I had this great idea to open a shop that just sells soft drink. Ever wander through a alcohol shop and marvelled at the incredible variety of booze on offer? It’s staggering, and I figure a soft drink version of the same would be awesome. Bright colours, amazing inventive branding, bring your kids.

Of course, it’s already been done. The Soda Pop Shop. Great stuff.

Kanye’s unfiltered flood of content means music journos might have to create rather than regurgitate (which is perhaps what they should be doing in the first place):

When everything there is to know about a celebrity is being transmitted straight to a hungry public, the need for music journalists such as myself becomes increasingly questionable.

The problem of interviewing someone who speaks to millions of people online everyday, reviewing singles that are deliberately leaked with little regard to label policy or even reviewing a concert filmed and streamed especially for user consumption, may well render many of us superfluous. In his own bizarre fashion, Kanye has thrown down the gauntlet to writers, to expand their creativity as fast as he can write 140 characters or face ignominy.

Marco Arment:

Some are obvious: people like awesome apps and dislike those that crash. A few words are more interesting, though:

It’s promising to see simple in the top-positive list, which says a lot about user expectations on the platform.

Cyclisk sculpture. Hopefully not made of the remnants of bikes smashed by cars.

A Kotaku writer watches his Hockey fan friend struggle to play a video game version:

Together, we represent both halves of why sports games are the most difficult genre to play in all of video gaming.

Not “one of the most.” The most.

It’s amusing to consider, because for what we’re simulating in real life, I’m certain there are a lot more soldiers who can play football than there are linebackers who are trained to stay alive in combat.

Other than a great headline, a good argument for Google to start selling their Nexus again:

The thought of a truly open mobile operating system is very appealing. The problem is that in practice, that’s just simply not the reality of the situation. Maybe if Google had their way, the system would be truly open. But they don’t. Sadly, they have to deal with a very big roadblock: the carriers.

The result of this unfortunate situation is that the so-called open system is quickly revealing itself to be anything but. Further, we’re starting to see that in some cases the carriers may actually be able to exploit this “openness” to create a closed system that may leave you crying for Apple’s closed system - at least theirs looks good and behaves as expected.

George Monbiot, writing for The Guardian, changes his mind about the ethical wrongs of meat eating. The article and book seem to be arguing for low impact, organic, free range farming, which is nothing new and obviously better than the feedlot nightmares.

More interesting is the argument that it is more ethically sound to support those farmers by eating meat than it is to be vegetarian or vegan. I heard a similar position being taken in an introduction being given before watching The End of the Line, about the decline of the world fish population - don’t not eat fish, rather eat fish from sustainable sources to encourage and support their approach.

The meat-producing system Fairlie advocates differs sharply from the one now practised in the rich world: low energy, low waste, just, diverse, small-scale. But if we were to adopt it, we could eat meat, milk and eggs (albeit much less) with a clean conscience. By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It’s time we got stuck in.

All of which makes sense, kind of, whilst ignoring the more basic and complex ethical question of killing animals in the first place.

As selected by Inside Films. Not convinced - the Mess Hall, Bridezilla, Philadelphia Grand Jury, and Phrase vids are worth it, the rest are pretty blah.

Talking to the director of Arcade Fire’s We Used to Wait video:

My real motivation came from my desire for music videos to have the same equal soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I’m not sure they ever can. Music scores your life. You interact with it. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl. Music videos are very concrete and rigid. They don’t allow for that emotional interaction.

Taylor Mali - How to write a Political Poem. Spoken word for our insane political times.