What started out as a small gathering on the beach of San Francisco has evolved into a fully functioning city in the Nevada Desert. And with nearly 50,000 attendees last year, many participants are concerned that the event’s mainstream appeal will jeopardize the festival’s utopia vision.

While the documentary is still in the post-production phase, it is set to be released in early 2009. However, there will be a special preview screening at CELLspace in San Francisco this Saturday, June 28th.

Check out the trailer below:

[via Laughing Squid]

The Chicago Times reports on Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson who are traveling across the US correcting typos and grammar as they go. Driving a GPS-guided ‘97 Nissan Sentra they call themselves TEAL — the Typo Eradication Advancement League. When they spot typos on signs, they stop and if they can’t ask someone to correct them, they do it themselves.

So they approach a cafe, a shoe store, a visitors center. They identify a typo on a sign, a label, a poster. They point out the typo. They await the reaction.

This next part varies. They are greeted warmly (sometimes). They are told to go away (sometimes). They are gently blown off (usually). “We have not yet encountered fisticuffs,” Herson said. But it’s always a possibility. Often they make the needed alterations themselves, with compliance from a manager or supervisor. And when ignored, they have resorted to guerrilla tactics—slipping in a stray letter here, removing an errant comma there. They have found about 400 cringe-inducing examples of bad copy mistakes—on church signs and at Rockefeller Center, on sandwich boards and at the Grand Canyon.

That is, 400 examples they have brought to the attention of the powers that be. They have gone as far as correcting graffiti. Their tour ended this week.

Typo personalities — – chicagotribune.com
Typo Eradication Advancement League

He points to the above clip from LOST and says:

This insane montage of (nearly) every instance of “What?” from the LOST series started me thinking about this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.

Here are some examples he has found:

Film
Requiem for a Dream, montage of every drug montage
Scarface, every “fuck”

TV
The Sopranos, Every single whacking
House, every “lupus” reference

Games
Half-Life series, every G-Man sighting
Every Famicon (NES) Game Title Screen

See the full list on his blog Waxy.org

[via Russell Davies]

Backstage recently in a Little Rock, Ark., theater, actress Natalie Canerday said the cast of a play was enjoying debating the year Bruce Springsteen’s album “Born to Run” was released. Then the director took out his iPhone. All conversation stopped as he sought the answer: 1975, according to Wikipedia. “Everyone said, ‘Oh,’ ” Canerday recalled.

Indeed this can happen with any phone, but the user interface on the iPhone is just more conducive to browsing, so more people are doing it. According to a recent M:Metrics study, 58.6 percent of iPhone users visited a search engine on their phones, compared with 37 percent of smartphone users in general and a scant 6.1 percent of mobile phone users.

The problem is this constant accessing of information can make the iPhone/smartphone owner come off as a know-it-all, eliciting groans from friends.

When [Nora Wells is] with iPhone-toting friends and a question comes up, she braces herself, as she did recently when it was suggested that they go out for beers “stat.” Inevitably, someone wanted the exact definition. “The iPhone even gave us the Latin,” said Wells… “We probably could have been having our beer in the amount of time it took to look it up.”

The ultimate question is: does technology make us dumber? We are essentially outsourcing our brains. When your phone is smart, who needs to learn anything for real? But it can also be argued that the accessibility of information just means better, faster education. For example, Nora did just soak up some Latin instead of a beer. Perhaps we are just becoming a society of knowledge masters, learning how to wield and access information rather than storing the minutiae in our brains. But until everyone has a smartphone, people just need to use them wisely. No one likes a smartass.

Russell Davies points us to his ‘type’ of obsessives - music makers and collectors that use open reel tapes. The Tape Project that seems to be driving this movement says that these 15ips, 1/4″ half track stereo tapes reproduce the original master tape as practical. Albums retail for $200 and some then sell on eBay for double that price. In the FAQ on the site the people behind the project respond to the question ‘Why but open reel tape in 2008?’ with this answer:

Dan: I had been putting on this show (Vacuum State of the Art Conference) for several years, and my distraction with show administration meant that I always had an ill prepared demo room for my own Bottlehead products. So I decided for VSAC 2003 that we needed a really good sounding, dialed in display. I was talking with Paul and we wound up deciding on tape playback. Paul made a few master copies just for the show. My bud Dave Dintenfass of Full Track Productions put together an Ampex 350-2 for us. Paul and his cohort “Geets” Romo came up from San Francisco, and we played tapes, in addition to LP and hot-rodded digital front ends.

Paul: I expected the tapes to sound good of course, and I expected they would sound better than the LP and digital sources. But I was shocked at just how much better they did sound. And I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’ve been working with tape masters for 30 plus years.

Dan: Best Sound of Show from three reviewers at that show, and a Best Sound Of Show at the first RMAF (with headphones only, no less!) with tape playback, and now best sound of show at CES 2007 from many of the reviewers at TAS seems to support our approach.

So why are we doing this?

To share that experience with our subscribers.

the Tape Project

The NearSightedMan pulls out some of his favorite quotes from the book “Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting” by Brett Milano. They give an insight into the obsessive world of record collecting:

“Collecting is creepy. Record collectors put each other down for their various fixations. Everybody is convinced that his way of collecting is superior. They look down on casual collectors, who are just accumulators - the kind who’ll just pick up anything and let it pile up. A true collector is more of a connoisseur, and that’s the good thing about collecting. It creates a connoisseurship to sort out what’s worthwhile in the culture and what isn’t. Wealthy art collectors in this country have sorted out who the great artists are. If you’re collecting a lot of objects of one particular kind, you develop a very acute sense of discrimination.”

“Any of the younger guys who get into collecting are quirky and oddball types, pretty maladjusted people. They’re not into hanging around in bars and picking up chicks or nothing. If they have a girlfriend at all it’s amazing. And the older collectors I know, a lot of them just have their little room down in the basement where they go and listen. They don’t share it with anyone, and their wives don’t know anything about it. So when they die, the vultures start descending.”

Robert Crumb on Collecting « Observations of a Nearsighted Man

It’s been exactly four weeks since we posted our Frozen Grand Central mission. The response has been unbelievable. The YouTube video has 7.4 million views and counting. It’s been covered by The Today Show, Nightline, Good Morning America, and countless news outlets around the world.

Most interestingly, it’s inspired people in 40 other cities in 22 countries to stage their own freeze mission. Thousands of Global Agents worldwide in places like Romania, Poland, Italy, China, Sweden, and New Zealand have come together to make time stop for five short minutes.

What’s fascinating is that this activity has been inspired by IE’s work not controlled or organized by it.

IE Global: 40 Freeze Events Around The World at Improv Everywhere

The New York Times recently published a fun diagram to illustrate the supposed impact of playing Dungeons and Dragons early in your life. It suggests that if you did that you’ll either have an intense relationships with computers and/or science fiction and that the roll/role-playing concept may have contributed to the algorithm behind Google’s search ranking. In the accompanying article, Adam Rogers says:

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

The New York Times >

Finally, something to kick off this obsessives series: New York magazine interviewed five New Yorkers who wear only one color all day, every day. They include a shoe designer who only wears blue; a fashion designer who dons grey; an industrial designer who clads himself in white half the time, and pink half the time; a fabric designer wrapped in kelly green; and a singer-songwriter who only wears brown (probably like half of New York, now we think of it). Some interesting quotes:

NY Mag: Why blue?
Valeria “ValBlu” McCulloch: In college, I majored in color theory. Blue was the most interesting color, historically. Germanic tribes wore it to ward off enemies; Christians used it to denote divinity. Wearing blue for me is being in a dream all day.

NY Mag: Why gray?
Rebecca Turbow: I actually wore turquoise for eight years, but last September, I switched to gray. I’d had a bad year and needed to get out of it.

NY Mag: How do people react to a grown man in pink?
Karim Rashid: I make them smile. They say, “You make me happy.”… My statement is, Be who you are. Do what turns you on.

New York Magazine: Spring Fashion 2008 - Five New Yorkers Who Wear Only One Color Every Day

The game is a pretty ingenuous way to encourage real-life interaction between players, recruit new Nintendo DS gamers of all ages, and support tourism. Every day until February 19, all are invited to play from 10 AM to 4 PM, though you’ll have to reserve your spot on the Treasure Quest website to play.

[via PinkTentacle]

Maybe this is one for the Obsessives pool: Zezao is a Sao Paulo based artist, who does much of his work underground - in sewers and manholes. Part of the reason is he creates his art is to highlight the problems that the Brazilian city is ignoring beneath it.

Slideshow

[via Cheeta Fight]

So a question, for you readers… what Obsessives could we study and report on? Answers in the comments please.