Tonight's the all-ages Red Bull Big Tune Battle at Neumo's. It's a big hiphop competition (twelve producers are picked to compete, whittled down from the eighty who applied from all over the Northwest and even northern California), and the regional showdown for one of the only legit national beat battles. This year's featured guests are Detroit's Black Milk and Elzhi. more ›

We here at Seattlest use the internet a lot, so when a website we visit strikes us as exceptionally useful, we think it deserves some props, even if doing so makes us look a little dorky. We'll warn you in advance, it’s going to be hard to swallow what we're about to say, so brace yourself. more ›

We have to be honest: We were slightly annoyed when we read the email promoting Seattle School's (of Motel fame) latest event. Anything that calls an organization "insanely exuberant" and says that it is putting on one of the "craziest film events in the history of the city" is trying pretty hard to sound zany and exciting. more ›

Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Nintendo, The Robot Co-Op; the list of big name tech companies in the Puget Sound region includes some of the biggest, which is why we were surprised by the recent bandwidth report that ranked Washington 18th among U.S. states in high-speed internet access. Illinois is 17th, Michigan is 19th. Two fine states but what tech shops do they have? Rhode Island is number one, Kansas 2 and Jersey 3. Apparently the presence of large technology companies has shit to do with the speed of the general interweb in a region. California is 38th (phbbbbttt!) and South Dakota is dead 50th, which should be a warning to us all. Don't be like SD. We take it on faith that a slow internet leads directly to things like full-on abortion bans, although when we tried making a Red State vs Blue State map with these speed rankings it didn't pan out. more ›

Seattlest is more a Nordstrom Rack customer than Nordstrom proper shopper and we're not really interested in an RSS feed telling us that the Rack has a new shipment of six hundred thousand unsorted and unwanted shoes for us to pick through, but we realize that some people actually might be interested in up-to-the-minute information on the contents of the virtual shelves at Nordstrom.com. Enter Nordstrom RSS. more ›

God dammit! We're in no way convinced carbon offsets are any kind of a solution to global warming, but the news that a King County court has decided that Seattle City Light can't use ratepayer's money to buy them pisses us off nonetheless. Their argument is that it should be general taxpayer money that saves the Earth, and that ratepayer money is for the operation of the utility. more ›

There's a great opportunity to participate in a hack of Amazon.com today that won't net you a big list of credit card numbers or any free books or anything, but it will let you feel like you put one over on a local giant while at the same time helped a local website save the planet. And who would pass that up? The WorldChanging book which we've been mentioning lately (here and here) is for sale at Amazon and doing well, but WorldChanging.com and their book's publishers don't really have the capacity to do the huge marketing push that is necessary today to get a book in front of a whole lot of people. In lieu of millions of dollars of PR they've designed a situation that should get WorldChanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century way up on the Amazon bestseller's list. That list is more or less real time as it takes into consideration only sales over the last twenty four hour period, so if a whole lot of people buy a book at the same time that book is likely to be an Amazon bestseller, if only for a day. A day is enough, though, to get a whole lot of notice. People pay attention to what happens on Amazon. more ›

Seattlest finally got out to see a performance of Line One at the CHAC on Friday. The premise of Line One is that the actors on stage are all wearing Bluetooth cell phone earpieces - Different people call the show and are patched through to various actors' cell phones and the actors repeat what they say. The theme is different for each performance's phone calls, and part of the reason we took so long to get to a show is that we were waiting until the "Meet Me At The Mall" night. However, we screwed it up and went on Friday which was spooky and supernatural Friday the 13th night and had nothing to do with the mall. Meet Me At The Mall was Thursday night. more ›

The last few days have been overcast haze, and the forecast doesn't look much better. But summer hit Seattle a week ago, with temperatures into the high 80s. So it is about time to dust off the swimsuit and get ready to head down to your local Seattle Parks beach. You can check the bacterial count and the temperature before you go at the King County Beach monitoring website. Signs should be posted if there is some public health reason to close the beach. This Seattlest has been swimming in area lakes including Lake Union for years without getting ill or developing "Swimmer's Itch" (which is apparently due to the Canada geese). King County also makes available not so "real time" data collected at various water quality and weather buoys and even a narrative story about Lake Washington. more ›

Events this past Saturday night had astronomists, seismologists, public utility watchers, and conspiracy theorists well occupied. Seattlest feels bad for those individuals that belong to two or more of those... more ›