Web-Apps Recommendations

A hard truth for the lovers of the traditional dramatic arts: wide spread appreciation for opera is long gone. Blame  it on the medium being less accessible, or the fact that its profound melodramas, its weighty melodies are no match for today’s instant, multi-stimuli interactive media.

But what’s to say opera can’t be engaging and readily consumable, even in this day and age?

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Let’s be honest, it can be hard making adult friends, especially as we get older and our peers are becoming increasingly occupied with keeping tiny humans alive and healthy. Or when work moves us to a new city, away from our usual support networks.  Wouldn’t it be cool if we could skip all the boring smalltalk about the weather and the traffic, and see who’s likely to become a friend? The ladies of Vina have noticed this problem, and are starting a networking app to match awesome ladies up with awesome new lady friends.

The new Hey! VINA app is a social matchmaker for introducing new girl buddies. (You might have heard TechCrunch call this the Tinder for friends. IT’S NOT TINDER, YOU GUYS! Unless your goal is to ignore the whole personality matching part and pick potential friends based on the sexiness of their profile photo.  Takes all types, I guess.) The app promises to match new buddies up by personality style and shared interests for maximum friend compatibility. So far, Hey! VINA has just one short quiz, and it doesn’t ask any of the essential friendship questions yet (What kind of drunk are you? How late is too late to text and expect a reply? Who’s your favorite Doctor?) but it’s still in beta so I can assume those questions are on the way.

The app is live and matching pals in NYC, LA and SF, with plans to spread to other cities and start matching new friends soon.

The art of film is the art of kinetic, dynamic narrative. One film still is never meant to be inert or isolated, but builds upon and weaves into another. Even films with still frame shots are still in motion – the pause is one through time, it feels unnatural, tortured. But what if you took that dynamic out of film and insert a wholly different sensory narrative – creating in effect a whole way to experience the story?

You would get Peter “Peterski” Nidzgorski’s Nevver.

Nidzgorski’s Tumblr page is, in simple terms, “a song and a film still, daily.” And from the look of it — a plain page with post-card size pictures over unimposing play buttons, a page of  more grey-blue negative space with no more than four posts and tiny, oft-missed direction arrows — Nevver is a humble and modest site against which its film stills seem magnanimous and powerful.

And each film still does have power – each comes  alive, just not before your eyes.

When Nevver guts every aspect out of a film save a static photo, and re-plugs what was lost through a curated song, it creates in essence a new film, a collage of different sensory experiences, where you hear the narrative and imagine it on what you see.

Nevver is a death of film and a birth of music. Not only does it invigorate what is heard, but it acts as a discovery tool for songs and bands one never knew, never remembered they knew, or never heard played before, the way it is through an emancipated shot.This Tumblr Teaches You The Art Of Hearing Music

If the world has been shrinking ever since the onset of the internet, perhaps Google Street View is primarily to blame. At least that’s what the good people at Mapcrunch want us to believe — just flip through instant Street Views of a host of countries from every continent (yes, even Antarctica) and revel in the festively painted desert houses of Mexico, the dreary vast farmland of Belgium that looks eerily like Quebec, or the deserted plains of South Africa you could be forgiven for thinking were Iowa.

But it’s not all endless roads and open land — there’s an indoor filter that lets you see inside the buildings in a host of countries, from a military museum in Thailand, to a classroom in Tokyo, to a German cheese and meat shop and organic Mexican bodega (international food shoppers eat your heart out). There is also an urban filter that weeds out the countrysides and suburbs and plunges you into the concrete layers that is Hong Kong and Seoul and the quaint isolated settlements that are, let’s be honest, as urban as places like Bermuda or Mongolia get.

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