The Industry Standard blows the lid off of geek living. Someone who must be very clever is blogging dead blogs. Beautiful transitions at threecolor. “Sexy Beast” is the best movie I’ve seen in months.

Boys don’t play with dolls. Unless they’re action figures. Especially if they’re action figures representative of famous social theorists.

Come to think of it, even if you can’t be bothered to go vote for Blogger, you might still want to find it in your heart to point your browser on over to The Breast Cancer Site, where the Web traffic that you create helps pay for free mammograms for underprivileged women. Think about it: surfing can save lives.

Regular updates to Subtraction.com are driven by the amazing, free-for-now Blogger. Blogger is up for a Webby People’s Voice Award, and it seems like a good idea to me for you to go there right now and cast a vote for Blogger. Please?

Maps are good. These maps are great — a staggering set of cartographic/temporal explorations of Manhattan’s urban-sedimentary layers by the architect Brian McGrath for the Skyscraper Museum.

There are four incredible views of the city’s physical growth mapped to historical contexts, all done with Macromedia Flash. But the one you must see is the last, “Perspectival Fly-Through,” which allows you to float through an onion-peeled Manhattan. In its sweeping motion and vectors-on-black aesthetic, this fly-through recalls piloting an X-wing fighter through the trenches of the Death Star in the original Star Wars arcade game.

The shelves are done. I spent all day unpacking my remaining boxes, originally packed way back when I left Singapore. It felt great to toss them out and free my apartment from the clutter.

For the past few nights, I’ve been helping to assemble these shelves for my apartment, which I hired my friend Oliver to build. From a simple sketch I made, he tracked down all the materials and came up with a custom solution to meet the square footage-challenged dynamics of my tiny Manhattan apartment. We’re using the ultra-cool Speed-Rail line of industrial slip-on fittings, which allows us to assemble the shelves in countless ways using a simple allen wrench.

Once a year, for twenty-three years now, the mile-long stretch of big-name museums along Fifth Avenue open up their doors to the public for one evening, free of charge — they call it the Museum Mile Festival. Fifth Avenue itself closes to automobiles and becomes a promenade, and the street floods with art lovers. I sound like I know it all, but I’ve only just come home from my first Museum Mile Festival after repeatedly missing them year after year. I got to see the Frank O. Gehry retrospective at the Guggenheim, which was great because it’s great and also great because it was free. My only complaint is that the festival, which runs from 06-09p, is too short — by the time I was done with Gehry, there was barely enough time to quickly peruse the “Aluminum by Design” show at the Cooper-Hewitt.

Back on 08 May, I wrote that the recording of Nina Simone’s 1961 performance “At the Village Gate” was in heavy rotation on my CD player. That’s still the case. In fact, this past week, I became somewhat irrationally fixated on the disc’s opening track, “Just in Time.”

Simone’s performance of this small-scale paean to luck and love is sublime genius. She begins with her trademark casual precision, a subdued exuberance that quietly erupts towards the end into a beautiful, joyous crying. But these vocals are just bookends — after singing just a few bars at the beginning of the song she seemingly and suddenly abandons her audience to a quietly playful guitar, bass, drums.

The amazing trick she manages is this: defining the whole of the song by her very absence from its center, controlling that undefinable intersection of sound and time wherein the audience craves the form of her voice the most by not giving it over at all, withholding it almost cruelly. Yet, in spite of this absence, the whole of the song and every tiny detail in its crevices are clearly of her own design and volition — though the voice is gone, she’s not. She’s unmistakably there. It’s a brazenly confident gesture with which to open an evening’s performance, but her delivery and its effectiveness are immaculate. I’m left in wonder after each listen and I can’t get enough; since Thursday, I’ve had my CD player set to repeat that track without end.

A little on the ridiculous side but nifty all the same, TopCalculette Pro is a remarkably literal shareware calculator app from Rubensoft. Like it or not, Apple’s unleashed Aqua-style interface design upon the world, so we’d better get used to seeing more like this. Thanks to DD for the tip.

The first iteration of Sony’s Palm-OS-powered Clie PDA had all the panache and disappointment of an early prototype. Apparently Sony understood this, because they’ve completely revamped their Palm OS offering with this new Clie. It’s sleek in the same, wannabe-Palm V way that the Compaq iPaq is; thin, chrome and futuristic in a shorthand kind of way. It’s a parity offering that inspires a non-devotional kind of coveting; nice but not really on par with Sony’s other digital offerings.

There’s an interesting critique of the current state of fashion photography over at Slate. It bills itself as “An argument in pictures,” though it’s an argument that relies more on the cultural disparity between a semi-imagined golden age of fashion photography and today’s predictably bemoaned state of the same than on a real critique. What’s really interesting is the delivery of the argument, which is incredibly visual (if not perhaps overly so) — a kind of PowerPoint-like presentation in HTML, which is surprisingly rare on the Web. In spite of the weakness of the content, I kind of like the way it hits short, quick points. Now if only someone a little smarter would pick up on the form…

Hey you. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Weren’t you telling me the other day that you wished you could get the weather forecast burned into a piece of morning toast via a Java-enabled toaster? Good news, now you can.

Andre the giant has a posse, and Edward Tufte has a Web site.

Vladislav Delay’s “Anima” gives you only one track for your fifteen bucks, but it’s a sixty-four minute-long one. I’ll bet it could’ve been broken down to a more atomic level, but this makes for an arty kind of marketing statement. Nevertheless, it’s an hour-plus of beepity-blippity melancholy, intricate and subtle like a miniature factory of noises.