Triphop's Universe

Glüko & Lennon is about the psychedelic adventures of two best friends.

Glüko is like your imaginary friend becoming real. He´s a powerful, shape-shifting giant. However, like your real best friend, he´s shy and lazy.

Lennon is like you, an ordinary kid who has extraordinary adventures, always seeking for new experiences, only he´s purple.


Together, they explore this surreal world they live in and along the way they´ll make friends with all kinds of unique creatures. They always end up finding absolutely ridiculous solutions to the most nonsensical problems.

85ºC Cafe is a cafe and bakery specializing in coffee, cakes, and breads. We use premium Guatemalan coffee beans and serve the freshest gourmet baked goods. Each cup of coffee is brewed individually with grounded beans. All of our chefs have worked in five-star hotels and have created each cake to uphold high culinary standards at affordable prices.

The first 85ºC Cafe opened in Bao-Ping, Taipei in July 2004. The cafe set extraordinary records serving more than 2,300 cups of coffee to nearly 2,000 guests every day. Within one and a half years, 85ºC Cafe expanded to 137 shops throughout Taiwan, creating a new trend in the food industry. Each cafe serves coffee, tea, cakes, and breads, and offers a comfortable atmosphere for everyone to relax and enjoy a meal or snack at any time of day. Come watch our chefs prepare your food in our open kitchen or choose your favorite cake from our display.

The dip pen is a bit of fetish item for me (as it is for many pen users). The pen is extremely difficult to master but ultimately allows for an extraordinary degree of expression. The well-constructed pen and ink drawing is a monument to perseverance, requiring tremendous patience and control. I am thrilled by the challenge of creating such drawings in public and introducing new audiences to the allure of the medium. The pen (nib) itself will be approximately 16 inches long, made of steel and fully functional. The holder will be six feet long and made of wood with a metal sleeve insert to hold the pen. Nib and holder will resemble as closely as possible the actual implements on which they are based.

Once the pen and penholder are built I will train myself to ink with it; and once I've done that, I will arrange at least two public performances in which I will use the pen to ink large graphite drawings on 3' x 5' sheets of bristol.

The money raised will go towards the engineering and manufacture of the steel nib; the creation of the pen holder, which will be hand turned and lacquered with a cork wrapping and metal insert with spring retainer; the supplies to create the public drawings (ink, paper, graphite, eraser, and); and the creation of the drawing table itself.

via kottke

From Dan Fierman's interview with Bill Murray in GQ:

I have never heard of this band, but a friend of mine got invited to go see them tomorrow night so I decided to check them out. I actually like this song, and I am very much into this video. I think you will enjoy it. I promise some blood.

This is an amazing cover of Billie Jean. Enjoy!

via BOOOOOOOM!

I'm quite embarrass to admit that I'm kind of into Katy Perry's songs right now. Her seriously infectious new single has been giving me earworms. And not to mention the fact that it is way too danceable. Besides, Candyland as the setting for her video? And Snoop Dogg? How can I not be into this? So perfectly marketed.

Harvey Pekar changed my life when I was 16. At that point I was already an avid comic book reader. I had grown up on manga and anime since the age of 2. As a matter of fact, I learned how to read by reading the Doraemon collections.

Reading manga had taught me that comics can be wide ranging. When I arrived to the States in 1988, however, I completely stopped reading comics. Those bands of superheroes and their stories didn't appealed to me very much. At that time, it was also incredibly difficult to get a hold of the mangas that I was reading in Thailand. It was even difficult to get the Thai editions from the Thai bookstore in Hollywood. But my enthusiasm for comics never waned. I did eventually read The Incredible Hulk, Silver Surfer, and Superman.

By the time I discovered Harvey Pekar and American Splendor at the age of 16, I had already branched out into reading the black and white independent comics of the 90's. Even then, the comics I was reading were genre stories. The thing about Pekar's comics that struck a chord with me was the fact that he wrote about the most mundane and ordinary things. When I discovered the collection of the American Splendor comics at the library across from my high school, I couldn't, at first, fully grasped its importance. But as I began reading the stories, I became engrossed in the life of this ordinary Cleveland residence.

Reading the story about Pekar finding finding another Harvey Pekar listed in the phone book was the life changing moment. I could not believe the simplicity of it. Not only in the subject matter, but also the execution of the graphics by Robert Crumb. I knew that there were great possibilities with sequential art, but up until that point, I had no idea how far it could go.

Pekar's genius lies in his ability to find poetry in everyday existence. I think this will be his legacy. Thank you, Harvey Pekar for not only changed the way I looked at comics, but for allowing me to recognize that there are many great stories to be found in my own every day existence.

Lo-Bat does chiptune music. This is a video of his performance from Blip Festival 2007. All of his songs are released under the Creative Commons License, which means you can head over to his website and download them for your enjoyment.

From The Elements of Style:

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

If experiences of Walter Mitty, of Dick Diver, of Rabbit Angstrom have seems for the moment real to countless reader, if in reading Faulkner we have almost the sense of inhabiting Yoknapatawpha County during the decline of the South, it is because the details used are definite, the terms concrete. It is not that every detail is given—that would be impossible, as well as to no purpose—but that all the significant details are given, and with such accuracy and vigor that the reader, in imagination, can project himself into the scene

Bunny Gunner is celebrating their 3rd anniversary, and they are doing an ice cream themed art show. The above is my little contribution. Opening is this Saturday. Information can be found below:

Saturday July 10th, 6pm - 11pm.
At Bunny Gunner
266 W. 2nd St.
Pomona, CA 91766

From "As We May Think", published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic magazine:

Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.

The cord which trips its shutter may reach down a man's sleeve within easy reach of his fingers. A quick squeeze, and the picture is taken. On a pair of ordinary glasses is a square of fine lines near the top of one lens, where it is out of the way of ordinary vision. When an object appears in that square, it is lined up for its picture. As the scientist of the future moves about the laboratory or the field, every time he looks at something worthy of the record, he trips the shutter and in it goes, without even an audible click. Is this all fantastic? The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use.

Will there be dry photography? It is already here in two forms. When Brady made his Civil War pictures, the plate had to be wet at the time of exposure. Now it has to be wet during development instead. In the future perhaps it need not be wetted at all. There have long been films impregnated with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated. An exposure to ammonia gas destroys the unexposed dye, and the picture can then be taken out into the light and examined. The process is now slow, but someone may speed it up, and it has no grain difficulties such as now keep photographic researchers busy. Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.

via Drawn!

via Boing Boing

via Wired Magazine

This is pretty much my current worldview in general. I mean, this is want you want, no?