Category: 5things

Things of note for the week ending Friday December 5th, 2014.

1. In Conversation with Chris Rock

Touching on Obama, Cosby, and the political comedy landscape of the United States in general. This interview/conversation with one of the smartest, most astute, and perhaps even underrated comedians of our lifetime is a must read.

So y’know, read it.

2. The TWABM Advent Calendar
The TWABM stands for ‘That Was A Bit Mental’ as taken from the That Was A Bit Mental website wherein you might find said advent calendar. Not just any old advent calendar mind, an advent calendar that lists the 25 best Christmas-based horror films of all time.

It’s a brilliant list, if only for the scrappy YouTube trailers that go along with each one. Everything from Rare Exports to Santa Claws to Satan Claus – these Christmas films are cheesy as hell, and awesome to go with it.

If you like that sort of thing then you’ll like this sort of thing very much.

3. Twitter News
It’s almost a regular thing these days but hey, who’s counting? Here are four interesting new developments that you might be interested in from Twitter this week:

• Netflix is testing bespoke ‘Remind me!‘ Twitter Cards
• Twitter is [trying to make itself] safer
• For those that care, you can share Tweets via Direct Message
• Twitter’s new mobile platform, Fabric, is very interesting indeed

4. Got a balloon? Instant iPhone cover
Not much else to be said really.

Hipsters everywhere will be all over this.

5. #PukkaPimms
And now we get to the reason why this edition of Five Things is so darn late.

In short: blame Hardeep.

I really don’t know where to begin. One of the planners at Ogilvy & Mather had been harbouring a theory that Pimm’s (yes, that super gorgeous drink that you and I use to kick off (and continue) our summers) went extremely well with the sweetness and spice that can be found in Indian food.

We spoke to Hardeep. He agreed.

We spoke to Pimm’s. They agreed [that we had an idea].

A few weeks later and seemingly out of nowhere, #PukkaPimms was born.

A pop-up curry house serving the finest Punjabi and Bangladeshi cuisine – complemented with a can of Pimm’s – and hosted by Mister HSK himself, we were open Thursday night, Friday night, and all day Saturday to demonstrate to the great curry-going British public that curry and Pimm’s is a thing.

Having a curry any time soon? Have a Pimm’s with it; you may well be surprised (more on this to follow).

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Bonuses this week:

• Rich content, poor advertising (the best ‘Future of…’ piece I’ve read to date)
• Oh Salesforce
• I haven’t downloaded this yet but I’ve heard it’s quite good

Things of note for the week ending Friday November 28th, 2014.

Let’s do this.

1. Spider-Man Gecko Gloves

Many lizards such as geckos—not to mention thousands of insects—have the remarkable ability to climb up vertical surfaces with ease. The process has fascinated scientists for years, but a simple physics principle has kept bigger animals like people out of the wall-scaling game. The square cube law basically says that as objects, like animals, increase in size, their volumes grow at a much faster rate than their surface area—specifically, if you square a creature’s surface area, you must cube its volume so that its body can support its own weight. This is why ants can carry more than elephants in proportion to their own weight and why small animals like geckos can more easily support themselves with small patches of adhesion.

A clearer understanding of the efficiency of a gecko’s pads gave scientists hope that a more intentionally designed replica could support human weight. However, these gecko-gloves would still have to overcome the issue of evenly distributing a hanging human’s weight so that no one pad was strained to the breaking point, setting off a chain reaction that could collapse the entire system.

Well, the smart scientists only went and solved it.

So yeah, Spider-Man gloves with Gecko-inspired technology. Amazing.

Fun fact: I used to have a gecko named Steve. Great pet, but the locusts I had to feed him were super noisy.

2. Leonard Bernstein’s tribute to JFK
I came across this article (on the always excellent Brain Pickings) earlier this week and it is wonderful.

“This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence”

The whole thing is worth a read.

So do so.

Post-haste.

3. Batman vs Vader

Time for a bit of silly, yet really quite excellent, fan-fiction.

What strikes me about these fan-made videos is the level of production value that goes into them. In this particular case, not only does it look fantastic but the story is well told too. I don’t know the team behind this effort but they should be applauded.

Well done.

4. Get rid of Google Birthdays
A recent update to Google Calendar has meant that millions of people all over the world now have their Google contacts’ birthdays appearing in their calendars. This might be useful to some but is really quite irritating for others.

Fortunately, there’s a way to get rid of them. Surprise surprise, Google doesn’t exactly make it easy (as in: it’s not an obvious solution) however I managed it in five minutes, you might want to do it too.

‘How to delete birthdays from your Google Calendar‘

As a bonus calendar-based hack: if you still haven’t subscribed to my UK Cinema Release Calendar, there’s no time like the present!

 5. Three Twitter things

• You can now target ads based upon what apps users have installed on their phone, via ‘App Graph‘.
• Twitter is experimenting with inline Twitter analytics.
• Coupons or ‘Twitter Offers’ are now a thing [in the US]

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Finally, a note from the author.

Five things on Friday #100, that’s not bad is it, as blogging habits go? I had a big speech lined up in my head about how many readers I get and how many subscribers there are to the newsletter version of this weekly post but…

But then I saw this awesome gif and decided it did a much better job.

Thank you. To all of you, for your readership and your support.

Whatley out.

Yes, I know it’s Sunday…

Things of note for the week ending Friday November 21st, 2014*.

1. A-X Writing Advice
This, from the copy chief at Random House Publishing, is excellent.

Example:

• One buys antiques in an antiques store from an antiques dealer; an antique store is a very old store.
• He stayed awhile; he stayed for a while.
• Besides is other than; beside is next to.
• The singular of biceps is biceps; the singular of triceps is triceps. There’s no such thing as a bicep; there’s no such thing as a tricep.
• A blond man, a blond woman; he’s a blond, she’s a blonde.

Great reading.

2. This F1 / Truck stunt is RIDICULOUS

You may have seen this already but Team Lotus just set a new world record with the above. Masterminded by the stunt coordinator behind the truck chase in Terminator 2 this is without doubt the coolest thing I’ve seen all week.

Watch it.

3. Ogilvy’s New Home
I work for an advertising agency that goes by the name of Ogilvy & Mather. Our offices are in Canary Wharf. As of next year, that location will change as we up sticks and move the whole group into Sea Containers House (SCH).

If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s this big building next to the Oxo Tower on London’s South Bank.

The top photo of this article (the one with ‘Five Things on Friday’ written on it) was taken by me from the bar of the new Mondrian hotel that can also be found at SCH. I was there on Thursday night for a work thing and I can tell you right now it is one of the best bars I’ve ever been to. If you’ve ever stayed at a Mondrian (I’ve been extremely fortunate and have stayed at a couple of them) then you’ll know exactly what to expect.

If you’ve not stayed at one before, or if you’ve never been to one before, all you need to know is that a) it’s really nice, b) you should go [and visit the bar at least], and c) the toilets are just like The Chamber of Secrets.

As for an Ogilvy tour? Well, I’ve seen the new reception and that’s pretty swanky. Come for a coffee in the New Year and I’ll show you around 🙂

Tres exciting.

4. Movember Heroes
I’m not doing Movember this year however that’s not going to stop me from sharing these pretty awesome superheroes-with-facial-hair art jobs that help raise its awareness further.

There are awesome.

More at the link.

5. Buzz Sumo
Found out about this service a few weeks ago but have started using in earnest. If you’re looking for certain kinds of content based around certain themes Buzz Sumo is really useful.

Check it out.

Bonuses this week are things that I’m about to write about but haven’t got around to yet:

• Nokia announced it was getting back into the device market (tablets, not phones – at this point).
• What We Do In The Shadows is the funniest film I’ve seen this year. Trailer.
• The Facebook demoting brand stories that look like promos thing; article going live on The Drum about this on Monday.

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*Thirty five years to the day since I was born. Which might have something to do with why this was late to publish. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it on a Sunday evening as much as you do on a Friday afternoon. Let me know, x

Things of note for the week ending Friday November 14th, 2014.

1. The Hidden Tactics of WW1
The 11th of November is behind us. On the day itself, I read this: ‘Why Blackadder Goes Forth could have been a lot funnier‘. A title that I immediately took a dislike to / disagreed with. However, I clicked through and read on.

Here’s an excerpt.

Mass refusals, disobedience, mutinies, strikes and out-right rebellion were all part of the British armed forces experience in WW1. These were all fairly explicit events and to a certain extent these hidden narratives are becoming part of the historical record despite the attempts of contemporary military censors and government ‘D’ notices on the press as well as the 100 year rule in suppressing military documents. Subsequent post-war collective memory loss related to dominant patriotic ideologies served to smother these events even further, but in the 1960s/70s a critical historical reappraisal of WW1 began, marked in the cultural sphere by the biting satire of the musical ‘Oh What a Lovely War’. This reassessment of WW1 led to a series of historical and sociological examinations of the ‘life in the trenches’ in the succeeding decade. Some of these works provide a new and interesting angle on the subterranean (but at the same time mass) collective tactics British (and German) soldiers used for avoiding combat.

Insightful, amusing, and informative – about one of the most horrendous periods of history – it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time.

You should read it too.

(and then watch the Sainsbury’s ad again)

2. The 2014 Vanity Fair Hollywood Portfolio

Photographer, Chuck Close, shows some of the most famous faces in the world in their most natural way.

This is a wonderful collection.

3. Some Twitter Things (three, to be precise)

Twitter Thing Un

The new mission strategy statement is a thing of… beauty?

[thanks to Mark Jennings for the correction]

This is interesting for many reasons. Not because it uses the word ‘world’ three times in a really horrible and clunky way but mainly because it refers to ‘information sharing and distribution platform products’. Twitter + Vine = plural. But I think this means there’s more down the road.

We’ll see.

Twitter Thing Deux

Inline with the web interface, you can now ‘dismiss’ promoted tweets in the official Twitter app.

The reasons you have to give are all the reasons why I’ve dismissed stuff in the pas

Twitter Thing Trois

Targeting. It matters.

4. Shia Lebouf
This is one of the most bizarre things you’ll see this week/ever .

5. Alex from Target: the other side of [internet] fame

Two weeks ago, Alex Lee was just a regular teen working his job. At said job, a girl thought he looked quite hot and shared a sneaky snap to Twitter. After that? Well, he kinda went viral.

If you know who #AlexfromTarget is. You’ll love this New York Times article covering the price of internet fame. If you don’t know who #AlexfromTarget is, then read it anyway.

That’s it from me this week.

Y’all have a great weekend.

Whatley out.

Things of note for the week ending Friday, November 7th, 2014.

(t-shirt from Hero & Cape)

1. 3D-printing machines make awesome Tattoo artists.
Not. Kidding.

This is staggering.

The machine actually reads the the surface of your arm as it ‘prints’ (by prints, I mean punctures your skin at up to 150 times per second) ensuring that it moves smoothly along your chosen limb.

There’s a video too, natch.

Amazing.

2. Turning the Game Around
This, believe it or not, is 13,000 words on what makes the storytelling at the centre of the 2008 version of the Ubisoft video game, Prince of Persia, so compelling.

This is has been open in one of my tabs since August - that’s how long it’s taken me to get around to reading it.

But it was worth it.

There are many reasons why you might not want to read this essay. First: ‘Da-yam! Dat word count!’ Get over it. Second: ‘I’m not really a gamer, so I know I won’t be that interested’. Wrong. The piece is about not only how to tell a story but also gaming as art. It really is great to see gaming deconstructed in this way and, while it may give away the ending (I’d completed it, so I didn’t mind – but really, does it matter?), the intelligence in the writing makes everything OK. Make the time, then read the essay.

If you’re a gamer, you’ll love it (obvs).

3. The Christopher Nolan Profile
I’ve written about him before in these webpages of mine however, with the release of Interstellar right around the corner (I’m seeing it at the IMAX tomorrow), it seems fitting that I should write about him again. Well, I would, except The New York Times have done such a good job of it that I’ll link you to that instead.

This bit, on Insomnia, is great –

After that, when he came across the script of “Insomnia,” a remake of a Norwegian psychological thriller, Warner Bros. had the option. Nolan was interested but couldn’t get a meeting. His agent, Dan Aloni, called Steven Soderbergh, an early fan of “Memento.” Soderbergh told me that he “just walked across the lot and said to the head of production, ‘You’re insane if you don’t meet with this guy.’ My sense even then was that he didn’t need our help except to get in the door.” Everything happened very quickly. Nolan made the film on a budget of $46 million, and Soderbergh and George Clooney signed on as executive producers. Soderbergh visited the set in Alaska. “I got there and was having a conversation with Al Pacino: ‘How do you feel? How’s it going?’ Al said, ‘Well, I can tell you right now, at some point in the very near future I’m going to be very proud to say I was in a Christopher Nolan movie.’ ”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we are lucky to be alive at the same time as this particular film maker. His passion and vision for the final delivery is something that, come the end of his career, will be held up alongside Kubrick, Spielberg, and Scott. Nolan’s body of work is already excellent.

So go read his profile piece; it’s really very good.

4. Alternate Universe Movie Posters

These are great.

5. More Monument Valley

Ever played Monument Valley? If not, why not? It is honestly one of the best iPad games I’ve ever played (it’s now available across iOS, Android, and Kindle) and you should absolutely play it! Beautiful to play and look at; it really is that good.

That being said, if, like me, you’ve already played Monument Valley and wish it could’ve gone on longer or are hankerin’ for the next version/sequel/expansion pack – then hanker no more! ‘Forgotten Shores’ is the official name of the forthcoming next part and it’ll be hitting iOS on November 13th. Hurrah and hurrah again.

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Bonuses this week are three random things that I picked up this week:

• Prostitute or City Trader: how do you want your workspace?
• Note to self: don’t go to Mars.
• Ever read this and wanted to write your own? Steve Waddington has published an e-book entitled ‘Blogging for Beginners‘, and you might find it useful.

Until next time,

JW x

Things of note for the week ending October 31st, 2014.

1.Twitter does Video (or how to predict the future).
Two Five Things ago – aka ‘Five things on Friday #94‘ – I told you all about the new Audio Twitter Cards from Twitter.

I ended the bit saying:

Reminds me a lot of how the YouTube app works on Android which in turn says to me that you could expect Twitter’s video cards to follow a similar set up in the very near future. Maybe.

Well, low and behold, it has happened!

That’s right, in the exact same way that you can listen to audio tracks in Twitter and then continue to scroll through Twitter, video content now acts in the same way.

The interesting thing about this is that the content is actually playing through a Twitter Player card. That’s right, Twitter’s own native video upload – NOT YouTube. This is the first sign of a trend, ladies and gents.

Josh Constine, pictured (and author of the TechCrunch article where I first read the news), spotted an even better idea. Especially when you start taking the above feature into tablets…

The bigger opportunity might be in long-form video. Imagine following along with a docked video of a sports match or awards show as you read and post tweets about the event. Twitter’s long been seen as a companion to TV. But by ditching the television set and subsuming its video content, Twitter could be the only screen you need to step up to the global watercooler.

Now you can see the future too.

2. Polyamory is boring.
Apparently.

3. The Grand Canyon. From space.
I don’t know when the first ‘let’s stick a camera on a weather balloon and do something cool with the footage’ video first appeared but I really am nowhere near getting tired of them (yet). The next one is always better than the last…

John Flaig is the man behind ‘the next one’, and yet again I am not disappointed.

Not only are the photos amazing but the video is pretty darn cool too.

Yeah.

4. The Realisation
Another Five Things, another Leo Babauta post. But this one is super worth it. Promise.

It is a great read. If you only click on one link this week, make it this one.

5. NASA does Volcanos
This is excellent –

“A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain, and it is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island. Prior to June 12, the last explosive eruption occurred in 1989, with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows. Ash from the multi-day eruption has been detected 2,407 kilometers east-southeast and 926 kilometers west-northwest of the volcano, and commercial airline flights are being diverted away from the region to minimize the danger of engine failures from ash intake.”

There’s a video of the eruption on the website. But it was too big and I didn’t want to upload it so I made it into a gif for you.

Email me and say thanks or something.

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Bonuses this week are all HALLOWEEN-themed:

• Dizzee Rascal does Halloween
• Minimalist posters of scary films (Carrie is my favourite)
• IKEA does The Shining

Until next week.

Have a great weekend everybody.

Things of note for the week ending October 24th, 2014.

1. I like this

This Superman art wasn’t originally going to be one of my Five things of the week but I wanted to share it with you because a) it feels like the week that I’ve just had and b) it’s just so darn awesome (via SuperPunch).

Onwards!

2. Orange Juice: you’re doing it wrong
Planning on pouring yourself some juice this weekend? Don’t glug, pour.

And do it like this:

Yeah, probably the best gif I’ve seen all week.

(via Lifehacker)

3. Michael Ironside
Great actor. You’ve seen him in a ton of stuff.

You definitely know him.

This guy:

See?

You recognise him from films such as Top Gun to Total Recall to Starship Troopers and everything in-between. He did an AMA on Reddit recently and it was superb.

Here’s one example response [re Highlander 2]:

There’s a scene in the movie where my character comes to earth, and literally lands by going through the city streets and through the roof of a subway car, and lands on the subway. My stunt double had never been anywhere in the world where cocaine was so cheap. And he got absolutely hammered out of his mind for a week, and ended up running through the streets naked in Buenos Aires, and was arrested the morning of that sequence. So I had to do the stunt, because we had nobody in that part of the world who looked anything like me. So I had to hang on the roof of the subway car, and land on the floor, without any pads, and it was about a 12 foot drop, straight down, and in costume as the character. In the actual movie, you’ll see me slowly get up, and the character checks both his knees as he’s standing, he checks his back, his arms, and then throws his head back with a joyous scream knowing that he hadn’t broken anything.
That was not acting. That was me. Because i realized I had done it, and I didn’t have to do it again! From that moment, we just walked forward with the scene. It’s one of my favorite sequences of that film, because it’s where real life and acting come together in such a joyous moment, and it’s captured.

Brilliant.

Featuring anecdotes from almost his entire filmography, Ironside is a fantastic AMA participant and gives bloody brilliant answers. The Christian Bale one might make you feel a bit ill mind.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Michael Ironside – AMA

4. Game Theory and The Dark Knight
This dissection and analysis of all the games that are at play during The Dark Knight is a fantastic read. Good for both fans of Batman and Game Theory.

5. Supermovies: 2014 – 2020
Fan of awesome films? Fan of some of the best awesome films ever made? That means you probably like SUPER HERO films. Not only are they going through a huge resurgence but they’re also, in the main, turning out to be totally brilliant.

The whole thing is about shared universes. But whatever. The important thing is the future. And ladies and gentlemen, this is what your [known] superhero film future looks like –

Batsh*t crazy.

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Bonuses this week are all long form articles that I’ve picked up from other newsletters over the past six months and have only just got around to reading/finished:

• Six Inches is a fairly NSFW short story from Charles Bukowski. Boy meets girl. Girl shrinks boy. Cue: dark hilarity.
• Who wants to shoot an elephant? Horrible reading.
• What [leading industrial designer] Frank Nuovo did next [after Nokia]