this day writhes with what?

An awesome bit of stop-frame meta-moviemaking from Evelien Lohbeck:

You can find more of her work here.

It’s not entirely new, but the Will You Be My Friend? project touches on a number of issues I’ve been thinking about in the wake of a recent spate of LinkedIn linking-in.

What do these online connections represent, really?

Are friend and friending simply convenient appropriations from the real world, like the desktop metaphor, and thus stripped of their original meaning?

Or do people these days really think that, if they have 782 friends on some social-networking site, they actually have 782 people out there in the world who would come to their side in times of sadness / joy / need / calamity?

Sorry. Did that make you feel awkward?

A couple of days ago, DustoMcNeato uploaded a remix of a-ha’s mid-’80s packet of aural aspartame, “Take on Me.” The lyrics now describe the action with a hilarious literality.

And if you need a cheerful thought to get you through the elections and the coming global Great Depression, ponder this: According to WikiPedia, a-ha are planning to drop a new album in early 2009.

Tilt-shift + The Piano + Godfrey Reggio + something undefinable = Thom Yorke’s “Harrowdown Hill” video.

For a higher-res version, click here.

For more TSTLV (tilt-shift, time-lapse video), click here.

As Sofia nimbly demonstrates, being (or feeling) caged is often just a failure of ingenuity.

Go, Sofia, go.

Merlin Mann, of 43 Folders and elsewhere, published a wonderful post a few days ago about the seductions of the online world (and, by extension, I suppose, media consumption in general) and the steps he’s taking to rethink his susceptibility to (and culpability in) them.

“What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it….

“So, yes. I am cutting way back on trips to the steam table of half-finished, half-useful, half-ideas that I both make and consume. And, with respect, I encourage you to consider doing the same; especially if that all-you-can-eat buffet of snark and streaming produces (or encourages) anything short of your “A” game.”

As someone whose recent reacquaintance with fiction (via Netherland) was delayed by too many all-absorbing jobs and an artificial need to stay absolutely current, I couldn’t agree more.

And if Merlin had done nothing but his 5ives list of “terrible fake Jane Austen novels,” he’d still be a hero.

Aubo Lessi, a graphic designer who lives in Otwock, Poland, has created a gorgeous video for “Siren Songs,” a haunting and elegiac tune by Thomas Feiner & Anywhen. (If you haven’t heard Feiner, imagine what Peter Stormare might sound like as a singer.)

You can see more of Lessi’s video work here. And you can download an edited version of “Siren Songs” here.

Mozilla Labs has released an extremely interesting Firefox extension called Ubiquity (scroll down for the link to the installer). In short, Ubiquity lets you stitch together various tools and bits of Web-fetched functionality within your browser window via a smart drop-down menu and trigger words. (Mac users who rely on Blacktree’s awesome Quicksilver app will immediately grasp the potential.)

For example, if you highlight the name of a restaurant in an email message, press Alt-Space (to invoke Ubiquity), and then type map, a Google Maps street map will appear, which you can size and zoom and then insert into your message. The video below highlights some of the other cool things it can do (bear with, or fast-forward through, the PowerPoint-y few minutes—it’s worth a look).

The current release is only a 0.1 prototype, but it’s pretty impressive nonetheless. And there’s already a community of users—which ML has dubbed “the herd”—extending the command set.

As of this past Tuesday, all your Page Up/Page Down are belong to Microsoft.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has seen fit to grant patent rights to the Redmond Army Faction with regard to a “[m]ethod and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments.”

Press the Page Down key and your window scrolls a “substantially exact increment” south? Duck under the bridge and thank Bill.

Press the Page Up key and your window scrolls a “substantially exact increment” north? Duck under the bridge and thank Steve.

And before the publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers breathe a sigh of relief, they should note that the Field of the Invention clause reads thus: “The invention relates generally to computers, and more particularly to displaying content on a computer system.”

“Generally,” indeed.