Fascinante. La primera sinfonía de Mahler en un conjunto de ordenadores ZX Spectrum conectados en red. Siguiendo la divertida propuesta del manual original.
Muchos recordarán el Spectrum como su primer ordenador (el mío fue el ZX81. Más antiguo todavía). Por lo visto, queda todavía toda una comunidad de entusiastas de esa máquina.
(ht Xavier Riesco)
Me gusta mucho esta reflexión sobre BoJack Horseman, esa excelente serie de animación de Netflix. El argumento principal es que una serie así no debería existir, que mezcla demasiados géneros, que cambia excesivamente de registro en unos pocos minutos como para poder recibir la aprobación de una cadena normal de televisión. Sin embargo, Netflix dispone de enormes datos muy precisos sobre lo que la gente ve o deja de ver. La hipótesis es que una empresa como Netflix podía “ver” que el uso de elementos tan diversos mezclados podía trascender las divisiones demográficas habituales y satisfacer a un grupo “desconocido” hasta ese momento.
Neighed to Order: The Case of BoJack Horseman Matt Sienkiewicz / Boston College | Flow:
Our suggestion, therefore, is that at the moment of the show’s pitch and throughout the development process, Netflix may well have had reason to believe that BoJack’s strange menagerie could actually work. Armed with data about the viewing habits of its clients, the company was able to free itself from the restraints of long standing industry lore and even the limitations of blunt instruments such as genre conventions and traditional demographics. In a previous era, BoJack may well have been seen as a program full of contradictory niches, hailing small audience groups with one aspect while repelling those same groups with the next. The data, however, may well have shown that this would not be the case, suggesting that audiences for the shows BoJack draws from have more in common than is immediately apparent.
Certainly, there is the potential for the abuse of such information. If BoJack works too well, we could see a parade of increasingly ham-fisted attempts to combine popular programs in cheap, search engine-friendly ways. Though this may be unfortunate, it would also not be terribly new, of course, as copy catting has long been one of the industry’s most unappealing but profitable vices.
Es, simplemente, una hipótesis, que se fundamenta en saber que Netflix dispone efectivamente de esos datos. Evidentemente, ya se apunta en el segundo párrafo que si es así, podemos acabar con un montón de programas creados según los datos.
Pero:
In the meantime, we can enjoy the freedom that BoJack displays in its mixing of genres and crossing of references. It is a strange, wondrous beast of a show, recalling Raoul Duke’s description of Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “too weird to live, too rare to die.” In a previous era, it likely would not have lived at all. Today, it exists and even thrives, perhaps less to the surprise of its benefactors than we might think.
Late Rembrandt es una exposición (hasta el 17 de mayo) en el Rijksmuseum de Ámsterdam:
Rembrandt’s later life was marked by tragic personal loss and financial setbacks. Yet it was also the time when he produced his best work. He experimented with paint and light, managing to bring an unprecedented emotional depth to his work. It resulted in his most daring and intimate work.
En A Generosity of Rembrandts: The Late Works at the Rijksmuseum la comentan:
The exhibition begins with a series of late self-portraits, a somber how-do-you-do in the foyer of the show. These establish what Rembrandt’s numerical age might not (he was 63 when he died): that he was playing an endgame. All half-lengths, the self-portraits depict the body in a three-quarters view, the head turned to the picture plane. In each, his face is wrinkled and pouchy, and in the 1659 self-portrait now in Washington, D.C., he seems to have taken great care to use all the crusty bits of paint on his palette to render the weathered and spotty texture of his skin in strokes of jaundice yellow and rosacea pink.
Rembrandt had reason to feel the weight of mortality and loss. He had once dominated the Amsterdam art world. His portraits were in demand by the city’s elite, he made a love match with his dealer’s higher-born niece, Saskia, and he could afford to buy a large new house in a nice part of town. By 1656, all that was over. Saskia had died after a series of difficult pregnancies; he’d had a disastrous love affair with the woman he’d hired to take care of his surviving child; and unwise spending, much of it on art and things like exotic shells, led to bankruptcy. He lived in reduced circumstances with his second love, Hendrickje, and his son Titus, but he survived them both, Hendrickje by six years, Titus by one.
Legit is a complementary command-line interface for Git, optimized for workflow simplicity. It is heavily inspired by GitHub for Mac.
Se puede coleccionar cualquier cosa, incluso esos cartelitos de «no molestar» que hay en los hoteles. Y resulta que la variación puede ser espectacular.
As the son of a hotel manager, Edoardo Flores spent his childhood around objects many of us associate solely with the niceties of vacation. His interest in collecting “Do Not Disturb” signs didn’t come until later, when he grabbed some unique ones as business trip souvenirs. Around 1995 he began collecting in earnest, and he now owns close to 9,000 signs from 190 countries.
In a history of the collection that Flores provided to Hyperallergic, he claims that little is known about the development of the “Do Not Disturb” (DND) sign, now such a common, expected component of hotel stays. Flores speculates that the DND sign was the wise invention of one hotel manager, and that other places later emulated the practice.
Mi preferido creo que es:
Play House. Según la descripción:
Play House is an automata that generates slow hypnotic acid house through mechanisms built from LEGO Technic.
Y efectivamente, ofrece un enorme deleite visual ver ese cacharro en funcionamiento.
Su creador, Alex Allmont, tiene bastantes otras creaciones en su web, que combinan todo tipo de elementos. Dice:
My research ties together aspects of cognition and performance and I am focused on making the experience as open as possible so that the audience can get better understand what is driving the performer – or become the performer in some cases. The intention is to blur the lines and responsibilities between them in an attempt to have a deeper connection with music.
Para los aficionados a LEGO, este otro vídeo puede resultar fascinante y educativo:
LEGO Sketchbook 2013 from Alex Allmont on Vimeo.
La revista New Yorker ofrece un muy buen perfil de Gene Wolfe, el mejor escritor de ciencia ficción vivo. Su magistral El libro del sol nuevo es una lectura maravillosa y una prueba de las cumbres a las que puede llegar el género en manos de un autor sobresaliente.
Wolfe has published more than twenty-five novels and more than fifty stories, and has won some of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards. But he has rarely, if ever, been considered fully within the larger context of literature. His books contain all of the nasty genre tropes—space travel, robots, even dragons—and he hasn’t crossed into the mainstream on the strength of a TV or movie adaptation. Wolfe himself sees the trappings of science fiction and fantasy, the spaceships and so on, as simply “a sketchy outline of the things that can be done.” But even within fantasy fandom, Wolfe’s work presents difficulties. His science fiction is neither operatic nor scientifically accurate; his fantasy works are not full of clanging swords and wizardly knowledge. But ask science-fiction or fantasy authors about Gene Wolfe and they are likely to cite him as a giant in their field. Ursula K. Le Guin once called Wolfe “our Melville.”
