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WE'RE SUPPORTING

My first encounter with the work of Portland, Oregon artist Carson Ellis was when stumbling across her beautiful cover art for The Decembrist’s Crane Wife album. It was love at first sight. She has such an amazing way with a simple pencil drawing. And as much as I enjoy all of her work, from her watercolors to her acrylic paintings, it’s still those pencil drawings that tug at my heart strings with their nuanced textures and forms. Read more

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

I came across the Dongzhong cave school, which is situated in a Miao village within the Ziyun county, while watching a fascinating BBC documentary series about China the other night. The school, which was built in 1984 and caters for just under 200 students, is considered to be ‘a teaching branch for nearby resident units’. It looks stunning in its ornate beauty, and it must be one hell of a stimulating environment in which to learn. Read more

WE'RE WEARING

From this artist selection of t-shirts comes this Mydeadpony illustrated t-shirt, silkscreened on a limited edition tee, and distributed in a vinyl sleeve, with a biography of the artist on the back of the sleeve. Every t-shirt is numbered and signed by the artist, and comes in organic cotton.

WE'RE THINKING

By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (’sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading? Read more

WE'RE READING

I’m enjoying reading the insight and witticisms of the Indie Breakfast Club blog, which casts a wide net over entrepreneurship and what it means to be one and still have a conscience.

Peter Nalitch is Russia’s answer to Manu Chao. His video for the song Guitar is a Borat-like jab at low-budget, post-Soviet awkwardness — absurd English lyrics, Eurotrash earnestness, bad wipes, and cheap subtitles. But its tongue-in-cheekness is quite apparent, and the song is disarmingly catchy and romantic.

WE'RE LISTENING TO

‘I have been trying to go with my whims. Fuck it, let’s make an iPod album’. This statement from Team Genius leader Drew Hermiller was the jumping off point in the creation of the band’s debut self-titled full-length album, one of the most interesting and eclectic pop records of the year. ‘Basically it’s a reaction to the modern way music is consumed and listened to’, Hermiller says. ‘The idea of an album with a focused sound and a complete statement kind of gets lost now-a-days. Everyone shuffles around, so I thought “why not write an album that does the same thing?” Luckily, the band did an awesome job of keeping up with it’. Download a couple of free tracks off the album in our Music Download section [pssst, it's in the third column of the site]