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tavi gevinson's blog

IN OTHER NEWS, I saw Moonrise Kingdom yesterday thanks to a screening set up by their PR for me and my friends, and it was EVERYTHING I'D HOPED IT WOULD BE AND MORE. During the school year I usually avoid watching movies that I know will make me that emotional and inspired because I'm left with all this energy that school doesn't allow for and then it has nowhere to go, but it's almost SUMMER, so soon I get to run away and read fantasy novels and play records as much as I want! (People rolling their eyes right now might like to know that I thought the movie did a good job of not being too self-indulgent on the montage-of-cute-people-doing-cute-activities part. Just enough for me to be like, "Oh Wes, that is so you! Typical Wes! Wes, you aesthetically-defined bitch! =P I heart u so effing much!!!!" before complimenting him on his shoes and throwing my yogurt spoon in the air, but not so much that it stops actually helping the story move along. Also the main kids were so absolutely perfect, and too witty and dark and confused to be cutesy, too. The other kids were also absolutely perfect. So were the grown-ups. Oh my god it was all so good. I may have liked it more than Royal Tenenbaums, which is my favorite Wes Anderson? Oh my god I don't even know I just want to go back. I plan on seeing it at least four more times once it's out in theaters.)

via www.thestylerookie.com

Is it too weird that i'm reading Tavi Gevinson's blog?

Hackathon Planning In Less Than 10 Steps | TechCrunch

For future reference....

AKQA Sells to WPP, Proud of it's Inflatable Installation

and a giant inflatable installation outside the event’s hub at the Palais Des Festivals.

via www.digiday.com

This just made some marketing interns week. Who doesn't want a giant inflatable installation?

Facebook Exchange: A New Way For Advertisers To Target Specific Users With Real-Time Bid Ads | TechCrunch

If investors were looking for clues as to how Facebook could ever get to the $104 billion valuation it IPO’d at, Facebook Exchange should excite them. It shows Facebook is willing to shift towards slightly more aggressive advertising mechanisms.  While just a year ago Facebook ad targeting was only based on user-entered personal information and interests, now both browsing behavior and activity within apps, for example listening to a specific artist on Spotify.

And for users who aren’t abnormally worried about privacy, Exchange means the ads they see could be for things they actually want to buy.

via techcrunch.com

I don't think this is going to turn out well for FB. I could be wrong, of course, but this will be problematic.

A job that didn't exist 2 Years ago: Tumblr’s Curator-in-Chief: A Red Couch Interview with Christopher Price | Inside Flipboard

What does the editorial director of Tumblr do, exactly?
It’s pretty insane, between the way the job has changed and the sheer increase in blogs, to try to find amazing, original content to promote. That is really the core essence of my job: to surface up the people who deserve to be seen, who are making really great stuff. Whether it’s art, GIFs, traditional, non-traditional or disruptive content, if it’s original I think Tumblr users deserve to see it.

Who deserves to be seen?
You know it when you see it. It helps that we have community editors, people I trust who are actually illustrators or GIF creators. We look at their ‘likes’ or their re-blogs—the whole re-blog tree of the way Tumblr works—and it allows us to find who, or what, is good at the moment.

via inside.flipboard.com

This job is great. And, it's new and mainly possible because of open standards and the general support of the remix culture.

2012 London Olympics -- Hollywood script continues for cyclist Evelyn Stevens - espnW

Four years ago to that day, Stevens, then working in investment banking for a Wall Street firm, participated in her first road cycling clinic in Central Park. She had been smitten by the bike racing bug mere months before, when her sister Angela persuaded her to enter a cyclocross event in the Bay Area.

Stevens celebrated the anniversary by returning to Central Park with a few of her Specialized-lululemon teammates. But this time, she was being filmed by NBC because she had just clinched a slot on the U.S. Olympic team.

via espn.go.com

This is one of my alltime favorite sports stories. Such a great example of talent meeting will meeting intelligence and resulting in superb results.

To Pay or Not to Pay: A Closer Look at the Business of Blogging - Digital - Media - WWD.com

Duplantis believes the relationship between brand and blogger to be symbiotic — and it’s not just about the monetary reward. So, although the brand benefits by reaching a blogger’s audience in addition to its own, the blogger also benefits from the cachet of working with a brand as large and influential as Coach.

via www.wwd.com

I think i've been saying something like this for years to anybody who will listen. So, i think this is right on.

I also think this is a really useful article for those seeking ways to work naturally with style setters and culture drivers online.

Maker Faire and Science Education: American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. - Slate Magazine

This is what the American public school looks like in 2012, driven by obsessive adherence to standardized testing. The fate of children, their schools, and their teachers are based on these school test scores. I wondered what kind of tests the students were taking. The California Department of Education’s STAR website  has sample test questions, and I started looking through them randomly. Soon, I came across the following reading comprehension question about the proper use of a microscope, shown in the illustration below.

via www.slate.com

One to print and bring home to Andrea.

A flying cat? Dutch artist turns dead feline into a helicopter - latimes.com

The cat helicopter was conceived by Dutch artist Bart Jansen, and debuted for the public at the KunstRai ArtFair in Amsterdam that ended Sunday. Jansen calls his creation the Orvillecopter and describes it as "half-cat, half-machine."

via www.latimes.com

Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ.com

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant.

via online.wsj.com

Worth reading again. And again. and again.