My Head Hurts

It’s Friday and last night I drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of wings and watched a lot of really exciting basketball. That means today you get lots of random links I’ve been meaning to point you to for the last two weeks.

I tried to organize these into groups, but I don’t have the energy. Please forgive me.

• Will Wright created Sim City and The Sims. He’s brilliant. In this month’s Wired he writes, “In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset – the fact that they are learning in a totally new way – means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.”
• Great video by two New York-based comedians about indie music clerks. My favorite part is when someone dares enter the store without the knowledge of Pitchfork, watch and see what happens.
• Steve Krause has an in-depth analysis comparing Pandora and Last.fm and more generally what he calls “nature versus nurture” systems.
• What happens when you throw 12 strangers into New York City and tell them to find each other? They do. (Thanks Kareem.)
• Malcolm Gladwell compares PitBulls and statistics in a way only he could.
• In Design is like a Hand of Cards, Joshua Porter writes “Each design is a new hand of cards. Not only are the cards we’re holding different every time, but so are the hands of the other players. Our hand is our own knowledge of the design project, and the hands of the others are the constraints that we must deal with.” Word.
Adidas put together a cool billboard campaign in Germany that encourages people to spray paint on them.
• Artists in Melbourne stack a bunch of crates together to create a giant person sitting on the edge of a building.
• Oxo makes those kitchen gadgets with black handles that work better than any others. The LA Times covers their design process. (Another good catch by Kareem.)
• I think this is a post in its own right, but Smart Mobs writes about creating words just so that they’re findable on Google. You can create a whole community around a new word that doesn’t yet have Google results. Really interesting idea.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully that’s enough to keep you relatively busy this wonderful Friday. I’m thinking about going for another slight redesign of the site, if you’ve got any thoughts let me know.

March 24, 2006