Jeff Rubin's Unanswered Lost Questions
— all the answers are in the mystery box, and you can’t have it via Kottke #Sean Bonner on the near-death of Metblogs
— people are pledging to keep it alive, and they may be saved #Short film on the making of 48HR Magazine
— “The most powerful thing in the universe is a whole bunch of people paying attention to the same thing at the same time.” via powazek.com #The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield
— 15-page comic about the discredited link between autism and the MMR vaccine #Hurt Locker producer calls downloaders morons who belong in jail
— “I hope your family and your kids end up in jail” #Superbien's video projection onto mapped blocks
— when I first saw this, I thought it was CGI via @lhl #Ask Metafilter saves two Russian students from NYC sex traffickers
— Internet heroes save the day in real-life #First synthetic cell created
— subject of an embargoed Science story and cover of the new Economist #Typekit and Google announce open-source collaboration
— see Google’s free font directory and the new Font API and WebFont Loader #Girl Talk's Feed the Animals sample visualizer
— using my sample list, HTML5 audio, and iTunes web service #Newzbin closes down
— keep in mind, they only indexed metadata for Usenet binaries, not hosting files #4chan's moot raises $625k for stealth startup
— “reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available” #NYT's chart of Facebook privacy settings
— privacy policy’s longer than the US Constitution; also, the evolution of Facebook privacy #Panic loads Apple //e Grandaddy music video source using an iPad
— feels like WALL-E connecting to EVE #An Open-Source History of Mondo 2000
Over at the Kickstarter blog, I interviewed R.U. Sirius about his project to create a collective memory project about Mondo 2000, culminating in a website, book, and possible film project directed by Mondo art director Bart Nagel.
Aside from the Kickstarter project, we also talked about the history of Mondo and its long-term impact, their rivalry with Wired, and the long-lost unpublished issue. He also reveals that Joi Ito bought the $750 reward to fictionally write yourself into Mondo’s history, which is funny because Joi was actually on the masthead.
The full transcript is on the Kickstarter blog, or you can download it or listen below.
Back in 1999, my first job out of college was at Gettingit.com, a San Francisco-based webzine edited by R.U. Sirius. I was a total Mondo/Wired/bOING bOING fanboy in the early ’90s, so the opportunity to go work with R.U. was incredibly exciting to me. In a disappointing turn, he was an incredibly nice and normal guy, instead of the hyperactive cyberhippy on mescaline that I was expecting.
I recommend reading Patrick Farley’s The Guy I Almost Was, a classic webcomic that nicely characterizes my impressions of the early ’90s cyberculture scene. (Patrick Farley just ran a successful Kickstarter project to revive Electric Sheep, and R.U. backed it.)
Random trivia: In July 1999, we tried to sell R.U.’s soul on eBay. Here’s the image I made for the auction:
