Deep Love Core

Found a really excellent design portfolio site with some help from the benevolent Nicopolitan. It's this site called Krop and they display your resume and portfolio in a really clean, slick looking setup. The free account lets you have ten images and looks great as it is. They've got more layout designs and a larger portfolio size for the paid service. I'm really enjoying the results I've gotten with it so far.

Really, really hooked on this song at the moment. It's actually a collaboration that Girls' Generation did with Intel for the release of one of their processors in Korea. It sounds like a aural bomb dropped through a time warp from some far flung distant future digital society.

McG, Murakami, and Dunst are Turning Japanese

Takashi Murakami and McG teamed up to film a cover music video of The Vapors' "Turning Japanese" in Akihabara starring Kirsten Dunst. A fun video and playful enough to not flog the dead horse of "Japan/Akihabara is different and weird!" Dunst turns in a good performance, and is obviously enjoying herself.

I think Murakami's genius is simplified by many observers in the current wash of anime-aesthetic hitting US shores. His visions manage time after time to be more compelling and interesting than the vast majority of commercial cash-ins on the anime boom.

I saw a display of his work at the Little Tokyo branch of the LACMA two years ago. His designs border on the psychadelic but manage to incorporate a bubbly, cute anime/cartoon feel that makes them digestible. I especially enjoyed how he takes the exaggerations of women and sexuality in anime aesthetics to the extreme conclusion. (see: "Hiropon")

Olympic Theme

I'm sure news shows in the US are using powerful, bombastic orchestral songs as their Olympic theme but here in Japan our news shows play this over Olympic montages:

Audio Wars

MySpace announced it has acquired music sharing service iLike, which allows users to share songs and playlists over social networks and via a Last.fm-like iTunes plugin. This consolidates MySpace's emphasis on music and bands in their network but interestingly it's also a move to block Facebook invading this territory.

According to the article above, iLike has a music sharing application on Facebook that boasts 10 million users. This chunk of the userbase theoretically will lose access to the application and need a replacement. Seeing as how these users potentially have accounts they've made on iLike that can be ported over to whatever iLike-based application that MySpace creates there's a chance they may take an interest in the network again.

It's a very smart move by MySpace. The few people I know who still prefer the network over Facebook primarily cite its music support. Based on what we've seen so far FB may be content to let their rival keep that userbase but this is clearly a move they need to address as it affects their own service.

Digital Selves

There are a number of services online that make an "e-penis" list of the things I've listened to, read, played, or watched. I religiously update both my Shelfari and MyAnimeList accounts, and Last.fm takes care of itself as does Steam. I'm trying to find a comparable site to keep my movie reviews and ratings, and I was using Flixster on Facebook until I logged into the application with my actual Flixster account and it deleted the year and a half of ratings and reviews I had made while not technically "logged in." Great feature. IMDb is likely the place to go, and Mashable put out a list of 10 top social networking sites for movie lovers.

I'm both curious and squeamish about exploring what makes these kinds of sites so addictive. Squeamish because I'm afraid all I can point to is they help me feel like I've done something "productive" with activities that might not otherwise be considered "productive". Sure, I just logged two hours in Team Fortress 2 and grabbed a handful of achievements, or I finished three more episodes of Nodame Cantabile, but I could have been spending that time studying Japanese. I can't help but come to this conclusion because I also tend not to be very social on these sites. Sure I've got real life friends on Shelfari and Steam, and I keep an eye on their updates, but I'm mostly content to see myself chip away at the massive list of films I haven't seen or books I haven't read.

Is there inherent value in having these lists? Beyond justifying how I spend my time and sometimes not being able to remember all the media I've consumed.