like using a font to print a book and then including the font with the printed book. Enter TypeKit, a web app that designers and developers subscribe to. The service has a collection of typefaces that the dev can link to in their jscript and TypeKit handles all the background witch's brew of delivering the font to the end user's screen, without that iser being able to download the font package. Interesting idea! I wonder what the tech looks like behind the service and the susbcription fees.
  • secret forts: Domestic Furniture/Domestic Architecture: Roy McMakin.
    fine art, architecture and furniture all clash here. great work! that green staircase? i'll have one, please.
  • greg.org: Obamas slowly replacing staid art in the White House with modern art
    How cool is this?: "According to the very slowly reported story [1] in the Wall Street Journal, the Obamas have been selecting modern and contemporary art for the White House from among pieces in national and museum collections. The artists they requested includes several African American artists, including the wonderful DC abstractionist Alma Thomas, whose paintings from the Hirshhorn are already installed in the White House's private quarters. But they've also chosen plenty of white contemporary artists, too, though the Journal obviously doesn't identify them as such: works by Ed Ruscha, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson and Jasper Johns all came from the National Gallery, for example." – cue the old white guy rage
  • Guggenheim Guadalajara: Not a Dead Deal? – CultureGrrl
    The Guggenheim Foundation has been planning to build a new museum in Guadalajara for the past 7 years or so. A museum to rival Bilbao's. but apparently it's dead in the water, or close to it. sucks, the arch drawing is beautiful. and it would have been awesome to have modern art museum within 2000 miles of where i live.
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Bookmarks for May 24th

By Ed Fladung | May 24, 2009
  • Kottke: Our soon-to-be outdated beliefs
    “Attitudes about human treatment of animals is something that will likely change in my lifetime. At some point domestication and consumption will move from something that we do because our ancestors did to something that just doesn't fit into modern society. In a cultural sense, humans don't belong to the animal kingdom anymore; we're not normal predators that need to kill animals to survive. Soon we'll have the technology to grow enough meat in factories to satisfy even the most hardcore meat-eaters. Once this happens, it will be difficult to justify the continued imprisionment and slaughter of cows, pigs, chickens, and the like simply so that we can eat what we like rather than what we need to survive.” – This totally got my noggin spinning!
  • Hecuba "Suffering" [Official Video] HD on Vimeo
    my good homie, Isaiah Seret, directs the video for the new Hecuba single "Suffering". Great concept video. lensed by Arthur Jaffa. cameo from Devendra Barnhart.
  • Recession Design
    "An event-provocation on the theme of “DIY DESIGN” that ironically (but not too much) presents a way of “designing” that goes beyond current trends and returns the object’s essential form and function to the forefront. Recession Design is a collection of objects created using everyday DIY products that are processed and assembled using common utensils and accessories. Featuring a design that is clean but not banal, essential but not meager, the objects show how a good project can result in high-level design, even with the use of readily available materials and utensils." – Super awesome concept, would be even more revolutionary if they gave instructions on each of the designs.
  • mañanarama: Notes on failed development, bogus modernization, and other urban or architectural dreams deferred.
    "Early in that manic-depressive decade, the promises of neoliberalism were materialized in blue-hued mirrored glass and pink limestone. After remaining empty for years, The Hotel de México — a desarrollismo era icon-to-be turned massive structural carcass — was scheduled to reopen as a new WTC, complete with a Hilton and a J.C. Penny’s. Mini-skyscrapers and chain restaurants sprung up on lots left empty in the aftermath of the '85 earthquake, inner-city factories turned into Costcos, and the decadent movie theaters of my childhood, with their sticky floors and rat infestations and mid-movie intermissions, became proper multi-screen cineplexes with soda machine refills and self-service candy buffets stuffed with the once-exotic treats imported from the States. We were becoming modern, global, North American, gringos, and it was glorious. Soon enough, the new life modernization injected turned Frankenstein on us." [via Intersections]
  • in Bb 2.0 – a collaborative music/spoken word project
    human beings and the internets are awesome. this made my day!
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Bookmarks for April 28th

By Ed Fladung | April 28, 2009
  • Where did this thing come from? The Swine. Influenza in Mexico City
    interesting read. conspiracy theory-laiden blog ramblings. if you're sick of the 24/7 news coverage that still manages to say nothing new.
  • jQuery for Designers – Tutorials and screencasts
    so you're a web designer (i.e. not really a programmer), you know your way around xhtml, css and can even hack your way through php enough to get your designs up and running in WordPress (i'm basically describing myself) but you javascript gives you the heebies. Well, this is the site for you (me). lots of good tutorials on integrating the jquery framework into your sites. Incidentally, I rarely see cool websites nowadays that aren't using some kind of jscript framework.
  • Kim Høltermand – Photography
    beautiful landscape and architecture photography. I'd love to see these printed large. and the flash-based site is minimal and awesome. great design/programming.
  • Should I Be Worried About Swine Flu?
    statistics don't lie
  • "Cuban Skateboard Crisis" a 2007 Documentary
    awesome docu on skateboarding in Cuba. if you're not on it already, Glen Friedman is killing it on his blog, go grab the rss. i know i sound like a broken record, but he is on it.
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Bookmarks for April 26th

By Ed Fladung | April 26, 2009
  • Look & Sea: A Little Experimentation Never Hurt Nobody
    and even more alaia-madness. these are some guys who are experimenting with various different forms of wooden finless shapes. some of the longest and thickest boards i've ever seen. beautiful rides in this video, it gets really good around the 10 minute mark, some beautiful alaia riding, some true bending of the plank.
  • Under the Sun Surf Film Blog: Alaia Sliding in Cardiff
    keeping on the alaia page, here's some recently past footage of Cyrus Sutton sliding on an alaia, from his blog, which for some reason hadn't made it into my rss folder. that's all changed now.
  • Look at this fucking hipster
    one of my current guilty pleasure websites. kinda takes what the cobra snake was doing and distills it even further. the captions are the clincher. down in mexico hipster fashion is 3 years behind (at least in my neck of el campo) and mostly limited to emo styles. so when i’m feeling a bit too far removed from the big city, I check on this blog. eggcelent.
  • Peter Funch – photographer
    great conceptual photography. Funch plays with the concept of time and the decisive moment in his work, among other themes. [via ncbeets's tweet]
  • How to Save Newspapers (Or, Why the NYT Should Acquire Twitter) – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org
    great article and he's dead on. The New York Times is in a precarious position, either charge ahead full steam or die swimming, like the rest of its peers. The good thing about the NYT is that they are the most forward looking news rag and buying twitter isn't a long shot by any stretch. Very interesting.
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Bookmarks for March 2nd

By Ed Fladung | March 2, 2009
  • Tierney Gearon's "Exposure" exhibit
    i'm really digging on the in-camera double-exposure photographs of Tierney Gearon. Amazing stuff. Some of them combine to create images where it's hard to tell which photo is which. really nice. [via every photography blog]
  • Epic Adventures
    Josh and Jocelyn, two youngerish people (not sure how old you guys are?!). They've both just quit their jobs and are getting ready to come down to Mexico to scout around for a new place to live. And their documenting it all on their blog. very cool. definitely worth checking in on them. I really hope they document the highs and lows in their adventure. Interesting experiment.
  • Christopher Hewitt
    A portfolio site for a Director/Designer/Photographer. Site design by Suprb. I really like the super minimal sites these guys do. Lots of javascript going on in this site and lots of "scaffolding" content. Sometimes the text re-wrapping is a bit disorientating, but I really like the one-page feel.
  • ZumoDrive – Hybrid Cloud storage for all your documents and media
    pretty bad-ass personal cloud file storage. check out the demo. amazing piece of software. this is how google's G-drive should work once it finally arrives.
  • The Crisis of Credit Visualized
    "The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California." – incredible animated presentation to explain those big scary words we've all heard recently: sub-prime mortgage, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, etc….
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Bookmarks for February 20th

By Ed Fladung | February 20, 2009
  • Santa Barbara Edhat | Shaping Bay
    great article on up-and-coming Santa Barbara shaper Ryan Lovelace. Ryan is making some really nice hulls. me wants to buy. me wants it now.
  • UNEARTHED 2006
    "Graham Bury and Danielle Rubi’s exquisitely rendered photographic portraits combine a style that is more 1906 than 2006 with a large-scale format that is innovative and contemporary. Employing the antique Van Dyke process Bury and Rubi unearth regional notables and elevate them to the status of cultural icons. At once a photographic exhibit and a site-specific installation, the seventeen images of Unearthed hang in an idyllic garden setting, each piece suspended from its own freestanding armature." – looks like a beautiful project.
  • Sweet sweet sugared Pepsi Throwback
    "PEPSI WITH REAL SUGAR COMING TO USA!!!" this is awesome news. I f*cking hate high fructose corn syrup. i've been dying to try red bull cola, which is also made with sugar and has cardamon and ginger much like India's Thumbs Up which for my money is the best cola available.
  • The Art of M. S. Corley
    diverse, amazing illustration styles on display. especially like the "alternate universe" book cover series. so nice.
  • NewerTech miniStack v2
    I had one of those Lacie Big Disks, the 1 Terabyte version that has two 500gb drives in it. and then thing went on the fritz, so i salvaged the drives, the data was mostly all backup data. The rub is that I couldn't find hard drive enclosures for the two IDE uATA drives that has FireWire. most enclosures either don't have a fan (bad) or are USB2.0 (worse). I spent about 4 hours combing the internet and came up with nothing. Until this. This enclosure from Newer Tech fits IDE drives, has FireWire and is shaped like a Mac Mini. and it's $50!
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Bookmarks for February 12th

By Ed Fladung | February 12, 2009
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avthentic

By Ed Fladung | January 6, 2009

avthentic
photos by Rudy Jacques

I ran across the french-language avthentic blog yesterday. Lots of juicy stuff going on over there and I really dig his aesthetics. It’s written by Rudy Jacques to document a french surf culture-based surf film he’s making of the same name. The Van’s blog did an awesome interview with Rudy and you can see an example of his deft storytelling skillz over over at Rudy’s vimeo account in a short entitled Things. In addition to great analogyish photos Rudy has a pretty in depth english-language interview with Nathan Oldfield, creator of Seaworthy1. Added to the rss reader for sure, I look forward to seeing how this film develops.

  1. which I have yet to see, if anyone could float a copy down mexico way ↩
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