Loveland is Rebuilding Detroit Through the Internet, One ... | Motherboard

Great interview with Jerry Paffendorf, the brains behind Loveland, a social media/real world project that is currently selling property in Detroit 1 inch at a time.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jerry/♥☑♥☑♥☑♥☑♥-1-million-inches-in-det

I have yet to buy in! must get a move on as the inches are counting down.

The Vice Guide to Liberia 1 of 8 - The Vice Guide to Travel | VBS.TV

(Now Playing) The Vice Guide to Liberia 1 of 8 - Episode 8 of 26

Jan 18, 2010

Welcome to The Vice Guide to Liberia. In this eight-part series, VBS travels to West Africa to rummage through the messy remains of a country ravaged by 14 years of civil war. Despite the United Nation’s eventual intervention, most of Liberia’s young people continue to live in abject poverty, surrounded by filth, drug addiction, and teenage prostitution. The former child soldiers who were forced into war have been left to fend for themselves, the murderous warlords who once led them in cannibalistic rampages have taken up as so-called community leaders, and new militias are lying in wait for the opportunity to reclaim their country from a government they rightly mistrust. America’s one and only foray into African colonialism is keeping a very uneasy peace indeed. In Part 1, Vice’s own Shane Smith provides a brief history lesson and some essential context for understanding what caused Liberia’s civil war and how things got so bad. Liberia was originally planned and founded as a homeland for former slaves back in 1821. But fast forward a bunch of years and a military coup and you find the First Liberian Civil War in 1989: yet another third-world regime change in which the US-backed opposition, led by Charles Taylor, overthrows a government unfriendly to US interests. Once in power, Taylor’s corrupt, dysfunctional government quickly finds itself under attack by local warlords, leading to the Second Liberian Civil War ten years later. From there things go from bad to total shit.

I just started looking at this web-tv site a few days ago - whacked! There are a number of documentaries running in episodes here and so far the Liberia doc is quite gripping. I've barely scratched the surface.. and I don't know how extreme the 'vice' tag takes the content - so be forewarned!

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood:S/Telling the Story

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Henry Jenkins has posted this Conference Overview on his blog - must figure out cloning myself!:

Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. The event brings together top creators, producers, and executives from the entertainment industry and places their critical perspectives in dialogue with scholars pursuing the most current academic research on transmedia studies.

Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics, which will be held this year in Los Angeles from March 17 to 21, 2010.

DAVID LYNCH'S INTERVIEW PROJECT - NEW EPISODE EVERY THREE DAYS

I love this project now on episode 081- this documentary archive is in style reminiscent of David Lynch's The Straight Story - the interviews are random encounters of people the filmmakers meet in their travels. Each interview is edited down to 3-5 minutes and gives a remarkable sense of the essence of each individual and the stories or life events they care about.

"The Runaways": trailer

The Runaways biopic is generating buzz at Slamdance, cast - Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart - ok sell it to an audience who have no idea who the Runaways are - written by Diablo Cody - promising - but Floria Sigismundi directing her first feature?!?!?!!!! this could be an amazing film

And for those fans who don't know (I had no idea) Cherie Currie is now an award winning chainsaw artist whose work can be found here:

http://www.chainsawchick.com/

One Cubic Foot — National Geographic Magazine

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The Feb. issue of National Geographic has a lovely interactive website with an interactive photo archive & videos. Great for kids and beautifully designed. The project is described as follows:

How much life could you find in one cubic foot? That's a hunk of ecosystem small enough to fit in your lap. To answer the question, photographer David Liittschwager took a green metal frame, a 12-inch cube, to disparate environments—land and water, tropical and temperate. At each locale he set down the cube and started watching, counting, and photographing with the help of his assistant and many biologists. The goal: to represent the creatures that lived in or moved through that space. The team then sorted through their habitat cubes, coaxing out every inhabitant, down to a size of about a millimeter. Accomplishing that took an average of three weeks at each site. In all, more than a thousand individual organisms were photographed, their diversity represented in this gallery. "It was like finding little gems," Liittschwager says.

link to photo gallery for the interactive component

We're planning summer science doc projects already!