Tyler Hellard

A pretty fantastic thread featuring vintage chess photos. [via]

When did the remix become a requirement? The Awl puts together a fairly concise history of remixing music.

How did we get to the point where a one-hit-wonder band from the ’90s like Marcy Playground can release an entire album of remixes made by fans?

Behold the insanity that is Risk: Legacy. [via]

Here’s the hook: as you play Risk: Legacy, the game changes. I don’t mean in the conventional sense of gameplay evolving as players become more experienced; I mean the game literally, physically changes. The components include an assortment of stickers, which players use to irrevocably alter play: stickers affixed to the board forever enhance or mar the topography, stickers added to cards permanently revise their value and utility, and so forth.

But wait, as they say: there’s more. The rules frequently ask–demand!–that players take up Sharpies and annotate the board, to name continents, record events, and immortalize victories by scrawling their John Hancock on the “Winner’s List”.

Some events require that cards be removed from the game. This is not uncommon–many games ask you to “take cards out of play” by setting them aside or returning them to the box; only in Risk: Legacy are you told to do so by ripping them into confetti and then tossing them in the trash. The horror.

Andy Baio’s annual look at the availability of Oscar screeners online.

Photos of the Toronto locations used in Scott Pilgrim.

Peter Hook on the Joy Division/Mickey Mouse shirt I linked to the other day:

“I take it as a compliment,” Hook said, adding that to his knowledge, Disney didn’t approach representatives handling Factory Records’ catalog or the surviving members of Joy Division for permission. “If I had a pound for every time someone bootlegged Joy Division, I’d be as rich as Disney. But it’s interesting in a kitsch way. It’s this cross between something very adult and this well-known image of childhood. I’ve heard it’s sold out, so maybe it’ll become a kind of urban legend.”

Also, Disney has apparently pulled it, which makes me really want one.

The web and the end of serendipity.

Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.

People who got their MBA ten years ago entered the workforce just in time for back-to-back recessions, and most of them never really got to do what they thought they’d do (which is, apparently, get really rich really fast).

We weren’t the people who inflated the bubbles; we were the ones hired, and then fired, by those people. We were the ones who happened to be standing next to the guy who was pushing the buttons when everything went to hell.

(On a personal note, I mostly blame the MBA for ruining the world. Well, more so the BBA, but still.)

Susan Cain on the rise of the new groupthink (or, I love it when science proves my most deeply held beliefs).

Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. “The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question,” Mr. Osborn wrote. “One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.”

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

[…]

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations.

This Disney Joy Division t-shirt is equal parts clever and the saddest thing you’ve ever seen.

Photographers posing with the famous photos they took.

The Ramones on a mostly terrible New York public access show in 1978. [via]

An interview with Skee-Lo. No real revelations here, but any opportunity to take a moment and remember how awesome “I Wish” was is an opportunity worth taking. [via]

The hook floated into his mind that Thursday night at the Good Life, following a successful preshow freestyle in the parking lot. When Sunshine Records (the parent company of Scotti) heard it, he received a $150,000 advance. The song’s success created a familiar paradox: His music was omnipresent but he never made a penny. Nor did he get with Leoshi (though she did appear in the video).

American Beauty in retrospect.

I can think of few other films that struck such awe, and now inspire such vitriol. Unlike other contrived winners, like, say, Crash, whose repugnant qualities are immediately apparent, American Beauty’s badness, its slickness, its insistence on its own profundity, was enough to bamboozle many of us as teenagers. I believe it’s one of the earliest firsthand experiences my generation had with changing our minds about a movie we loved.

Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are.

In which I fix my girlfriend’s grandparents’ wifi and am hailed as a conquering hero. Hilarious.

Some in the kingdom thought the cause of the darkness must be the Router. Little was known of the Router, legend told it had been installed behind the recliner long ago by a shadowy organization known as Comcast. Others in the kingdom believed it was brought by a distant cousin many feasts ago. Concluding the trouble must lie deep within the microchips, the people of 276 Fernadale Street did despair and resign themselves to defeat.

Another thing I did this week: Walking Without Rhythm 004 (and the SoundCloud version).

Megaupload has been shut down. Even crazier news is that Swizz Beats is the CEO of Megaupload, which no one really knew. It wasn’t even on his Wikipedia page until today.

Some things I’ve recently written for Fifty Mission Cap: Why I wish Eric Taylor (Friday Night Lights) was my coach, why I’m ready to get behind Mike Cammallari coming back to Calgary and why talking about sports makes us all raving lunatics.

The interior design sensibility of Mexican drug lords. [via]

These are the palaces of legend. In Mexican novels, and in movies, the houses of the illicitly rich and infamous are louche, luxurious affairs, with toilets made of gold, mounds of cocaine or cash lying around and furniture of thronelike proportions. In the public imagination, what might be called “narquitecture” or “narco style” is all gaudy excess — part “Real Housewives,” part “Scarface,” part conquistador.

The Big Picture has collected some stunning shots of the capsized Costa Concordia in Italy.

The video for Santigold’s “Big Mouth” is all kinds of crazy.

I was raised in PEI, and I can tell you that there is a lot of truth in this video. And now I’m a bit homesick.

Why write novels at all?

As the music critic Carl Wilson argues in “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste,” his book on Celine Dion, “In early 21st-century terms, for most people under 50, distinction boils down to cool.” And the Internet has rendered the competition for cool more transparent than ever. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we’re doing publicly, “like”-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.

[…]

To hell with style, then; the novelist now has to confront the larger problem of what the novel is even for — assuming it’s not just another cultural widget.

The 2012 Tournament of Books lineup.

Alternate universe movie posters.

The newest tech blog we’re supposed to care about run by people who worked for tech blogs we stopped caring about: PandoDaily. Why is this a trend?

UPDATE: This! Blogger beef!

Tumblr of note: CanLit is Sexy.

The finest collection of CanLit pickup lines from the authors themselves. A misguided response to the end of McClelland & Stewart as an independent Canadian publishing house.

Sasha Frere-Jones interviews the guy who started Dangerous Minds. More interesting is that one of the DM contributors is Marc Campbell of “88 Lines About 44 Women” fame. It’s one of my wife’s favourite songs, which is why it’s on WWR #2. Also, we are prone to shouting around the house “Jackie was a rich punk rocker, silver spoon and a paper plate!” (This may seem odd, but we are also prone to yelling “Psycho killer. Qu’est-ce que c’est?” So, you know, it’s just a thing we do.)

Being a “guest blogger” at Boing Boing, though, was a big impetus in starting Dangerous Minds. I posted some ridiculous videos of Obama’s 2008 stump speeches played backwards, “exposing” supposed satanic messages. That night, Rachel Maddow ran a story about it, attributing it to Boing Boing, and the following morning, the Maddow clip was on Huffington Post. Tara and I were shocked to see how easily the news cycle could be influenced by an unshaven stoner in his pajamas who hadn’t left the house for a few days.

Something interesting I read on conservatism this weekend:

So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we’ve forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type.

Something interesting I read on capitalism this weekend:

At many companies, then, both public and private, the optimal course of action is a modest one — run the business so that it makes a reasonable profit, and can continue to operate indefinitely. If you chase after growth, you often end up in bankruptcy: that’s one reason why the oldest companies in the world are all family-run. Families, unlike public companies or private-equity shops, don’t need growth: they’re more interested in looking after their business over the very, very long run.

These things are unrelated, but I still felt like posting them together was somehow right.