“The author shares his enthusiasm for the upcoming release of “Blade Runner” with the production company.”

“Philip K. Dick wrote this letter after seeing his first glimpse of Blade Runner in a television segment. To the best of the family’s knowledge, this letter has never been previously released to the public.”

Philipkdick.com is Philip K. Dick official web site:

“On behalf of Philip K. Dick’s children, welcome to the Official Philip K. Dick website. We endeavor to create a venue for new readers, as well as a valuable resource for the loyal fans who have enjoyed his works for years. It is a work in progress, but one nevertheless that we hope you will find useful, and also truly enjoy.”(more)

“Raymond Depardon (b. 6 July 1942, Villefranche-sur-Saône, France) is a French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. In 1966, Depardon co-founded the photojournalism agency Gamma. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979. Depardon is also the author of several documentary shorts and feature films notably including 1974, une partie de campagne, on the 1974 presidential campaign of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Reporters (1981) and New York, N.Y. (1986), both winners of the César Award for best short documentary, La captive du Désert (1990), nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and Délits flagrants (1994) which won awards for best feature documentary at the César Awards, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Joris Ivens award) and the Vancouver International Film Festival.” (wikipedia)

Raymond Depardon at Magnum Photos.

The New York Times: “Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story?” by Nick Bilton, March 8, 2010

“I called up an expert on language for some insight into this issue: Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer and editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Mr. Sheidlower said the evolution of meaning and interpretation is natural for language. He considers it entirely possible that a younger generation growing up online might understand “like” to mean something different than older folks do.

“People are posting very heartfelt feelings on these social sites, and the option is to either like it or comment,” he said. “I don’t think it changes the meaning of the word, but there is a disjunct that is happening here, and it forces you to think of the word that is pointing to a story and not necessarily the content within it.”

“Like” clearly isn’t the only word that is seeing a change to its context or understanding. We are starting to perceive the word “friend” differently, too, thanks to social networking services.

“There’s a point when these friends are really just people I have in common with others, or people I’ve only met once, but ‘friend’ is the only word available to say you know this person, even though they are simply connections,” Mr. Sheidlower said.” (more)

About the project:

“Well, feeling inundated with the amount of fonts, brushes, images, patterns, gradients, drop shadows and copy I generally squeeze into each day, I set myself a little minimalistic design challenge. The challenge : represent a range of movies in 4 pixels or less.” (more)

About Paddy Donnelly:

“Anyway, I am an Irish web designer, blogger, interviewer and illustrator currently living in Belgium. My official title over at Nascom is somewhere between ‘user experience designer’ and ‘information architect’. I’m a big fan of my own little mini projects and I generally spend way too much time on the Internet. I learned most of what I know from my degree in Interactive Multimedia Design, my Masters in Multi-Disciplinary Design and Wikipedia.” (more)

“Last but not least, Tumblr plans to launch two revenue generating features next month. Details are scarce (all we know is they’ll be powered by the widget, pictured below), but with constant talk of Twitter’s revenue generating plans (which are still completely open to interpretation), it’ll be interesting to see how Tumblr plans to tackle the issue. Its success (or lack thereof) might pave the way for microblogging networks (although Tumblr arguably stands in the middle, between blogging and microblogging), an area traditionally devoid of revenue.

About Mashable:

“Mashable is an Internet news blog, started by Pete Cashmore in July 2005. With a reported 7+ million monthly pageviews and an Alexa ranking just over 400, it ranks as one of the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, Apple and startups, but it also reports on less high-profile social networking and social media sites. Mashable is popular on many social networks. As of December 21, 2009, it has over 1.8 million Twitter followers, over 90,000 fans on Facebook, and over 330,000 RSS subscribers.” (wikipedia)

Check Mashable’s “About Us” page.

First spotted via Oueb Niouzes.

About Samantha Loman:

“Sam or in case you are wondering her full name is Samantha Patricia Loman was born on August 7, 1983. She studied Illustration at the academy of arts in Rotterdam the Netherlands and received her Bachelor of Design in January 2005. A year before her graduation she started her own design business. First as an illustrator but soon she extended her creative skills with graphic design, photography, product design and writing children and non-fiction books.” (more)

About Roz Chast:

“Rosalind “Roz” Chast (born November 26, 1954) is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker. Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher Street and the The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review. (wikipedia)

Image above taken from the Boobytraps series (2008):

“The last series, Boobytraps, is not photographic in nature, but has every thing to do with spread ing ter ror and cre at ing an atmosphere of invisible menace that sur­rounds us everywhere and could hit any of us any time. Taken from two US Army field manuals they show soldiers how to construct boobytraps out of literally every­thing available in the world of every day objects, including pipes, beds, couches and chocolates.” (read more)

Artist’s statement about his Boobytraps series:

“I have taken these images from two books “Boobytraps” (1965) and “Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques - References” (1966). These are two “Army Field Manuals” of the US Army. In these books, soldiers are taught to construct boobytraps out of literally everything available. The key point of these two books is not how to detect these exploding traps but how to construct them.

The basic idea of building a trap out of - let´s say - a tea kettle is to spread terror. If a simple tea kettle might be a bomb that could kill or maim me what is there left to trust. Everything might be a bomb and therefore, in the head of the potential victim,everything IS a trap.”

See the whole Boobytraps series. The complete catalog can be dowloaded in PDF (Texts German, 3.12MB). Here is Simon Menner official website.

About Mr. Deane:

“Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from respectively Ger­many and Holland. It is named in after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the 20th century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds one selfconfronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the prob­able. Here, every man has to decide for him self what he holds to be true and what not.” (read more)