oh shit!

I'm back! As a food blog this time. Nothing yet, as I have a cold and don't really feel like cooking, but I'll post recipes and photos soon.
For now, here are some links to my favorite food blogs:
Poor Girl Eats Well
Broke-Ass Gourmet
(notice a theme?)
FoodGawker (more focused on aesthetics than delicious, but does have some good recipes)
A Hungry Bear Won't Dance

renege'd

i lied to you! i just got me a shiny new tumblr. newnewnew

shift

Since I rarely update about the intellectual subjects I love to blabber about, I've decided to add a little more to the topics I write about here. Mostly this will be music and shallow things like fashion and design (of all types, even maybe including furniture which I feel weird talking about but shutup i like modernist design in housewares ok.) To commemorate this moment, here's a short film with music by Copy (Portland electroliciousness).

astroturf

Oh man it's been a while. A brief little update with a nifty little widget, via FreePress. It tells you the nonprofits that aren't really grassroots, but "astroturf" and funded by corporations.

quick word-vomit about segmenting of society and marketing

AdAge is a leading advertising industry magazine. Here's a little bit about what may become a greater trend in advertising: the increasing push of the utility of a product and less specific identification of the product with an identity.
The comments section is particularly fantastic, as it contains some great critique. My personal favorite is the one that says "you lost me at 'consumer generated media'", which says to me that the commenter is probably very confused by the MySpace. The next comment provides better commentary, saying that self-segmentation (such as the type Facebook uses for those little side-bar ads) are not the death of consumer segmentation, but considerably better than any focus group could be. He also says that what "marketers need to think about is how to encourage more consumers to share their preferences with marketers – replacing privacy concerns with a desire to receive more relevant and appealing marketing communications." Ew.

two sides to every story: somali pirates

Most of what I've heard about piracy off the coast of Somalia pertains to their nautical reign of terror and hostage situations. Here are some nice alternative perspectives that do a pretty good job in not justifying all while excusing those that are excusable. There is also analysis of the surrounding political situation that has allowed (or pushed) this to happen.

You Are Being Lied To About Pirates (via Huffington Post)

'Toxic waste' behind Somali piracy (via Al Jazeera)

Piracy challenges global governance (via KenyaImagine magazine)

And, as a final link, here's the simultaneous blog post by Gabriel Teodros. It contains a video of K'Naan, a Somali rapper, talking about the situation from a more personal perspective.

Twitter, Fans, Owning Your Culture

There is a group of people on Twitter that are tweeting as characters from Mad Men, the fabulous AMC show about the advertising industry in the late 50s/early 60s. They tweet in-character, and at each other, as if communicating about work and their personal lives. At first I thought they were a sort of viral-but-not-really marketing stunt, but it turns out they're made by a group of fans that are dedicated to the show and the characters. This is fantastic, and apparently they're the talk of the tech-crowd at SXSW.

Here are a few of them:
Don Draper
Betty Draper
Peggy Olson
Roger Sterling