Very late with this review, but last month the Abbey Theatre invited me along as part of a group of bloggers to see Last Days Of A Reluctant Tyrant.

The long shadow of the Irish property market is cast across Tom Murphy’s latest offering, Last Days of A Reluctant Tyrant. The story is decidedly Learish – Arina, an old women divides her land amongst her sons. One, a drunkard seeking comfort and solace he was never shown by his mother. The second, a silent son mindful of the despair his mother wrecks on their microcosm. The third and her favourite, Peter, a preening greedmonster that the seminary lost with a thousand more mouths of avarice than his mother’s.

Borne of a craggy mountain, Arina married into monied family and now she makes a choice. To whom should she bequeath her lands to in life?

Marie Mullen burns a hole in the stage as the Arina, a woman blinded both by fear into preserving the family fortune and pride in her accomplishments to make the wrong decision. Murphy’s Arina could almost be a “Celtic Tiger Ireland-shaped” crone – blind and wistful looking back at the mistakes made by blindly trusting in greed.

Moving past Mullen’s soulful portrayal of Arina, Declan Conlon’s Peter steals virtually every scene he’s in. He’s a long way from Fair City’s Torlough, as fucked-up Peter – a sexually-repressed bible-quoting sociopath, hellbent on bedding servants and his niece with equal aplomb. Peter is a hot concentration of a terrible hunger to dominate his family and community with every strand of his being; a confluence of greed and deviancy. Oh, how Conlon eats up whatever Mullen leaves of the stage.

While terribly conscious of its literary forebearers, Lear and The Golovlyov Family, Murphy’s piece finds enough middle ground with the current economic and political malaise to remain vital and easily accessible to the masses. My plus one even noted nods to Rochester.

On the directorship, the play seems oddly paced. By the time the interval came, I felt the emotional toil of the running several marathons. I was a little worn by the sheer ferocity of the performances. The resumption after the interval was by contrast, a muted affair. A pointed change of pace to play with the audience too much for them to swallow? The set was bare-bones, almost a nod to our rangy nerves.

Pacing aside, the play was a wonderful piece and a burning confessional on greed and the duplicity of sociopaths.

Last Days of A Reluctant Tyrant ends its run at the Abbey tomorrow night.

Picture by Ros Kavanagh. Shamefully borrowed from the Abbey Theatre site.

Via Justin. DNS attacks and redirects to advertising pages.

How to make a twinkle board.

You want to hang this over your desk! Wantsies! Via Sell Sell!

Smashing Magazine’s HTML 5 cheatsheet.

Our childhood favourites reimagined blockbustery.

Bon Iver ‘Wisconsin’ (just the track)

Charles with another brilliant review. This time, Volver!

Damien wrote an excellent post on finding the beat. That creative beat.

Twitter for Busy People.

Debunking social media myths.

Unfocused groups.

Liking the latest Pretty Much Amazing ‘cast!

Blonde Redhead ‘Heroine’ [just music]

J Dilla ‘Nothing Like This’

As a teen, I stuck those terribly greenie,  luminous stars on the ceiling of my room. And at night, they’d shine. An inside-outside galaxy. The posters changed on my walls, but my stars still twinkled.

In the months coming up to exams, I’d draft massive posters and hang them all over my room. I’d pace and learn or simply sit still to gather my thoughts and drink them in. Always surrounded by posters. Surrounded by things that measured progress, taught me something new or told me where I came from.

In some ways, sticking to clean lines of conventional interior design robs us of marking life events. Makes it impossible to really live in rooms.

This month’s Creative Review has a piece on how modern composers are adopting colour and graphics in unconventional notation, with the roots of the article from The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. The book charts the how classical music changed in the Twentieth Century moving from Viennese waltz twirlings to the Cage’s idiom that anything is music if you listen hard enough.

For as much as the unconventional notation tells the composer, conductor and musicians what to do and when, it’s also a tangible impression of where the creativity came from. How it was hewn out of the mind and onto white paper.

I used to paint quite a bit. The strange thing about painting I found was the remembrance of moments every time I came back to them. I’d remember the amazing strong cup of tea I’d made on that flower petal. Or perhaps, the tune and radio station I listened to on the sketch layout of that guitar.

How do you measure the space you live in? Are you teaching yourself new ways to measure and share outside Cookie Cutters?

Patrick publishes a handy script for screen capturing, uploading to a server and urling.[updated]

Via Metafilter. Proof of the Free Will Theorem.

Support group for carrot munchers. Soyfuckers anonymous.

NPR giving a first listen to Bjork’s Voltaic.

Wrangler’s advert -  ‘We Are Animals’.

Blur ‘Tender’ at Glastonbury last night. So tingly, it’s given me tongles. Skip ahead to 5:39 and listen to the crowd singing it back. Possibly the only band I’d like to see at Oxegen just for those 10 minutes.

This morning, I’m stretching to

• Peaches ‘Mommy Complex’
• Friendly Fires ‘Strobe’
• Explosions in the Sky ‘Your Hand in Mine’

Youtubilicious.

God bless you, BBC.

Update: this video was removed and the others have embedding disabled. Click here to go to Youtube and see Neil’s performance.

Update 2: Oh dear. Youtube is killing all the Neil videos. Apologies folks.

The Joy Formidable’s myspace. Their site hosts a video that Youtube banned. Oo-er.

Daithí on the Nightjack case and anonymity in blogging.

Terri Timely’s Synesthesia.

Ouchies!

We missed our pop at a Kindling. Damn.

Wall E has a terrific end title sequence. Interview with the director of the sequence Jim Capobianco and Alexander Woo, an animator from Pixar.

On George Nelson’s legendary design house.

So many fun and talented people in one spot. Did I miss anyone?

More pics.

On the ground beside him a sign reading ‘Shop of Recession Flowers – Useless CVs’. Kinda says it all really.

Opera’s product analyst, Lawrence Eng explains:

At Opera, when we first talked about media applications created for Opera Unite, one idea was a simple music player, where I would play a song on my computer, and my friends on their computers would then hear the same song on their machines. That’s not a bad idea, but is it something people would truly want to use? Does it offer anything revolutionary or anything fun, like a social component, that makes it worthwhile to use?

In trying to come up with something better, I envisioned the Opera Unite Jukebox application. Instead of just choosing a song and forcing all of my online friends to hear it, the Opera Unite Jukebox will let me choose 10 songs from my collection and put it in the queue, and all 8 of my friends who are connected to me (via Opera Unite) will do the same. In doing so, we create a virtual jukebox that contains the songs we’ve all selected. The jukebox will then play the songs to all of us (in random order), creating a shared listening experience. It’s sort of like online radio but with a social component, harking back to the days of going to a friend’s house to listen to records/tapes/CDs together. It’d be great for get-togethers too, allowing everyone to be the party DJ.

Interesting premise. Like to see how Opera approaches DRM and security in the brave new world of browservers.

The theme of the party is “Pride of Place” and the ice-cream flavours will include some of our favourite Irish foods and drinks including Bluebell Falls cheese, Porterhouse beer, Kilbeggan whiskey, Lorge chocolates, McCambridge’s brown bread,  Eden Apple Brandy (and Irish apples) and Connemara Seaweed.

Full details on the party invite.

Photo owned by *clairity* (cc)

Photo owned by fPat (cc)

Pointed to the Dirty Projectors album ‘Bitte Orca’ by Jim and loving it’s many-faced sounds so far. I want to rob all of Jim’s music for a lost weekend somewhere. Fin.

The International Space Station captures the Three Gorges Dam.

The Other Back Stuff makes drip coffee gadget reviews scientific and sexy.

Moments captured by Rosie Hardy.

I shot the serif.

Real-life Ryu

Techcrunch capture the pulsating Apple App Wall at WWDC. Each pulse means a purchase!

I spent the weekend at the RDS stalking anyone that’d look at me twice. The exciting thing at the counts is how immersive the experience is. It swallows you whole. Racing between tallies. Watching the watchers. Eagle-eying the counters. Getting jumped on by shithead photographers that’d as easily set a granny on fire as they’d knock you down. Seeing losing candidates look like they’ve eaten broken glass. I’ll be posting some thoughts over at Election.ie.

Many thanks to everyone that dropped by the Count Day Liveblog over the weekend. You made the Liveblog work. Your texts, pictures, comments, live updates – every scrap of information meant that we were mostly on the ball and way ahead of mainstream media in turnaround times. Special thanks go to Cian, Suzy, Mark and Damien.

The Powerpoint Album – a variation of Jay Z’s Black Album. Via Today and Tomorrow.

Via Andy. Make your arcade font.

Love Beyond 2000-esque prototypes. Meet the 2-in-1 turnaround toilet.

An 1964 modem is alive!

You want viral? Dance party at the Sasquatch Music Festival.

The longer I live on the web, the more I appreciate small things. Strange as it sounds, the more and less cynical I become. The more I believe in doing your own thing – being original – and less in fate. I want to give more and receive less. The more I am thankful.

The more people that fascinate me, the less bull I take heed of. The more I’m inspired, the less lines I sit and watch. I have many things I want to step out and do, the more I’m exposed to people living at different beats, the more paths I will follow. I humbled by this more-ness.

Been thinking about the role of community manager. There are so few people that do it professionally in Ireland. Speaking to someone recently, we agreed that it seems like there are so few capable folks out there.

On seconds thoughts, looking at the attributes that community managers have – we all do it in a way.  A community manager is an advocate for that everyman in a project. His greatest skill should be listening and then preempting the slow bureaucratic machine of a company. Feeding back into the machine and being a catalyst for change in that same organisation. If constant change be chaos, then the community manager is its soul.

He thinks about new ways to talk an audience that is abseiling from one social nook to that cranny. He cuts the time to wait for customers and the cost of support. He has fun with the tool. He’s humanises the organisation.

I’d like to think we’re all kinda community managers of something. Nowadays on the web, everyone has a project. We’re playing with tools and building treehouses – blogs like Liveblog.ie and IrishElection. Being active in a community means trying to instill an ethos of sharing, openness and humanity. A community manager does this, but with a business bent.

Before you quit you job, to professionally whore Facebook groups, there’s more…  You have to be subtle. Knowing how to use tools isn’t enough. Being a professional whore that links to everything and anything isn’t enough. Being that Johnny Social Connector isn’t enough. Were I hiring someone as community manager for an online project, I’d like them to have an independent voice, but more importantly, strong moral fabric that’s part of their DNA. Were I starting a project as a community manager, it would be one of the first lines I draw.

How important is following ethics when balancing a community management role? Where do you draw the line?

Ye medievalesque lunchbox.

Sustainability stands on it’s own. Cute recycled luggage.

Enda is not for chilling. * snap whip * Booo!

Heathers sequel? Bad idea.

Monchhichis. Remember them?

Excellent advice via Jackie. Upset is not for upset sake, rather it’s honesty.

There was no central narrative to the film. The documentary was a loose, lazy whirlwind trip through shiny names in design. I get the feeling Hustwat bought tickets to zip-zip through countries. Japan – ping / Paris ping – ping / Rotterdam – ping. As the talking head pieces continued on, the smell of shallow, self-indulgent smarm got stronger. Jonny Ive was the single voice from the melee that spoke about the engineering process. He described how form is informed by material and process. Something that at least one voice in the post QnA prickled at.

The audience was fanboy heaven. Sandals and designer tees. Who am I to talk? But moving past this, the movie did little to uncover the mystique of iconic design. Instead, it offered up prechewed rhetoric – iconography of different sort – to design heads. We smelled its second-hand sweat. The audience, rapt with colours of Helvetica in their mind’s eye, was open (even given to relate overly) but instead it was a handed a bum ride.

Objectified would have worked better as a warts and all journey through a product line, documenting how design in a company changed over time and relating it to a company’s designers that design changed over that same period. Design doesn’t change how we use things but it changes us. Great design manifests our unspoken rituals and challenges preconceptions, all executed to look simple.

The QnA dragged on way too long. Yawn. I haven’t seen Helvetica and to tell the truth I couldn’t be arsed after to seeing this self-indulgent, transparent exercise in design elitism. Roll on those that disrupt. They design because they question and pull apart our DNA to built new things. Exciting things.