It's that time of the year again, those balmy, mid-summer days when the urge to stretch out in the sun with a good book, a cold drink and several hours with which to enjoy them overtakes me. Fortunately, I'm good at beating urges like that down with a stick. Tomorrow, for example, The Boyfriend and I are hopping in the car and heading out to Las Vegas for the week, not to par-tay, but to shoot a bunch of stuff for his reel. (Work is the new leisure!)
I may set up an entry or two to post while I'm gone so you all can get your c-trix fix, but then again, I may not! So why not use this little break to catch up on some of the many lovely sites I've collected for your reading pleasure? There are plenty of them all up & down the sides of this website (whose non-design is starting to bug me), and don't forget, I'm a delicious junkie, too!
But we know you like the FRESH HOT LINKS, so here's a batch, straight from the Firefox bookmarks holder-thingy:
Everyone else has been reading him for centuries, but I've just discovered the always-prolific, sporadically hilarious Tony Pierce. He yaks on too much about hot chicks (snore...) for my taste, but I am a straight girl and perhaps if you are not, you might dig it. But his post about jury duty is one for the ages. It's almost got me excited about showing up for mine in July...not.
I loooooove the Blowhards, and especially Michael Blowhard, with whom I have struck up a little eCorrespondence. He posts all kinds of interesting, thought-provoking thangs, but I especially loved this little essay-thoughtstarter on the proliferation of choice in our consumer culture. Great comments section, too: 2Blowhards really pulls in the smart cookies.
Random surfing turned up this Hints from (Doctor) Heloise-type site which should forever lay to rest the notion that doctors are any fun at all.
Design Observer, which I found via the aforementioned Blowhards, also has tasty, thought-provoking essays. They featured a fantastic piece about the authenticity of "faux" a while back, and the archives are chock-a-block with good, tasty reading. (You could spend a day, and quite a bit of dough, clicking around on their links, too.) But the greatest thing about DO is that they have a goddam sense of humor, which is (sadly) rare among designers and other arty types, who generally tend to take themselves a tad seriously (or "a tad bit seriously," for those of you in Oklahoma). This, for example, may be the best post title ever.
Speaking of regular reads, Cool Hunting has some of the most consistently...well, cool stuff of any site I have in my RSS. Lately, for example, they had a groovy, make-your-own-name-from-Flickr-photos post and a table I really, really, really like. A lot.
Finally, while listening to the re-broadcast of This American Life yesterday, I heard the most hilarious bit of live performance it's been my pleasure to encounter in some damned time. The "artist" was reading from her diary, the very worst, very most humiliating parts of her TEENAGE diary, aloud at a little show called "Mortified" that goes up now & then in NYC and here in L.A. (Archived version of the show is at the TAL website and is called "My Experimental Phase", you can skip to the last 10 or so minutes, if you like.) Mortified has a website I haven't had time to vet just yet, but it promises lots of excerpts from the diaries of peoples too shy to get up onstage. I, on the other hand, not only am NOT too shy, but have been dreaming of some useful purpose for the 10 years of shite piled up in a dusty corner of my Billy bookcase, and plan to root through them just as soon as I'm back from losing my shirt taking pictures.
You think I'm pathetic & truthful now, people? You have no idea...
xxx c