Automobile Apocalypse

In the last century, cars have made incredible progress at taking over our livable spaces. The public commons, once the cradle of human community, have been largely usurped by the automobile. It happened slowly, so it's easy to forget that there might be another option. The tide is turning, though, with more cities creating pedestrian-only zones, rejoining places like Venice who never left the pedestrian world.


Then there are places like Detroit, epicenter of America's car culture. Symbolic of humanity's domination by automobile is the Michigan Theater, once a golden-age movie palace, now a parking structure, its grand sculpture playing to a crowd of metal boxes with wheels.


Makes me want to do a series of art pieces of human places taken over by cars. Not anthropomorphized cars, mind you, but full-size impersonal hunks of metal, parked in a restaurant, a public restroom, a playground, your living room. Either that or take still frames from Pixar's Cars and insert reminders that people once lived there, before they were inexplicably eradicated; perhaps some human skeletons, or a baby doll with tire tracks over its mutilated torso.

Viewing the World through Etymologically-Colored Glasses

Today's random project idea: a text reader that color-codes each word by some etymological factor, such as country of origin or how old the word is.

Fade Away

I've just discovered Shoo Apps and Spirited Away, both of which hide background applications on your Mac to cut down clutter. I dig things like that; simple, thoughtful niceties. Here's my feature request: rather than blinking out of existence, I want the apps to slowly fade away.

Projects

This year I hope to finally get around to some of the projects I've had on my back burner for a while now (wait - have I said this before?). This includes starting an open source update of Seize the Day, redoing some of the Heaven & Earth puzzles as a website where people can create new ones, expanding Thoughtsam into a community site, developing a Micropatronage aggregator, and spreading the ideas behind the Langley Community Forum to additional neighborhoods.

Wish me luck!

Movie Tagging

So, while watching the del.icio.us video stream on FireAnt I ran across this version of the original Planet of the Apes with everything cut out except Charlton Heston talking. Turns out that makes the movie only 15 minutes long, an interesting snapshot of a classic film I'd heard plenty about but never actually seen. As a bonus, now I know where the quotes in Transglobal Underground's "Thousand Year Heat" come from.

Anyway, it got me to thinking it would be neat to be able to do that with any movie - zero in on a particular actor or type of content. It would be easy enough to make a movie player that could do so, given the right data. All we need is a file format (presumably XML-based) that allows one to attach tags to times and specify what movie it's for. Create a database for these files and let people have at it, Wikipedia-style. In addition to chopping movies up, these new data tracks could be used for all sorts of things: subtitles, trivia, where-to-buy information for all that darn product placement, etc. It's like the whole DIY movie commentary thing but, like, more so.

Now we just need someone to build it.