5things – Page 36 – whatleydude

Five things on Friday #96

Things of note for the week ending October 31st, 2014.

1.Twitter does Video (or how to predict the future).
Two Five Things ago – aka ‘Five things on Friday #94‘ – I told you all about the new Audio Twitter Cards from Twitter.

I ended the bit saying:

Reminds me a lot of how the YouTube app works on Android which in turn says to me that you could expect Twitterâ€™s video cards to follow a similar set up in the very near future. Maybe.

Well, low and behold, it has happened!

That’s right, in the exact same way that you can listen to audio tracks in Twitter and then continue to scroll through Twitter, video content now acts in the same way.

The interesting thing about this is that the content is actually playing through a Twitter Player card. That’s right, Twitter’s own native video upload – NOT YouTube. This is the first sign of a trend, ladies and gents.

Josh Constine, pictured (and author of the TechCrunch article where I first read the news), spotted an even better idea. Especially when you start taking the above feature into tablets…

The bigger opportunity might be in long-form video. Imagine following along with a docked video of a sports match or awards show as you read and post tweets about the event. Twitterâ€™s long been seen as a companion to TV. But by ditching the television set and subsuming its video content, Twitter could be the only screen you need to step up to the global watercooler.

Now you can see the future too.

2. Polyamory is boring.
Apparently.

3. The Grand Canyon. From space.
I don’t know when the first ‘let’s stick a camera on a weather balloon and do something cool with the footage’ video first appeared but I really am nowhere near getting tired of them (yet). The next one is always better than the last…

John Flaig is the man behind ‘the next one’, and yet again I am not disappointed.

Not only are the photos amazing but the video is pretty darn cool too.

Yeah.

4. The Realisation
Another Five Things, another Leo Babauta post. But this one is super worth it. Promise.

It is a great read. If you only click on one link this week, make it this one.

5. NASA does Volcanos
This is excellent –

“A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, and it is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption occurred in 1989, with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the multi-day eruption has been detected 2,407 kilometers east-southeast and 926 kilometers west-northwest of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake.”

There’s a video of the eruption on the website. But it was too big and I didn’t want to upload it so I made it into a gif for you.

Email me and say thanks or something.

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Bonuses this week are all HALLOWEEN-themed:

Dizzee Rascal does Halloween
Minimalist posters of scary films (Carrie is my favourite)
IKEA does The Shining

Until next week.

Have a great weekend everybody.

Five things on Friday #95

Things of note for the week ending October 24th, 2014.

1. I like this

This Superman art wasn’t originally going to be one of my Five things of the week but I wanted to share it with you because a) it feels like the week that I’ve just had and b) it’s just so darn awesome (via SuperPunch).

Onwards!

2. Orange Juice: you’re doing it wrong
Planning on pouring yourself some juice this weekend? Don’t glug, pour.

And do it like this:

Yeah, probably the best gif I’ve seen all week.

(via Lifehacker)

3. Michael Ironside
Great actor. You’ve seen him in a ton of stuff.

You definitely know him.

This guy:

See?

You recognise him from films such as Top Gun to Total Recall to Starship Troopers and everything in-between. He did an AMA on Reddit recently and it was superb.

Here’s one example response [re Highlander 2]:

There’s a scene in the movie where my character comes to earth, and literally lands by going through the city streets and through the roof of a subway car, and lands on the subway. My stunt double had never been anywhere in the world where cocaine was so cheap. And he got absolutely hammered out of his mind for a week, and ended up running through the streets naked in Buenos Aires, and was arrested the morning of that sequence. So I had to do the stunt, because we had nobody in that part of the world who looked anything like me. So I had to hang on the roof of the subway car, and land on the floor, without any pads, and it was about a 12 foot drop, straight down, and in costume as the character. In the actual movie, you’ll see me slowly get up, and the character checks both his knees as he’s standing, he checks his back, his arms, and then throws his head back with a joyous scream knowing that he hadn’t broken anything.
That was not acting. That was me. Because i realized I had done it, and I didn’t have to do it again! From that moment, we just walked forward with the scene. It’s one of my favorite sequences of that film, because it’s where real life and acting come together in such a joyous moment, and it’s captured.

Brilliant.

Featuring anecdotes from almost his entire filmography, Ironside is a fantastic AMA participant and gives bloody brilliant answers. The Christian Bale one might make you feel a bit ill mind.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Michael Ironside – AMA

4. Game Theory and The Dark Knight
This dissection and analysis of all the games that are at play during The Dark Knight is a fantastic read. Good for both fans of Batman and Game Theory.

5. Supermovies: 2014 – 2020
Fan of awesome films? Fan of some of the best awesome films ever made? That means you probably like SUPER HERO films. Not only are they going through a huge resurgence but they’re also, in the main, turning out to be totally brilliant.

The whole thing is about shared universes. But whatever. The important thing is the future. And ladies and gentlemen, this is what your [known] superhero film future looks like –

Batsh*t crazy.

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Bonuses this week are all long form articles that I’ve picked up from other newsletters over the past six months and have only just got around to reading/finished:

Six Inches is a fairly NSFW short story from Charles Bukowski. Boy meets girl. Girl shrinks boy. Cue: dark hilarity.
Who wants to shoot an elephant? Horrible reading.
What [leading industrial designer] Frank Nuovo did next [after Nokia]

Five things on Friday #94

Things of note for the week ending October 17th, 2014.

1. Teens are NOT deserting Facebook (again)
Earlier this year, tired of all the ‘Oh no! Facebook is dying!’ trash that was flooding the news feeds, I wrote an article for The Drum entitled ‘Myths, Money, Mobile, and Teens: this is how we debunk the demise of Facebook‘. Eight months later and the counterpoints to the deafening waffle all still stand: Facebook isn’t going anywhere (and the kids aren’t either).

But that hasn’t stopped the headlines rolling in.

‘Teens are officially over Facebook’ states the headline from The Washington Post, with an almost deliberate yet understated finality. The source? A ‘dramatic new report’ from investment bank/research house, Piper Jaffray.

The article states:

“Between fall 2014 and spring 2014, when Piper Jaffray last conducted this survey, Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 percent to 45 percent. In other words, less than half of the teenagers surveyed said â€œyesâ€ when asked if they use Facebook.”

And they’ve got this killer chart to back them up.

So it must be right, right?

WRONG.

The Washington Post fails to mention two key factors that make this report fairly meaningless.

Key Factor One: Only 7,200 US teens were surveyed.
Seven thousand two hundred teenagers. There are 1.19billion Facebook users, total. But let’s be fair, only 728million of those users visit the service every day. So basically, if you’re worried about the opinion of a potential 0.0001% of Facebook’s daily active users then you’re doing it wrong. To say that this is not representative data would be the understatement of the century.

Key Factor Two: Only 7,200 US teens were surveyed.
This is absolutely not the first time a US publication has cited US data as a global trend. But surely, what with Facebook having been founded in the good ol’ US of A, must obviously have the lion’s share of its users on its home turf, right? WRONG.

On Facebook’s very own company info page the following data point can be found:

“Approximately 81.7% of our daily active users are outside the US and Canada”

That’s an incredible stat. Less than 19% of all Facebook users reside in North America.

I ask you: how can a subset of a subset of a subset be anywhere near passing for the norm?

Here endeth the lesson.

2. Newsletters
A short one now. I like newsletters. This list of newsletters is a good list of newsletters to dive into if you like newsletters too. So y’know, go and like newsletter yourself nuts.

3. Bill the Billboard
Hand on heart, I saw (and loved) this work before I knew it was from Ogilvy. But seriously, this stuff is awesome. Ogilvy Nairobi decided to help Sprite launch a new kind of billboard. Bill the Billboard, in fact.

As Adweek put it:

If it’s more comedy you want from your billboard, Sprite is happy to oblige.
Ogilvy Kenya recently put up “Bill the Billboard” at a busy intersection in Nairobi, and programmed him to endlessly crack jokes. He’s sort of an outdoor version of the famous Pringles banner ad from 2009, offering seemingly stream-of-consciousness quips to keep viewers entertained.
The jokes aren’t exactly side-splitting, and the case study’s boast that Bill is the “first ad ever with mental issues” isn’t exactly P.C. But at least he’s a little different than your typical boring digital ad.

The video is gold.

4. Super Mario Bros 2
If you grew up in the 80s (like me) then you might be familiar with the Nintendo game, Super Mario Bros 2. If you are one of these people then you’ll know how wildly different the game was to its original counter-part. This article, ‘Four things I learnt while writing about SMB2‘, is a really interesting read.

If you’re not familiar with SMB2 it’s still, genuinely, a very good read.

Check it out.

5. Music Twitter Cards
They’re a thing.

Twitter introduces Audio Cards so you can listen to music directly from your timeline http://t.co/GApDczTXi7 (aka ‘Fancy Player Cards’)

â€” James Whatley (@Whatleydude) October 16, 2014

And they’re actually quite a good/nice/cool thing (David Guetta aside).

You click on a (soundcloud) link, the music opens, starts streaming, and then can be ‘docked’ so you can continue to scroll through Twitter while the music plays.

Reminds me a lot of how the YouTube app works on Android which in turn says to me that you could expect Twitter’s video cards to follow a similar set up in the very near future.

Maybe.

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Bonuses this week:

X-Men: Days of Future Past comes out soon and to celebrate Twentieth Century Fox are putting on an X-Men exhibition at the O2 in London. Including this massive 18ft tall Sentinel.
Daredevil is coming to Netflix and da-a-a-mn it looks good.
I’m not kidding, this might be most interesting thing of this entire post: The New York Times with this wonderful article, ‘Our understanding of Giraffes does not measure up‘. Go read it.

Five things on Friday #93

Things of note for the week ending October 10th, 2014.

1. This is Groot
Did you see Guardians of the Galaxy this past summer (this is worth sticking with even if it’s a ‘no’, by the way)? Did you fall in love with a walking talking tree named Groot? If not, why not? Seriously, he steals the entire movie!

Anyway, all that being said, I found this video this week. It’s of wood sculpture specialist, Griffon Ramsey (yeah, she uses a chainsaw), creating her very own Groot statue out of an actual tree.

Yes, of course the end product is awesome and yes, now you’ve seen his face you can probably skip over this bit and get to the next thing (spoiler: it’s David Fincher related) but before you get there just stop.

Take six and a half minutes out of your day and watch the amazing making-of video that Ramsey made. It’s not only an awesome look at how such a beautiful thing is created but also a rather lovely bit of story-telling about what makes an artist tick.

Enjoy.

2. All of the Fincher things
If you read my website regularly (thanks) or follow me on Twitter (thanks again) you might already know that I saw Gone Girl last weekend and you might already know that I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT too. To say I have a massive hard on for all things David Fincher right now would be an understatement (yes, I was a fan already). So with that, here’s a selection of different Fincher things I’ve been reading this week (none of which hold any spoilers).

Stream the Gone Girl soundtrack (Reznor / Ross nailing it yet again)
What David Fincher Sees (Grantland)
David Fincher’s misdirectons (Grantland)
This guy’s spoiler-free Gone Girl review

Have you seen it yet? What did you think? Let me know, yo!

3. Future of Copywriting
Written by the talented wordsmith, Rishi Dastidar, this piece over on Medium (actually entitled ‘continuous partial argument’) is/was an entry into a competition with the above name. Read as a lament for all that is wrong with the art of the written word the author comes through as passionate, driven, and yet ultimately bereft of hope for the future.

It is a fantastic read.

4. Amazon for a Fiver
The rather thoughtful Mr Terence Eden has put together this Tumblr of things you can buy from Amazon for under a fiver. Christmas is coming so I thought this might be useful. Bookmark it. Put it in your diary for pay day. Whatever.

THIS IS IMPORTANT AND USEFUL FOR CHRISTMAS.

5.Â Hello Willem
My friend, Willem van der Horst, is back in Europe and this makes me very happy indeed. He is a big thinker, a deep philosopher, and overall, the keeper of a big warm heart. We caught up last night and I’m hoping it’ll be the first of many drinks now that he’s back (ish) from Asia.

You can follow Willem on Twitter or catch up on his travels via his blog, Ice Cream for Everyone (I know, right?).

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Bonuses this week are –

Over the past month or so I’ve given the same talk a few times to various groups of people all about Twitter Cards (aka ‘expandable Tweets’). The latest slides, used most recently at Social Media Week London, are now available to read/share/download over on my Slideshare account. If you do anything in social then you might them useful. Share and share alike etc.
Speaking of Social Media Week, The Guardian asked me about it recently. ‘What were your five key takeaways?’ they said. “Well,” I repliedÂ “they are as follows…”
The Trailer for Disney’s new film, Tomorrowland, dropped just yesterday and it looks great.

Five things on Friday #92

Things of note for the week ending October 3rd, 2014.

HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYBODY! Let’s do this…

1. Other Valleys
I love a good newsletter, me. So much so in fact that you can even get this wonderful post as a newsletter every week if you were so inclined (although about 200 of you already know that – hi fans!). But this item isn’t about me. No no. It’s about Anjali Ramachandran. Or more specifically, Anjali’s rather awesome new newsletter, ‘Other Valleys‘.

The pitch is simple:

A short list of creative/technology ideas, sent weekly, that are by and large NOT from the US/UK/EU. Inspiration can strike from many other places (the multiple Other Valleys spread across the world), and I like to know about them. Now you can too.

Go subscribe.

It might change your life.

2. Fashion Week
Yeah I’m a little late on this one and, truth be told, I’d completely forgotten about it. But I was cleaning out the Chrome tabs on my mobile the other day and I came across this absolute gem of an article: ‘I DRESSED LIKE AN IDIOT AT LONDON FASHION WEEK TO SEE HOW EASY IT IS TO GET STREET SNAPPED’.

IT. IS. GOLD.

This is just one amazing quote of about five million –

Anyone with a smartphone and a pair of socks can be a fashion blogger. Put some clothes on, take a photo of yourself, upload it to Instagram (tagged with #OOTD for easy clarification) and follow it up with a picture of some ladybird nail art or a bottle of aloe vera juice. There you go: you did it!

Go read it.

You never know, you might come away looking like this –

3. Legend of the Yokai
As part of the upcoming launch of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (and as seems part of a growing trend) an art exhibition has been put together celebrating the origins of the mythical mutants and it’s actually alright.

Things that are good:

The artwork. I’d say about 90% of it is really quite well done.
All of the images are downloadable direct from the website.

Things that are bad:

The website UI is painful (it’s like someone has read a book on a responsively designed websites but never actually seen or used one before).
The website also lacks any information on the actual exhibition – one assumes that this work will be on display somewhere at some point?

Anyway, if you like the Ninja Turtles, you might like this stuff.

Legend of the Yokai.

4. Edge of Tomorrow

I can’t remember if I reviewed Edge of Tomorrow or not…

(edit: I didn’t. Short version of what I could write: it’s a good sci-fi epic that is strange as it seems to exist in a world where Groundhog Day never came out (or else Tom Cruise would be running around saying ‘Guys! This is just like Groundhog Day!’) but actually very good as the writing is snappy and the cast is eminently watchable)

…but the above poster is kind of awesome, which is why I’m sharing it.

via this expletive URL.

Oh and the film is out to buy in like, ten days. And it’s been renamed ‘Live. Die. Repeat.‘ – which is much better.

5. Gratify
We live in a world of instant gratification. Don’t know something? Google it. Post a photo? People LIKE it. Someone messages you? The outside of your thigh buzzes and sends a signal up to your brain. The dopamine hits, they’re addictive.

But too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing.

I talk about Leo Babuta on this list a fair bit. He’s probably one my favourite sources of good reading and inspiration. Today is no different. If you’re feeling addicted, then maybe it’s time to switch off. Unplug. Get over that craving of instant gratification and just relax. But I get it. You’re hooked. It’s not easy to just check your phone 200 times a day and then suddenly stop. You need help.

You need a guide on how to overcome instant gratification.

This one’s on me.

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Bonuses this week are all film director related.

First, PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) has a new film. It’s called INHERENT VICE and the trailer has just been released. Watch it.
Second, DAVID FINCHER has a new film out this weekend. It’s called GONE GIRL (you might’ve heard about it – do you subscribe to my movie release date calendar? Maybe you should). I am so excited about this film it’s ridiculous. Seeing it tomorrow. Expect a review on this website at some point thereafter. Bonus Fincher quote? Oh go on then –

“People go to the movies to discover things. They want to see actors as theyâ€™ve never seen them before and to see them in situations you never imagined them in because hopefully you never imagined seeing yourself in that situation. I need that sense of discovery when I look at movies.”

via

Third: CLINT EASTWOOD also has a new film. It’s called AMERICAN SNIPER. It stars Bradley Cooper and it looks like it could be quite something; I watched the brand new trailer literally 10mins before I wrote these words. It gave me shivers.

Whatley out.

Five things on Friday #91

Things of note for the week ending September 26th, 2014.

An image heavy week this week, kicking off with this utterly brilliant collection of mental photography featuring the one and only John Malkovich. Seriously.

Let’s dive in –

1. Audrey Hepburn

Speaking of amazing photography sets, I came across this collection of ‘rare’ Hepburn photos earlier this week and, well, they’re absolutely gorgeous.

Thing I learnt from this post? Audrey Hepburn had a pet deer named Pippin.

Lovely.

2. On Geeks
‘Geeks. You are no longer victims. Get over it.’ is the title of this provocative debate piece in last week’s New York Times (you read it regulalrly, right?) –

Popular culture right now frequently appears to be a large-scale experiment in cognitive dissonance. By any rational measure, the geeks â€” fans of comic books, science fiction, video games and fantasy â€” are utterly triumphant. Economically, the genre in the media is dominant, earning billions of dollars a year. Critically, it is celebrated, getting sympathetic reviews in the stuffiest publications and winning national awards. In every meaningful sense, geeks are the overdogs.

Believe it or not, the comments are actually well worth reading

3. What is El NiÃ±o?

Ever heard of El NiÃ±o? If you’re not in the US of A, it might be on the periphery of your weather-based awareness. If you’ve got a spare two minutes and seventeen seconds, you could increase your knowledge of the meteorological phenomenon right now by watching this video.

4. Zelda Art
If you’re a gamer of any shape or form, then you’ll probably agree that set of original Legend of Zelda this is unbelievably cool.

Beautiful.

5. Mark Ritson on Oreo
Mark Ritson is a professor of brand and one of the smartest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. If you’ve known me for a while, I may’ve shared this with you before.

What with it being the end of Social Media Week, I thought it was a good time to share to again. This deconstruction of that Oreo Tweet is utterly fantastic. It’s 90mins long but I implore you – watch it, listen to it, put it on your Chromecast this weekend, or have it playing in the background while you work this afternoon.

Just consume it, and take it in.

Please.

No bonuses this week.

Whatley out.

Five things on Friday #90

Things of note for the week ending September 19th, 2014.

1. Sennheiser Urbanites

Featuring the German ‘Ultimate Love of Ears’, this has to be the oddest ad I’ve seen all week.

Obviously I’m sharing it with you.

Sorry not sorry.

2. A complete summary of 17 years of X-Men comics
Doesn’t matter if you’re a fan or not, this Reddit write up of [nearly] everything that’s happened in the X-Universe since its inception is pretty darn awesome.

3. In praise of Fincher’s women
Little White Lies is a fantastic film magazine. I cannot express this enough: Little White Lies is a fantastic film magazine. Bizarrely, I only recently discovered that it actually produces web content too. One of those pieces (titled above) is an excellent read:

A formalist with a forensic eye for detail (and no patience for wading through emotional sludge), David Fincher holds his characters at armâ€™s length â€“ perhaps all the better to see them in their entirety. Most of these characters are men; Fincher is, after all, a manâ€™s man with a particular predilection for stories about fraternity in crisis (The Game, Zodiac, The Social Network) and the crumbling framework of masculinity in a late-capitalist society (Fight Club, The Social Network and â€“ we think â€“ Gone Girl). However, that is not to say that Fincherâ€™s women are shrinking violets.

Covering off everything from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all the way back to nods to Alien 3, this article is a celebration of the interesting, complicated, and just plain subversive female characters Fincher commits to celluloid.

Read it.

4. An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words
‘Lost in Translation‘ is a collection of drawings illustrating words that don’t exist in English (I’ve covered something like this before) and I really, really I like them.

I’m just pouring out my tretÃ¥r now… 🙂

via.

Book available at Amazon.

5. Ask the Past
I found this gem in a collection of niche blogs that I came across last week. Ask the Past is basically a blog set up to collate all the best advice it can find from old books.

Example:

How to keep your cat (1470):
“If you have a good cat and you don’t want to lose it, you must rub its nose and four legs with butter for three days, and it will never leave the house.”

Brilliant.

Cat owners, does this work?

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Bonus items this week:

Race the Tube started out as item number one this week but so many people have seen it now I relegated it to a bonus item. Still, worth seeing if you’ve not seen it yet (it is rather good).
Beyond Contempt is ‘the inside story of the phone hacking trial’ – here’s a PDF of the first chapter.
Legendary Engram on Twitter. This is a Destiny thing (yes, another one). Play Destiny? You’ll love this. Don’t play Destiny? You’ll have no idea what it’s about.