For your Halloween viewing pleasures.
Here’s another Halloween mix brought to you by Casey. Filled with horror and creepy things. Actually, it’s mostly just humor.
Found my Halloween costume
Large Hadron Collider
This’ll be easy to put together.The Look: SCIENCE!
Construction: Proton beams, Dipole and Quadrupole magnets, and some copper-clad niobium-titanium. All available at your local Joann Fabrics.
Behavior: High-speed collisions, spontaneous creation of new particles and uncovering the mysteries of LIFE. Once the party is in full swing, fall asleep for a little bit in the middle of the room. Then wake up and shout, “Is it 2014, yet?!” because that’s when the Hadron will be turned up to full energy again.
Choice Sayings for Authentic Party Interactions:
“Is that the Higg’s Boson?? Oh nm it’s just a bowl of peeled grapes. I’m gonna go touch them.”
“Have you ever been to the Franco-Swiss border? I know a lovely underground compound there.”
“May I borrow your fine china, preferably the circular ones. I’d like to smash them together real quick.”
It’s almost Halloween! (via VHX)
Help a brotha out
I’m back co-producing another album with the Reverend John DeLore. This time, the Rev is need of your help. In addition to recording the whole album live in the studio in three days, John’s cousin Keegan filmed the session, as well as a bunch of interviews & some artsy footage of the city. It’s going to be a very cool trans-media album release, which is where most of the extra cost is building up.
Take a look at Kickstarter to get a taste of how the album looks and sounds.
If you like what you see, become part of the project with a pledge. You can pledge as little as $2 or as much as $2000…whatever’s good for you. There’s a list of incentives on the page, and the more you donate the more you get back (i.e. hand-typed lyric sheets, limited edition posters, and you can even request a cover song for $150 pledge!).
The title of the album is Songs From Church Avenue and is a love story set in a city in late Autumn. It begins with the line, “The dress she wore was the color of envy.” The album’s intended release date is Late Autumn, 2011. This will be the third studio album from the Reverend DeLore that I’ve been involved with and I gotta say that this is by far his best work to date. Understated, mature and moody.
John’s cousin M. Keegan Uhl has won awards for his directing, editing and cinematography and his celebrated work includes commercials, music videos and shorts, one of which recently won Canon’s Beyond the Still contest featured on Vimeo and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.
He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”
I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.
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I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.
A few ways to help:
- If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
- If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
- If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.
*NEW* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheecks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.
My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.
Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.
This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.
How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.
Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.
We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.
You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.
We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.
Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.
Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.
Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.
via SplatF
Hilarious.
My favorite search so far is “slow motion”.
I made showmenonstop.com with Chad Pugh and Casey Pugh at the 24 hour hackday.tv event this weekend.
Type anything in the box for a continuous, full-browser stream of videos. Get as specific as you want, e.g. dogs welcoming soldiers home.
The app is just HTML & javascript using a customized VHX embed player — one with no play/pause button, cuz this is nonstop. Click here for source code.
See also: Music Video Genome
New logo thanks to Chad! Brothers are cool chill.
I recently created Music Video Genome. It’s essentially Pandora for music videos (or a personalized MTV). Through the power of VHX’s new API, Last.fm and YouTube, it made it quite simple to accomplish.
This past weekend I participated in a video hackday. You get 24 hours to start and finish a video based project. At the end everyone demos their speed hack.
My project morphed several times over the course of the weekend, but the final result ended up being something I’m really enjoying.
I called it Genome because it’s not that simple to match music videos to real songs. Most music “videos” on YouTube are just a stupid static image. Granted not all songs have music videos, but it would be amazing if I could crowd-source the documentation of music videos to songs. If a song does not have an official music video, fans could make their own and have it bubble up as the official video.
We just launched VHX Playlists into a private beta. Now you can create your own slick, customizable, video mixtapes or simply use it as a way to archive videos you find across the web.
If you want to be a beta tester, just reply with your VHX username!
This is my favorite video of the week (Sign up for VHX.tv to discover more awesome videos with your friends)
LA
This is right when Irene discovered I have poop on my jacket. TBD where it came from.
Jamie and poppy
I saw this minimalist business card the other day and didn’t love the proportions, so I thought I’d try it out. I only really like 1 of them; guess which one! Unfortunately I don’t own the twitter handle of chadpugh, but I should, right?
I’m pretty sure my family owned this CD in the 90s.
For fun, I wanted to see the extent of Spotify’s music library and converted “Pure Moods” into a Spotify playlist. I’m having such a pure mood right now, guys.
