Two years ago, we launched an experiment: an online image library where we made 2,000 high-resolution images of artworks that the museum deemed to be in the public domain available for download without any restrictions. This week, we’ve exceeded ourselves with the launch of our new collections website, giving away ten times the number of images we offered in the initial image library. Nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art from our collection are available to search, download, and use as you see fit.
What Do Cats Have to Do With It? Welcome to Our New Collections Website
Dear Tumblr-verse,
Merry Christmas: we just gave you 20,000 high-resolution images, for free. Now we have just one question: what are you going to do with them?
The LA County Museum of Art is awesome and forward-thinking, and just got added to several of my librarian lists of places to go for great imagery.
(via laughingsquid)
Life is hard. Here is someone.: affirm me! -
This is a great piece of writing.
“This is so brave.”
I have started to notice the way people say that when women write memoir-y things. This is a thing people do and it’s annoying but now I can’t stop seeing it. And I like to write these memoiry things, on whatever small scale (does twitter count?). I absolutely have that…
Please reblog if you feel like strangers sometimes try to manipulate you for selfish and personally debasing reasons.
Now, run into traffic on the busiest street you can find while buck-ass naked, heavily-oiled, wearing an elaborate wig made of shrimp- or pork-flavored ramen noodles, and dancing a spastic and deranged Hokey-Pokey as you hopelessly shriek, “I AM THE KWISATZ HADERACH!” to the tune of your favorite sea shanty.
Then, send all the information about your checking account to an exiled Nigerian prince, watch a full season of She’s the Boss, and put half of your clothes back on.
Do NOT, under any circumstances, wash off the oil for one month, or you’ll be cursed with seven years of bad luck and will instantly develop excruciating pus-filled butt shingles.
If you instantly develop excruciating pus-filled butt shingles, please re-reblog.
The metronome was invented in 1817, and Beethoven went back and marked all his symphonies way faster than they’re usually played. The explanations offered for why that can’t be what he meant are my least favorite parts of classical music criticism (“he must have made a mistake, our interpretation cannot be wrong”)…but getting some musicians to experiment with it on the air are my favorite parts. It’s music, folks. It’s play.
A lovely performance at my favorite concert venue, Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory. Hahn and Cory Smythe, her pianist, played a bunch of really interesting modern stuff, mostly commissioned for her “In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores”. I am delighted by the directness of a star violinist just playing encores. But the way the program was arranged was interesting also. The pieces by Abril and Yun were very modernist (that is, hard to predict, sorta scrapy sounding, and fast), but she transitioned in and out of more traditional stuff. The biggest ovation was for the Bach Ciaconna. But I had an epiphany during Sharp’s Storm of the Eye. I’m a big fan of the baroque and am still learning the traditional set of stuff that’s common culture at concert halls, so modern stuff has often been off-putting for me. But in the context of this performance I realized what the artist and composer were saying is “We can play the traditional stuff very well, thank you, but we’re choosing not to right now. Listen and see what we can do with these instruments.” Once I realized that I relaxed. And the pieces by Ramnath and Lang which followed were my favorites of the show.
In other news, Hahn’s violin case has a Twitter account.
Anton Garcia Abril
Du Yun: When a Tiger Meets a Rosa Rugosa
Arcangelo Corelli: Sonata No. 4 in F Major, Opus 5
Gabriel Fauré: Sonata No. 1 in A Major, Opus 13
Elliott Sharp: Storm of the Eye
Kala Ramnath: Aalap and Tarana
David Lang: Light Moving
JS Bach: Ciaconna, from Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004
James Newton Howard: 133…At Least
Jeff Myers: The Angry Birds of Kauai
Mason Bates: Ford’s Farm
I will cheerfully reblog anything I see that was originally published in The Magazine, precisely because its writers are free to use what they write however they like after a month. Scholarly publishers please note.
Also, this is an awesome piece of writing.
Here’s the full text of a piece I wrote for The Magazine a few months ago. I really enjoyed writing it, and would like to thank Marco once again for publishing it there. If you haven’t checked out The Magazine yet, you should. Anyway, here’s why you’re a total snooze:
Everything was going great until you showed up. You see me across the crowded room, make your way over, and start talking at me. And you don’t stop.
You are a Democrat, an outspoken atheist, and a foodie. You like to say “Science!” in a weird, self-congratulatory way. You wear jeans during the day, and fancy jeans at night. You listen to music featuring wispy lady vocals and electronic bloop-bloops.
You really like coffee, except for Starbucks, which is the worst. No wait—Coke is the worst! Unless it’s Mexican Coke, in which case it’s the best.
Pixar. Kitty cats. Uniqlo. Bourbon. Steel-cut oats. Comic books. Obama. Fancy burgers.
You listen to the same five podcasts and read the same seven blogs as all your pals. You stay up late on Twitter making hashtagged jokes about the event that everyone has decided will be the event about which everyone jokes today. You love to send withering @ messages to people like Rush Limbaugh—of course, those notes are not meant for their ostensible recipients, but for your friends, who will chuckle and retweet your savage wit.
You are boring. So, so boring.
Don’t take it too hard. We’re all boring. At best, we’re recovering bores. Each day offers a hundred ways for us to bore the crap out of the folks with whom we live, work, and drink. And on the internet, you’re able to bore thousands of people at once.1
A few years ago, I had a job that involved listening to a ton of podcasts. It’s possible that I’ve heard more podcasts than anyone else—I listened to at least a little bit of tens of thousands of shows. Of course, the vast majority were so bad I’d often wish microphones could be sold only to licensed users. But I did learn how to tell very quickly whether someone was interesting or not.
The people who were interesting told good stories. They were also inquisitive: willing to work to expand their social and intellectual range. Most important, interesting people were also the best listeners. They knew when to ask questions. This was the set of people whose shows I would subscribe to, whose writing I would seek out, and whose friendship I would crave. In other words, those people were the opposite of boring.
Here are the three things they taught me.
Wait, would a weather application display information on the lock screen? Then it would be completely frictionless¹. I could almost think about investing in such things.
¹ Like an introductory physics cow.
Oh, this is lovely. Total Perspective Vortex (tm)
(via merlin)
I’m at the Educause Learning Initiative conference, where there is a badging initiative ongoing. I’ve already earned badges for attending the Town Hall meeting and for one other thing. Just went to a good session by two folks from Seton Hall on their program, which uses Mozilla’s Open Badge Initiative.
I have to say that I have mixed feelings. Cred.ly, the service ELI is using for validation, adds an extra layer of complexity that I really don’t want. And it’s also possible that I just don’t have the collector’s instinct that makes it a good fit for some people.
On the other hand, I do like the idea of tapping people’s underlying motivations to encourage educational objectives. The social learning built into game systems like World of Warcraft and other online role-playing games is a really interesting model to look at. Players learn really complicated systems, and very elaborate processes to solve problems.
One of my to-do’s after the conference is to look into existing research on checkins through services like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook, as well as research into the achievement systems of online games. More details here as I track it down.
“
“Obama made the recess appointments after Senate Republicans blocked his choices for an agency they contended was biased in favor of unions.”
(because in Bizarro World it’s a problem for the organization responsible for enforcing laws protecting workers’ rights to protect workers’ rights)
” — Court Rejects Obama Recess Appointments to Labor Board - NYTimes.com
It’s been a while since I’ve actually walked out of a movie, and some of my friends can speak to my relatively high tolerance for bad movies done in interesting ways. This movie crystallizes a whole lot of my problems with the Star Trek franchise, and mixes them up with several things I hate about sequels.
Spoilers abound.
1. The world is not inherently interesting. I, as fan, will only be interested if the main characters from the original series are in their accustomed roles for as much screen time as possible. There are several novels which attempt to imagine what Starfleet Academy was like for Kirk, Spock, et alios. This gives me one barfight, two scenes, and a “three years later” graphic.
2. No one in Starfleet other than the characters in the original show is interesting, or, in fact, important. See also #13.
3. Cameos by characters in the original show are not necessary in a prequel. The point of the prequel being to, you know, watch the characters develop.
4. Time travel plots *must* die. Especially Trek time travel plots.
5. Thou shalt not require me to rethink thirty years of character development, story continuity, several TV series, and nine or ten movies as a main requirement for basic acceptance of the plot of your fluffy summer blockbuster. Kirk and Spock is *the* core of the show.
5. Cadets, even promising ones, do not start out as the bridge crew on a battleship.
6. The flagship of the fleet is, you know, with the fleet in the Laurentian system, not waiting in drydock to be crewed by promising cadets.
7. I am now really tired of randomly invented Starfleet regulations. It was kinda cute for a while, but it’s become such a crutch that I just don’t care anymore. Regulations should make sense for a military organization. I walked out when Spock started to explain to Kirk that he could remove his captain from command if said captain was “emotionally conflicted”.
8. You could really make a Trek movie that wasn’t about saving the Earth. I’d buy a ticket. Or, you know, would have prior to today.
9. Most military organizations are prepared on occasion to fight or run rather than simply to drive up to scary spaceships and wait to be destroyed. This is apparently not the Starfleet way.
10. Spock had a good death in Wrath of Khan. It made sense, it was moving. Every time you bring him back you diminish the only actually good movie in the franchise.
11. Bones is more than a collection of bile-filled comments about Spock.
12. The franchise needed to retire time travel as a plot device a Long Time Ago, especially since they only use it for one purpose: whoops, the world blew up, let’s go fix it.
13. Surely a whole Federation of planets has more than one competent crew at a time.
14. Surely there are technologies other than the warp drive and the transporters which are worthy of inclusion as plot devices.
15. The chick in the green paint was cute. She did not blend so well with the Star Wars aliens who were also added into this movie. This is a continuity problem between original Trek’s humans-plus-makeup approach, and later series/movies ability and budgets.
16. The whole birth/death thing you opened with has been done a few times. You handled it tolerably well, but that *was* the point that I began to wonder if I was in the right movie.
(originally posted as a Facebook note in May 2009)