If you're a Mad Men fan addict like I am, you already know Don and Betty are making a comeback on March 25th thanks to minimalist print promos that are a grab shot from the show's animated title sequence. In New York, this ad caused a bit of an stir due to its similarity to Richard Drew's haunting image of a man falling from a World Trade Tower on 9/11. Drew's "Falling Man" appeared in one edition of the New York Times, but was pulled after readers protested its publication. Now it's an ad? Tom Junod of Esquire does an interesting speculation on whether this is a desecration or simply how we continue to reckon with the day the world as we knew it came to an end.
Walter Isaccson’s (most enjoyable) book on Steve Jobs introduces his notion of a “reality distortion field” by which he created perceptions that didn’t jive with the way things are.
Aurasma takes the power of "reality distortion" to new levels with a phone app that animates inanimate objects, imbuing photos, books, even buildings with moving, interactive life. The app is free and works with iOS, Android and tablets. It’s made by Autonomy, an AR company that just announced that the download count broke three million.
Aurasma is the darling of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where darlings are hard to come by this year, according to David Pogue.
Appropriate that Halloween, holiday for appropriation of fictional identities, is the launch day for Storyworld in San Francisco, the first conference dedicated to the art—and business—of crossplatform entertainment. This ambitious gathering is the brainchild of Alison Norrington, Doctor of Transmedia and founder of storycentralDIGITAL. I look forward to tales and insights from the trenches shared by luminaries like Jeff Gomez, Ivan Askwith, Mike Monello, Frank Rose, Liz Rosenthal and other cross-platform players from around the world.
BoingBoing just posted the statement from Apple's Board of Directors. Wired put together a video montage of his Apple announcements since 1983. The New York Times laid out a grid of the 317 patents he left behind. But the most vivid image in my mind tonight is a commencement speech he gave at Stanford, talking to 2006 grads about how to live:
I look in the mirror every morning and ask myself, If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today? Whenever the answer’s been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
He died today at just 57 of pancreatic cancer, the cancer that's killed 34,000 people this year--including my brother-in-law whose name was Steve, too. May they rest in peace.
I received a postcard today. A handheld postcard in a 3-D mailbox. How to describe the beauty of this. The lovely heft of the paper. The sincerity of the hand-written message, ink-smeared by weather. The satisfaction of getting a message to which no response was expected--no Like or Thumbs up, no request for repost. Curious to me that this formerly common means of correspondence can be a source of wonderment today.
Thanks for the blogpost on Radio Row—it brought back a lot of memories. My father used to work there when I was growing up, and every so often on a Saturday he'd take my brother and me on the subway from where we lived way, way uptown (in Inwood) all the way to his little office at 34 Cortlandt Street. We were fascinated by the military surplus stores, the little glass circles in the sidewalk (that let light into the warehouse spaces below), the boxes of vacuum tubes (remember them?), and the shadows of the elevated West Side Highway as we'd get closer to the river. All long gone, just like the Towers that replaced them... but still alive in memories.
