Thom Yum

Thom Yum is not my name, but I seriously love Thom Yum soup.

998 notes

life: Born Robert Zimmermann, Bob Dylan borrowed his name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas — an apt homage, given Dylan’s status as the bard of the ’60s protest movement. Both politically and artistically courageous, Dylan first took on the establishment with folk-inflected — yet razor-sharp — songs like “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” but throughout a career marked by regular reinvention, he has steadfastly refused to subjugate his own muse to anyone else’s cause or expectations.  (read more — Heroes of the 1960s) Actually, most biographers cite the Gunsmoke character Matt Dillon as the original inspiration. He later changed the spelling to match the poet.

life:

Born Robert Zimmermann, Bob Dylan borrowed his name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas — an apt homage, given Dylan’s status as the bard of the ’60s protest movement. Both politically and artistically courageous, Dylan first took on the establishment with folk-inflected — yet razor-sharp — songs like “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” but throughout a career marked by regular reinvention, he has steadfastly refused to subjugate his own muse to anyone else’s cause or expectations. 

(read more — Heroes of the 1960s)

Actually, most biographers cite the Gunsmoke character Matt Dillon as the original inspiration. He later changed the spelling to match the poet.

7 notes

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391 Plays
Mighty Good Road
Squarepusher cover: Exciton (Quasiparticle Remix)

mightygoodroad:

Have you heard of Squarepusher? He’s an electronic music savant who performs with a bass guitar and a laptop, so mostly only undernourished drum-and-bass types have heard of him. If Starship’s “We Built This City” is on your iPod, you probably haven’t heard of Squarepusher. 

But we thought Squarepusher’s frenetic instrumental Exciton should be unplugged and performed with washboards, spoons, kazoos and stuff. Why? Well, because. You might have to listen a few times to get the why, but just because. Download it any of these ways here and enjoy:

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And you know what? Since the electronic crowd is so remix-y, we thought some people might like to download the stems and go to town. Like, physically go to town and do the ol’ remixing thing. So we’ve thrown in each instrument on separate WAV files to download and even the artwork, if you want to remix that too. Download a big package of that here.

0 notes

This is the second film in a series of golf tips I produced with Bruce Brian Billings. Working with Bruce can be tough. He’s very mercurial, and you’re never quite sure if he’s actually going to instruct you on golf. But the final product is always rewarding, and I definitely come away feeling like I learned something about myself. Or at least something about Bruce.

1,260 notes

seldo: This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it. The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot: Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph: Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

seldo:

This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.

The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:

Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:

Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?

Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

0 notes

Investor Approved

Here’s a gif custom-made for the Internet. Share wherever someone might be questioning the feasibility of creative financial derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. Should we leverage our assets 50:1? 100:1?