Fast forward to 6 minutes in. This guy is obviously way better at programming than he is at making exciting YouTubes.

Check out this Augmented Reality plugin for Ableton that allows you to control your sequencer by moving blocks around in front of a webcam. It’s free for download here and all you need is a webcam, a printer, and Ableton to make it work.

Now if only they would add sweet visuals to it like the real Reactable.

Aaron Koblin probably has one of the coolest jobs ever (if you’re a nerd like me). He works at Google Creative Lab, where it looks like all they do all day is think about wild art projects using all the data that Google has at its fingertips. He’s presented at TED, SIGGRAPH, Coachella, has done a Radiohead video, and his work is permanently on display at the MoMA. Some of his most interesting work can be seen in the video above, or on his website.

This beat sounds like SNES videogame music. Maybe something underwater. Plus errybody loves Mane.

Mario – Break Up (ft. Gucci Mane and Nicki Minaj)

Apparently the official rule is “Always capitalize the first and last words of titles of publications regardless of their parts of speech. Capitalize other words within titles, including the short verb forms Is, Are, and Be.” That’s how I knew how to title this post.

I’m really into 90s backpack rap and pop-punk lately. You should probably avoid this.

Company Flow – Vital Nerve

Wild ass olymic level freestyle flatland fixie tricks!

As a resident of Echo Park, I spend a lot of time checking the local blogs to find out what’s happening in my neighborhood.  I was pleased to stumble across this collection of portraits by Sonia Paulino called “We Come Here All the Time”; Dog Walkers of Echo Park.  This collection, composed and compiled by Sonia over the last 3 years, chronicles the people she finds walking their dogs around the famous Echo Park Lake.  I see a lot of people regularly walking their dogs around the lake, but few stoke me out as much as Cali, pictured above. (Link via The Eastsider)

I’ve heard this Shinehead’s cover of Billie Jean at a lot at daytime BBQs.  There’s still about 4 months left of summer here in LA, so I figured it would be a good idea to post it up.

Shinehead – Billie Jean

I don’t know much about Pink Skull.  They make music that sounds like industrial disco.  They have really hip graphic artists doing all of their record covers, and they named their first record “Zepplin 3″. I think that’s pretty cool.

Pink Skull – Gonzo’s Cointreau

You know how it is. You’ve been stuck in a bus on the road for 4 weeks. You pull into a town in the middle of nowhere ready to rock the fucking faces off 10,000 fans. The last thing you want to be doing is recycling the same socks you wore yesterday. So, you put it on your rider. “Clean socks, 90 McNuggets, 12 bottles of Heineken and a pack of Camel Lights.”

Van Halen had a reputation for making some pretty funny rider requests. One of these was “no brown M&Ms” which was famously parodied in Wayne’s World. It turns out there was a pretty good reason for that rider request. From the article on Snopes:

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . .” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . .well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

I’m guessing the same sort of reasoning is behind Busta’s rider. “1 box of Lifestyles or Rough Rider condoms (ribbed).”

The most anticipated superhero team-up since Spawn and Batman (nerd alert!), west coast kings Quik and Kurupt came together this year to release BlaQKout.

This video and single reminds me of 36 Chamber era Wu Tang. It’s some rap shit.

BlaQKout – “9 X’s Outta 10″