Artist Huang Yong Ping completed this Giant Twisting Serpent Skeleton art installation off the coast of Nantes, France and I can not express my adoration for the photos of it. The official writeup is thought provoking but, as with most art writeups, a little overwrought:

By having a major figure from Chinese mythology appear on European shores, Huang Yong Ping examines, the notions of identity and cultural hybridity, as is often the case in his work. The environmental question is also very present in his art where he regularly exposes the paradox of the man sawing the branch he is sitting on, torn between creative abilities and destructive impulses. This is one of the many possible interpretations of this work: placed on the beach, the skeleton appears with the tide and, little by little, will be home to marine fauna and flora

Simply put, it looks awesome and I like it for that.

Scott gave me the heads up on these awesome substitute OSX Flat Icons and a handy replacement app called Lite Icon. Normally this sort of customization seems a little bit too much like work but I really like the consistent look in the dock. Going to give it a spin!

JAY Z's Life+Times

bucketcitymobile

millsustwo

As I mentioned, Codaphonic is releasing a little something special next week. It's two EP's on one record, complete with two different producers, two different artists doing cover art and two different approaches to the overall songs. Both sides sound amazing in their own ways.

You can listen to the entire Oh Radio! EP now in preparation for it's release on January 14th.

Apparently, back in the 1950's it was rather difficult to get "Western" music inside the Soviet Union. So, rather than do without, some rather ingenius bootleggers took it upon themselves to press records themselves directly on to discarded X-ray film - the end result is called "roentgenizdat."

This article gives a nice broad overview of the history tactic but the real goodness is over here - complete with photos of the records and recorded samples of such classics as "St. Louis Blues" and "Heartbreak Hotel" - to name but a few. Definitely click over there and have a listen - the lo-fi quality is haunting but there's something optimistic about the smuggled nature of this music making its way into a locked down area.

I sort of hate linking into Facebook for photo galleries (it never feels like the "real" web to me) but this collection of 1970's Hillsboro Village should not be missed, especially if you're a Nashville resident. If not, it's always good to see portions of your town from days gone by. Use this time to seek out your cities Historic Photo Archive to find some real gems.

Do you love Emoji? I mean, do you love it? Do you love it enough to create a tumblog paying homage to the format in which you recreate the icons through photography and some post-work photoglossing? Sounds like you may not love Emoji as much as Emoji IRL. LOL does. There's obviously a wealth of iconography to pay tribute to so expect lots more from these folks.. I'd love it if they managed to do them all.

https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000079210826-0jt773-large.jpg?e76cf77

Speaking of upcoming releases, Codaphonic has something special coming your way very soon. It's a split double EP. One record, one EP per side. Both will be available next week! January 14th is the day. Preview the first EP, Mindwrecker, in it's entirety right here.

Cover art by Rachel Briggs

There will be plenty more insight about this coming down the pipe but I'm happy to officially state that the new Jasmin Kaset record, Quiet Machine, will be available on January 28th. We relaunched her site this morning with a few photos and some insight into the record - (Vinyl mastering by David Vandervelde!) but we've got a few more treats coming along soon. If you haven't heard it yet.. relisten to "The Salesman" and get prepped!

This 100 Years of Rock genre flowchart is absolutely mindboggling. It's impressive for a myriad of reasons - the design, the sheer onslaught of data, the fact that all labels are clickable for examples and, mostly, that it's actually incomplete because there are so many insane subgenres not even slightly represented. Moral of the story: post 1960, genre's went completely bonkers.

via Cody.

Today is the official release of Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary The Act of Killing, an incredibly harrowing look at the Indonesian "death squad leaders" of Indonesia. It's a slightly controversial film because the "protaganists" of the film aren't necessarily condemned for their actions and their grief level for previous transgressions is questionable. All that and they've led a life of being quasi-celebrities so they're pretty bizarre individuals.

There are three options for purchasing and they all include quite a bit of additional material - extra cuts, interviews, deleted scenes, etc. This is for sale via VHX but I'd suggest this movie regardless, it's a powerful piece of work that everyone needs to see and think about.

I've sung his praises before but my co-worker Adam is a real gem to follow. He's actually taken to a bit more of a longform read with his Medium post We Need Better Pricing for Movies and Television - a little treatise on some of the issues with the landscape of pricing via iTunes, Roku, Amazon, etc and the depressing price points for purchasing vs renting. Fortunately, it's not all just complaining as he does provide some insight as to how things can be improved and where we should all be looking for better pricing examples (spoiler: videogames).

It's a great read and I suggest you follow him on all the medias for future pieces like this.

swoonerz

Instead of building up an album's worth of material and releasing it all at once, Meadownoise has decided that he's going to release a new track a month for who knows how long. Plenty of other artists have done it but that doesn't make it any less of a great idea to keep putting out new content for people that want to hear it (such as myself).

I can not believe something like OpenEMU did not exist before now. An iTunes like interface for game emulators seems like a no brainer but maybe the Mac platform just wasn't really associated with gaming of any sort until recently. Regardless, I love the clean look of it and the smart organization of it all. All the other emulators I've used are very bare bones and you need a different piece of software for every platform.

Paul Maloney has been kind enough to share some web tools for some of the more annoying conversions and testing needs in the world of new CSS. These are essential bookmarks:

• PX-EM - convert your em size to pixels - easy.
• Nth-Test - figure out exactly how to write the CSS rule for selecting a particular set of NTH children.
• RQRWD - Percentage to Pixels and back for responsive design. Essential.
• Iconogen - easily generate all those nice site addons like favicons, Windows Tiles, Apple Touch Icons and iOS icons quick!

Heads up via Daniel - the new king of reference tools.

2014 feels like a much better sounding year than 2013. Not that the previous 365 were bad for me in anyway but something about getting that unlucky number moved out of being ever present just feels right.

I'm not one for resolutions (mostly because I inevitably break them by March) but I am planning on starting a few new projects and continuing to ramp up some of my existing ones. Expect more posts about VHX releases and fun endeavors that promote yk records releases. I've got some real doozies planned over the next few months at least.

I also hope to make this stream of posts a bit more conversational and, hopefully, engaging to the reader. The sidebar is such an easy place to post consumable content, I'd like to be a bit more wordy over here whenever possible.

Long story short, this is my post to say I'm going to keep on keeping on. No drastic changes in the short term but hoping that the perseverance will continue to be as rewarding as it has been.