As if x-mas wasn’t close enough, office Max has a pretty damn cool game where you put your face on a dancing elf and watch it dance. Great time waster for those lame afternoons at work: www.elfyourself.com
A blog by Raul Coto Batres.
Archives for the year of: 2007
Watch as this amazing duo play their instruments creating an amazing mix thats just incredible. If these guys ever come out with an album, I’ll be there to buy it!
The guys over at Sounds Familyre are putting together a nice compilation of Christmas songs. The songs are remakes of classics as-well as originals played by Sufjan Stevens, Danielson and Soul-Junk, just to name a few. They will be releasing 1 song each day for 13 days, so make sure to go back for your daily fix. The songs are available for download at the Sounds Familyre Blog.
Here are two of my favorite tracks:
Christmas Eve Nite by Danielson
[audio:xmaseve.mp3]
We Wish You A Merry Christmas by Sufjan Stevens
[audio:wishyou.mp3]
via Stereogum.
What the heck is a Keepon you may ask? Keepon is a small yellow japanese robot designed by Hideki Kozima to study social interaction mainly amongst kids but also adults. This small cute yellow robot has been recently featured in Spoon’s newest music video for “Don’t You Evah” as a Japanese scientist takes the robot to the streets of Japan to see how people react. See if you can spot the band members throughout the video:
Just today Flickr, one of the best online photo sharing sites, has introduced online photo editing capabilities. They partnered with Picnik to provide the tools necessary to make simple yet handy and fun changes to your pictures.
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Once you click on the ‘Edit Photo’ button on top of any image you will be taken to this screen. From here you can crop, rotate, change the exposure, sharpen or fix red eyes just to name a few. Under the ‘Create’ tab, you add fun photoshop like effects, text, and frames to your pictures. Some of these features are only available under a premium service which is almost as much a year as your Flickr subscription but there is plenty of free options make your pictures look their best. Flickr even gives you the option to save your changed image as a different version and keep the original, very handy for archival purposes.
Overall its a great addition to an already great photo service. Make sure to check it out.
My friend’s band just recently released their new album “The Musician” and they have used one of my pictures for the cover. The band, Looking Glass Wars is an alternative indie rock band from Westchester NY. Brandon, their singer is a good friend of mine that I met years ago while designing a website for another friend’s band.
The cover they used was a photograph I took back in 2006 in a alley near City Hall in NYC.
The album is now on sale in iTunes or you can listen to some of their tracks on MySpace.
Looking Glass Wars – She’s Mad, Madly in Love
[audio:shesmad.mp3]
Stay tuned as the band will be doing a special promotion on x-mas and we will be doing a fun shoot for it. Make sure to check out the band and support them by buying their music.
Links:
Looking Glass Wars – MySpace
I’ve been meaning to update my blog for months now and finally got around to it. As you can see I changed the header image to match the season better. That picture was taken back 2003-04 I can’t quite remember, it’s a street near where I live. I added a music player dubbed “Potatoine Player”, I am still trying to figure out how to make it work while you are reading a post, I think it’s all in the CSS (geeky stuff). What else, what else? Oh yeah, I integrated my Last.fm weekly top albums and added an RSS feed of my Del.icio.us links. Oh wait…almost forgot, also added a small script that allows you to view images on the same page without sending you to another screen. Here’s an example:
Pretty cool huh? Now we tune you back to your regular schedule.
The New York Times said it best:
It’s a little embarrassing to watch the New York art world “discovering†Latin American modernist art year after year, as if forever only half-aware of its existence.
It’s a little surprising to see the NYC art world not paying much attention to the Latin American artists. There are so many talented Latinos waiting for their break in a big city like New York. It has not been until recently that these artists have had a chance to present their work to what seems like an ignorant audience. That chance comes in the form of Pinta, the contemporary Latin American art fair, the very first of its kind in NYC.
I actually have a pretty interesting story about how I came to hear about Pinta. I was in Harlem visiting El Museo Del Barrio just trying to enjoy a quiet Sunday with a friend. We arrived to the museum not knowing we only had about an hour left to walk around. So we walked in and instead of trying to see everyone in a hurry we decided to concentrate just a few pieces and really study them. As we finished the tour, with guards almost pushing us to leave, we stopped by the gift shop to look at some books when we were approached by one of the cashiers working there that afternoon. He overheard our conversation on how we were so disappointed to not see all the pieces. He must have seen our enthusiasm and invited us to this new of a kind Art Fair in NYC filled with Latin American artists, us having nothing else to do that night we jumped at the opportunity. He handed us two white translucent, very modern looking envelopes with the Pinta logo on one side, it was out free tickets to the fair. That was the very first day I ever heard about Pinta and was lucky enought to be invited for free on its opening night. I had a great time there, seeing works by some of the most talented contemporary and modern Latino artists. I just hope that next time it will have a much bigger turn around, more publicity and a lot more art (this first year there were only 35 galleries).
Keep an eye out for the next Pinta and hopefully I will see you there.
Links:
Bulletins From a Bustling ‘Undiscovered’ Land
www.pinta-art.com
Listening to Richard Cheese a while I was trying to find other funny/ridiculous song covers by other artists, here are the best 3:
The first one is by Avril Lavigne covering “Chop Suey” by System of a Down. It’s not really funny, more like…pathetic.
Second one is by Alanis Morissette covering Fergie’s “My Humps”.
Saved the best for last. I am sure you have seen this one already but it still cracks me up. William Hung’s rendition of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs”.
…she bangs, she bangs…Now I’ll have that song stuck in my head all day, thanks William Hung.
I decided to start a continuos series of entries all relating to technology which we may have seen or thought to only exists in sci-fi movies, books or cartoons.
I have always been a Sci-Fi buff, always interested in anything with robots and lasers to say the least. One of my favorite series of all times is Aliens. I clearly remember watching the scene where Ripley fights off the mother-bug with that powered suit as the base is about to collapse. The military has been funding a 50 million dollar project to develop such suit for its armed personel. It gives the wearer super strength and stamina for sustained physical tasks, I was pretty amazed to see such a device being developed:
Pretty damn impressive.
I was trying to think about what I enjoyed the most about a cold morning on my way to work. Here are a few things that just popped into my mind: Holding that warm coffee cup, steaming endlessly while I wait on the station for the train. Watching strangers awkwardly huddle together without touching or making any eye contact. Lighting the first cigarette of the day feels so damn good (fuck, I gotta quit). Turning your back to the wind as it picks up in your direction. Chap-stick. Feeling your hands start to go numb because you forgot your gloves. Seeing your breath every time you exhale. Shaking your legs almost as if you had to pee. Repeating in your head over and over again “Fuck it’s cold”. Yeah, that is why cold mornings are great….
The internet has completely come to revolutionize the music industry from the way we discover new artists to how we acquire their music. Millions of music files are shared back and forward everyday between listeners, most of them shared illegally and freely. The music industry has tried everything from protecting their songs with DRM encoding to making public examples of those who have shared music illegally. But it is like swimming against the current, it seems impossible to win. Instead of fighting it many artists have realized they need to embrace the torrent (no pun intended) and use the internet to their advantage. Recently bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and even Madonna have realized this and have decided to go “indie”, that is, ditch their music labels and look for alternative means of promoting and selling their music.
First it was Radiohead that announced on October 7th that they will be selling their album at whatever price you felt like paying, be it $15, $5 or ever $0. Soon after, Trent from Nine Inch Nails announced that he will be giving his new album for free too. These artists are turning their backs on the labels and going their own way. The way this works is, since a lot of music is being shared for free, why not just give away the music and reach a broader audience, artists will then make up their money by touring, selling merchandise and endorsements. Signed artists make very little from every album sale, about $1 – $1.50 when they could be filling 10,000 to 20,000 seat arenas for about $50 a ticket and keep 80% of the money, not bad at all. The business model seems ideal but it is still being tested, not everyone is sure how it will work out on the long run and if artists will actually make a profit. Radiohead and fellow bands are taking a big risk by doing this.
Not before long we could see a lot more artists jumping on the bandwagon, not just well known and established artists but upcoming and underground artists. In the near future there might not be music labels anymore, many bands such as the Arctic Monkeys have made their name through word of mouth and the internet, not from the help of a major label promotional campaign. We can only wait and hope for the best, in the meantime go listen to Radiohead’s new album “In Rainbows”, here is the link, and don’t be a cheap ass.
It seems like the Bush administration is at it again, what will it take for everyone in this country to open their eyes and do something? He is now trying to grant himself immunity for any possible war crimes committed against detainees. Check out the video:
Here’s a fun link, this small web app measures your body’s wattage output and gives you some real life examples of what you could be powering. So, how much electricity does you body produce?
Here are my results:
