And i thought about trying to do the CD/book cover meme each workday but have decided against it b/c I’ve got enough else going on (1othumbs, LC003…). Both of these feel like very good decisions.

a to-do list for that site:

1. move DNS records for 10thumbs

2. sketch out a plan for the site

3. wordpress wrastlin’

i think rather than name them separately (i.e. BK-001, CD-001, MV-002) i’ll just name them all sequentially:

001 - The Baader Meinhof Complex (imdb; ebert) — What could have been a fascinating look at political action, violence, the escalation of both in the face of an immoral war and the assasination of movement leaders, instead was confusing and overly dramatized. The members of the Baader Meinhof group that begat (or became) the Red Army Faction in Germany may have been narcacists (sp?) but I dout they were as shallow and impulsive as they come across in this film. After searching for answers — i was very disappointed — in the making of short, I think the director and producer was more interested in recreating bits of history than crafting a movie that let us understand the folks in the RAF… who were they? why did they turn to violence? how did they get to the point of taking up arms against the state? if you believe the movie, the leapt from lambasting their liberal parents and from one demonstration.

By not putting the Baader-Meinhoff group’s actions into a political context — which you can still do without promoting or condemning them — the movie makes these committed people (again leaving aside the rightness/wrongness of their ultimate actions) look like petulant fools and adds little to our understanding of them or their actions.

3 thumbs up (mostly for the look of the movie).

002 – Burn After Reading (imdb; ebert)

Seemingly typically off-kilter stuff from the Coen Brothers. Not as focussed and interesting as Fargo, not as disjointed as Big Lebowski. I think I’m just not cut out for the majority of Coen Brothers movies. Brad Pitt was really standout among a lot of great performances (including a small role for the guy who played Sledgehammer!), but overall it was just an odd pretzel and i’ve already forgot the ending. (quote Ebert’s final paragraph)

5 thumbs up

http://generalprojects.com/blog/

2. seen in Brian Warren’s (Be Good Not Bad) portfolio, the big masthead (which Chris Glass uses on his front page too) is an interesting twist — and might make some sense for 10thumbs as a way to explain.

http://www.maxriffner.com/

– the non-scrolling background image (seen here on holy shmoly); I remember in the very early mockups of LC 001 using that and getting help from the sixfoot6 blog (note: i just found it again and there’s an awesome layout archive page)

– narrow main column width. Draplin and a thousand others use this but it just dawned on me that there’s a real practical reason for using one on 10thumbs — unlike the layout currently being used on XTH, it lends itself to shorter content (but not wide images — which is what Enjoythisbeautiful day is trying to deal with).

duh.

Chris Glass did this too — but another amazing little collection of mixtape series covers

The brilliant folks at Wire and Twine launched a new studio log (enjoy this beautiful day)and beyond it’s overall beauty & spirit, I loved how they used this 3 column layout for their main post area.

Reminds me to go back and look at Khoi Vinh’s presentation on Grids & web design (grids are good)