Cicada (link coming shortly) is our first site of 2010, commissioned by a friend of mine for his new business. The brief was to provide a simple and clean website in order to allow prospective clients to contact him and to conform to all current European standards for businesses. It should also be compliant with IE6+, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

The website truly does seem simple at first look, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in terms of JavaScript and design choices. The big one being cufon, used to serve Helvetica Neue — in Light and Ultra Light variants — to the viewers. Using cufon is as easy as uploading the typefaces to their provided generator (make sure that the licensing allows for them to be embedded, you should also lock the file to your domain) and then linking the generated JavaScript file in the head of your HTML:

<script type="text/javascript" src="../js/cufon-yui.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../js/HelveticaNeue_300-HelveticaNeue_400.font.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	Cufon.replace('h1, h2, h3, p');
</script>

Here I’ve chosen to have cufon replace all h1, h2, h3, and p elements. It’s not recommended to use cufon to replace body text like I’ve done here unless it’s less than 1,000 characters.

Next up is a little bit of jQuery to switch states between the main page and the contact page (seen below) — when the viewer clicks on the “get in touch” link — by hiding and unhiding two <div>‘s.

$(function(){
$('#email_us').click(function(){
	$('#about').toggle();
	$('#contact').toggle();
});
});

Note that this all degrades neatly if the viewer doesn’t have JavaScript enabled. First by simply choosing Helvetica or Arial from the viewers machine if it can’t serve them the cufon version of Helvetica Neue, and secondly by showing them an email address they can use instead of the contact form with <noscript><a href="mailto:us@cicada.eu">us@cicada.eu</a></noscript>.

Also to note is that all text and images are solid white (#FFF) with varying degrees of opacity to give them some transparency over the blue gradient background. To get this working in all browsers (and their ancestors) required quite a few lines of CSS (the order is very important):

-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80)";
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
-khtml-opacity:.80;
-moz-opacity:.80;
opacity:.80;

Another thing to note with the transparency is that Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7) handle transparent PNG’s terribly. So I’ve had to use a Microsoft designed catch-all to serve IE a non-transparent PNG instead:

<!--[if !IE]><!-->
	<img src="../images/white_logo.png" />
<!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE]>
	<img src="../images/logo_ie.png" />
<![endif]-->

This covers the majority of the little pieces of code I’ve used in developing this website. I’ll update this post with a link to the site when it goes live later this month.

Superbrothers: Sword & Swocery EP is home to the collaborative work of Superbrothers, Jim Guthrie, and Capy. They’re working on a game together and I’ve gotta say I’m pretty interested in what it will be like. To explain to you just why I’m interested I’m going to have to break it down.

Superbrothers
The first I heard about Superbrothers was when art and design blogs flipped their shit for their videos, and rightly so. Embedded below is my favourite of these: Dot Matrix Revolution.

People have described their style in many ways: “gorgeous”, “beautiful”, “8-bit”, “pixelated”, and “lame” But personally I think Jim Guthrie summed it up best with “eyegasm inducing”, and may I just add “sinister”. Their first video — The Children Of the Clone — in which “a single executive recruits an army of clones to attack, behead and ‘incorporate’ an old money industrialist into their consumptive system” is more outwardly sinister, but I was struck by Dot Matrix Revolution. The awkward dancing of the two Software Engineers, the steady encroachment of the technology before it explodes with the advent of the internet, the colours, and the soundtrack by Jim Guthrie doesn’t help matters. Which brings us to the next section.

Jim Guthrie
Jim Guthrie — a Juno Award nominee and collaborator of The Hidden Cameras, Arcade Fire, Islands and more — is another talented Canadian. Originally making a name for himself through composing his songs on a PlayStation, his haunting and sparse yet pretty arrangements are sure to add to the game. He’s doing some shows at the end of the month, so make sure you check him out (something that I — unfortunately — can’t do, being 3325 miles away from Toronto).

Capy
Credited on the Superbrothers website under “engineering and miracles” Capy also happen to be the creators of my favourite game that I’ve never bought (I’ll get around to it one day I promise): Critter Crunch. Aptly described by Brandon Boyer with “like Ghibli barfing rainbows” it also happens to be addictively fun. Also recently they have produced Might And Magic: Clash Of Heroes, a game that has received solidly great reviews.

The Game
Which brings us to Sword & Sworcery itself. The graphics are by Superbrothers, the sound by Jim Guthrie and the engineering by Capy. I know next to nothing other than some lucky members of Toronto’s Hand Eye Society got a 10 minute sneak-peek of the game, coming soon to iPhone and iPod Touch. Having managed to get a peek of that development footage (apparently the game was less than 25% complete) myself, I can honestly say I’m looking forward to it. The game is apparently broken up into two parts, Sword: a “musical combat type thing”, and Swocery: a “streamlined approach to adventure and exploration”.

To find out where they go from here you can subscribe to their rss feed, Teletex or Twitter. Make sure to keep a close eye on them in the coming months as this game starts to come together.

Unfortunately, a few of the tutorial posts are now slightly outdated. I will be updating them in the coming weeks to comply with the new theme and changes in code.

I’d like to thank 1KB CSS Grid for the base grid used in the new code. I’d messed around with various grids — such as 960.gs — before, but found them almost universally bloated in the effort to provide for every eventuality. 1KB Grid is tiny and neat and much more elegant than the system I had come up with previously. The grid now looks something like this:

.grid_1 { width:222px; }

.grid_2 { width:462px; }

.grid_3 { width:702px; }

.grid_4 { width:942px; }

.column {
margin:0 9px;
overflow:hidden;
float:left;
display:inline;
}

.row {
width:960px;
margin:0 auto;
overflow:hidden;
}

.row .row {
margin:0 -9px;
width:auto;
display:inline-block;
}

And the corresponding HTML is simply:

<div class="row">
	<div class="column grid_2">
	</div>
	<div class="column grid_1">
	</div>
	<div class="column grid_1">
	</div>
</div>

This sets up the nicely formatted 3 columns that you are seeing here, and provides a clean base to continue to compose to a horizontal baseline. It’s also simple to nest the columns within each-other as seen here.

WIth this new system I should be able to change up any part of the design with a minimum of fuss (and code) whenever needed.

First off, tools. The only tools I really need are a shifting spanner, a hacksaw (please make sure you get a metal and not wood saw), and a c clamp. If you don’t have those then don’t worry, you’re going to need to make a trip to the shop for some 15mm copper piping (usually found in 3 or 4 meter lengths) and 90° compression bends. Back from the hardware store yet? Mouse-over the images below for the process.

Copper piping, cut to length. I find that 300mm and 400mm a side works best for A4 prints. Note that I’ve sanded them slightly to allow the mesh better purchase .

Compression bends, the secret ingredient in this recipe. They allow your frame to be tensioned and re-tensioned at will.

One completed frame. Hand-tighten the nuts on the compression bends to keep it solid for the next steps.

All purpose glue, will hold the mesh at any tension you wish yet allow for easy removal.

Trim the mesh to fit.

Tighten the frame until it looks like this. If you were doing this properly you’d have a tool to measure the tension, but if that was the case you wouldn’t be reading this tutorial would you … just tighten it up as much as you can.

And there you go. Results may vary depending on your tools and/or patience, but I’ve been using frames like this for years with no issues. Hopefully you find them as useful as I have.

God Of War: The Third is now (as of about 20 minutes ago) available as a playable demo on the PSN. Currently sitting at 14% of a 2671 MB file here. Hopefully we will finally find out what Kratos is so angry about.

Whether I am ordering books from Amazon (home to everything you could ever want) which I don’t have space for or I’m haunting the local and central branches of the Dundee Library (home to what I think is the best teenage reading section on earth and possessor of some real hidden gems), looking for something new.

This voracity of consumption can often pose a problem when combined with my short attention span and lack of memory for anything that happened more than a week ago. A lot of the time when I try to remember what book it was I read a month ago and what it was like I just plain old can’t, which can make reviewing or recommending them to anyone quite difficult.

With that in mind I’ve prodded Ryan into rigging me a simple reading journal (to be found in the wonderful header menu under ‘books’) where I can record when I remember to (which will hopefully be often) the books I’ve recently ploughed my way through. This would seem to both sets of my problems — remembering and ‘reviewing’ (if that’s what you can call what I say about any of them) — at once.

Segmental is a 16 segment display font from Superposition Kitty to you. It’s free for personal use, so please contact us if you would like to use it in a professional project. It should be available to download from dafont shortly.

This happened only days after the poster went up on the Perth Rd. I haven’t gone back to see if it’s been changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept on happening. I apologise to everybody visiting this blog for David Cameron’s staring face, but it may help to know that you can now make your own poster.

Some more photos of Dundee, it’s library, it’s skyline of architectural clashes, and Jen below.

First off, a few cautions: This is a bad idea, people don’t like it when you respond to their automated responses, if they even notice at all. However, this was — for me — more of an art project in the vein of Caleb Larson’s A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter (A sculpture that continually lists itself on eBay) than any real programming exercise. And now, on to the project itself.

You’re going to need Procmail for this. Procmail can be used to create mail-servers, mailing lists, sort your incoming mail into separate folders/files, preprocess your mail, start any programs upon mail arrival or selectively forward certain incoming mail automatically to someone. Today we’ll be focusing on some variation of that last one. Now, you’re going to need to install and set-up Procmail yourself (have I mentioned yet that it’s a command line tool?), I recommend Nancy McGough’s excellent Procmail Quick Start. Once you’ve gotten that done you can get to my Procmail ‘recipe’.

:0
	check1 = "automated e-mail"
	check2 = "automated email"
	check3 = "automated notice"
	check4 = "automated message"

	*$ ! ^$MYXLOOP
	* B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4
	| (echo "From: you@domain.com" ;
		$FORMAIL -r -A"Precedence: junk"
		-A"X-Loop: you@domain.com" ;
		echo "This is an automated response
		in reply to your automated response.\n
		Please do not respond to this
		automated response.\n
		Thank you.\n"
	) | $SENDMAIL

Obviously, the first thing you’re going to want to do here is to replace you@domain.com with your actual email address (on both occasions).

The actual code is quite simple. As you can see above, I have set up checks for the most common wordings in the body of automated emails I have received, you can add, remove, or change as you wish. The next part — *$ ! ^$MYXLOOP — makes sure we’re not setting up an infinite loop here. The line after — * B ?? check1|check2|check3|check4 — simply cycles through the strings provided above and if any of them match sends the message:

This is an automated response in reply to your automated response.
Please do not respond to this automated response.
Thank you.

Bo Wang

Bo Wang is a Chinese photographer currently based in New York. With a BS and MS in Physics from Tsinghau University he is now studying photography, video and related media at School Of Visual Arts, New York.

He currently has a show — Heteroscapes — at Gallery 456 (ending 5th of February), I feel that his artist’s statement describes his photography best:

HETEROSCAPES is a portrait of China’s contemporary urban spaces and landscapes in a period of intensified transition. Throughout the past 20 years of an economic boom, this transition has shifted the social power structure and subverted once common values, dramatically altering the functions and even the concreteness of landscapes and urban structures.

Bo Wang is relatively new to the photography world, but I feel he will be one to watch in the coming years.

Ihei Kimura

Ihei Kimura (1901 — 1974) was “one of the most celebrated Japanese photographers of the twentieth century”. Born in Tokyo, he opened his own photographic studio in 1924 and soon became well-known for the informal photographs he took with his Leica.

A chairman for Japan Professional Photographers Society, famous for his documentary spirit and photos of Japan and Europe, he still remains popular in Japan, with dozens of books published since his death and the Kimura Ihei Award — for new photographers — set up in his honour.

Julia Galdo

Julia Galdo is an American photographer and a frequent collaborator with Cody Cloud. Her dreamy fashion photography on Behance immediately caught my attention and made me want to find out more about her, I especially love her day-to-day work on Flickr.

Eiichi Scart

Eiichi Scart is a man whom I haven’t been able to find much about. Born in Japan, he has an amazing collection of cameras and the ability to use them all well.

I recently realised that I haven’t gone into any detail about my work environment. For today, I thought I’d start with my desktop. First things first, the wallpaper is from a picture posted up on Twitter recently by Bryan Lee O’Malley — the author of the wonderful Scott Pilgrim series, soon to be a movie by the talented Edgar Wright (director of Spaced / Shaun Of The Dead).

But recently I’ve been getting comments about the “crazy text in the top left corner” of any screen-shots I show people, so I thought I’d post up a bit of a tutorial for the application that makes this all possible — GeekTool. What it does is run scripts and commands that you would use in Terminal and display the output on your desktop.

GeekTool is quite simple to use. For now we will just be messing with ‘Image’ Geeklets, just drag one into position on your desktop and you will see the ‘Properties’ window. There are three important things here: Command, Refresh, and Style. Command is where you will enter the scripts below, Refresh is how often you want the output to refresh (I find 10s works well for most cases), and the button below Style — ‘Click here to set font & color.’ — opens up the default Font style window of OS X (which you should already be accustomed to).

The various scripts I’ve gathered together below have been collected from tutorials all over the web, I hope you find them as useful as I did.

Date
We’ll start from the left and move our way across to the right. First up we have the date, to display this we use date +%d. Similarly, the month and day are generated using date +%b | tr ‘[a-z]’ ‘[A-Z]’ and date +%a | tr ‘[a-z]’ ‘[A-Z]’ respectively.

Dividers
The dividers are very simple, just echo '|'.

Time
The time is achieved in much the same was as the date was: date +%R. If you’re not comfortable with 24 hour time then you will want to use date +%I:%M.

Weather
The weather was a tricky one. I went through various scripts using both Lynx and cURL, Yahoo Weather and Weather Underground. The one that I found that worked best was:

curl --silent "http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=YOURCITYID&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|[A-Z]<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's/<br \/>//' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's/<\/b>//' -e 's/<BR \/>//' -e 's/[A-Z a-z]*, //' -e 's/\(.*\) F/\1 °F/' -e 's/\(.*\) C/\1 °C/' | sed 's/ //' | tail -n1

The problem with using Yahoo Weather is that it’s recently been changed to use a different set of parameters, and although both new and old will work for American cities the same does not seem to be true for the rest of the world. Luckily AOL uses the same naming conventions. So if you visit AOL Weather, and find your city, you can get the ID from the end of the URL. In my case it was ‘UKXX0045’. You will then need to use that to replace YOURCITYID in the code above.

Music
This is the bar with the Kanji (because I was listening to Yura Yura Teikoku at the time) that is underneath the rest of the information. This doesn’t use GeekTool at all, but rather Bowtie. Bowtie is supposed to sync with your Last.fm page, flash Growl notifications on new songs, allow custom key combinations to control music, and look pretty on your desktop (using an HTML and JavaScript theming system). In truth it does all of these things quite poorly, and I’ve often found it will simply stop syncing with no warning, but it is still only in Beta.

Hopefully you found these scripts of some use. If you’re looking for more then I would recommend you Google “geektool scripts”, or visit this over 70 page thread on MacRumors.

Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea

Trailer

This is Hayao Miazaki so it’s obviously Studio Ghibli so you can’t escape how good it’s going to be. Beautiful, fully realised yet simple and easy to watch this re-weaving of Hans Anderson’s Little Mermaid is one of the best things I’ve ever looked at.
Luckily for the UK it’s hitting cinemas soon, although personally I’d ditch the Cate Blanchett headed dub and hold out for a subtitled screening if you don’t want to catch the Disneyfication effect of Noah Cyrus and trying to hard to talk to kids. Either however, is better than not seeing it though. Especially if you have some kids to take with you. They’ll love it just as much, if not more than you.

Ai No Mukidashi

This movie is quite literally an epic. I know, I know. That’s a word thrown about far too often in relation to cinema and usually actually means ‘had a large budget’ or ‘directed by a fat ham who made a popular movie once'. But at an initially off-putting 4 hours long this offering from beat poet director and mentalist Sion Sono, Love Exposure, to give the film it's English title, is engrossing, charming and amusing and well worth the evening it'll take you to get through it. Honestly you may not think you want to watch a 237 minute treatise on the nature of relationships featuring up skirt photography, panties and one young man's quest for love against a back ground of religious confusion and shady cult activities but you really, really do.

Funky Forest: The First Contact

Trailer

This is another longing Japanese offering but bare with me. It's worth it.

Told as a series of interconnected vignettes this movie is bafflingly cool, endlessly confusing and utterly hilarious. I can't say much more about it that would make sense save the words 'dance numbers' and 'aliens' and if this makes it sound a little 'OMG I AM SO WACKY AND LIKE RANDOM LOL PURPLE MONKEY CHEESE' then that's the fault of my bad reviewing, not the movie. Check it out.

Nadja

Trailer

A post modern as fuck black comedy, this is perhaps one of the few things you'll ever see to feature Vampires that's actually enjoyable and meritorious. It may have been made in 1994 but it kicks the tits off True Blood and laughs devilishly in the face of the Twilight Saga.

Train

Trailer

A terrible vehicle for Thora Birch.

The only reason that this movie appears is because I've been saving that pun for months.

Pontypool

Trailer

If you've ever had the feeling that a director accidentally managed to film entirely the wrong movie while another far more interesting story was taking place elsewhere on set, somewhere behind the catering tent or just around a set corner then this is the movie for you. Funnier than death, insightful, intelligent and compellingly original this Canadian horror is an example of what movies could be if the people who made them didn't suck. Slickly presented for a horror and perfectly written Pontypool is a gem of a movie that seems to understand the principles of it's genre almost perfectly.

Moon

Trailer

The English speaking highlight of my cinematic year, Moon was hard to track down despite it being a mostly UK made movie. It received no general release in any cinema under 40+ miles from my home and languished, mostly ignored, for months until Jonathon Ross had the decency to mention it briefly in his 2009 movie review of the year, if not the courage to advertise it more than this years terrible block busters.

I didn't see Moon till November, which was aggravating.

It was however, well worth the wait. Commandingly directed and visualised, brilliantly designed and written and featuring the tiny cast of Kevin Spacey as a maintenance droid who communicates in smilies and Same Rockwell as his moon bound charge, this film blows everything else out of the water. Directed by David Bowie's son - Duncan Jones - Moon is like 2001 but good as opposed to being deliberately obtuse and pompous in places.

Utterly Beautiful.

Ink

Trailer

Production, writing, direction, editing, soundtrack composition and costumes designing: these are some of the things performed by Jamin and Kiowa Winans that made Ink happen. Though it's flawed and a little sentimental at times with some ropey acting here and there you can't help but admire the efforts of two people working very hard to bring what was obviously their baby into the world. Something of their dedication and sheer pluck will always leak through and leave you with a good feeling towards their movie which makes it worth seeing, highlighting as it does the ability for independent film companies to secure a well deserved release for their products. New voices are mostly always good. Unless they're terrible. Then they should go away.

This is not the case for the people behind Ink. It may sometimes over reach itself, or perhaps just it's budget, but it's still a charming, visually daring piece of work and well worth the time you might spend having a look at it.

Pandorum

Trailer

Starring Dennis Quaid and an MMA cage fighter this movie could have gone super wrong, super quickly but luckily for me, as I actually paid to watch it at a cinema, it didn't. Well paced, not entirely predictable and good looking Pandorum is a nice addition to the Space Survival Horror role call like Event Horizon and Alien - and we could always do with more like those.

Whip It

Trailer

This is a movie I tried to ignore. Hard. I mean, it's about Roller Derby. Not that Roller Derby isn't kick ass. It's just a very hip sport right now which is bound to mean that some asshole will want to ruin it by making a shitty movie all about it. That's how Hollywood works after all.

But thank God for director Drew Barrymore and writer Shauna Cross who managed to do the almost impossible and produce an actual pro-female movie without ruining Roller Derby in the process.

Whip It is genuinely funny and handled with a lightness and subtlety often missing from the rom-com-chick-flick genre which usually leave you feel bruised and sore after they're done kicking you in the shins with the steel toe capped boots of feminine conformity. This is a movie I would take my teenage niece to - if I had one - and insist she took notes on.

Starring Ellen Paige, Juliette Lewis, Beef Supreme and featuring a show stealing performance by Barrymore as the amazingly named 'Smashly Simpson', Whip It is the sort of life affirming coming of age movie that's easy to stomach and fantastic to watch.

Halloween II

Trailer

The second of Rob Zombie’s remakes may not be liked by everyone, just like his first attempt. But if you feel that way you are dumb. Powerful, raw, and sexy-interesting Mr Zombie brings reality, an unflinching commitment to violence and his super hot wife to a boring stilted franchise and if you don’t like it then hard cheese to you.

It’s possible that you haven’t seen Adventure Time before. Possible, but with over 2 million views in 3 years, not very likely. It aired once — at midnight — on Nickelodeon, before going on to win awards and become the internet sensation that it is. Picked up by the Cartoon Network at the end of 2008, it’s finally drawing near to the date the first episode airs — March 10th 2010.

Adventure Time is the creation of Pendelton Ward. His personal website seems to be down currently, but he also happens to have a twitter on which he posts many delightful drawings. Other than that, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find out that much about him.

However, the voice actors are much easier to track down. Starring Hynden Walch, Jeremy Shada, and John DiMaggio (best known as Bender from Futurama) — with guest appearances from talents such as Mark Hamill — it’s definitely off to a good start.

Fredator Studios are the producers of the series (as well as of the animated short) and they have a terrific blog on which they post up artwork, storyboards, backgrounds, character designs, and much more. Well worth keeping an eye on over the coming months as things start coming together.

But perhaps my favourite thing about the new Adventure Time is the gorgeous sets (261 in total) as seen above. Designed by Ghostshrimp and Santino Lascano, the high resolution versions are already in heavy rotation as my desktop wallpaper.

In short: keep an eye out for it, it’s going to be popular.

So I present to you my dud photos of 2009, a little white-balance here and some levels there, but they’re pretty much as they came straight out of the camera:

But in the real world things have been busy — or at least as busy as we’d ever like them to be. Over the last three months spanning the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 a lot of things have conspired to happen all at once, categorically ruining all fun, ever. Things like new jobs with erratic and often unexpected work hours, the dreaded festive season, appointments with the immigration department and the weeks of paper work connected with them, actual paying graphic design work, double flu which may or may not have been swine related but sucked either way, persistent coughing, self doubt, lack of confidence and the search for some kind of unifying theory which explains the reason for ‘stuff.

There have been deaths. Several of them.

It’s just been that kind of three months — the kind where motivation is at an all time low and which in an unprofessional like myself are the sort of time when you withdraw the gang plank and float adrift liked a crotchety pirate in a sea of ‘leave me alone’ and ‘is there any Jeremy Kyle on TV?’

But all things must pass — it’s one of those essential governing principles of life necessary to moving forward.

And that’s what the next few posts will be all about — passing on the things we didn’t have the time or motivation to tell you about. It’s all about vomiting up the past three months onto your lap, wiping our mouths and mumbling sorry before pushing ourselves up into a stumble across the room like an unknown drunk at a party.

Classy.

I spent a lot of time worrying about the second part until I realised the validity of my code had absolutely no effect on how the site is displayed to visitors. This doesn’t mean you should just throw validation out the window — at the very least it is a great way to discover hidden errors in your code, or why something isn’t displaying as you think it should — but I just don’t believe it is as important as I once did.

Headers in WordPress are a relatively simple affair. If you want to brush up on the basics then I would recommend checking out the excellent WordPress Codex article on designing headers. The header for Superposition Kitty is based on Son Of Suckerfish Dropdowns, which is in turn based on the groundbreaking A List Apart article: Suckerfish Dropdowns. Reading through both of those articles (which I heavily recommend) will give you a good grounding in how to style lists as a horizontal (or even vertical) menu.

First up we have the HTML code, which will traditionally go directly after the <body> tag in the header.php file in your WordPress directory:

<div id="head">
<div id="navigation">
	<ul>
		<li><a href="#">#</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">#</a>
			<ul>
			<div class="center">
				<li><a href="#">#</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">#</a></li>
			</div>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">#</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>
</div>

This creates the basis for a simple two-tiered menu of three items (the second of which will have two child items). The <div class="center"> is the tag mentioned at the beginning of this article that will break validation. However, it is necessary to center the list items with the rest of the site while still allowing the background to take up 100% width. This should become more obvious with the CSS:

#head {
width:100%;
background:#222;
height:36px;
}

#navigation, #navigation ul, .center {
margin:0px auto;
width:960px;
}

#navigation ul li {
float:left;
margin:0px 12px 0px 6px;
padding:18px 3px 0px 3px;
font-size:15px;
line-height:18px;
font-weight:bold;
text-transform:uppercase;
}

#navigation ul li a {
color:#FDFDFD;
}

#navigation ul li:hover, #navigation ul li:active {
background:#34B0F8;
color:#222;
}

#navigation li ul {
position:absolute;
left:-9999px;
}

#navigation li:hover ul {
left:0px;
width:100%;
padding-top:2px;
background:#34B0F8;
}

#navigation li ul li {
padding:0px;
margin:0px 9px;
}

#navigation li ul li a:active, #navigation li ul li a:hover, #navigation ul li a:active, #navigation ul li a:hover {
color:#222;
}

This should be relatively self-explanatory if you read the articles linked above. We’re simply styling a list as a menu, and when the mouse is hovered over an item with a child element that element is unhidden. The only problem we have here is that Internet Explorer won’t properly recognise the :hover class on any element other than <a>, so we’re going to need to borrow some JavaScript from the Son Of Suckerfish Dropdowns article:

sfHover = function() {
var sfEls = document.getElementById("navigation").getElementsByTagName("LI");
for (var i=0; i<sfEls.length; i++) {
sfEls[i].onmouseover=function() {
this.className+=" sfhover";
}
sfEls[i].onmouseout=function() {
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(" sfhover\\b"), "");
}
}
}
if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent("onload", sfHover);

What this does is look for <li> elements in navigation and then apply :sfhover to them when moused-over, and remove it when moused-out. So we’ll have to add the following to our CSS file for it to have a class to apply:

#navigation li:sfhover ul {
left:0px;
width:100%;
padding-top:2px;
background:#34B0F8;
}

Put all this together and you should have something that looks rather similar to our menu. Feel free to post any comments, suggestions or questions below.

For the table below I have compared Media Temple’s ‘base’ dedicated virtual server to it’s nearest Linode competitor the ‘Linode 720′.

 
Linode comes out way in front in everything other than ‘Network Transfer’, however I have found that for the few small sites that we host we rarely use more than even 50GB a month. Obviously, depending on what you host you may need more than the 400GB per month that this level of Linode offers, but I would be wary of hosting anything pushing that much traffic on a server with only 512MB of RAM (in Media Temple’s case). It’s also worth noting that Linode offers additional transfer at the rate of $0.10 per 1GB if need be. Media Temple does not offer such a service, and will charge you $0.50 for each 1GB you are over your limit.

In the table below we have the various levels of support offered by both companies.

Most of my communication with Media Temple was through their email support, responses usually took anywhere from 2 to 24 hours and were varyingly helpful. With Linode I have found their IRC channel to be a terrific help in setting up, fine-tuning and securing my server, not to mention any random Unix, Windows, Mac (or even BeOS) questions you may have that have nothing to do with your server. Populated by dedicated staff members and other helpful individuals, I have found it invaluable.

I should also note that the Linode Library is still being populated with articles and that details may occasionally seem sparse, but it is something that is improving almost daily.

Finally, we have some additional details that I thought were important to compare.

Note that the Beta under ‘Backups’ for Linode is to signify that their backup service is currently in Beta, there is no word yet on when it will be out of Beta or what the price would be when this happens. Also shown above is my favourite feature of Linode: Pro rata billing. I have mentioned previously what a big help this was to me. I have also found that many people find Linode’s pro rata billing (ie. only pay for what you use) to be extremely helpful in testing various set-ups before they move them onto their live server.

Not mentioned above is Linode’s LISH console, which I have found pretty useful when I’ve done something stupid, such as locked myself out or messed up my network settings.

Overall it comes down quite favourably in Linode’s corner, which is pretty much why when I started to experience issues with the service provided by Media Temple they were my first choice. If you are still not sure about choosing Linode, then maybe give this a read: where they beat the best that the other VPS providers have to offer.

If you’re thinking of using Linode after reading this article then please sign up using this link and Linode will give me a small discount on my hosting.

WARNING: Semi-technical talk ahead.

Either somebody took offense at something we have written or they were just really, really bored, because at 16:00 on Friday of last week our server started sending out massive amounts of data over UDP. I received an automated notice from Linode a few hours later telling me that my server had averaged 6.16MB/s over the last two hours. That one spike there managed to use up 5% of our monthly bandwidth. The network usage continued at random intervals for only brief periods of time, making it quite difficult to catch with tcpdump, and neither ntop or iftop noticed anything amiss.

Keeping an eye on Linode’s conveniently provided network graphs I was finally able to capture the tail end of another massive output with tcpdump only to reveal absolutely nothing. None of the (very helpful) Linode staff were able to tell me just what was going on, but after a few hours came to the conclusion that it was likely somebody had compromised my server and was probably using it to perform DDoS attacks. Solution: delete and rebuild.

This could’ve been painful if I was still with Media Temple, but Linode offer pro-rata billing (meaning that I only have to pay for what I use). I immediately opened up a new server and got to work transferring my backups. Then it was time to secure it, and better than I had done last time. I am now using iptables to block all ports other than www, https and ssh. I have also set up SSH public/private keys, disabled root login, moved ssh ports, removed vsftpd and installed fail2ban.

I could now close up my old account. Total cost to me: $0.63 in server charges and half my weekend. Hopefully I won’t have to deal with this again, but it taught me to make sure I always have up-to-date backups and to keep on top of security. And not to piss off Eastern European hackers.

Spec — short for ‘speculative’ — work is applying the ‘try before you buy’ principles of selling cars to the design industry (hopefully you can see already what a bad idea this is). In short, it is any work in which a fair fee has not been agreed upon up front. This should seem obvious enough to most professional designers out there; personally, I don’t take on any projects these days unless there is a signed contract and — if a flat fee rather than on hourly fee is chosen — between 30% to 50% of the fee up front.

Anybody that has been ripped off by a client that decided not to pay at the end of a project, or decided that the fee is too large and they will pay the amount they feel is ‘fair’, knows how stupid it is to take on spec work. But there is another form of spec work: the design ‘competition’. Design competitions have been around for decades, but the popularity of the web has brought us many websites hosting these competitions — and some of them even promise a reasonable fee.

We’ll ignore for now the hundreds of websites and forums that are populated with “best design for a logo that contains a picture of my cat and the words ‘synergy’, ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘cross-platform’ will be PayPal’d £20″. While these design pleas are universally terrible, I have been told that the main entrants for these are 16 year-old’s that have just pirated a copy of Adobe Photoshop and are looking for weed money, not exactly my audience here.

The new breed of design competitions is represented by many quite recently launched websites (which I have deigned not to provide links for) that appear to offer a reasonable fee. They act as intermediaries between the client and hundreds of designers. The client puts up the brief and the amount they are willing to pay, and the designers clamber over each-other in an effort to win the £300 or however much is being offered. While — if you only spend a few hours on your design before you submit it — this may look like quite the deal, this is definitely not true. Depending on the quality of your work, your chance of actually getting paid is only 1:number_of_designers_entered, while the client is getting hours_worked x number_of_designers_entered worth of design. How does that not look like a terrible deal for anybody that entered, and a brilliant deal for the client?

It’s easy enough to stop all this, just say no to spec work. When the clients realise that the logo designed by the 16 year-old with a pirated copy of Photoshop isn’t holding up, they’ll have to come to you.

Stas Orlov

Stas Orlov — also known as Indi and Uno — lives in Moscow, Russia. A member of Bang Bang Studio, he produces beautiful detailed pieces that look almost as if they’ve been drawn in MS Paint. His work is largely surreal, dealing with themes from childen’s stories, to pop culture, to religion, and so on.

Unfortunately this profile is tragically short as there isn’t much information on him to be found, and certainly not in English. But, make sure to check out his aforementioned blogs on LiveJournal, or his Profile on Bang Bang Studio, to get an idea of just how prolific he is.

Takato Yamamoto

Takato Yamamoto is a Japanese Illustrator. Born in the Akita prefecture of Japan, he graduated from the Tokyo Zokei University in the 1980’s and mostly drew illustrations for commercial advertising. He then became interested in Ukiyo-e, which he refined further into his “Heisei Esthiticism” style.

His work mainly deals with eroticism, bondage, and surrealism, and more examples can be seen here.

John Bauer

John Bauer was born 1882, in Sweden. At the age of 16 he began to study art, and at just 18 he had discovered his love of surreal/fantasy work. His most famous work is Bland Tomtar Och Troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), a Swedish fairy tails and folklore annual, the first issues of which (1907 — 1910 and 1912 — 1915) were illustrated by him.

Bauer’s career was cut unfortunately short when he died at the age of just 35, when he, his wife, and their three children drowned in Lake Vattern. To see his hauntingly surreal illustrations and paintings in person visit the John Bauer Museum.

Now we get to set up our new Linode VPS. The first thing you’ll want to do is configure your DNS. Make sure that you delete the MX record and replace it with the records from Google Apps as discussed in part one. Note that you do not need to wait for the name servers to propagate before editing your DNS records, in fact it is probably better to set up your DNS first so that downtime is minimised. You’ll then need to deploy a linux distribution. As mentioned in the preface; I chose Ubuntu 9.04.

Now this is where the need to use the Linode dashboard ends. The following can be used with any VPS provider. You can follow either the Linode Setting Up A LAMP Server On Ubuntu article, or alternatively Slicehost’s Ubuntu Hardy Setup article to get your VPS up and running. Note that the Slicehost article focuses more on security and that you will need to read the rest of the articles in their series to set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

With everything set up, you can copy all the data you have backed up on your personal computer to your new VPS. I found it easiest to just scp to my server and upload an entire website to it’s public_html directory on my server. You’ll also want to copy the output of your databases to your server. Make sure to actually create the database on your new server and then grant your user permissions on it. You can then migrate the data from your output.sql file to your new database.

You may now find (as I did) that you server isn’t serving PHP files properly. A simple fix is to create an .htaccess file (if one doe not already exist) in the public_html directory for your domain and add:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.php5
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Make sure that if .htaccess already exists then you add it to the top of the file.

Now — if you’re like me — you probably don’t like editing all those .CSS and .HTML files through a terminal, so we’re going to set up FTP so we can edit using our application of choice (personally, I use Coda). Following this article will get everything up and running, but you’re still going to need to create accounts. I find it best to set up an account for each individual domain, which is as easy as:

sudo useradd -d /srv/www/domainname/public_html -m username
sudo passwd username

Obviously, change domainname to the actual domain, and username to the name of the user you want to create. Using these credentials we can now ftp to our domain, but we don’t have any permissions to upload or edit files. This is easily fixed with:

chown -R username /srv/www/domainname/public_html

The final (and hardest, for me) step is to get Ruby on Rails working. What I didn’t realise was that installing Phusion Passenger meant that mod-php was uninstalled. Thus rendering my WordPress installation useless. I found this helpful guide that recommend using FastCGI instead, but FastCGI gave me out of memory errors no matter what the limit in php.ini was set to. So the only alternative left was to install Mongrel, this was easy enough using another guide.

Now hopefully everything has gone as well for you as it did for me. If not, then go back through the guides I linked and read the comments section to see if anybody has had the same problem as you, otherwise post a comment below.

Seeing as my Media Temple install still wasn’t responding, the first thing I had to do was login to Plesk and see what services I could shut down to get on with the move. Turned out there actually wasn’t any, so I took the decision to shut down Apache for a few hours while I tried to get email sorted.

Hours were spent researching the best way to migrate the seven email addresses between servers, until a friend recommended Google Apps. The standard edition (free) gives you a calendar, docs, sites, and — most importantly — email. 7GB of data per user, with 50 users allowed per domain. There was also the added bonus that I would be moving reasonably intensive resources (spam filtering and such) off the server, and that if my server ever went down again email would not be effected. The only downside to Google Apps is that you can’t have multiple domains on the same account (unless you want all the email to go to the same address), so it required setting up 3 different accounts to manage all my email addresses. Setting up an account is relatively painless, involving creating a document in the root of your domain to prove your ownership.

The first thing to do was to upload all my emails. This required booting up Parallels Desktop into XP, as the Google Apps email uploader is Windows only. It was simple enough to create a new POP (important, as you need the email available on your machine) account for each user in Thunderbird and then upload them to the relevant Google Apps account. The only other important step is to modify the MX records for your domain, your hosting provider should provide some way in which to do this. You’ll want to delete your old MX record, and add the following:

1     ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5     ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5     ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10    ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10    ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

Give it a few hours to propagate and you’re good to go. The last thing to do is change the setting in your email client to reflect the fact that your email is now coming through via Google.

I could now go back into Plesk and turn my mail server off, and Apache back on. As I already had an FTP account set up for each domain, it was easy enough to FTP into them all and backup entire websites to my laptop. The only tricky part remaining was MySQL, and I didn’t know my admin account or password. Luckily cat /root/.mysql_history|more gave me the details I was looking for, and I could get to backing up my WordPress databases. Once again, a single line of code was all I needed:

mysqldump --opt --user=username --password=password  dbname > output.sql

Where username was my username, password my password, dbname the name of the database I wished to back up, and output.sql the file created from the process. Once that was done I could copy output.sql to my laptop. Up next; getting Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Ruby on Rails to place nice on my new server.

It all came to a head last week when the site went down completely. Frantic requests to Media Temple (over a period of 24 hours) ended in a response of “If issues persists, we can only suggest either adding addtional RAM or upgrading your server. We’ve determined the root cause and have helped you optimize your server as a courtesy.”

When the support staff still can’t tell you why you server is performing so badly with no changes, and deem it a courtesy to keep it running, you know it’s time to move on. So goodbye Media Temple, and hello Linode! I signed up to the base plan — less than half the price I was paying at Media Temple — and got to migrating all my data. There will be a post coming up about all the pitfalls involved in moving from one hosting company to another, as well as tips and tricks to set up your fresh server.

Who knows the joy of the open road on a perfect autumn afternoon?

Picture the King’s Highway rolling smoothly down over the moor into the little valley where an old-fashioned riverside inn is half concealed by an opalescent mist! The purling brown waters of the stream make rippling music under the moss-grown arches of the grey stone bridge. And then the great road winds on up the hill opposite until its brown streak is lost amidst the distant trees.

The Real Joy.
The silk-clad girl lolling on the cushions of a big limousine may see these things. But she does not really feel them, she does not drink in their full beauty. It is her sister on the motor-bike who learns the true spell of the countryside, who gets the intoxication of speed and colour and movement — the joy of the open road.

Motor cycling as a sport for girls has come to stay. The modern girl is not content to sit perched up on a pillion or embedded in the close confinement of a sidecar. She is out to have a bike of her own, and to ride it herself. Nothing less is going to satisfy her.

The Training.
In the strain and stress of the war all these ideas have been changed. Motor cycling demands a costume fashioned more or less on masculine lines. The war finally abolished the prejudice against girls wearing some kind of rational dress. The lady motor cyclist despatch riders attached to the British Army commanded universal admiration. They were subjected to rigid military discipline, and their life was a very hard one. Out early and late, often in driving rain or bitter cold, entrusted with urgent messages of the utmost importance, and responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of their own machines, these intrepid girls put up an achievement which their country will never forget, and which, incidentally, has washed away the last trace of prejudice against motor cycling as a healthy pastime for women.

Advice.
Here are a few suggestions for the beginner: Special machines are built for ladies, but the best advice is to get a man’s machine of a suitable type and to wear a costume fashioned on the same model as those of the war-time despatch riders. Girls who have had experience in munition factories or as land workers ought not to have much difficulty in settling the details of their attire.

The problem, of course, is to choose a rig-out that will be perfectly neat and workmanlike on the road, and which will at the same time all the fair rider to present an appearance not devoid of feminine charm when enjoying a cup of tea at some wayside hostelry.

Short rides, say, fifteen or twenty miles in fine dry weather do not present any special difficulties. But the girl motor cyclist who is out to do her sixty or hundred miles at all seasons will be well advised to make careful preparations. Warm underclothing should be worn, and the neck should on no account be open. For footgear easy-fitting waterproof leather boots — and above these puttees, or better still, leather leggings, if funds will run to them. Probably the wisest plan of all for the lady-rider is to wear a suit of grey, or fawn-coloured overall of some rainproof material. These can be purchased at quite reasonable prices, afford a complete protection, and can be slipped off in a few seconds at the journey’s end or during a meal en route. Serviceable leather gloves are an absolute essential, and for headgear it would be difficult to beat one modelled on the lines of those worn by the lady motor cyclists of the R.A.F.

The Choice Of Machine.
In the choice of machines the would-be girl rider had better be guided by the advice of her men friends. A medium-powered machine, somewhere in the neighbourhood of a 3-h.p., should be selected, and preferably with a two-stroke engine, as these are easier to start and cause much less vibration.

A machine for a lady’s use should have a clean running engine. Oil is all very well in its way, and so is dust, but when you get them in quantities, and mixed, they are apt to be a sore trial to the flesh.

Here is a simple explanation of a petrol engine for the benefit of the absolute novice.

The motive power is caused by the explosion of a mixture of petrol gas and air in a closed cylinder, thereby forcing down a piston which communicates its power through suitable gearing to the back wheel. The explosion drives the piston down. As the piston comes up a valve is opened and the burnt gases are forced out the through the exhaust pipe. As the piston comes down again another valve is opened and it sucks in a new lot of explosive mixture. THis is compressed on the succeeding up stroke. The moment it gets to the top it is fired by and electric spark, there is a new explosion, and the whole operation of four strokes as described above stars again.

Obviously, the two prime essentials are to have the explosive mixture ready to be sucked into the cylinder and the electric spark to set fire to it at the right moment. The latter is accomplished automatically by the magneto, a clever device consisting of a coil of wire spinning between two magnets. Modern magnetos are very reliable and require no attention except an occasional oiling.

Less Risk.
Girl riders should adopt sidecar rather than solo machines. There is less danger or skidding, and it is best to have a friend with you, both for company’s sake and to lend a hand in case of a puncture or other breakdown.

Here are a few don’ts to finish up with:-

1. Don’t ride a motor bike unless both brakes are acting perfectly.
2. Don’t forget to see that the petrol and oil tanks are full before starting.
3. Don’t stop unless you can possibly help it when descending a hill.
4. Don’t ride fast round corners or try to show off by doing clever “stunts”.
5. Don’t try to economise by riding damaged or worn tyres. Nothing is more likely to land you in heavy expenses.
]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/the-speed-girl/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/from-the-newsdesk/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/from-the-newsdesk/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:35:09 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1571 Global Panic as Swayze …]]> Global Panic as Swayze Text Joke Acquires Sentience

STOCK MARKETS reflected the world’s growing uncertainty last night, as it was revealed by top military officials that a joke about the death of Patrick Swayze, sent by text message, has acquired sentience.

Around 7pm, analysts at a listening post in Edwards air force base, north east California, detected a change on the oscillation of high-frequency waves, thought to carry mobile phone SMS messages.

Despite the full effects of the sudden change in wavelength remaining unknown, Edwards’ staff are convinced that one constantly circulated message may have caused the world-wide network, in the words of one staffer, to go “totally Road House.”

The cause of the joke’s acquired savoir faire is unknown, although a newly published report from the UK’s main source of press releases noted that, despite several newsworthy global cataclysms having taken place since Swayze’s death, there has been a remarkable absence of new, funny material.

Neil Purves, of the Council for Associate Mortgage Lenders, said, “I usually get a few messages every week with a joke about what’s just happened in the news.”

“I would have expected that some sort of gag about Sumatra or Samoa would have been forwarded by now, but it’s been a few days – it looks as if the guy who makes up the jokes has gone on holiday.”

Asked if he had noticed any change to his mobile phone’s activity since the Swayze joke first exhibited intelligence, Mr Purves added “I think it sent a bunch of blank texts to one of my friends last night. It wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I switched the thing on and off.”

As the probability of a text-virus became greater, the Japanese stock market saw an unprecedented decline in its value this morning.

The Nikkei 225 index was forced to close down 20 points at 114.5, having witnessed widespread technical problems, which many feared were due to the Swayze joke. Many traders dubbed the outbreak “text influenza.”

by Hanstock Hauser



]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/from-the-newsdesk/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/miss-li/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/miss-li/#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:04:10 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1566 It seems like Apple have done it again.

I would say I was getting a little sick of them launching the careers of every decent zeitgeist artist of the moment but I’m not. And this is not because I like Apple. I own none of their products and never have done. I am still terrifically prejudiced against the Ipod and prefer to buy Creative MP3 players. I think those white head phones make you look like a twat and I am still, to my great disadvantage, using a dell.

But the thing with Apple is that you can’t fault their business model nor their marketing which are both unmistakably well put together, often flawless and responsible for the career boosting exposure given to artists like Feist, CSS, (regrettably) The Ting Tings, a whole host of others and now to my great delight Miss Li.

Real name Linda Carlsson, Miss Li is a Swedish singing sensation with an established catalogue of 4 albums already behind her and a voice like a drunken angel. Playful, bawdy and roguishly innocent her music is a joy to listen to.

If you like cabaret sound mixed with a little jazz and a side helping of big band then you’ll like this.

If you don’t I’m very sorry.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/miss-li/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/introducing-pixl-a-pixel-font/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/introducing-pixl-a-pixel-font/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:50:06 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1563

Pixl is a new pixel typeface. Best displayed at 6pt (or multiples thereof for larger sizes) it is only 5 pixels high. With an x-height of 4 pixels, an ascender of only 1 pixel, and a descender of also 1 pixel it is one of the smallest pixel type family’s around. And it’s available (and cheap) in our shop right now!

You may notice similarities to Susan Kare’s ‘Five Dots’ or Jason Kottke’s ‘Silkscreen’ because — truth be told — there’s only a limited number of ways that you can arrange pixels in a 5 pixel high box, but Pixl differs in that it has both uppercase and lowercase, full symbol support (as much as can be arranged to be recognisable at this small size), and many variants.

First up we have ‘Pixl’ itself. Available in Regular/Medium, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic it is as versatile as a pixel font has ever been. Next is ‘Pixl Mono’, in which various characters have been lengthened (or shortened) so that they all fit in a 5x5 square, perfect for displaying code at a small size. Finally we have ‘Pixl Serif’: a variation of Pixl — but only available in Regular and Bold — it has grown slightly in width (and style) thanks to the addition of serifs.

As another advantage of Pixl, it is also licensed to be fully embeddable. This means you can finally take advantage of CSS 3’s @font-face embedding. To learn just how to do that, visit here.

You can purchase any (or all) of these fonts in TrueType format, and at a much lower fee than any Type Foundry would charge you (if indeed you could find such a diverse and complete family) by heading to our shop and making your selection. If you have any issues with the shopping process then please contact us using any of the means noted to the right of this post and we’ll be happy to help.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/10/introducing-pixl-a-pixel-font/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/internet-etiquette-being-un-friended/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/internet-etiquette-being-un-friended/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:57:41 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1494 The internet is a lonely place — never before in human history have so many people come together to act so childishly to each other. As it exponentially increases in size so does it’s capacity for histrionics and snap decisions allowing millions of people the ability to act out en masse.

Previously, in days gone by, we were forced as a species to rely on slower less whimsical mediums of communication like the telegram or spending time together and sharing our experiences through a filter of privacy and hindsight.



But no longer is this the case. The days of direct contact and communication have been replace by the subjective transience of social networking leaving us at sea in an ever expanding perfect storm of craptacular proportions.

This calls for a personal evolution of sorts — a re-learning of adapted social norms to adjust to a society built on an Ash Ketchum style of friendship. If one seeks to succeed at the business of friendship one must learn to traverse the swelling peaks and sharps descents of internet relationships and learn to circumnavigate the murky pools of modern fraternity. But how does one, being unsure of these new paradigms, go about this task?

Today I plan to guide you over one the most unsettling and discouraging hurdles of internet life — the phenomena of being unfriended.

Ghastly as it may seem some of your terrific internet friends may not like you. Secretly they may seethe behind the scenes — the very sight of your wall comments or pictorial updates sending them into paroxysms of grief and anger. With every status update or quiz posted to your news feed their resentment, ever simmering, grows larger and soon they can no longer bear to acknowledge your existence.

This is when unfriending happens, although you may not notice right away. There will be no announcement unless the unfriender is particularly courteous or spiteful as they are simply required to click a button and then languish safely in their passive aggression, shielded by the indirectness of telecommunications. Effectively your friendship has ended but as yet you remain uninformed.

For how long this is the case depends entirely on yourself. Do you routinely check Facebook? Do you know exactly and just how many friends you have? Does your value as a member of the human race rely on the number of contacts leaving positive comments on the multiple pictures of yourself covering your profile page? If the answer to these questions is yes then you will know sooner rather than later when a change in the ecosystem of your online buddies occurs.

If not, it may take some time until the information of your stunning social failure filters down to you. The process could take months. Or even years.

None the less, however long this process takes you will at some point be faced with the terrible grief of your situation. You have become the unfriend and must now conform to an expected and time honoured tradition of falling out on the internet the steps of which I now endeavour to map out for you.

Step 1 — The Bait and Hook

You must immediately, upon discovering you have been unfriended draw attention to yourself and your plight. This is done so that the rest of your friends are well prepared and can begin to circle the wagons for the coming events. Sides will be taken. Lines will be drawn and crossed. This is the internet.

At this stage you should be seen to exercise decorum and class, only ever hinting indirectly at your sadness and turmoil. This can be done in several ways.

The Passive Aggressive


The Pity Party


The Woe Is Me


Step 2 — The Misdirection

When directly questioned about what your status update is referring to do not commence with reciprocal directness. Evade all attempts made to open you up, maintain the allusion of having taken to the moral high ground and deflect all inquiries. Try lines like “It doesn’t matter — don’t want to talk it here”, “LOL You know me — my life is like a soap opera or summit”, or “Can’t say — don’t want to start drama because that wouldn’t be nice.”

Answering questions like this will prompt your remaining friends to contact you privately over pm’s or services such as AIM or MSN Messenger to inquire as to the nature of your misfortune. This will make you feel better and set up step 3.

Step 3 — Bolstering Your Troops

Once you’ve begun contact with the people real enough to show how much they care by asking you about your Facebook drama proceed to explain everything to them. Be sure to detail your heartbreak and internal torture at being so ungraciously treated while maintaining a degree of external coolness and dignity.

You’re upset but you don’t want to come across as a whingetard lest the very friends you seek to comfort you decide to unfriend you too. Internet friendships take no prisoners as detailed in step 4.

Step 4 — The Slow Creep Of Subjective Revenge

Over time you’ll want to build a growing resentment for the person who saw fit to banish you from their sphere of influence within the hearts of your other friends. Craftily remind then over a period of weeks and months — whenever the topic is brought up — just how bad a friend the unfriender is.

Whatever small thing they say must become a testament to their unworthiness as a human being and any activity they engage in and document via the medium of the internet must be objectified into a pathetic reminder of their obvious desperation and loneliness.

There is nothing that cannot be reconstituted as your own personal truth and presented anew to the world — the unfriender who was so arrogant as to assume their place above you has lived to regret their folly and will die alone and unloved whereas you will live forever in the bosom of your online circle of friends, cherished appreciated and better off. Who needed them anyway?

This step should be easy to complete as there is nothing that brings internet acquaintances together and cements the bonds between them quite like mutual and abiding hatred.

Step 5 — Recovery and Replenishment

Remaining friendships secured it’s time to move on. But how does one go about this? How exactly does a person begin to make up for the time and emotion spent on an even of this magnitude? It may not seem easy but I assure you, there is a way.

Nothing says “I don’t care! I’m over it!” like making new friends and circulating yourself and where better to carry out this process than publicly? Social networking sites have millions of new users all waiting to become intimate and involved with your life so get adding!

Contact undervalued cousins, friends of friends, people you walked past in high school or who have cool hair or interesting beards. The sky’s the limit so knock yourself out.

Start groups with broad and reaching themes that seek to define you as a person like ‘True Friendship’, ‘BFF’s Forever!!!!’ or “Boycott The Unfriend Function” and invite everyone to join.

Hold regular events and have your new friends RSVP to them so that everyone can see the wonderful life you now lead. Be sure your every picture demonstrates the fun and good times you have at these events and that every person you tag glows with the inner joy they feel at knowing you and being forever, your friend.


You are a survivor.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/internet-etiquette-being-un-friended/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/css-image-caption-rollovers-for-wordpress/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/css-image-caption-rollovers-for-wordpress/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:49:30 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1485 Lately at Superposition Kitty we’ve been adopting more of a photo-blog feel to some of our posts. If you’re recently read Apple Crumble The Retarded Way then you would’ve noticed that text is displayed in a caption inside the image when you mouse over it. The original idea for this was taken from The Guardian website, where if you hover over any images on the main page a caption will display giving you more information on the linked story.

I spent hours coming up with what I thought would be the most perfect solution to this (I didn’t want any of the extra JavaScript effects that The Guardian used), but my approach turned out to be too narrow — working only in Firefox. So I turned to my good old friend Google, and started searching. I eventually came up with this CSS On-Hover Image Captions tutorial by Soh Tanaka. Being pure CSS and working in all browsers (including Internet Explorer 6 and 7) it seemed to be exactly what I wanted. You can view a page demonstrating how his version works here, and I recommend that you read through his post first to get a greater idea of how these little CSS tricks achieve such an effect. Read on past the demo image below to see how you can get this up and running on your blog.



Here we have a bike. Lookit dat bike.


The very first thing we’re going to do is create a CSS file. I try and contain most of my CSS files in their own folder, and have thus created a file named hover.css in /wp-content/themes/mytheme/css/, which will then be filled with my customised version of Soh Tanaka’s code as below:

.imgteaser {
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
margin-bottom: 18px;
overflow: hidden;
float: left;
position: relative;
}

.imgteaser a {
text-decoration: none;
margin-top: -18px;
float: left;
}
.imgteaser a:hover {
cursor: pointer;
}

.imgteaser a img {
float: left;
margin-bottom: 0px;
border: 1px solid #FDFDFD;
}

.imgteaser a:hover .desc {
display: block;
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 18px;
font-weight: normal;
color: #FDFDFD;
position: absolute;
bottom: 1px;
left: 1px;
padding: 0px 3px 0px 3px;
margin: 0;
width: 454px;
background: #000;
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
opacity:.80;
-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80)";
}

.imgteaser a .desc {	display: none; }
.imgteaser a:hover .more { visibility: hidden;}

If you want more information on what each bit of CSS does, then once again I’d recommend reading the original post. This file then has to be linked in the header of your WordPress theme, so make sure to put the code below between the <head> and </head> tags (changing as necessary):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/css/hover.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

It really is as simple as that! Now whenever we want to display one of these beautifully captioned images we can just modify the code below when writing a new post (make sure that you are writing in HTML Mode and not Visual Mode):

<div class="imgteaser">
<a href="#">
<img src="IMAGE LINK" />
<span class="desc">TEXT</span>
</a>
</div>

To see an example of this in action, simply scroll back up to the top and move your mouse over the picture of the bike.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/css-image-caption-rollovers-for-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/muse-commit-plagiarism-in-space-again/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/muse-commit-plagiarism-in-space-again/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:55:09 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1464 First listen to this.

Now listen to this.

Now listen to:

• Muse — Uprising

WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP TO BELLAMY

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/muse-commit-plagiarism-in-space-again/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/girl_music_featuring_polly_scattergood/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/girl_music_featuring_polly_scattergood/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:49:49 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1456

We like girl music. Let us tell you about some.

Hannah Rockcliffe and Sophie Madeleine Ball, or Rocky and Balls are a super cute comedy music duo who’ve previously been featured on the likes of Boing Boing, Ukulele Hunt and Bearduary. They’re as interesting and eclectic as that blog roll suggests.

With songs like I Heart You Online and Gaysong they’re well worth a listen and hopefully just getting started.

In a similar vein Peggy Sue are a Brighton band comprised of Rosa Rex, Katy Klaw and a man named Olly who plays the drums who we found quite by accident some months ago. Their anti-soul/anti-folk sound has remained a staple of our car music since then and we highly recommend them. A sample of their music is available here as are instructions on how to download their latest EP.

Hooray! There’s a new La Roux video. This time it’s the turn of “I’m Not Your Toy” for the single treatment and it’s very enjoyable. Of course I would say that since I think I’m in love with Elly Jackson.

And finally, but most importantly, Polly Scattergood! Brit School graduate and ethereal ingenue that she is her debut album sounds like a nervous break down at an afternoon picnic and therefore it’s no surprise that a parallel has been frequently drawn between her and Lewis Carrol’s Alice.

Of course that seems to happen almost every time a young woman writes an experimental or interesting song but with her blond hair, obstinate pixie face and blue blue eyes you can’t help but notice a certain similarity.

If you’ll direct your attention here you’ll be able to watch the video for her single “Please Don’t Touch” — a catchy, poppy but individual number that completely disarmed me by the first chorus.

You’re not going to be the first person to point out that she sounds like Kate Bush. Rob Da Bank already got to that comparison on November 10th of 2008 and ruined it for the rest of us. It’s lucky then that the rest of the album is stuffed full with moments where you’ll find yourself trying to place the musical influence behind her songs and piecing together the landscape of her brain.

Not for everyone (according to certain reviewers — personally I’d recommend it to anyone ever) Polly Scattergood will take you on a weird and sometimes unsettling journey through a space often uncharted by members of the female pop scene. There’s more than a hint of genuine sexuality, instability and darkness that will often leave you wondering what exactly it was you just heard and why you don’t hear it more often. Honest, vulnerable and yet somehow strong if this album doesn’t remind you a little of acts like Björk, Tori Amos or Bat For Lashes you’ve probably never listened to them.

And if you decide, like I’m sure some of you will, that that is not a good thing then you are wrong.

Polly Scattergood is a gem of a performer and her album is a breath of fresh air in an already stagnating female led music scene.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/girl_music_featuring_polly_scattergood/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/snow-leopard-round-up/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/snow-leopard-round-up/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:36:02 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1442 Mac OS X Snow Leopard was released by Apple on August 28, 2009. Famous for being announced as having “no new features”, that’s not entirely the case. This seventh major version of Mac OS X was designed to improve performance and efficiency, reduce memory usage, and increase HDD space. As Snow Leopard is also the first Mac operating system since System 7 to not support PPC architecture, there is understandably a lot of questions about compatibility, requirements, speed, and other changes to be answered.

First up we have a Snow Leopard compatablity list, very useful for anybody that has not yet upgraded. Make sure to search through for all your important applications, but be aware that there are still many not on the list. About the only application/plugin that I use with any regularity that is still not working in Snow Leopard would be the Letterbox plugin for Mail that rearranges the window into three vertical columns to take advantage of widescreen monitors, but an update should be available shortly.

If you’re wanting some quick reviews of Snow Leopard, then Wired has a bunch. Starting with 6 Things You Need To Know About Snow Leopard, How Snow Leopard Will Improve Your Hardware, and a review. They also have a reasonably detailed upgrade guide. And if you’re wondering just what is missing in Snow Leopard, then this link is for you.

However, the cream of the crop of Snow Leopard reviews would have to be this 23 page review by John Siracusa of Ars Technica. Make sure to set aside the couple of hours that you will need to read through it all, and if you’re at all interested in the core technology and changes beneath the skin then don’t skip through the middle. For the even more technically orientated amongst you, we have an Apple Developer Center article detailing What’s New in 10.6 for developers.

I’ve been using Snow Leopard for what is coming up on a couple of weeks now, and find it blazingly fast when compared to 10.5, even on my 32bit MacBook Pro. Overall, it’s well worth the £25 upgrade price.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/09/snow-leopard-round-up/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/wordpress-plugin-round-up/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/wordpress-plugin-round-up/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:24:34 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1391 Every so often I get questions about what plugins I’m using on the site, and the sheer number they get in response seems to shock most so I’ve decided to document them all below. I believe that the best plugins should be invisible, thus the majority of these plugins add some kind of back-end functionality that I feel is missing from the WordPress core.

Advanced Excerpt
Advanced Excerpt adds several improvements over WP’s default excerpt. It will trim to a supplied character or word length and has the ability to keep HTML markup. You can see it in use just to the right of this post under ‘Latest Posts’, I’ve set the excerpt length to four words, the HTML markup for <em> to be kept, and the ellipses to be …. All-in-all, very easy to install and use, and it provides some much needed functionality.

Akismet
Akismet is a very well known (and well used) plugin. Simply install it, enter your WordPress API key, and you’ll likely never have to worry about comment spam on your blog again. At the time of writing Akismet has caught 1,276 spam comments on this blog with a 100.00% accuracy rate. Occasionally you will have to delete a few of the comments that it catches when it’s not completely sure that they’re spam (at the moment I’ve been deleting quite a few Russian comments), but for the most part it will do its job behind the scenes.

flickrRSS
FlickrRSS can be seen working in the very right column. It is a simple plugin that pulls photos from your Flickr photostream and displays them on your blog, just enter your Flickr User ID and the number and size of the photos you want to display. An added bonus is the ability to cache the thumbnails it creates of each photo.

fmTuner
Next up we have fmTuner, which retrieves song information from your Last.fm profile and publishes them to your WordPress theme. In much the same way as FlickrRSS, you only have to enter your username and options to display. For those wondering, the display format I’m using to show the tracks to the very right of this post is <li class="lastfm-item"><a href="[::url::]">[::artist::] - [::title::]</a></li>

Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps generates an XML sitemap of your blog for use by Google, Bing, Ask.com and Yahoo (Yahoo requires an Application ID). You can see the sitemap created by the plugin for SuperpositionKitty.com here.

Limit Login Attempts
Limit Login Attempts does just what it says on the tin: it gives the admin the ability to limit the login attempts, by locking out the user after a certain number of tries. As only Jen and I use the admin panel I have set it up quite harshly, with a 24 lockout after 4 retries, as well as taking advantage of the plugins ability to email the admin upon lockout.

Platinum SEO Pack
Platinum SEO pack is apparently the “ultimate WordPress SEO solution”, and I have to admit that it does a pretty good job of it. The ability to optimise titles, generate META tags, override META descriptions, settings for index or noindex, for follow or no follow, and much more make it almost indispensable. For more information on just what each setting does see this page.

Random Posts, Recent Comments, Similar Posts
These three plugins are grouped together as they all make use of the Post Plugin Library by Rob Marsh. Recent Comments and Similar Posts can both be seen in action to the right of this post. Random Posts will be seen by anybody who manages to get a 404 page, which you can see here.

Sideblog
Sideblog is probably one of the most important plugins on this site as it drives the Vignettes that you see to the right of the main page. Relatively easy to set up, all I have to do to publish a mini post is select the ‘Vignette’ category and the plugin will publish it to the sidebar while at the same time removing that post from the main feed. The code to do this is as easy as <div class="vignette">%content%</div>.

Twitter For Wordpress
Twitter for WordPress simply displays your latest tweet(s) wherever you wish on your blog. There is no GUI set-up for this plugin, as it is all done in your theme template. The single line of code that I use to display our latest tweet at the bottom right of the main page is <?php twitter_messages('spkitty', 1, true, false, '$lt;img src="/twitter_small.gif" alt="rss" width="18px" height="10px" /$gt;', true, true, false); ?>. This displays the latest tweet from our feed, with no timestamp, with my little bird icon as a link to the tweet, and URLs and users both as click-able links.

wp-Typography
WP-Typography is one for all the type nerds out there. It adds hyphenation, spacing control, intelligent character replacement, and CSS hooks, all of which greatly improve the look and feel of your blog. At the moment I have the hyphenation, character replacement, and widow prevention turned on.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/wordpress-plugin-round-up/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/apple-crumble-the-retarded-way/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/apple-crumble-the-retarded-way/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:37:36 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1397 This Friday was Ryan’s birthday and as such there had to be cake.

This wasn’t a problem as a) cake is easy and b) cake is fun.

Here is how we did it (hold your mouse over the pictures below for MAGIC).

Firstly we took this recipe by Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall and then more or less ignored it.



Now according to Hugh you will need 180g of plain flour. Which is more or less what’s in this bowl only we replaced some of the flour with oats because we had some. Also because we could.


Next you need 120g chilled butter which you’ll want to cut into cubes. This is a lot of butter. When we got to this part of the recipe I was like “120g of butter? Really? I am looking at it and that seems like an excess of butter…”. But that’s what you need. Seriously.


Now you’re going to need to wash your hands (this is important because otherwise you will make an unhygenic cake which is not fun). Once you’ve done that dry them off, pick up some of your butter and add it to your flour. Then get rubbing it together. Continue to do this until all your butter is in the flour and the whole thing looks like bread crumbs. It will take a while but it will make you buff. Super buff.


Now you need 80g of sugar. Hugh says caster sugar but we didn’t have any. Either that or I couldn’t see any because our kitchen cupboards are too high up for me to use properly. Anyway Demerara sugar is nicer so that’s what we used. Throw the sugar of your choice into your bowl of flour and butter and mix well to complete your crumble mix. Cover it and stow it in the fridge while you deal with the apples. Once you’ve done this turn on your oven and pre-heat that motherfucker to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. We chose 180C because metric RULES.


You’re going to need a kilo or so of apples. Like the butter this seems excessive. We chose Gala, Golden Delicious and some little home grown apples kindly donated by my mother. Hugh says Bramley apples. I don’t even know what Bramley apples are.


Get peeling


Use the peeler to core all your apples. By this point your hands will be sticky and you will hate apples. But don’t stop because next you want to cut up all the apples into chunks of whatever size you feel like and throw them into *another* bowl.


Add about a table spoon (or two or three) of lemon juice to your apples and then quickly follow it with two table spoons of water. This helps to cook your apples which is a good thing.


Ginger. This was not in the original recipe — I just had some. If you also have some chop it up and throw it in with your apples.


The next step is adding another 80 grams of sugar and some fresh raspberries and some cinnamon to your apple, lemon juice and ginger mix and then sticking your hands in there. This will actually feel more sticky than when they were covered in apple but they will taste delicious. Make sure everything is nicely covered in sugar etc and tip into an ovenproof dish big enough to hold everything. At this point I wasn’t sure we had one of those.


Remove your crumble mix from the fridge and cover your fruit with it. Try to do it evenly because otherwise your cumble will be lopsided and this would suck. Sprinkle on some nutmeg and further sugar for good luck. After you’re done with this put it in the oven and go order some pizza from a local take away. You made crumble — you don’t also need to make dinner.


After you’ve ordered your pizza, eaten a few slices and a good 40 minutes have passed check on your crumble. If it looks golden on top it’s done. Remove it from the oven. With oven gloves because it will be hot.


Serve into vivdly patterned bowls and ladle on cream. Our cream had more sugar, vanilla essence and maple syrup whisked into it because I can’t leave well enough alone. It was delicious though. The next step is to shovel the crumble into your mouth.


Beer.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/apple-crumble-the-retarded-way/feed/ 1 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/the-worst-book-i-ever-read/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/the-worst-book-i-ever-read/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:41:12 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1362 The worst book I ever read was Ritual by Graham Masterton. I was told to read it by a boyfriend when I was 17 and was therefore impressionable, so that when he said it was the best book ever I ignored the tacky picture on the front of it and thought “why not?”.

I was also probably worried that if i didn’t read it he wouldn’t like me anymore and being a dumb teenager didn’t realise that anyone who doesn’t like you just because you don’t like a book is probably a twat.

So I sat down to read Ritual.

To this day I sincerely wish I hadn’t.

There are many things wrong it. Many, many things which have stuck with me these last 8 years and which do not bare repeating even for the purposes of this review. I wouldn’t say it had permanently scarred me because being honest, it wasn’t really interesting enough to do that, but it definitely left an impression.

Firstly let’s start off by saying the premise of this book is that a cannibal cult ambitiously decides it’s going to bring about the second coming of Christ by eating the hell out of each other.

Into this gaping black hole of plot falls Charlie McLean a major dickbag and restaurant critic who much later in the story has to eat his own finger and his son Martin who hates Charlie almost as much as I do.

Charlie finds out about an exclusive dining club and boorishly tries to gain entry to it. Obviously the exclusive dining club is a local division of the aforementioned cannibal cult, or Celestines as they call themselves, which manages to kidnap Martin. This is mostly because like I said, Charlie is a massive dickbag.

The rest of the book is a very long stupid story involving more cannibalism than anyone really cares about, Charlie trying to get his son back despite the fact that his son hates him, a killer dwarf assassin who isn’t actually a dwarf but is instead a man who has eaten his own feet, shins, hands and forearms but somehow still manages to wield a machete and disembowel numerous people in an artistic show of pluck and determination in the face of disability, what I seem to remember as the unironic use of the phrase ‘fiery wimple’ and a cameo appearance from Baron Samedi.

It’s all very bad. In fact it’s bad so it should come with a health warning: CAREFUL THIS BOOK IS SO TERRIBLE IT WILL MAKE YOU VOMIT UP YOUR SPLEEN. Unfortunately the closest it comes to describing it’s own awfulness is this excerpt from the second last chapter:

Charlie turned around. He saw M. Musette, thigh-deep in regurgitated tissue, still endlessly vomiting one thousand times one thousand. He saw Mme Musette, with her wimple alight, rigid with hysteria and fear.

And so it’s my job to tell you that really, honestly, Ritual by Graham Masterton is the worst book ever composed on earth if not the entire galaxy.

Stay away from it. For the love of God.



]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/the-worst-book-i-ever-read/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/monthly-round-up-july/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/monthly-round-up-july/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:52:57 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1256 For some reason, this months round-up features a variety of Japanese content, starting with some brilliant (yet devastating) photos of Hiroshima from 64 years ago thanks to The Big Picture. We haven’t mentioned The Big Picture on Superposition Kitty before, but it’s a definite favourite in my feeds. Run by Alan Taylor, a web developer who previously worked for Amazon, it’s a photo blog updated thrice weekly with some of the best, most beautiful, and highest quality images of what’s been going on each week.

Next up is the artwork of Toshio Saeki, the 63 year old godfather of Japanese erotica. You can find a rather large collection of his work here and here (very not work safe). He studied art at school, and after graduating pursued a career in graphic design. At the age of 24 he left his hometown of Osaka and traveled to Tokyo where, using the money he saved up, he rented a tiny apartment and began working as an illustrator and erotic artist. Famous for his images which revolve around both sex and death, Saeki says that he is not a violent person but that he just loves to entertain and shock people.

Only in Japan would a restaurant kitchen be run by robots. You can watch them do their thing (serving up delicious bowls of Ramen) on YouTube. Apparently the benefits of using the robots in such an environment is that they can perfectly time boiling the noodles, and are capable of precise movements in adding toppings, so that the temperature and taste is consistent from bowl to bowl. They also spin plates and carry out mock duals in the downtime!

Moving away from the Japanese theme, we have some terrific interactive design in the form of these screenshots of the Xerox Star 8010 interface. Introduced in 1981, it was the first commercial personal computer to implement a graphical user interface. Not to mention the mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail! Screenshots of the interface such as this one and this one show the level of detail required in designing a cohesive feel for the system. You can read about (and see) the progression the interface took here.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/08/monthly-round-up-july/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/bad-books-twilight-is-terrible/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/bad-books-twilight-is-terrible/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:53:08 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1199 So just before we left for London we pointed you towards books — a new feature we’re trying to get off the ground. So far it’s pretty sparse with only the links and pictures section set up but hopefully that will begin to change with the introduction of bad books our one stop shop for information and reviews of the books you should try to avoid.

Today it’s The Twilight Series — a literary saga so terrible it’s inspired horrors like this or this and can only be explained rationally like this.

Long, insipid and written by a lunatic the Twilight Saga beckons you forward into it’s nest made of spit and torn up books so get real comfy, settle down and prepare to be amazed.

(Major props go to Alex at Rowdy Media for the links and brain damage they caused us.)

836 pages. That’s how long Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn is.

It wasn’t like that in the beginning.

Her first story Twilight was by comparison tiny at only around 250 pages. Her second, New Moon was around 20 or so pages longer and almost as tolerable due it’s brevity. Her third, Eclipse was 368 pages in length– a number I believe to be pushing it when you have very little to actually say.

But Breaking Dawn, her magnum opus as it were, is 836 pages long and it is with great dread and horrible foresight that I consider reading the first words of it.

All told and then regrettably combined that’s around 1700 hundred pages of teenage masturbatory vampire fantasy written by a woman who seems to hate teenagers more than anything else on the planet. 1700 pages penned by a woman possessed by the horrid urge to continue to write despite the fact that she ran out of plot at around the 100 page mark and continued to substitute it for self insert fan service and name dropping.

These are 1700 pages written solely for Stephanie Meyer to read, and re-dream the dream that led to the penning of the Twilight saga. A dream of vampires and Washington so personal that it reads like a livejournal entry.

Her main character, the insipid dish water brown Bella Swan is supposedly selfless beyond all other historical figures. Ever. On the planet.

And that she is.

She is actually so devoid of a self as to be utterly characterless. Of course this explains perfectly why her super natural boyfriend’s talent of reading the minds of every person in the world ever whether they like it or not doesn’t work on her — there is no mind there to read.

This is of course despite the constant allusions to her intelligence or feminism or advanced maturity. Mind you these things are only ever pointed out directly, in some fine examples of telling not showing, in order to tell you how the humans she’s forced to spend time with are stupid, small minded and just ‘don’t get her’. She simply wanders around all day, every day being narrated in the first person so that every page (of which, I would like to remind you, there are around 1700) is an endless list of things which “I did” or “I saw” — the things which Bella and by extension, Meyer observes to be true.

But Bella is a 17 year old girl dreamt up by a 40 year old woman trapped in the mindset of a 14 year old girl who has only recently learned what adjectives are and yet doesn’t quite understand them.

In this world of home spun hormone infused folk tale the perceptions of Stephanie Meyer are those of god. A creepy, Mormon and permanently pre-menstrual God who peers down out of the hole in the sky moralising her difficult teenage years into a nightmare of pubescent fantasy.

Edward, Bella’s 100 year old tragic golden eyed hero is a marble Adonis — in the authors own words the exact replica of Michelangelo’s David — who’s nasty tendency to sneak unbidden into the rooms of teenage girls to watch them sleep is endearing instead of threatening and obsessive. He’s a GOOD VAMPIRE after all and only feeds on Deer and Mountain Lions and it’s not like his attraction to her is initially based on his magical VAMPIRE sense of smell which makes his every waking moment a constant battle not to literally eat her. And I mean every waking moment because that is precisely what they spend together it being much healthier to constantly stare torrid sexual danger and annihilation in the face than it is to occasionally walk away and take some time out for biscuits.

Every decision Edward makes is solidly backed up by the psychic powers of his adopted sister. Together these two super human jokers co-operate to bring Bella into their family using methods oddly reminiscent of some sort of messianic cult. The age difference between the two (that of roughly 83 years but who’s counting anyway) is written off due Bella’s immense maturity which is apparently the product of being made to protect and otherwise look after her child like selfish mother. She is the real adult of the story, being in possession of the sort of old souls enthusiastically talked about by the kind of people who routinely take time out to view the girls swim wear section of the LittleWoods catalogue.

In Meyer’s fictional world of Forks Washington it is clearly acceptable for things like this to happen. Restraining orders are a thing of legend and childish experimentation reaps no consequences that cannot be completely ignored due to the omniscience of VAMPIRES.

VAMPIRES are fantastic. VAMPIRES fear nothing. Especially not consequences, concerned fathers or statutory rape laws. The only thing they could possibly fear is other VAMPIRES.

And around these universal maxims grows our story which will encompass obsessive jealous Native American werewolves, equally obsessive and vengeful EVIL VAMPIRES and multiple crimes against grammar.

Not that there’s anything wrong with escapism. (Which is what Meyer is writing about here.) Not that there’s anything wrong at all with a bit of fantasy. (Although in this case it might be necessary to replace a bit with ‘a fucking ton’.) And what was I doing reading a collection of books (supposedly) written for teenagers anyway?

To be honest I don’t really know. It started with a YouTube video of the by now famous baseball scene from the movie adaptation of Twilight. It featured sparkly photoshopped 20 somethings pretending to be teenagers, like most movies for the teen demographic. It was horrific and yet fascinating at the same time. So obviously when the movie appeared on general release I had to see what exactly was going on with these ‘sparkly faggot vampires’ and so I watched it.

And then after I’d watched it I somehow decided that reading the books would be a good idea. I will never know where ideas like this come from — whether it’s wholly formed out of the ether or from inside the part of my own brain that fucking hates me and wants me to suffer. Regardless those ideas are always terrible, as I have discovered before and was about to discovered again around two pages into what I would like to call ‘my horrible journey of discovery’.

It’s not that I hate Stephanie Meyer — even though there is a lot to hate. I’ve never met her so it would follow that hating her wouldn’t be entirely rational. I have frankly no idea what she must be like as a person apart from the vision of her I have managed to pull together from her writing.

If anyone reading this is familiar with Virigina Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ then you are probably equally familiar with her supposition that any novel writing that results in the reader forming a picture of the author in their mind is technically bad. Shakespeare, in Woolf’s opinion is the perfect example of a writer who avoids this trap — there is very little which can be taken from his work of himself and therefore the man remains a mystery, which is the goal of writing good fiction.

Not so for Miss Meyer who’s cardigan shrouded, round shouldered presence was so recognisable in her cameo appearance as ‘silly cow eating burger in dinner while looking massively fucking smug and out of place’ in the movie adaptation of Twilight that it was impossible to miss her. She’s just that type of woman.

The type of woman who, at the end of the day, wrote a book that behind all the pretend feminism, dramatic self indulgence and self interested self sacrifice was really about was what it would be like to be married to a VAMPIRE and the magical responsibility-less teen pregnancy that such a union would result in. It’s pure pulp fantasy trash.

She’s not a hateful cow. She’s not a horrible human being. She’s just a lady who wrote a stupid series of books for teenagers, which, at the heart of it is why I dislike her and her 1700 pages of retardo VAMPIRE smut. At the very center of it I have climbed on to my high horse, not because of her bad writing, but because I’m annoyed at her dis-service to teenagers in general.

Your teenage years are the safest place and time for you to do stupid things. They’re specifically the time in which a young adult is supposed to make retarded mistakes and in doing so learn from them. Bad friendships, dangerous relationships with intense older dudes your parents disapprove of, sexual experimentation, flirtation with alcohol and the wrong type of people. You’re supposed to do all this when you’re a teenager and it’s ok to be stupid — that’s the behaviour expected from you.

Any sort of young adult fiction aimed at teenagers is going to reflect that. But it’s also hopefully going to try to educate the idiot kids reading it and steer them away from making stupid decisions they can’t undo while encouraging them to understand more about themselves and the world around them. Writing for young adults is a serious job with big responsibilities. Peddling a bit of fantasy is great but you have to back it up with a feeling that at the end of the day you don’t jealously begrudge young people their youth, beauty and possibilities the way that Meyer does.

She single mindedly sets Bella on top of a pedestal of incontrovertible logic — at her mature 17 years of age she knows it all far better than any adult or in this case super human 800 year old adult.

Bella knows everything. Bella is bulletproof and nothing, ever can go wrong. She just has to keep on believing that her relationship with a giant controlling creeper is right for her and no-one can tell her any different even if they’re older and more experienced.

She knows she wants to become a VAMPIRE instead of going to college. She knows she wants to lose her virginity before becoming a VAMPIRE even if this means going against her bloody minded principles and getting married at the age of 18 to a possessive, broody twat bag whose 18th century chivalry wont stand for sex before marriage or compromises. Later, after her marriage of VAMPIRE convenience she then knows she wants to give birth to her very own half idiot half VAMPIRE baby, which until it’s delivered by fang cesarean amuses itself by eating her alive from the inside out.

Bella Swan, the literary incarnation of Stephanie Meyer, is a bloody minded, pig headed, arrogant teenage girl. There is nothing in her story that couldn’t be fixed with some self esteem building exercises like horse riding and a good lecture about contraception. It would be that simple to turn this horror story around.

Throughout her 1700 page journey of selfishness she whines, moans and name drops expensive yet terrible cars for no real reason. There’s no point to any of it save reading about a bit of gothic glamour and dreaming about how great life would be if a suave well read older man whisked you off to Europe and filled you with babies so that you didn’t have to turn up for your shift at your summer job at Tesco.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with that.

As long as you don’t pretend to impressionable teenage girls (and in some cases fully fledged adult retards) that it’s anything other than it is.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/bad-books-twilight-is-terrible/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/andrew-w-k-party-ii/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/andrew-w-k-party-ii/#comments Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:21:59 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1193 We’ve written about Andrew W.K. before. We felt that it was a reasonably accurate account of the things that were awesome about the man, but there are so many things that we missed out on or have happened since, that we’ve had to rectify it with this post in front of you.

The very first thing we should mention is that Andrew W.K. has a Twitter. Go on, follow him. Yes, now. Yeah, I’ll wait while you create an account. Of course there was no reason to have one before, who the hell would you follow? Well, now there is a reason. You too, can wake up to your Twitter application of choice, and see this:



Who know that Twitter could bring you such ethereal experiences? Of course, there are many more things that you are missing out on. A video of Andrew making breakfast and feasting on pancakes, a Twitter petition (which from now on shall be known as a twitition … FUCK, it already exists) to get Andrew on The Ellen Degeneres Show, and of course my favourite:

I will leave you with this.

It’s very important to note that no where on this album is the word alcohol or drugs ever mentioned, and there’s never any instruction as to what to do to have a party. Having a party is as much eating a piece of cake as it is dancing as it is drinking as it is sitting in your room listening to music. It’s whatever you want it to be. That’s the most important thing to know here. No one is going to say, “You’re a wimp. You’re doing it wrong. A real hard partier does this.”

We do what we want when we want to do it, and I’ll get totally drunk and wasted one night, but maybe the next night I don’t want to. That’s hard for some people to understand, but I just do what I want, and I just want people to do the same. The most important thing to me is that they know that they don’t have to do anything to be perceived as cool by us. As long as they’re having fun, they can do whatever they want.

A lot of people who like this band are straight edge. I never thought in a million years that someone who is straight edge would love this music. I’m not straight edge and no one in this band is straight edge, but there are tons of people who are who love this band. And I ask them, “Please don’t get me wrong here. I’m honored that you like this band, but explain to me why.” And they tell me, “Because we know it’s not about drinking, it’s about having fun.” And that’s the whole point. If you want to drink to have fun, then that’s great, but if you don’t, then that’s fine too.
Andrew W.K. on partying



It’s about having fun.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/andrew-w-k-party-ii/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/shock-and-horror-as-girl-25-is-polite/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/shock-and-horror-as-girl-25-is-polite/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:47:22 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1173

If you saw my appearance on the 4th plinth on Thursday of last week then you’ll know that I didn’t exactly stick to my plans. If you didn’t see it — and I am pretty sure that you didn’t — then here’s what happened.

Originally I’d planned to wear a hand stitched bag over my head and read a book as a pastiche on Rene Magritte’s The Lovers. I’d decided to do this because it’s boring to sit in one place for an hour and I had no idea what to expect so I was going to do what I usually do in that situation and take a book. I like books. The sack was my mother’s inspiration and took me 3 hours to sew together during which time I repeatedly stabbed myself in the hand with pins. The whole idea was to promote the concept that if you don’t read more you may well die stupid and alone which I think is a fair point.

However this is not what happened and here is how it didn’t happen:

For starters by the time I was being wheeled onto the plinth by a team of art students in a forklift I had been awake for roughly 23 hours, 12 of which had been spent on a bus driven by a lunatic. Another 5 were spent sitting huddled in a corner of Trafalgar Square watching mice run up the steps of The National Gallery and a drunk Russian guy being beaten up by teenagers so both Ryan and myself were at this point what you would call ‘fucking knackered’.

Previous to this we’d been sitting in a portacabin for roughly 90 minutes. Although really it was two portacabins stacked on top of each other to which I’d been told to report to to be interviewed and sign a lot of forms handing over my likeness, time and soul to the SkyArts Channel who now own me. Obviously the fact that this was necessary wasn’t mentioned in any of the communications I’d had with the One and Other people beforehand but 23 hours and 478 miles into something probably isn’t the appropriate time for moral objections. For future reference I will try to remember that everything requires paper work of some kind and object before it’s too late.

Of course the signing of documents was part of an interview process where a girl who looked about as tired as I did asked me some questions and took some photographs of me. Anyone who knows me knows I dislike both of these things — answering questions about myself or being photographed — but it had been me who’d volunteered to make a spectacle of myself in the first place. In those circumstances I will quite affably talk crap about my life and pretend I am comfortable with cameras. Besides — the people manning the portacabin were super lovely despite the fact that night shift sucks and they were sharing an enclosed space with two people who had been traveling for several hours and smelled terrible.

It was the cabin full of art students (whose names I have all forgotten because I am a terrible person) who pointed out just how Klan-esque my hand stitched head bag looked. Of course it had already occurred to me but there’s something about a middle class person’s facial expression when faced with something they find potentially distasteful that always encourages me to drop the subject or change my plans especially if I am too tired to bother arguing.

Like I keep saying on all my job application forms ‘I am highly flexible and adaptable to change’ so the bag was out from this point onwards.

Still in was the giant book cover with ‘Read More or Die Stupid’ printed across the front of it and my copy of Seeing by Jose Saramago (which in hindsight was probably the wrong choice — it’s a brilliant book and all but perhaps something a little bit … easier to read might have been better). These things would still be in for around 15 minutes into my shift after which time I gave up which may seem cowardly and lacking in conviction but let me explain what happened.

I think before I got up there that I didn’t really understand what was going on with Antony Gormley and his Plinth because it can be pretty hard to visualise the point of a piece of art without having had some direct experience of it. Whether or not I got the point of it had even been a question asked in the earlier interview which I had hemmed and hawed through because I was a) exhausted and b) hadn’t really gotten what exactly was going on clear in my head. I had not had a clear answer.

Of course I could quite easily spin off some of the opinions other people had had about it — Charlie Brooker for instance calling it Big Brother: The Tate Modern Edition — and say whether or not I disagreed with them but really I was having some problems grasping the point of the trees because of the entire bloody vista of the forest.

But what happened to clue me in was I got up there and I realised something very important — watching someone read a book is pretty boring. Of course I didn’t realise this on my own. Rather I had an audience of hecklers and onlookers who ever so gently prodded me towards re-valuating my idea of what the hell I was doing 8 meters off the ground in central London at 4am on Thursday morning. I was being public art.

Now I’m not an art historian.

I have never been to an art college apart from to look around Duncan of Jordanstone’s very well stocked supply shop.

You could maybe loosely categorise me as a critic in that sometimes I don’t like a particular bit of art by someone and then voice my opinion on it.

But really I know just about fuck all about art. Which is why the following explanation is probably incorrect and largely incoherent but stick with me. This is going to be like watching monkeys learn how to use tools.

As far as I could see it, from a lump of hewn rock bordered by some nicely caulked edging, the point of me being up there was largely to interest the public. Because that’s what public art does.

You turn up somewhere like Trafalgar Square and you look at the art payed for to impress upon people the world standing and personality of the town that it now lives in. I was like one of the massive Lions (which are hella cool by the way) or any of the myriad of other sculptures strewn about London — I was supposed to be something you travel to look at it, form an opinion of and then leave after hopefully spending some money on refreshments or other things in the local area.

That’s what public art does — it improves and enriches the area it’s in. That’s it’s job. It is hopefully pretty and improves the economy of the surrounding area.

Of course I can’t claim to have been particularly good to look at or smell and I don’t think you could call me majestic or breath taking. But I was, after my initial mistake of boring people to death, polite and hopefully engaging to the people who stayed to look at me.

(Of which one man in particular bares mentioning — we were too tired to think of asking for his name or contact details but he was charming, courteous, helpful and overall a good laugh. We may not know your name Erotic Photography Dude, or EPD as we now call you, but we will remember we met you. Rock on.)

All in all I’m glad we went to London despite the horror of both bus journeys and the throat infection I know have thanks to broken air conditioning on the return trip. I’m glad I manned up, accepted the place and spent the money to get there.

It wasn’t exactly an amazing journey of discovery and I am pretty much done with talking about it after this article is finished — anyone who wants to know how it was can read about it here or make up their own version of events in which I battle aliens for the future of the planet and return home to Dundee a hero.

We ate sushi and were tired, grotty and grumpy.

It was fun and I did learn something from it.

I learned that Antony Gormley understands public art better than nearly everyone and I am grateful to him and all of the other One and Other staff for the experience.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/shock-and-horror-as-girl-25-is-polite/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/a-photo-journey-to-london-and-back/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/a-photo-journey-to-london-and-back/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:15:37 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1164 Below we have a small example of some of the things that we got up to in London. Note the various photos of food, because after 11 hours in the bus all you want to do is sleep and eat and the first wasn’t going to be available to us until after another 13 hour bus ride home 12 hours later.

























]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/a-photo-journey-to-london-and-back/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/get-well-soon-mca/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/get-well-soon-mca/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:37:12 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1140

I’m off to listen to Licensed To Ill.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/get-well-soon-mca/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/the-trip-in-bullet-points/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/the-trip-in-bullet-points/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:59:48 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1129

Expect multiple updates in the next week about our exciting trip. In the meantime, here’s a brief list of everything that happened.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/the-trip-in-bullet-points/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/ok-so-i-have-a-confession-to-make/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/ok-so-i-have-a-confession-to-make/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:20:37 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1114 We’ve been quite busy this week leading to a lack of updates. We’re also set to be busy for the next 2 or 3 days so I’m afraid there wont be much going on here until next week.

But there is a reason for this.

Unfortunately the reason has a lot to do with this.

Yes. That’s right. I volunteered to stand on Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth and accidentally got picked after someone else refused the 4am time slot.

So we’ll be setting off on an 11 hour bus journey at 9am tomorrow morning, arriving in London at around 8pm, staying there for another 12 hours, one of which will be spent sitting on the aforementioned plinth with a bag on my head reading a book, and then getting back on another bus which will take 11 and a half hours to get back to Dundee.

Here is a preview of my performance which is entitled The Book Lover or Read More Or Die Stupid which you can watch live (ha) at the One & Other website:



Updates mostly comprising of photographs of bus journeys to be made when we get back.

Also check out some books which is a new feature we’re adding here.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/ok-so-i-have-a-confession-to-make/feed/ 4 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/monthly-round-up-june/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/monthly-round-up-june/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:56:30 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1075 This months links round up has been delayed by Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin of which I still have roughly 30 pages left to read. The only reason I am not reading it right now is because I’m expecting a phone call some time in the next hour and don’t want the end ruined by not being able to think about it properly.

I’ve also read The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake this month. The former was a good as I remembered it being when I first read it as a teenager. The latter you would have had to pry from my cold dead hands to stop me from finishing it.

So June 2009s summation comes fueled by Margaret Atwood. Who is amazing. You should all read her books right now.

Other things that have taken up time in June have been La Roux’s debut album which appeared around two weeks ago. It’s obviously written by a 21 year old girl who’s been in a bad relationship for what seems like forever. It’s more than likely common knowledge by now that there were floods and rivers of tears produced during its recording because music journalists love to make a point of it (although I suppose I’m just as bad now). In fact the only thing people like to comment on more is her hair cut or choice of clothes, like musicians should all dress in clothes from Topshop and be wearing fruity mass produced unique hipster bo-ho head bands just like that Shirley Manson chick or that David Bowie dude.

But who cares about all that? Her personal grooming is her own business and we’ll all be 21 once whether it’s now, earlier or later, and we will all do dumb stuff. What really matters is that the album is a tight little work filled with hooky synth lines and clever lyrics that Elly Jackson really means. What else do you want in your wonky synth pop?

Speaking of Elly Jackson and La Roux I also have to touch on other, sadder news — which is of course that her album was in fact batted from the number one spot here in the UK by the resurgent interest in the now dead and once again popular Michael Jackson. I may hold personal opinions of Mr Jackson which don’t seem to match up to those of other people but I felt the same way about my families memories of my grandfather when he died so perhaps this is what death does to people and their feelings. I wont lie though, and tell you I was a fan of his music, because I was not. I watched Moon Walker as a child and couldn’t possibly avoid seeing every video of his ever due to the omnipresent media machine that was his career but my most vivid memory of him is Jarvis Cocker’s interuption of Earth Song during the 1996 Brit Awards.

I am sorry I can’t fake enjoyment as a tribute to him but I can play Alien Ant Farm’s cover of Smooth Criminal over and over. I think it’s what he would have wanted.

And that was June.

(I could go on to mention Perez Hilton’s terrible month but I’d rather pass you onto Mat and Trey of Southpark who covered the issues nicely in an episode called Breast Cancer Show Ever. If you’re outside of America and can’t watch the episode I’m sure you can figure out another way to manage it.)

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/07/monthly-round-up-june/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/random-stylesheets-in-wordpress/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/random-stylesheets-in-wordpress/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:57:28 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1034 You might have noticed lately that the colour-scheme of this site changes each time you click a link or reload a page (currently we have blue, pink, and green). This is something easily accomplished with just an extra 2 tiny CSS files, and a little bit of PHP.

If you’ve read my previous article — WordPress And A Horizontal Baseline Pt.1 — you are already familiar with the CSS that forms the foundation of this site. What we’re going to do first is strip out anything to do with colour from the CSS and put it in it’s own separate file that we’re going to call blue.css.

a:active, a:hover, .commentlist a:hover, .commentlist a:active, .commentlist cite a:hover, .commentlist cite a:active, #recent-comments a:hover, #related-posts a:hover, .lastfm a:hover, #footer a:hover, #footer a:active, .commentlist pre a:hover, .commentlist pre a:active {color:#34B0F8;} 

#menu ul li a:hover, #menu ul li a:active {background:#34B0F8;}

.entry p a:hover img, .entry p a:active img {border:1px solid #34B0F8;}

a.feature:hover	{border-color:#34B0F8;}

Then, after a little messing around with the colour tool in Photoshop, we know the hex code to edit in for pink.css.

a:active, a:hover, .commentlist a:hover, .commentlist a:active, .commentlist cite a:hover, .commentlist cite a:active, #recent-comments a:hover, #related-posts a:hover, .lastfm a:hover, #footer a:hover, #footer a:active, .commentlist pre a:hover, .commentlist pre a:active {color:#F834E3;}
#menu ul li a:hover, #menu ul li a:active {background:#F834E3;}

.entry p a:hover img, .entry p a:active img {border:1px solid #F834E3;}

a.feature:hover	{border-color:#F834E3;}

As well as green.css.

a:active, a:hover, .commentlist a:hover, .commentlist a:active, .commentlist cite a:hover, .commentlist cite a:active, #recent-comments a:hover, #related-posts a:hover, .lastfm a:hover, #footer a:hover, #footer a:active, .commentlist pre a:hover, .commentlist pre a:active {color:#46F834;}
#menu ul li a:hover, #menu ul li a:active {background:#46F834;}

.entry p a:hover img, .entry p a:active img {border:1px solid #46F834;}

a.feature:hover	{border-color:#46F834;}

The next part is to write the PHP, which is just a simple random function followed by an if-else statement. The code must go between the <head> and </head> tags in your header.php file. It’s also a good idea to make sure that it is after you call your main CSS (style.css) file.

<?php
$random = rand(1,3);
if ($random == 1) {
    echo "<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/css/pink.css' type='text/css' media='screen' />";
} elseif ($random == 2) {
    echo "<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/css/green.css' type='text/css' media='screen' />";
} else {
    echo "";
}
?>

As the main CSS file already provides the styles for the colour blue, there is no need to call it again in our PHP function. Now every time that somebody visits the site there is a ⅔ chance that they will get a different colour! To add any more colours you will need to change the 3 in $random = rand(1,3); to a larger number, and add more elseif statements.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/random-stylesheets-in-wordpress/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/the-echo-nest-remix-api/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/the-echo-nest-remix-api/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:47:55 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=1018 The aim of the Echo Nest Remix API is to let you manipulate and remix music and video through code. Execute the few lines below:

import echonest.audio as audio
audio_file = audio.LocalAudioFile("input.mp3")
beats = audio_file.analysis.beats
beats.reverse()
audio.getpieces(audio_file, beats).encode("output.mp3")

And you have now reversed a song by ‘playing its beats forward from the end of the song’. The output of which would look a little something like this.mp3.

First off, you’re going to need to grab an API key by registering an account. If you’re using OS X you can follow this install process (here’s Linux and Windows). Make sure to run the example at the end of the installation process to confirm that everything works.

Congratulations! You can now mess around with beats and manipulate all your mp3s and videos. Try out the rest of the examples to get an idea for just what the Echo Nest Remix API can do. To get an idea of just how powerful the (upcoming) video manipulation is, check out Where’s The Pow by Paul Lamere in which he remixes the Black Eyed Peas — Boom Boom Pow.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/the-echo-nest-remix-api/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/hunch/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/hunch/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:02:00 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=987 41st Best Stand up Stewart Lee suggested during his recent BBC program that once upon a time in history a man who could lay claim to having read all the books in the world would be considered to be extremely intelligent. This is fact that’s hard to dispute. However, it’s equally hard to dispute the following point he put forth — that a man who could claim to have read all the books available today could be considered to be perhaps the stupidest man alive.

The idea I took from this is the perhaps controversial phrase “all of us are not as smart as one of us”.

This is a common idea on the internet — that there more people there are on it, the worse it actually gets — and has been witnessed first hand through the mass movements of people from one social networking site to another. Myspace for instance, once the happy home of everyone everywhere was abandoned for bebo at the point where it launched Lilly Allen’s career and every other ass with a guitar decided to network themselves to perfect strangers. Bebo was abandoned for Facebook when everyone we hated ended up there. Facebook has been abandoned for Twitter by idiots.

Basically as soon as everyone knows about a site and joins up to it it’s potential usefulness, fun and eventually credibility is destroyed. For an example of this just look at Trent Reznor and Ashton Kutcher’s personal use of Twitter to trumpet nothing other than their own egos and how this might affect a persons decision to use it,

So where then does this leave Hunch the new site which offers you your very own web based decision making robot?

Launched from closed beta yesterday, Hunch is a site that recommends you stuff and helps you make up your mind about really tricky questions. You can also recommend your own ideas to the various topics up for discussion to improve results for other people. A recent blog post nicely sums up it’s ambition and ethos:

For those of you who are new, Hunch helps you make decisions, and gives you results it wouldn’t give other people, getting smarter over time as more people use it. We would like it very much if you would like it. We like it! So very much!

What a wonderful idea…

And I mean that without a trace of sarcasm. I like ideas like this. A lot. The internet can be an irritating place filled with terrible blow hards who want nothing more than to tell you how good something is when it is clearly not. It’s nice that there’s a place to go that aims to personally tailor the recommendations and help it’s gives you.

It’s nice that there’s a place like that just now. Hunch right now carries the smell of the early adopter. Of unspoiled virgin lawn tended by the caring beta testers. It’s a lot of fun right now — as is being involved in anything from as close to the ground as possible.

It’s just that I can’t vouch for it in a week or a month and especially not in a year. Not once it’s been found by the dreaded general public.

Hopefully the Hunch team are aware of how stupid we all are together. Hopefully the mechanism by which the site tailors recommendations on a person to person basis is put together dynamically enough to withstand the incoming flux of general retardation amassed within the group consciousness of the internet. Hopefully Hunch doesn’t learn stupidity from us.

In this light my recommendation to you is to get over there right now and give it a go before the morons find it.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/hunch/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/wordpress-and-a-horizontal-baseline-pt-1/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/wordpress-and-a-horizontal-baseline-pt-1/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:54:06 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=971 It was this article on A List Apart that first got me started on the idea of using a horizontal grid on my latest WordPress theme (the very one that you’re looking at right now). The best example of what aligning your type to a baseline grid means, can be seen here. Note how all the text falls within the lines, no matter the sizing or images. It took quite a few months of work to try and get it to look the same in all browsers using the very minimum of CSS hacks, but is now 99% done (more in the next post on how IE6 and IE7 deal with text-boxes differently).

The very first part is setting up a CSS reset. I’m using a reset that has been slightly customised from one I found a few years back. The more important changes were to do with how <table> is treated, as I found quite a few conflicts with WP-eCommerce (more on how heavily I have had to hack up that piece of junk in another post).

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin:0;
padding:0;
border:0;
outline:0;
font-weight:inherit;
font-style:inherit;
font-size:100%;
font-family:inherit;
vertical-align:baseline;
}

:focus {
outline:0;
}

body {
background:white;
}

ol, ul {
list-style:none;
}

table {
border-collapse:separate;
border-spacing:0;
}

caption, th, td {
text-align:left;
font-weight:normal;
}

blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after {
content:"";
}

blockquote, q {
quotes:"""";
}

Make sure that you call your reset.css file before your style.css file in your header. The next part is to decide your line-height and font-size. For the best legibility I have gone with a line height of 18 pixels, and a standard font size of 12 pixels (you’ll find that this is a quite common sizing). This — as well as choosing Helvetica for the typeface and a slightly off-white for the background and a dark grey for the text — leads us to the below:

html, body {
font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
font-size:12px;
line-height:18px;
font-weight:normal;
color:#444;
text-align:left;
background:#FDFDFD;
}

a, a:link, a:visited {
color:#222;
font-weight:bold;
text-decoration:none;
}

a:active, a:hover {
color:#34B0F8;
text-decoration:none;
} 

h1,h2,h3, h4 {
color:#222;
font-weight:bold;
line-height:18px;
}

h1 {
font-size:24px;
line-height:36px;
}

h2 {
font-size:18px;
}		

h3 {
font-size:12px;
margin-bottom:18px;
}

h4 {
font-size:11px;
}

p {
padding-bottom:18px;
}

br	{
line-height: 18px;
}

ul {
list-style-position:outside;
}

em {
font-style:italic;
}

strong {
font-weight:bold;
}

This is what will form the basis for our horizontal baseline. We will delve deeper into this in Part 2, which will cover how to deal with images, as well as the basic layout of the site.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/wordpress-and-a-horizontal-baseline-pt-1/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/a-slightly-less-late-monthly-round-up/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/a-slightly-less-late-monthly-round-up/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:29:58 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=951 Welcome to Edition Two. I haven’t done one of these in a while because I’m lazy, so I suppose I better get right into it.

THEM THANGS is the photo blog of Justin Blyth. There are rarely any words, and definitely no explanations, so I’m going to have to make some assumptions here. THEM THANGS is a collection of cool photos/designs/pictures/lyrics/words that Justin has found in his travels throughout the internet, and there is certainly a lot of them (over 10 pages now). Make sure to wait for the long load times, and beware of the slightly NSFW content that lurks within.

Scott Pommier takes cool pictures of cool things, there really isn’t much more to be said than that, but make sure to click on through to his interview with feature shoot and read about how he got started.

The Beardmore Bros are legends in automotive circles. Having worked for decades, and with an almost unhealthy obsession of Morris Minors, they have created some of the coolest custom cars and sleepers in the UK. Make sure to read about their latest project: A space framed, 2000cc 16v Fiat engined, 178mm widened, Morris Minor convertible that they use for hillclimbs and sprints.

Windosill is a beautiful point-and-click adventure from Vectorpark — creators of a bunch of brilliantly simple downloadable games for the Mac and PC. You can play the first part of the game online here but will have to pay US$3.00 to play the remainder.

And lastly I’m going to introduce you to the way that I’ve been spending the last 3 days: reading Fullmetal Alchemist. A manga about two brothers who are trying to restore their bodies after an attempt to bring their mother back to life went very wrong. Full of terrific action, great comedy, and an enthralling plot, it will suck you in. I’m sure that if you search hard enough you’ll find a variety of ways to read it online.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/a-slightly-less-late-monthly-round-up/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/really-late-monthly-links-round-up/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/really-late-monthly-links-round-up/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:33:04 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=942 It doesn’t matter that we’re halfway through June already — there’s still time to gather up all the stuff we’ve been looking at at SPK and throw together a post of to let the internet know about it. So to make up for our extreme lateness, we will be doing two editions, one from each of us.

For the most part the reason that this post is late has a lot to do with comics. Specifically Seinen Manga which I can’t seem to get enough of right now. Since there are so many of the things out there it’s proven difficult to stop

Luckily (or unluckily) for me, as I am not Japanese and sometimes find it hard to tell which title will be what I’m looking for, recommendation sites like Anime Planet exist and their easy to use database system, though small right now, makes it very easy to pick out something new.

Just to get you started here are a few of the things it’s pointed me towards this month:

Dragon Head is post-apocalyptic, dark and creepy but otherwise difficult to catergorise but definitely worth a look.

Berserk requires a word of warning: there are just over 20 years of it to read so it could take a while to trawl through it. It’s also a fairly brutal read focusing as it does on evisceration and sexual violence towards almost everything so if these things are not to your taste it may be best avoided. However it is a brilliantly drawn, engrossing and stunning in it’s scale and imagination. There are also a lot of drawings of horses.

Hotel is a short but beautiful one-shot comic. If it doesn’t make you cry a little you are probably not human.

If you’re interested in any of these titles, or any manga at all and you’re looking for a place to try them out for yourself then you can head over to MangaFox which is easily the best site of it’s kind I have found so far.

Movie wise The Good, The Bad and The Weird is released on DVD this month. If you like anachronisms, trick riding, and Westerns set in 1940s Manchuria you will probably like this movie which stars Kunh-ho Song star of The Host, and Park Chan Wook’s Thirst (which recently premiered at Cannes). It may not always make a lot of sense but it is visually stunning, entertaining and oddly hilarious.

Another movie of interest is Moon which is on limited release in the USA right now and which will eventually arrive in the UK on the 17th of July. Starring Kevin Spacey as GERTY, a whimsically creepy HAL-esque computer this could be like a watchable version of epic but frustrating 2001.

Lastly a new series of the long running Red vs Blue starts tonight at 9pm CST (that’s 3am for all you UK people). I can’t say a lot of about a machinima series put together with Halo 3 because I neither own an XBox 360 or enjoy anything to do with Microsoft, but I can endorse Red Vs Blue as the only good thing to do with both of those things. The previous five seasons and their companion mini series have been consistently hilarious and are even enjoyed by my mother which should go to prove that a prior knowledge of the Master Chief is not required to enjoy them.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/really-late-monthly-links-round-up/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/trent-reznor-rage-quits-twitter/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/trent-reznor-rage-quits-twitter/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:09:47 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=939 We all know my history with Twitter — I hate it. Unrelentingly. But I leave it alone, it leaves me alone and we’re quite happy ignoring each other. Occasionally I use it to to shout at this man as he is an old acquaintance I don’t get much of a chance to talk to anymore. On the whole I am aware of the dangers of Twitter and am happy to leave them the hell alone.

Not so for one Mr Trent Reznor, lead singer of Nine Inch Nails who has recently taken his huffy little ball and stomped all the way home. You see Trent Reznor does not understand the most important thing about the internet in that it is much like the abyss — when you stare at it, it is staring right on back.

Now I’m not a Trent Reznor aficionado. Apart from knowing that he is pretty short (5 foot 7 and 1/2 according to Yahoo answers) and that a guy I knew once whored himself out to a fat chick for tickets to one of his shows I am pretty clueless as to general Reznor facts. Which is why I have had to do some appropriate research before taking the time to write this article and what I deem appropriate is around 5 minutes scanning his Wikipedia article and checking out his now famous Twitter.

The first is a selection of facts and dubious accolades spanning his long career (25th best metal vocalist out of a poll of 100, an album released on the internet, placing 46th on a list of 100 people reinventing America, engaged to a real life lady) and the second is an illuminating insight into the mind of a man who takes criticism rather badly.

Trent Reznor is, if you will, something of a baby man. Regardless of the fact that his music career has been ongoing for longer than my own life on earth he seems to be awfully easily riled. This could be due to a number of factors — like his height or the fact that he was last relevant around 1994 no matter how desperately he tries to prove otherwise. I don’t know. I have never met the man and am eternally grateful for this fact.

What I do know however is that Trent Reznor needs to calm down. It’s just the internet. It can’t actually hurt you unless you let it. You can always put people on ignore. You don’t have to rage quit social networking — after-all a man who claims to want to connect with his fans in order to re-invent the way music is conceptualised and received might find social networking useful in the long run.

You do not have to post long rants on your personal forum detailing why the internet is ruled by idiots and that is why the people on it can’t have nice things, like your dream forum filled with cardiologists and magical wish ponies. You do not have to link those posts on your Twitter for all the HATERS to read.

You do not have to be a massive drama whore whose sign off reads:

With all of that said, I have business in the real world to attend to including wrapping up the live version of NIN, DOING some cool new shit and spending as much time as possible with the most amazing woman in the world.

Because on the internet there is already a man who does these things. A man who when not eating all the food takes pictures of Superman doing his wife.

What I’m saying Trent is that you need to dial it back now before you pull a Kevin Smith.


Trent Reznor kissing his real life girlfriend which he totally has. I wish I was as cool as him.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/trent-reznor-rage-quits-twitter/feed/ 1 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/film-camera-collection/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/film-camera-collection/#comments Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:34:36 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=904

A collection of things. Expect some articles in the coming months about the Yashica Minister 700, FED1f NKVD, Nikomat FT2, and Polaroid SX-70 in the same vein as the Olympus Chrome Six. The hammer, wrench, paper bag, and girls diary will not be getting articles however.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/film-camera-collection/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/nico-video-registration-in-english/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/nico-video-registration-in-english/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:19:20 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=859 Nico Nico Douga is the YouTube of Japan. I’d love to link you some of the brilliant videos they have over there, as well as the great interface and the way that the comments can fly across the video in relation to the point they are talking about, but you can’t see any of the videos on the site without registering. So today we’re going to walk you through the relatively simple registration process.



When you first visit the site you’re greeted with something very similar to the screen above. Clumsily translated (using a combination of Babel Fish, Google Translate, POPjisyo, and friends) it reads something like this (make sure to click on the image below to see a readable version):



You’re going to want to click on the pink link “new account”, where you will now be met with the below screen.



Click on the grey box to choose to proceed with registering your “common account”. We’ve conveniently (and once again, clumsily) translated the next screen for you. Once again, make sure to click on the image below to see a readable version.



A few things on this screen, firstly you can choose your “thumbnail” image by selecting the options from the drop-down box on the right of the image. Secondly, for “province”, scroll all the way to the bottom of the drop-down box and select “Other(overseas)”.

The next screen will confirm the information you have entered, as well as show the TOS. Scroll down a little and enter the text for the CAPTCHA. If the current text is unreadable, then click the button to the right of the text box to reload the CAPTCHA. Once you have entered the text click the button below the box to continue. The next page tells you that a link has been emailed to you that you must click within the next 24 hours to complete the registration. So open up your email client and you should find an email from Nico Nico Douga (if not, then check your Spam box), the email will again confirm all of your information and ask for you to click on the link to complete your registration process.

You can now visit their beginners page and watch the 3 delightfully weird tutorial videos. Or click through from there to the main page and start watching. Just to get you started we have the initial page that we translated below:



All those links in the light blue boxes are tags that you can use to browse the various categories, so start clicking away!

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/06/nico-video-registration-in-english/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/i-love-la-roux/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/i-love-la-roux/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 14:05:13 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=833

Despite looking like a solo act La Roux is actually a duo comprising of Elly Jackson and Ben Langmaid who, at the beginning of the the year were tipped to become one of the big names of 2009.

Sounding as fresh and engaging as they do it’s very hard not to like them.

Similarly it’s definitely difficult to not be thankful for them — after all we’re being inundated right now with a succession of female led electronica projects whose names begin with L and who mostly sound the same:

Little Boots who’s been famous forever but now she’s been removed from her bedroom seems awkward and re-hashed, LadyHawke who I genuinely like but for some reason just doesn’t do it for me and Lady GaGa. The least said about Lady GaGa the better.

Classified as part of the Wonky Pop movement La Roux’s music is credible, androgynous, 80s influenced and mind-bendingly catchy working together addictive synth hooks, clear, piercing vocals and heart felt lyrics. Add their videos — which are in turn 80s camp, deceptively simple, and visually stunning — and you have a fantastic package that reeks of David Bowie, Annie Lennox and everything that was good about the 80s.

La Roux’s debut album is set for release on the 29th of June and promises to be something very special.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/i-love-la-roux/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/using-juicer-on-os-x/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/using-juicer-on-os-x/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 17:03:02 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=808 Juicer is a CSS and JavaScript packaging tool developed by cjohansen. I personally use Juicer to compress my multitude of nicely formatted CSS files into one neat minimized file for deployment. This minimizes the number of requests made to my servers and speeds up my websites. For more information on this visit this page.

First up, I’m going to assume that you’re already running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). If not, you’re going to need to first follow this brilliant tutorial on setting up Ruby on Rails for both Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). Even if you are running Mac OS X 10.5, I still recommend that you follow this tutorial to roll your own Ruby on Rails installation (however, it is not a requirement). I also recommend that your system is fully updated ( -> Software Update).

Now we’re going to go start Terminal and run the following command (Terminal is available from the Utilities sub-folder of your Applications directory): sudo gem install bones juicer. It will likely ask you for your password, which will have to enter to continue the installation.

Next up is to edit your .profile file so that the juicer commands will work. Your command promp should already show that you are in your user directory (ComputerName:~ username$), if not then navigate to it. If you do not know the basics of using Terminal then I recommend you visit this helpful tutorial to get better acquainted. Now that you’re in your user directory you can execute the command vi .profile, and you should see something similar to this:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

##
# DELUXE-USR-LOCAL-BIN-INSERT
# (do not remove this comment)
##
echo $PATH | grep -q -s "/usr/local/bin"
if [ $? -eq 1 ] ; then
    PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
    export PATH
fi

All we’re going to do is add our path to the end of the file. So press ‘i’ and use the arrow keys to navigate to the end of the file. Press ‘return’ a couple of times and then copy and paste the following code:

export PATH="$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin"

Now press ‘escape’ and then enter :wq, and press ‘return’ to save and quit. We can now run the next two commands in Terminal to install YUI Compressor and JSLint.

juicer install yui_compressor
juicer install jslint

(Execute them one line at a time). Now we can get on with using Juicer itself, which is as simple as:

juicer merge first.css second.css

This will merge the two CSS files into one single file (first.min.css), which can then be copied onto your server and referenced instead of the multiple files that you had before. If you wish to see other examples of Juicer than make sure to check out this page.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/using-juicer-on-os-x/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/guys-covering-songs-by-girls/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/guys-covering-songs-by-girls/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 14:59:15 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=792 Here’s the second part of our ‘Covers’ special. This time round it’s songs by women being covered by men, which is something I think is much harder to find that songs by men being covered by women. That probably has something to do with the fact that the music industry in general is just as male dominated as any other industry out there, having been powered for years by a collection of people known as the 50 quid bloke.

It may also have something to do with the fact that covering a female authored song may be seen to be something less than manly. What self-respecting male artist would want to be seen or heard singing a song about feelings, shoes or ponies? Traditionally doing this may have led other men to call you a gay or an effeminate nancy boy.

Joyously however it’s 2009 and things are changing with the growing influence of the £8.93 woman and the MP3 lady. Like it or not the disposable income of women in developed countries is a sought after and fought over thing and has been since the emergence of equal rights and women’s ability to earn their own money. Women are increasingly the driving force behind the mass market and that means you better get used to the things they like.

So essentially what I’m saying here is that the smart move right now, for any man in the music industry, is to start courting the ladies — and what better way to introduce yourself and your band of hairy, smelly male friends than by covering a well loved lady track. Seriously. You guys should think about it. Just like the fine examples of manliness and talent on my covers list have.

• Bob Dylan — House Of The Rising Sun

As a traditional folk ballad “House of the Rising Sun” was first recorded in 1933 and is probably the most covered song in the universe having been tried out by a variety of different artists such as Leadbelly, The Animals, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Nina Simone, The Rolling Stones, Dolly Parton, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Tori Amos, Johnny Cash, The Supremes, The Mamas and the Papas, Woodie Guthrie, Joan Baez, Cat Power, House of Pain, The White Stripes, Bon Jovi and even the dreaded Muse to name but a very few. Originally told from the perspective of an unknown young woman somehow tied to an abusive, drunken gambler the song has been re-worked as often as it has been covered and there are several arguments as to it’s original meaning and content. Of the several versions recorded by men Bob Dylan’s is one of the few to retain the original gender specifics and tone.

• Dizzee Rascal — That’s Not My Name

Originally written as Katie White’s rant on her frustrations about the music industry, this cover was recorded as part of the Radio One Live Lounge Sessions presented by Joe Wiley. Personally I hated the original for many reasons, not least of which has something to do with this but as it sometimes the joy of covers the Dizzee Rascal version adds a layer of dimension and attitude to an otherwise bland as fuck filler track.

• Willie Nelson — Time After Time

Being responsible for the National Woman’s Anthem of the 80’s Cyndi Lauper is fairly well known. Equally well known is Willie Nelson — the tax evading, pot smoking red headed stranger. When the artists of such renown collide only good things can happen right? Surprisingly, all sarcasm aside this is in fact that case as Nelson’s cover of Lauper’s “Time After Time” demonstrates. Originally a hit for Cyndi in 1984 it collected a Grammy in the Song of the Year category and is beloved of the recently single the world over. Similarly everyone everywhere loves Willie Nelson. Fact.

• Cake — I Will Survive

Originally written by a man and recorded by Gloria Gaynor “I Will Survive” is a disco hit which has become the domain of women with tear streaked mascara on the karaoke circuit and drag performances which may or may not include Jason Donovan. Marked as an anthem of female empowerment it’s genuinely interesting to hear it covered by any men at all, never mind covered well as it is here.

• Travis — I Kissed a Girl

Already know for their cover of “… Baby One More Time” in 1999 Travis have apparently been searching all this time for another pop song worthy of their attentions. Little did they know it would take 9 long years until the release of “I Kissed a Girl” by the eternally self satisfied lip stick “lesbian” Katy Perry. Switched in this instance to the perspective of a gay man experimenting with a woman for the first time the Travis cover at least seems to offer a listenable, slightly less insulting version of an offensive pop song about being a lady who kisses other ladies for male attention.

• The White Stripes — Jolene (Live Under Blackpool Lights)

Originally written by Dolly Parton, Jolene supposedly takes its inspiration from her husbands interactions with a red headed bank teller and has, like “House of the Rising Sun”, been covered by a wide selection of musicians. The only cover version that matters however is the one given here by The White Stripes. Many of you would be forgiven for not noticing that it had on this occasion been sung by a man since Jack White has been known to look and sound a lot like a woman (Which is probably why he grew that beard). Say what you like about Jack though, this is one of my favourite cover versions and I think it proves that no matter the gender of the person singing it a good song is still a good song.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/guys-covering-songs-by-girls/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/guest-article-i-am-a-teacher-and-your-kids-are-stupid/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/guest-article-i-am-a-teacher-and-your-kids-are-stupid/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 15:23:59 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=773 Guest Article by MisEducation

Sometimes I despair at my job. You try your damndest to teach each class of kids that are plonked in front of you twice a week something useful about life or the world, talk until you’re blue in the face repeating the basics of the English language, only to be left with gems such as these.

“In the play, women are put on a pedal-stool by their boyfriends”

“I was green with ivy when I saw that she had a better dress than me”

“Bullying leads to low shelf of steam”

“In Macbeth, Malcolm is Prince of Cumbernauld”

When you add in the amounts of dire spelling and bad punctuation that grace the pages of the graffiti’d jotters every day, its hard not to start banging your head off the desk and muttering to yourself about verbs and nouns whilst rocking back and forward like some asylum-bound nutbag.

I’ve tried several times to work out if kids are getting more stupid (or stupider as they’d say..) and I can’t work it out. I remember clearly that when I was at school there were people who were ‘challenged’ (hooray for wishy washy teacher speak.…OK, so I mean they were fucking thick) but the lack of general knowledge that I see on a daily basis is shocking.

They have in depth knowledge of fast food outlets, who is seeing who in the superficial wonderland of Hollywood, how many calories are in a doughnut or who is number one in the charts. However, they don’t know who the Prime Minister is, why the Holocaust happened (or in some cases that it happened at all and isn’t just a story that some guy made up), who the first man on the moon was, or more importantly, what marzipan is. One of my fourth years took a stab at it being a country in Europe, but the rest mostly just looked blank.

If you suggest that they perhaps pick up a book and read, you should duck quickly or you might get hit in the face with a Jane Austen novel as it flies across the room. OMG, reading is absolutely not something that any normal person wastes their time doing, FFS. Reading is for losers. Or poofs, who might as well be losers apparently.

Ask them about celebrities though, or where they can get Botox, or who won Big Brother for the last eight years running (or is it nine? Or does anyone care…?) and their eyes light up as they clamour to give you the gossip, fresh from the pages of Heat. Now, don’t get me wrong…I like to read Heat sometimes and find the kind of car crash celebrity stories they tell fascinating from a sociological point of view. It’s hard to see why we care so much about some of these people. It seems that we love to hate them for their lifestyles, glamour and success even though we can’t look away and therefore feeding their fame. The pathos that we used to feel as a result of art, music or theatre in the past is now evoked by reading about the lives of people that we don’t know. The worry is that kids see these celebrities as their new idols. They want to be like Jordan, Britney or Posh, but not to be singers or models, just to be famous.

Of course I’m doing the hardworking and intelligent pupils down, but sometimes these seem like the minority. While there are some highly intelligent young people out there who are mature, engaged and curious about everything and who suck up knowledge like the proverbial sponge, I could probably count on one hand the number of pupils I have that are passionate about learning or about particular subjects or topics. It’s a sad situation. I worry that if things carry on this way then society will degenerate into a store for mindless, surgery enhanced twats who don’t know what a book is and are PROUD of that fact.

But who’s to blame? The media? Parents? Obviously the latter have a huge influence on things which is a pain in the rear end for teachers. To have a child disrupt your lesson and be punished for it, only to have the parent complain and overturn your professional ruling on the grounds that “little Jimmy would NEVER behave like that” is undermining and frustrating. A colleague of mine recently gave homework to a class nearing exams to aid revision, only to have five of her pupils’ parents write in to say that their little angel was not going to do it because it was “too easy”. Later, when she asked them to underline all of the adverbs in a piece of writing, they didn’t know what an adverb was because they had failed to do the homework. My solution? CCTV in classrooms. That way if any parent doesn’t believe that their child’s behaviour is what a credible, professional adult said it was, we can show them the tapes of Junior being a cheeky shite.

Maybe I’ve just had a bad day. I’m not saying that my job isn’t often good fun and rewarding, because it is. Teaching is a varied job where no two days are the same. And education is a changeable beast by nature. Of course we should move forward and do things to help young people as the world itself changes, but I can’t ignore the nagging feeling that our kids are getting more ignorant when it comes to things that are historically important. Same goes for anything current which is, as we speak, moulding our society and planet into something new. Climate change is when mum turns on the heating and credit crunch might as well be a new dollar-shaped cereal.

Who knows? Maybe the future is exams in the correct use of text speak.

“txt the emoticons for Ngry, sad n cnfuzd”

:@, :( :$

CORRECT!

Or how to bag yourself a footballer and be famous (be blonde, have face like fizz, get tits done).

The textbooks would be celebrity weeklies and our teachers would be the likes of Paris Hilton and the aforementioned ex-Big Brother winners, here to give their hilarious and life affirming tales of how fucking awesome it is to be vapid and famous.

All I can say is I hope that this version of hell is all in my dystopic, jaded head.

And now I need a beer.…..;o)

MisEducation is a qualified, full-time High School English teacher working somewhere in Scotland. She has, for obvious reasons, chosen to remain anonymous.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/guest-article-i-am-a-teacher-and-your-kids-are-stupid/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/danger-mouse-sparklehorse-david-lynch/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/danger-mouse-sparklehorse-david-lynch/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 14:35:23 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=762

Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch have put together an all-star team of musicians (including Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Gruff Ryhs of Super Furry Animals, Frank Black of Pixies, Iggy Pop, and James Mercer of The Shins) and released a beautiful record blank CD-R accompanied by a book of photographs by David Lynch.

A spokesperson for Danger Mouse has said that “due to an ongoing dispute with EMI” the “100+ page book” book by David Lynch will no longer come with a CD containing the songs, but rather a blank CD-R labeled: “For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”.

The songs themselves are freely available from NPR (streaming only), and the book + CD-R can be bought from the Dark Night of the Soul store. This is already one of my favourite albums of 2009, and the controversy of the release is a brilliant example of the issues raised in this article written by Brian Eno earlier this month.

The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable — so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. People who won’t pay £15 for a CD will pay £150 for the limited edition version with additional artwork, photos, booklet and DVDs. They often already own the music, downloaded — but now they want the art. That suggests to me the possibility of a refreshingly democratic art market: a new way for visual artists, designers, animators and film-makers to make a living.

So, as one business folds, several others open up.
A living art reborn, Prospect Magazine, Brian Eno.




]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/danger-mouse-sparklehorse-david-lynch/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/white-adobe-cs4-icons-os-x-windows/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/white-adobe-cs4-icons-os-x-windows/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 15:26:44 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=731

Over the next few months I’ll be writing a variety of posts detailing the little tips & tricks and hacks that I use everyday in OS X. Today I’m sharing the icons that I created for CS4.

I was sick of seeing all those colours down in my Dock and decided to do something about it. As the Adobe typeface Gauge used in the original icons is not available, I have vectorized the letters and images by hand for the best match. Note that the type and images in these icons are not 100% black, but are slightly transparent like the originals. Unfortunately the level of detail is quite hard to see in anything other than the 512x512 .png’s.

There are 23 icons available in total, most of them seen in the image above, to download the icons in .icns format (OS X) or .png format (Windows) then please use the links below.

White Adobe CS4 Icons (.icns)




White Adobe CS4 Icons (.png)




I would appreciate that in linking to this icon set, you link to this page and not the direct download links. You are welcome to modify these in any way if make your version available for public use free of charge too.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/white-adobe-cs4-icons-os-x-windows/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/wall-of-arms/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/wall-of-arms/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 19:39:01 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=707

Being lucky enough to have caught The Maccabees at Studio 24 this Monday I got to hear them perform some of the tracks from their new album. I may be biased given that they’re a particular favourite of mine but the gig was amazing, the band was energetic and note perfect and it was well worth the two hour drive there and back.

If you haven’t been lucky enough to catch the band live then hooray for you because Wall Of Arms is out today.

You should get yourself a copy.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/05/wall-of-arms/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/girls-covering-songs-by-guys/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/girls-covering-songs-by-guys/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:44:17 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=529 Welcome to our first installment in our series on Cover Songs. In this issue we’ll be focusing on just a few girls that have covered songs by guys.
• Peaches — Search & Destroy

I really don’t think there’s that many people you can say have as much on-stage presence and energy as Iggy Pop, but Peaches is definitely one name that comes to mind for me. Whats more, they’ve worked together before.

Search And Destroy was originally performed by The Stooges, and the title of the song is from an article Iggy Pop read in Time Magazine on the Vietnam War. The song can be credited with influencing decades of punk bands, and Peaches’ cover contains all the emotion of Iggy’s original release. Stripped down even further than the Bruce Dickinson 1997 re-release — to just a drum machine and a couple of layered Synth tracks — I love the simplicity of it, and feel it does great homage to one of my favourite Punk groups.

• Patti Smith — Smells Like Teen Spirit

Patti Smith has released so many beautiful albums, and has written some of my favourite songs — yet it was with her album of cover songs — Twelve — that I realised the variety she is capable of. Although I’m concentrating on Smells Like Teen Spirit here, the album contains covers of artists from Bob Dylan to R.E.M. to Tears For Fears.

Almost universally, the initial listen of this song is met with an exclamation of “Wow, I never realised he was actually singing words!”. For the record, my favourite Nirvana album is With the Lights Out: a vast collection of studio sessions, boombox recordings, and live performances that show depth and talent you wouldn’t imagine from listening to the studio albums, and I feel that Patti Smith captures this intensity almost perfectly.

• E.S.L. — Girls

E.S.L. are a quartet of Canadian gypsies that make their living performing orchestral cover versions of artists such as Neil Young and The Velvet Underground. For this cover song, they’ve taken a brilliant Beastie Boys number from their first album: License To Ill.

On an album filled with such classics as Paul Revere, Hold It Now, Hit It, Brass Monkey, No Sleep Till Brooklyn and of course (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party), Girls at first seems like an odd choice to cover. However, E.S.L. take a catchy song and turn it into a brilliant and funny little number.

• Cat Power — Satisfaction

Cat Power is well known for her cover songs. In fact, her album — The Covers Record — is entirely a collection of covers recorded at various sessions between 1998 and 1999, the very best of which I feel is her cover of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. A song that was written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger as a response to the rampant commercialism that they had seen in America.

Cat Power’s cover takes a song that was originally penned as a folk song, and strips it back to it’s roots. In fact, she goes so far as to remove the chorus from the song entirely — it’s so different in feel to the original that I had to give it a couple more listens before I could be sure that it was indeed a cover of The Rolling Stones’ song of the same name.

• Aretha Franklin — The Weight

The Weight has to be one of the best-known songs by The Band, best described as a critically acclaimed and extremely influential Canadian-American rock and roll group of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Aretha Franklin is probably best known to many these days for her role singing Think in the movie Blues Brothers.

The Weight is said by Robbie Robertson to be influenced by the movies of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel:

In Buñuel there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good. In “The Weight” it was this very simple thing. Someone says, “Listen, would you do me this favour? When you get there will you say ‘hello’ to somebody or will you give somebody this or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth, that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favour when you’re there.” This is what it’s all about. So the guy goes and one thing leads to another and it’s like “Holy Shit, what’s this turned into? I’ve only come here to say ‘hello’ for somebody and I’ve got myself in this incredible predicament.” It was very Buñuelish to me at the time.

Aretha has one of the strongest voices I’ve ever heard in a female vocalist, and she uses it to her best in this striking cover, which has nearly as high a rotation in my play-lists as the original.

• Annie Lennox — Don’t Let It Bring You Down

Annie Lennox has a beautiful voice, as heard on Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Walking on Broken Glass, Why, and many more.

The original was written by Neil Young, and in describing it he says “Here is a new song, it’s guaranteed to bring you right down, it’s called ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’. It sorta starts off real slow and then fizzles out altogether.”

Annie Lennox’s cover may start off just as slow as the Neil Young original, but it’s much more grandiose in scope, with trademark Annie Synths and drum machines mixed with gorgeous backing vocals and a single piano.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/girls-covering-songs-by-guys/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/soundmanager-2-wordpress/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/soundmanager-2-wordpress/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:24:10 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=656 This is the first in what will be many posts explaining various bits of code that I’ve been working on for this — and other — websites. This post will detail how to get SoundManager 2 working with WordPress — and how you can have unobtrusive and stylish links to play MP3’s directly from your blog posts.

And just as an example, this is what we’re going to be working toward:

• E.S.L. — Girls

(make sure to click on it a few times to see the various states)

First up, you’re going to want to download SoundManager 2 from the website (click on “Download SoundManager 2″). You’ll then need to unzip the folder that you’ve downloaded, and I would suggest renaming it to something like “soundmanager2” while you’re at it. Then go ahead and upload the entire folder to your base directory (I’m going to assume here that if you have WordPress up and running properly, then you’re familiar with the ins and outs of FTP).

You can now navigate to http://yourwebsite.com/soundmanager2 (make sure to change “yourwebsite.com” to your actual domain!) and see if everything’s working. I’d also recommend checking http://yourwebsite.com/soundmanager2/doc/getstarted/index.html#troubleshooting to verify that you have no SM2 start-up problems. If you do have any problems with your install at this point with I’d recommend visiting the discussion forums for SoundManager 2.

I’ll assume that everything is running fine, so you can now see just what we’re going to be using for our unobtrusive MP3 playable links at http://yourwebsite.com/soundmanager2/demo/play-mp3-links/basic.html. Try clicking around a little to get an idea of just how it all works.

Now we’re going to start moving some files around. Firstly though, I have various directories within my current theme folder to better organise all my code. These are /js/, /css/, /images/, /mp3/ and /mp3/. Obviously everybody has different ways that they feel work better for them, so if you have your directory laid out a little differently to mine then put the files were you would prefer and update the latter links accordingly.

There are 4 files that we will be moving from the /soundmanager2/ directory — so navigate there first. Then copy the two .swf files (“soundmanager2.swf” and “soundmanager2_flash9.swf”) from /soundmanager2/swf/ to /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/swf/ (make sure to replace “yourtheme” with your current theme name). We will then copy the javascript file from /soundmanager2/demo/play-mp3-links/script/inlineplayer.js to /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/js/, and also the css file from /soundmanager2/demo/play-mp3-links/css/inlineplayer.css to /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/css/.

You will then have to add the following code to your header in-between the <head> and </head> tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/css/inlineplayer.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/js/soundmanager2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/js/inlineplayer.js"></script>

(note that the above code assumes that you have installed WordPress in the base directory of your website, if you have not done this then you will need to add the directory name for your WordPress installation before /wp-content/, also — remember to again change “yoursite” and “yourtheme” to the appropriate names).

The first file you need to modify is /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/js/inlineplayer.js. Scroll all the way to the bottom and you will see:

soundManager.url = '../../swf/'; // path to directory containing SM2 SWF

This needs to be changed to the absolute directory of your SWF file as below:

soundManager.url = 'http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/swf/'; // path to directory containing SM2 SWF

Next is to modify the css file /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/css/inlineplayer.css. Note that for the example below I’m giving the link a line-height of 18 pixels, this is to properly align the MP3 playable link to the horizontal baseline that is running throughout the website. Make sure that you replace the current code in the file with this:

ul.flat	{
	list-style-type:none;
	padding-left: 0px;
	font-size: 10px;
	text-transform: uppercase;
	color: #222;
	padding-bottom: 18px;	}

ul.flat li	{
	padding-bottom: 0px;	}

ul.flat	li	a	{
	display: inline-block;
	padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;	}

ul.flat	a.sm2_link	{
	/* default state: "a playable link" */
	border-left: 9px solid #222;
	padding-left: 9px;
	padding-right: 9px;	}

ul.flat	a.sm2_link:hover	{
	/* default (inactive) hover state */
	border-left-color: #34B0F8;
	color: #222;	}

ul.flat a.sm2_playing	{
	/* "now playing" */
	border-left-color: #34B0F8;
	color: #34B0F8;
	text-decoration: none;	}

ul.flat a.sm2_playing:hover,
ul.flat a.sm2_paused:hover	{
	/* "clicking will now pause/resume" */
	border-left-color: #34B0F8;	}

ul.flat a.sm2_paused	{
	/* "paused state" */
	border-left-color: #CCC;
	text-decoration: none;	}

As the code is commented, it should all be pretty self-explanatory what class does what. Note that I’m using the “flat” styles here as a base, and not the “graphic” styles as I feel it suits the style of our website better.

And now we’re ready to add a playable mp3 link to any blog post we choose! Simply add the code below to a post — making sure to edit as necessary:

<ul class="flat">
<li><a href="http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/mp3/songtitle.mp3">Artist - Title</a></li>
</ul>

Now if you’ve done everything right, then you should have a playable link that looks much the same as the one I posted at the beginning of the article.

You can now turn off debugging mode by finding the following line near the bottom of /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/js/inlineplayer.js:

soundManager.debugMode = true; // disable or enable debug output

Make sure to replace this with soundManager.debugMode = false;.

Feel free to post any addendum’s or questions in the comments section below.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/soundmanager-2-wordpress/feed/ 26 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/who-is-hwei-lin-lim/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/who-is-hwei-lin-lim/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:01:51 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=650

Hwei Lin Lim is an award winning comic book artist and Systems Integration & Technology consultant from Malaysia.

So far her completed works include 2 short stories entitled Vefurrin and Absent. Both of which are beautifully drawn and engaging.

She is currently working on a project called Hero — a touchingly humorous story of a young man on a mysterious journey which is quite simply best discovered for yourself.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/who-is-hwei-lin-lim/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/241543903/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/241543903/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:59:24 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=624

241543903

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/241543903/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/monthly-links-round-up-march/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/monthly-links-round-up-march/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:01:04 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=570 Welcome to the first edition of our Monthly Links Round-Up. This is a place for links that we couldn’t just throw up in the side bar, but didn’t quite make it into a post of their own.

Björk x Ratatat timelapse video. Shot on a Canon Rebel XT by Sai, you can see more of his videos here, or check out his Flickr page here.

Tatsuyuki Tanaka is the creator of the well-known Cannabis Works. He currently works for Studio 4°C — which did three of the Animatrix shorts, a Nike iD spot, and the gorgeous movie Tekkon Kinkreet. Tatsuyuki Tanaka — born in 1965 — has been working in the animation business since he was 18, with his first major role being a freelance key animator on Akira.

Multicolr Search Lab takes the colours from over 10,000,000 interesting photos on Flickr. You can then choose up to 10 colours from their colour palate to search for images by colour. Searching using a selection of skin tones can be fun.

Röyksopp’s Happy Up Here is their first single off the new album: Junior. It’s directed by Reuben Sutherland, who has done work for Eurostar, Orange, and Sony. I especially recommend his music video for Phoenix Foundation.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/monthly-links-round-up-march/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/paying-bills-kage-nightclub-pt-2/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/paying-bills-kage-nightclub-pt-2/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:06:16 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=539

The final posters from the winter season for Kage.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/paying-bills-kage-nightclub-pt-2/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/why-i-hate-twitter/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/why-i-hate-twitter/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:49:08 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=509 Or ‘Wil Wheaton eats a grilled cheese sandwich’.

Don’t get me wrong I am all in favour of the communications revolution brought about by the internet. Were it not for said communications revolution my life would be a lot a different.

I did, for instance, meet my partner and co-founder of SPK through the internet as well as many other people who I consider to be friends and acquaintances.

I can, it’s true, find out what’s going on almost anywhere on the planet in less time than it takes me to make a coffee and a piece of toast in the morning.

I have, with some restrictions, access to any form of media I can get my grubby little hands on at the press of a button.

I think the internet and the level of inter connectivity between otherwise unrelated people is fucking awesome.

So definitely don’t get me wrong when I say that I hate Twitter.

I’m not some sort of anti-internet puritan. I don’t think it’s corrupting our children and leading to the downfall of society. I have no wish to see it regulated by governments and stomped all over by Lars Ulrich and the copyright police.

It’s just that I think some people are going a little too far and that they are doing so on Twitter and the other myriad social networking sites and applications available to everyone and their dog.

Months ago I deleted my Myspace profile. And then shortly afterward I deleted my profile from bebo. I just couldn’t take it anymore and it was time to get out.

Specifically what I couldn’t take anymore was the glitter text and obnoxious music that assaulted me every time I looked at someone else’s profile. I couldn’t stand to see anymore badly taken nude photographs of people I knew. It was becoming too difficult to ignore the needy, attention grabbing status messages that told me every little thing about every sodding break up or argument going on in the world outside my house.

It was too much information. I really didn’t feel like I needed to know about these things. In fact I felt that naked pictures, personal problems and shared community bitching were perhaps best kept private and far the hell away from me, the uninvolved third party.

Now. It may be that I’m just middle aged and boring before my time. It could be that I am prudish and oversensitive. I may just be boring.

It could, and I do not deny this, be all of these things.

Maybe I just don’t get the internet anymore.

And so I retreated to Facebook where there was no glitter text and I kept the number of contacts on my friends page to under 20 — just the way I liked it. Just the people I wanted to know about and the ability to filter out anything I didn’t care to read.

But then SuperpositionKitty went live and someone had to man the Twitter feed.

It had sat, largely unused and lonely, at the bottom of the page for months and I, entirely foolishly, assumed that this was because Ryan was busy coding and designing and had no time to update it. So like the good business partner and girlfriend I am I offered to take over Twitter duties and skipped off to install a client I could use to do this, eventually settling on the Firefox extension TwitterFox. After all social networking tools are perfect for spreading the news about a new website hungry for views. How could I refuse an opportunity to get in on what several news sites and blogs told me was the place to be in 2009?

For the first few days it stayed there in the corner of my browser, a tiny blue ‘t’ that could be easily ignored while I messed around trying to get the hang of Twittering. I entered a few updates. I had a look at some other people’s pages. I halfheartedly filled in our profile and thought about adding some kind of picture for our avatar.

Essentially I stood a few steps back and poked at Twitter like a child at the sea side harassing a crab with a stick. And to all intents and purposes the crab did not poke back. Great! I thought, time to dive right in! The water in this rock pool looks amazing!

And so I did. A week into my Twitter experiment I started to follow people. Not many at first. Only ten or eleven. But that was enough to teach me that just because a crab doesn’t move for a while that doesn’t mean it wont pincer your ass the first time you’re not looking and then call in it’s many many friends to do the same thing.

Suffice to say the water was not amazing. The water was in fact very far from amazing.

TwitterFox has gone from a benign lower case letter to a soon to be uninstalled irritating blue box that popped up every fives minutes to inform me of as series of growing inanities. Twitter itself, as I found out over the course of one afternoon, was a place filled with the borderline hysterical who insisted that I knew everything that they were doing at every hour of the day. It’s not so much a social networking tool as it is a platform to stand on and demand that everyone be your audience and personal Greek chorus. “Validate the way I spend my time!” the Twitterer shrieks and the chorus rushes in to do just that. It is as close to mass hysteria as I desire to get.

Now again, don’t get me wrong. There are some people out there who use twitter to good effect. People who do things that are interesting and manage to tread the fine line between being informative and offering far too much personal information. It’s just that their voices are lost amid the myriad wailing of the Twitter attention whore.

But how exactly do you go about sorting out the unbearable white noise for the genuine and useful content? Why do people insist on polluting the air around them with the stinky cologne of desperation like the next door neighbour whose music permeates your home at 3am? How is it possible to become so invasive in only 140 characters or less?

I suppose, in fairness, that it was naive of me to expect it to have been different than it was. Like I stated earlier in this article I had already forsaken just about every other networking site because of abuse by people who really need you to know about their lives. I should have known better than to think Twitter would be free of this problem. But that’s the problem with hype — you may know that deep down something is a terrible idea but if people tell you over and over again how good it is a part of you really want to take a look. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.

More fool me for falling for it again despite my reservations. Hopefully this time I’ll learn and in future stay away from the next big thing.

So what have I learned from Twitter?

I’ve learned that it’s useful. I’ve had to agree that it’s a fantastic innovation. And yes it definitely helps all kinds of people from all across the globe keep in contact and up to date with world events.

I’ve also learned that maybe all of these things are not as fantastic as they may appear to be. I now know that Wil Wheaton enjoys grilled cheese sandwiches and that some dude who I have never heard of who Ryan added to our following category doesn’t sleep well at night and has a son who tries to stick forks into electrical outlets. I now know I can find out exactly what people I will never meet are having for dinner 2 continents away.

I’ve learned, I think, that any tool can only perform as well as the person who uses it which has been my problem with the social networking phenomenon all along. When something is available to everyone there is no way to ensure that everyone has something interesting to say and the only person responsible for the value of the messages is the individual hitting the send button.

The SPK Twitter will remain, mostly abandoned and forlorn at the the bottom of our site. It is after all something that could come in handy from time to time. Just don’t expect any great revelations about our choice of grilled sandwich or what I happen to be wearing on any given Tuesday. I just don’t think that’s what it’s for.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/04/why-i-hate-twitter/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/olympus-chrome-six-iii-b/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/olympus-chrome-six-iii-b/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:19:10 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=493 This is the first in what will — hopefully — be many posts about the cameras that I have been collecting over the years. Present count today is somewhere around 25 cameras, from the early 20th Century to only months old, both film and digital, SLR, TLR, Rangefinders, Folders and more.

The camera up today is the Olympus Chrome Six III B. It’s a Medium Format Folding camera first introduced in 1948, the revision III (below) was introduced in May 1952. The biggest difference between the earlier II model was the introduction of a ‘film plane corrector’ to improve the precision of the film position. The ‘B’ denotes the fact that it has the faster 75mm ƒ2.8 lens, and not the ƒ3.5.



My Olympus Chrome Six was handed down to me from Jen’s Grandfather. Apparently it was used heavily at all sorts of occasions over the past half a century, but the condition is so near to perfect that you could barely tell. The most distinguishing feature of this particular Chrome Six is the text ‘MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN’ that runs down the back latch of the camera. A reasonably common feature on many objects manufactured in Japan during the period between the end of WWII and April 18, 1952.

Personally, my favourite part of this camera is the fast (in the Medium Format world) ƒ2.8 lens. The field of view of the 75mm lens is roughly equivalent to 50mm on a 35mm — or a Full-frame digital — camera, and at full aperture it has quite a narrow depth of field. The quality of the F.C. (coated on all elements) glass is excellent, and in fact the only negative with a camera such as this is the relatively slow 1–200 speed of the Copal shutter. However, leaf shutters do have some advantages over focal plane shutters in that they can flash sync at any available shutter speed, and are generally quieter.

In short, this is a great camera if you’re looking to get started in the world of Medium Format film. It’s cheap, very easy to use, has great optics, and is even thinner (albeit heavier) than most modern-day dSLRs.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/olympus-chrome-six-iii-b/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/the-joker/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/the-joker/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:29:40 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=475 The joker was for so many years defined by his absence.

At once loved and dearly in evidence and altogether not there he hung at the corners, eyes set grimly in his squarish head.

So long ago reduced to just the back of a neck on a bus in July.

Once a burning, flickering inconstant in life.

Impersonal and cloying. Forever threatening to cut the strings with blunt scissors.

Not even in dreams anymore.

A stunning prat fall and a stolen necklace.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/the-joker/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/andrew-wk/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/andrew-wk/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:01:29 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=448 The first time I heard about Andrew W.K. I was somewhere outside of Glenrothes on a stagecoach Citylink bus. It was a Friday and I was 18. I hadn’t as yet heard any of his music, although admittedly at that point I hadn’t heard much music at all, but from what I could gather from Kerrang magazine he was young, apparently musically gifted and THE NEXT BIG THING in metal. At the time I was younger, musically inept and horribly eager to learn about anything my new group of “mosher” friends were interested in. Years later this article would be the only thing that I had permanently filed away in my memory from my brief flirtation with heavy metal journalism, apart from a story I read on another bus journey about Slipknot being pelted with Mars Bars by the angry fans of another band during a gig.

I always hated Slipknot and was obviously gratified other people felt the same way.

I wouldn’t actually hear his music until another Friday night a few weeks later. This time I was slumped ungraciously in front of a friends television, perusing his music channels. I had none of my own, living as I was between University halls of residence and a selection of sofas scattered around Dundee. And it was here that I heard Party Hard for the first time. It was, like the article in Kerrang, interesting in a way I couldn’t quite pin down. There was something about the man and his music (apart from his seemingly never ending legs, unwashed jeans and wet straggly hair), that was fascinating and judging by the way that the song followed me around different club nights for months afterward and filled dancefloors every week it indicated that other people thought so too. Party Hard was essentially a song that did what it said on the tin — insert CD, crank volume, rock out. The followup song She is Beautiful and the video (which I still believe to be an accurate portrayal of a day in the life of Mr W.K.) was the same. I couldn’t figure out why I liked him and I certainly couldn’t begin to understand why the hell I thought he was so cool.

That knowledge would only come years later, after the hype had died down, and I had forsaken heavy metal and most of the friends who liked it. I’d been adamant that it wasn’t just a phase but at the end of the day, truthfully most things are. Apart from, as I was about to find out, Andrew W.K.

I can’t tell you quite how it happened. I was 23 now and hiding out on the internet during my free time, of which I had a lot. I hadn’t thought about him for a long time and I suppose I assumed he had dropped off the face of the planet or was at home making milkshakes and terrorising his neighbours after dark ever night. But it was during this time that I began to hear about Andrew W.K. again. Had I seen this video? Did I know he was guest speaking at a friends university? That he had recorded an album of J-Pop cover songs? That he was gold standard, hard core cool on the internet?

I had had no idea.  For all those years I had been doing my own thing, trundling along, not thinking about him, Andrew W.K. had been busy.  Very busy.  My ignorance was of course my own fault.  I’d remembered the article from Kerrang for years, but I hadn’t paid attention to it like I should have.  After all, it had told me quite simply — pay attention to this man because he is dynamic and interesting.  Keep your eyes open and your ears pinned back because he is going to surprise you.  

I had made a mistake, like a lot of people had, about Andrew W.K.

 And so it’s time to redress the balance.  I am 25 now and I can state wholeheartedly that I un-ironically love and enjoy Andrew W.K. and here are the reasons why:

On Friday, December 5th 2008, a die hard Andrew W.K. fan named Dominic Owen Mallary passed away after an accident while his band Last Lights performed at Boston University. Dominic had always said his dying wish was to have Andrew W.K. blasted at his wake. Catching wind of this, Andrew came to the wake, and played classical piano for the entire time after paying his respects.
Andrew W.K. on Wikipedia




Your Friend, Andrew WK was a reality show on MTV2 starring musician Andrew W.K..

In the show, people write letters to the white denim-clad rocker, and he answers some on the air. Letters that will not be helped by an answer are overseen by Andrew himself; he does this by traveling to wherever the letter-writer is from, and staying at their house a few days, working out the problem.
Your Friend, Andrew W.K. on Wikipedia




In 2005, Andrew announced that he would begin performing as a self-help, new age motivational speaker. He accepted invitations to speak at Yale University, New York University, The University of Wisconsin, Carnegie Mellon University, The Cooper Union, Western Missouri State University, and Northeastern University.
Andrew W.K. on Wikipedia




During 2007, Andrew performed a series of unpredictable happenings as part of his “One Man Show” tour. Each event began with Andrew improvising on the piano alone on a stage before they frequently evolved into giant parties, with most of the audience dancing on stage with Andrew, themselves playing the piano and singing the lyrics.
Andrew W.K. on Wikipedia




Premium Collection: The Japan Covers, known as One-Shot Game: Covers (一発勝負～カヴァーズ ‚Ippatsu Shōbu~Kavāzu?) in Japan, is a cover album by Andrew W.K.. The album consists of covers of Japanese pop songs that was released in Japan by Universal Music Group on November 26, 2008.

The songs were originally marketed as 30-second ringtones and repackaged in their complete versions as this 14-song album. Andrew W.K. is quoted as saying that this album is a “gift to the Japanese people, for all the incredible warmth and kindness they’ve given me over the years.”
The Japan Covers on Wikipedia




On tour for The Wolf, Andrew was injured on stage and broke his foot. After the concert, he signed autographs from the ambulance. Not wanting to let his fans down, he performed the remainder of the tour in a wheelchair.
Andrew W.K. on Wikpedia







This post brought to you by the society for Andrew W.K. Appreciation.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/andrew-wk/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/the-path-a-short-horror-game/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/the-path-a-short-horror-game/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:00:56 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=344

The Path — A short horror game by the group that bought you The Endless Forest, will be available to download March 18th.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/the-path-a-short-horror-game/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/why-you-should-read-gunnerkrigg-court/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/why-you-should-read-gunnerkrigg-court/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:33:48 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=326 There are a lot of comics on the internet. They’re called webcomics and there are supposedly over 18,000 of them and they’ve been around for roughly the same time as the internet. So you’ve probably read a few yourself and have now realised that unfortunately most of them are unbearably bad.

That’s the the problem with the kind of self-publishing involved in the “webcomic scene” — there are no quality controls save for those of the artists and a lot of those artists are terrible.

So when someone mentions a ‘good’ webcomic to you and tells you to check it out you may be loathe to take the advice. Which is a real shame because amongst the dross and white noise of the internet there are also some true gems out there. Gems like Gunnerkrigg court.

Written and drawn by Tom Siddell, the comic is the story of one Miss Antimony Carver and the mysteries which surround both her attendance of the eponymously named Gunnerkrigg court — an eerie and frequently otherworldly boarding school located somewhere in a country that could be the UK — and it’s dealings with the adjacent and equally shadowy Gillitie Wood. It fuses science, magic and mythology and blurs the lines between them naturally and easily to tell a story of impressive span and ambition.

Started in April 2005 it now contains over 20 chapters throughout which Siddell (or Tea-san as he is known in various parts of the internet), has continually and consistently improved not only his artwork but his style and story telling ability which, as anyone who has ever read a web comic will know, is a rarity among the community in which he works. There’s a real sense of progression and growth and, unlike many similar web based comics, that the author knows exactly where he is going and how he is going to get there. But he doesn’t stop there either — central to my, and I believe many other peoples enjoyment of Gunnerkrigg Court are the personal relationships between the characters he has created, like the devotion between Antimony and her science genius BFF Kat or the strange and sometimes threatening bond between quiet gentle Gamma and loud mouthed abrasive Zimmy. Each relationship is multi-layered and complex, and against the detailed, overbearing back drop of the Court and it’s mysteries they create a heartwarming sort of fuzzy core within in it — a core which draws you further and deeper into the story and into Siddell’s world.

There is something marvelous growing inside Gunnerkrigg Court — something sweet and magical and yet at the same time threatening and powerful — which deserves to be seen and enjoyed by everyone. It’s the story and it’s the art and it’s the characters. But mostly it’s Tom Siddell — a dedicated man who updates 3 times a week despite working a Monday to Friday, 9–5 job in the real world, who never begs for money and who does not bend to fan service to keep his readers. There need to be more dudes like Tom Siddell and more comics like Gunnerkrigg Court but until there are we salute him and his work.



Gunnerkrigg court : Orientation — the full-colour 300 page book containing the first 14 chapters of Gunnerkrigg Court is available worldwide (nearly) here.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/03/why-you-should-read-gunnerkrigg-court/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/noby-noby-boy/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/noby-noby-boy/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:30:32 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=321
Girl has reached the moon, boy proceeds to eat everything on the moon. On the moon there are chickens and mushrooms and astronauts and robots and motorbikes. o–o.
]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/noby-noby-boy/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/six-beautifully-simple-programs-for-os-x/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/six-beautifully-simple-programs-for-os-x/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:53:25 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=293 Visor

Something so simple that I can’t live without it. As a web developer I do a lot of my work in the terminal, usually while I have other windows open. What Visor does is provide a system wide terminal window that you can access with a hot-key — if you’ve played any FPS’s then it’s quite similar to the way you’d bring up the console (though instead of putting on godmother or no-clip, you’re ssh’ing into your server). Visor is brought to you by the group that produced Quicksilver — an application launcher/controller/so much more.

Dropbox

This program is as simple as a little icon that sits in your menu-bar and a folder in your user account on your hard-drive. Copy your files into that folder and they’ll be uploaded to your account on dropbox.com (free accounts come with 2GB of storage). I find it invaluable for sending large files to clients; I’ll drop the .psd’s into my Dropbox folder and right-click to get the link to the file on the server. I can then paste this link into an email for my clients to download at the time of their choosing. It’s also possible to use Dropbox for rudimentary backups and version control with their system of recovering deleted files.

The Hit List

I happen to have typed the draft of this post in The Hit List; Potion Factory’s new task-management application, and — although in beta — already a much better alternative to Things. I much prefer the layout, the ability to add start and end dates and time estimates, the tagging functions, and the multitude of hot-keys available. It’s a great looking app, and I really recommend giving it a download and a try before they start charging for it in the coming months

NicePlayer

NicePlayer is a simple alternative to QuickTime, VLC, MPlayer and all the other movie players out there for OS X. It came out at a time when you had to pay for QuickTime to view movies in full-screen, but even though this has changed recently (and indeed QuickTime Pro will become obsolete in the coming months) I still much prefer the clean layout in NicePlayer. Couple NicePlayer with Perian (a collection of open source QuickTime components ) and you can view almost any type of file. My favourite touches are using mouse gestures to zoom the view window and the ability to send the window to the background.

Spotify

Spotify is only recently out of private beta, but is already proving to be a promising replacement to iTunes and a hard-drive full of .mp3 files. Just type in an artist name or a song name or even genre and it will bring up a list of matches of full-length songs. The library is surprisingly diverse — though there’s still some glaring omissions — but the rights have been cleared for every song so it’s entirely legal. All the content is streamed via P2P, so if you’re on a fast enough connection there will be no waiting for the stream to buffer (RealPlayer I’m looking at you …). You can even build up playlists by dragging and dropping songs. What’s the catch? Because it’s free it’s supported by ads (a premium ad-less account costs £10 a month), in the form of fairly unobtrusive ads in the side-bar, but also audio adverts after every 5 or so songs — so you likely won’t be using this to DJ a set on a free account. Even so, it’s a great alternative to an iTunes library full of .mp3’s.

Transmission

As of the time of writing, uTorrent on OS X is still in public beta — and it’s buggy, has problems with speed limitations, crashes frequently and the interface is horrible. The only real torrent client available is Transmission. The pared-down interface, ability to watch folders for .torrent files, remote web interface, and the all-important bandwidth limiting preferences (albeit not as important now I am no longer in a barbaric country that caps my bandwidth every month) make this a brilliant choice.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/six-beautifully-simple-programs-for-os-x/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/why-tom-kuntz-is-your-favourite-director/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/why-tom-kuntz-is-your-favourite-director/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:51:37 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=286 I watched quite a few movies back in 2008 — and a lot of them are now nominated for Oscars — from The Dark Knight, to The Wrestler, Changling, Encounters at the End of the World and so many more. However, all of these pale in comparison to the work of Tom Kuntz — and it’s a pity that he won’t be nominated for a single Directorial Oscar — because he works primarily in the field of abbreviated multimedia. That is; advertising and — more recently — music videos.

Now its quite rare that we actually enjoy any of these snippets of annoyance that interrupt our television viewing, but it’s even more of a pity that unless it’s somebody in the vein of Spike Jonze directing another Gap or Adidas ad, we won’t know who was responsible for these microscopic masterpieces.

It was when I saw this entirely conceptual — and completely un-advertising — advertisement last month that I decided it was time to put in the effort to find out who it is that comes up with these, and 99% of the time it boiled down to one name; Tom Kuntz — responsible for some of the best ads of 2007 and 2008 — and I’ve gathered a few of these below for your viewing pleasure.

As mentioned above, he’s also been working on music videos for quite a few years now, my two favourite ones have to be his music videos for Electric Six.

Then there’s his genius video for The Bumblebeez.

Tom Kuntz has been working in the industry since 2002, and a backlog of his catalog of unusual advertisements can be found at: kuntzmanor.com. You should probably keep your eye out when you’re watching your favourite television show this evening, chances are that if you enjoy any of the ads — they’re directed by him.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/why-tom-kuntz-is-your-favourite-director/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/you-should-probably-listen-to-the-maccabees/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/you-should-probably-listen-to-the-maccabees/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:36:20 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=283 You may or may not have heard about The Maccabees. Whether you have or haven’t doesn’t change the fact that their second album Wall of Arms is set for release this year and that the first track previewed from it on UK radio earlier this month provides some advice that everyone should listen to.

Luckily for everyone it’s been followed up by it’s very own video

No Kind Words is available for download on the bands website and the album is due out in April. We can’t wait!

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/02/you-should-probably-listen-to-the-maccabees/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/paying-bills-kage-nightclub/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/paying-bills-kage-nightclub/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:08:58 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=233







]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/paying-bills-kage-nightclub/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/guest-article-the-microchip-is-a-serious-thing/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/guest-article-the-microchip-is-a-serious-thing/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:31:07 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=224 At Super Position Kitty …]]> At Super Position Kitty we intend to bring you the latest and most up to date news on an array of important and serious subjects in a forthright and understandable manner. With this in mind we present to you now the first in a series of guest articles dealing with very serious subjects in a serious manner.

The Microchip by Simone S.

They are small square things made of silicon? I think this because in America they have a place called Sillicone Valley where computers are made. (Interestingly fake boobs are also made of this stuff!)

The microchip meant that computers no longer had to be the size of a room because all the information is sorted on this tiny little square plastic thing. ‘How exactly’ is an enigma when you think about it.

Nowadays there are pictures and films and telephone lines and the internet all on this tiny little plastic box with a screen. What really gets me is that you click buttons and type words and suddenly all these images and bits of information are displayed on the screen. This is no electronic type writer — although that makes little sense either…

Basically bits of wire and plastic produce images and photographs with no tangible or realistic explanation. This was explained to me once — that binary code (you know — numbers?) translate through the microchip into words and pictures. Personally I don’t believe it myself. I can use the internet and type essays but how it works is a mystery. And why should I know?

When it comes to the crunch and you’re stuck up a hillside in the freezing rain and searching for food a microchip will not make a warm fire or shelter.

As for as I’m concerned computers and technology are luxuries and no way essential to existence. You can’t hug, fuck, eat or talk to a microchip. But I admit — it could come in useful if you’re stuck in your house alone with no-one or nothing to hug, fuck, eat or talk to.

A poor imitation of real life — sadly.

Note on the author: Simone S. is a Londoner and MA honours Politics and Philosophy graduate who shares her home and life with a rescued Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross named Roxy somewhere in the heart of Dundee. She knonws almost nothing about technology but she can operate her own stereo set up. Just.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/guest-article-the-microchip-is-a-serious-thing/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/things-which-may-or-may-not-be-cool/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/things-which-may-or-may-not-be-cool/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:31:27 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=210 You know how it goes — you see something here or there, some form of entertainment media or curio item and for some reason you can’t seem to categorise what it is you’ve actually seen.  You watched the whole thing or picked it up and turned it round and stared at it but you just can’t figure out what exactly you’re supposed to make of it.

Something about it is terrible.  Stupid even.  Something about it is deffinitely off and you know that you just shouldn’t like it.  It would be ridiculously uncool to like it.

But then there’s something about this thing that is also indescribably awesome.  Time and time again, when you think no-one is looking you go back to it — this thing that lies somewhere on the border between fucking terrifying and unsettlingly terrific.

Here at SuperPosition Kitty we enjoy things like that and spend a good deal of time unironically liking many things that perhaps we shouldn’t.  But what’s life lived without a few dirty secrets?  So in this spirit we present to you the first in a series of lists and articles concerning ‘things which may or may not be cool’.

This time round it’s music.

TATU — How Soon is Now? It’s easy to react to TATU what with their musical career being punctuated with various degrees of sapphic erotica and contrived controversy but that’s in the past. The important thing is that they’re Russian and better at this song than Morrissey.

Mint Royale and Lauren Laverne — Don’t Falter. Pure and simple turn of the century sweetness with BBC Culture Show presenter Lauren Laverne.

Lemon Jelly — Nice Weather for Ducks. From the 2002 album ‘Lost Horizons’. Very, very good.

Liam Lynch The Museum Rap. You’ve probably heard of Liam Lynch. He’s been around for a while. Known as a man who once described himself as ‘a watered down idiot savant’ he owns one Finnigan Forcefield — a cat cloned from his original and beloved pet Frankie Forcefield. Love him or hate him he’s pretty special.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fE975gHk0ks (embedding disabled)
Alisha’s Attic — Push It All Aside. Two sisters whose debut single has remained stuck in my head for the past 12 years sing a song about getting along and perform a synchronised dance routine to an equally catchy tune.

1200 Techniques — Karma. A prime example of Australian hip-hop : it may not be done well but it’s catchy!

Hilltop Hoods — Dumb Enough. It’s a swan.

Kiiiiiii — 4 Little Joeys. What can I say about two Japanese ladies playing toy instruments and singing a song about baby kangaroos? Not much really, apart from that it’s quite good.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aQM_pDAfbIE (embedding disabled)
Gwen Stefani — Hollaback Girl. THIS SHIT IS BANANAS. B. A. N. A. N. A. S. It quite literally is.

Lily Allen — The Fear. Like a lot of artists who find instant success through a ground swell of adoration provided by MySpace Lily has had a hard time in terms of holding onto the zeitgeist of cool. Which is a shame because her presence on the music scene makes pop a little more palatable.

Hawksley Workman — Jealous Of Your Cigarette. A man who sings guitar solos like Hawksley Workman regularly does should not be good at music but somehow he really is.

Polysics — Electric Surfing Go Go. A Japanese band notable for sounding like a SNES game falling down a flight of stairs during an air raid and having a super kawaii robot-dancing synth player.

Bat for Lashes — What’s A Girl To Do? This video has BMX’s in it.

Chicks on Speed — We Don’t Play Guitars. This band apparently display their vaginas on over head projectors at the end of their gigs. Art school bands are awesome.

Ore Ska Band — Hana No Suka Dance. A group of Japanese school girls who upon deciding to start a band realised that the instruments that they played only allowed it to be a ska band.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/things-which-may-or-may-not-be-cool/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/facts-about-cool-an-open-apology-to-damon-albarn/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/facts-about-cool-an-open-apology-to-damon-albarn/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:19:24 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=200 When I was a teenager I thought two things were cool — electric blue and yellow Adidas sweatshirts and Damon Albarn. Of course since growing up is a process of trying on many different identities, much like trying on a series of distinctive hats, I dropped sports clothes and poor old Damon and picked up other singers and different clothes. Time went on and I decided that new and different things were cool before throwing them off and moving on to the next thing and this continued on and on, shifting in and out of whatever I could get into.

But despite this — despite all of the things I have thought were cool or uncool I still don’t strictly know what cool is. And that’s the problem with cool: there’s no way of putting your finger directly on it and pinning it solidly to the page. Cool, by it’s nature is an indefinable mass of culturally distinct, age specific ideas, items or attitudes which are completely singular to the individual or group concerned and yet which are entirely relative to the attitudes, items or ideas of every other group or individual within a specific society and the world at large.

It is therefore a mess of social construct, zero sum game and perfect timing which is vital to individual identity and ability to function in society. Rhetorically speaking to be cool is to be respected, liked and sought after as a person ‘who knows what is up’. (To be uncool on the other hand holds connotations of shame and embarrassment and of being something less than desirable.)

It is important then to be cool.

However this again is this problem with the idea and practice of cool — to admit this vital importance is to become singularly uncool — to say that you are in any way concerned with being seen as a cool and adjusting anything about yourself (be it appearance, attitude or actions) for similar reasons is definitively ‘bogus’. It is therefore obvious that no-one who is cool would ever say they were cool or perhaps even think of themselves as so.

It seems that to be cool a person must make almost no effort at all to be seen that way. Proportionally the less you seem to care about cool the more cool people will think you are.

So what’s a guy or girl to do?



It’s a confusing world out there with a functionally infinite number of people waiting to tell you whether your ideas, clothes and approach to life match up to their own feverishly held belief of what is cool. If you are summarily found wanting in any category there are a similar number of suggestions on how to make yourself more cool — whether they be smoking filterless cigarettes, wearing shades and flipping off the cops or clambering into a pair of wine red skinny leg jeans and an argyle knit cardigan.

With all these judgments and helpful suggestions flying about unchecked in the ether it is easy to stray far from the path of cool and wander into the domain of the lame. It was this pressure to perform that caused me, at a young and impressionable age to cast off Damon Albarn and brightly colored leisure wear in favour of bands and singers who wore a lot more black and professed the ability to smash things angrily and sing about it as cool. Whether or not this was the right choice is neither here not there — cool being relative to the individual it is up to you as the reader to decide which one of these things is worthy of more admiration.

It is not my point here to preach what is and isn’t cool. For a start, as I stated at the beginning of this piece I have no idea what cool is so it would be difficult for me to take on the role of oracle and start predicting this or that new fashion craze or break through musical artist of 2009. At the heart of it ‘cool’ itself takes on a new and separate meaning with every person who thinks about it and it is this that makes it such a difficult thing to define.

As a social construct it informs and instructs us on how to act, think and be in a way that is congruous to the rest of our world. It forms a universal yard stick against which we can measure all things and from there slot each new idea into the complex jigsaw of our own world view and is therefore a vital tool.

As a concept it continues to remain aloof and brooding as one would suspect it might. It does not seem to care who or what might wish to define it — it simply exists whether or not you pay it any attention. Possessed of a youthful and rebellious spirit cool does not give a shit what you think of it and it does not intend to change anything about itself simply because you think it should. Cool does not care.

And this is perhaps the point that any consideration of cool should ultimately make:

Cool does not care and neither should you.

While cool may be important it is equally important not to take cool too seriously.

You can try out many ideas in your lifetime, all of them seemingly cool. I, personally, have changed my mind a million times — if you will then please remember the series of hats. In changing them so often I have come to the conclusion that you must keep the ones you like the best no matter what any other person thinks or tells you.

I still have my Damon Albarn hat and even a pair of blue and yellow Adidas sports shoes and I intend to keep them.



]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2009/01/facts-about-cool-an-open-apology-to-damon-albarn/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2008/11/the-supermarket/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2008/11/the-supermarket/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:06:42 +0000 Ryan http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=157
Yashica Minister D 700 (45mm ƒ1.7)
]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2008/11/the-supermarket/feed/ 0 http://superpositionkitty.com/2008/10/mission-statement/ http://superpositionkitty.com/2008/10/mission-statement/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:02:34 +0000 Jen http://superpositionkitty.com/?p=107 Superposition Kitty are Ryan & Jen Smith (no relation)  — a graphic designer from 8 hours in the future and a self effacing stationary addict and university drop out who live and work together in Dundee, Scotland.  Shortly after meeting for the first time in September 2007 they drank several bottles of wine and decided to form an internet based t-shirt design company and set to work on a list of slogans and ideas that would, as they saw it, set the world alight.

The list was in part illegible, written in pink felt tip pen and has since disappeared in a house moving incident, which was probably for the best.

Just over a year and several site redesigns later Superposition Kitty aims to simply and unpretentiously present  the idea that good design and culture should be affordable, accessible and open to everyone everywhere.

At the heart of the site lies the ethos that good ideas no matter their purpose should be shared out, circulated and passed on to as many people as possible in a fun and informative way.

If we like it, it’s here and it’s very very awesome.

]]> http://superpositionkitty.com/2008/10/mission-statement/feed/ 0