CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

American (Wet) Dream. Pornhub recently published a rundown of the three most popular (erotic) search terms per state, and FlowingData’s Nathan Yau converted them into a series of stark maps. Fast Company points out that apparently Americans taste in pornography is definitely Geo-located. MILFs for instance are popular almost everywhere, except out West, and Wyoming, ever the cowboy state, has a thing for “smoking.” Read full article in Fast Company.

Photo: Far from Heaven (2002) via BFI.

To help us cope with the fact that Summer is over, Samuel Wigley shares with us in the BFI website a list of 10 great films set during the Autumn, the season when for a brief, resplendent moment, colour is everywhere, but then the leaves fall, the nights darken, and a mantle of melancholy settles over the earth in anticipation of the descent into winter. Read his list in the BFI website.

 Photo: Woody Allen via Esquire.

"Marshall McLuhan predicted books would become art objects at some point. He was right." This is just one of the interesting things that Woody Allen said in his Esquire interview in the September number. Read more about Woody's thoughts on marriage, the Acropolis, showers, sandwiches and other random but cool topics in Esquire. Also Blue Jasmine is already on the UK cinemas, have you seen it yet?

 Photo: Pelo Malo via TIFF.

Venezuela’s “Pelo Malo” (Bad Hair) has won the top prize at the San Sebastian film festival in northern Spain. The director Mariana Rondón collected the 61st Golden Shell for her project. Read full San Sebastián's article in Screen Daily, a review of 'Pelo Malo' in Variety or an interesting article in Spanish in El País.

DESIGN, INNOVATION & BUSINESS

Photo: Meron Gribetz, CEO and founder of Meta, by Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

We love the beginning of this Wired article: "Meron Gribetz wants to build a version of Google Glass that doesn’t make you look like an idiot." So far, all the polemic revolves around the ethic and legal considerations of this gadget that is not even for sale yet. Nobody has considered the aesthetic side yet, except Meta, Gribetz's company. Meta’s basic mission is to create computerized glasses that are everything Google Glass is not — stylish, cool, and non-distracting. Read all about it here.


Image: Screenshot of Slack.

Named by FastCompany as an "email killer",  a team of cofounders that designed Flickr launched Slack, a tool for office collaboration and communication that integrates various external services, bringing all communications (Google Docs, Dropbox, GitHub, Crashalytics, Zen Desk, etc) into one interface. Slack represents a "15-year slow-motion disintegration of Microsoft's hegemony over the workplace" states Stewart Buttlerfield, one of Slack co-founders. Boom. Read the complete interview in FastCompany and/or give Slack a try right here.


Photo: Volkswagen via Wired.

The Volkswagen Microbus is Officially Dead, but as Wired says 'not that you knew it was still alive.' Volkswagen’s official moniker was called Kombi or the Type 2 and to commemorate its disappearance V-Dub conspired with its Brazilian arm to create 600 Last Edition Kombis with white wall tires, special blue paint, an obnoxiously awkward grille, and a subtly reworked interior. Read about full article in Wired and don't worry for the Kombis out there, they'll all go to hippie heaven.


Illustration: Breaking Bad S05E09, part II, by Zoe Mendelson via Wired.

Commissioned by Fast Company, Broolkyn based writer Zoe Mendelson, created an amazing summary of the first episode of the last season of AMC's Breaking Bad using just emoticons. I personally always liked storytelling using emoticons, when Hotmail's Messenger was alive I used to make some, and I shamelessly used to call them MSN Art. But this if these can be called art, Meldelson is definitiely some sort of Da Vinci. Have a look at the whole episode in FastCompany.

And if you'd like to give emoticons a go, but are too lazy a new app by VoidWorks, a Singapore-based app development studio, allows users to transform boring photos into pop art pieces by replacing pixels with colorful emoticons. Read about it in Wired.