Whisky Van Gogh Go

“

At the time all of this hit, [Paris Hilton] was a 22-year-old girl going out and getting drunk and doing drugs and sleeping around—which, unless you are lame, is exactly what you were doing when you were 22. The problem with Paris wasn’t Paris, it was the amount of attention the media paid to Paris. And whether or not she encouraged the attention, the simple fact is that if you had a problem with the media, the target of your complaints should be the media.

… The message of the “South Park” episode was that girls shouldn’t use sluttiness as a way of getting ahead. But that’s not what Paris did. She got ahead just by being born.

—

Everyone Probably Owes Paris Hilton An Apology, Mike Barthel. If you watch South Park, please take a minute to read this.

I sometimes imagine that Trey Parker’s take on a particular topic depends a lot on what side of the bed he woke up on. There was a very similar episode four years later about Britney Spears (IMO a far more pitiful — if not pitiable — creature than Hilton), and it was surprisingly forgiving, even tender.

“ Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is “two minutes’ walk and round a corner” from something else isn’t actually “in” the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with crapping directly onto the Queen’s pillow.

—

Charlie Brooker on the “Ground Zero Mosque” (via nickdouglas)

I don’t like to make excuses for red staters, but in the overwhelming (geographic) majority of our nation, “two minutes walk and around the corner” is where you haul your garbage cans to get picked up, practically your front yard.

Anyone who has an issue with the Community Center (I refuse to call it a “mosque”) is either completely ignorant of NYC geography, or is just being an asshole. Or both.

ask a glib question…

Gizmodo: What a perfect 21st century tribute to Nighthawks at the Diner. And I wonder: has adding gadgets made these people more or less isolated than predecessors?

New York Magazine: In fact, many Internet and city behaviors we consider antisocial have social consequences. Think of people who lug their laptops into public settings. In 2004, Hampton and his colleagues looked at just those people—at Starbucks, in fact, in Seattle and Boston—and concluded that a full third of them were basically using their laptops and interacting at the same time. (Cafés, in other words, were like dog runs, and laptops were like pugs, encouraging interaction among solitaries.) Hampton did a similar study of laptop users in Bryant Park, and the same proportion, or one-third, reported meeting someone they hadn’t before. Fifteen percent of them kept in touch with that person over time (meaning that about 5 percent made lasting ties out of a trip to Bryant Park with a laptop).

If you had told me that the best cinematic sword fight since Kill Bill would star Jason Schwartzbaum and Michael Cera…

augh when the hell is the Xbox version coming out

“ Our species’ history is and remains one largely built around the ever extending circle of those who have “rights” and what “rights” they have. Pick any great expansion in the rights of humanity, from the advent of democracy to the Nineteenth Amendment to yesterday’s decision, and I doubt you will find DNA at the philosophical core of the change. So what is it? […] In a word: personhood.
You already know about personhood because you’ve seen it in your favorite movies. The Iron Giant, District 9, Blade Runner, A.L.F., E.T., Monsters Inc. and Ratatouille are about personhood. The eponymous hero of The Iron Giant demonstrates his personhood by willfully not being a gun and saving the day… Personhood is what you discover when you stop trying to figure out what makes humans human and instead try to understand how we recognize another sentient mind. A mind imbued with rights.

— The Sci-Fi Explanation of Why Gay People Must Be Allowed to Marry. Relates to the notion that (good) sci-fi is always a metaphor — never about the future but instead about the period and audience for which it is written.

» rstevens’ iced coffee hack

Putting ice in hot coffee to make iced coffee is like putting lipstick on a Dell and calling it a Macbook. You should be ashamed of yourself. Here’s an easy coffee hack:

1.) Get a small ice cream / sorbet machine that has a removable drum that you put in the freezer. These have double-walled…

Rstevens is the Hemingway of caffeine.

» Give a man a spoon full of sugar...

“Like Mayor Bloomberg’s trans-fats bans, smoking bans, and posted calorie counts, awarding A’s, B’s, and C’s for hygiene is an emanation of the liberal Nanny State so scorned by libertarians and conservatives—who, it seems, would prefer a Neglectful/Abusive Parent State and a Tyrannical Stepfather State, respectively. Don’t they know that nanny knows best, and is nicer besides? If the candidates in the next mayoral election are Mary Poppins (Dem.-W.F.P.), Pap Finn (Libertarian), and Mr. Murdstone (Rep.-Cons.), I’m voting for the carpetbagger with the umbrella. Spit spot!”

That appears to be the contemporary paradigm. Is there a fourth way?

challenge: mentally prefix every activity you do tonight with “In which —”

“In which I delve into Wikipedia and ascertain as to whether or not Jon Spencer was a founder of Fat Possum Records.” (he was not)

“In which I open this box of crackers and scrape the rest of the hummus from this carton.” (it was tasty)

“In which I endeavor to infect others with this silliness.” (it is done)

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Speed Is A Feature · Here’s the thing: Lightroom 1 was insanely ridiculously astoundingly fast; qualitatively quicker than any photo-processing tool I’d ever been near. Along with the well-designed feature set, it was addictive. ¶

Then two things happened: First, starting with Lightroom 2, Adobe deliberately sacrificed quite a bit of that speed in exchange for some admittedly pretty attractive features. Secondly, photographers liked it enough to start pouring bazillions of pictures into it…

What I’d like Adobe to do is to slap a total feature freeze on Lightroom and focus on exactly nothing but making Lightroom 4 approximately as fast as Lightroom 1.

—

Tim Bray If Adobe took this to heart with CS6 they’d win back the hearts of million weary design nerds.

Here’s a conversation I’ve heard several times over: “Is CS5 any faster or less crashy?” “Not really.” “Fuck it.”

Speed. Speed and stability. These are the only features anyone wants out of these damned programs today.

“ The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.

—

I like Prince’s take on this. It’s silly, but opting out is perfectly legitimate. Staying on the Internet and insisting that it conform to the way you imagine it ought to work, this way lies madness.

Would be cool if he stuck to his analog guns and went all-vinyl, though. CDs are just more numbers in your ear.

(BoingBoing via the Daily mirror) (via nerdcast)

We all hate it when directors go back and retroactively fuck their classics, but: what if we took Mel Gibson’s good movies and replaced him with Bruce Willis?

Maybe this power could be used for evil or good. Worth thinking over.

“ [The Incredibles] starts out plainly enough by highlighting how awesome superheroes are, a concept that most kids are already familiar with. Having covered the basics, it introduces the moral ambiguity of euthanasia and the Right to Life debate. The movie also explores the Kafkaesque inner workings of the insurance industry, and one can rest assured that kids will take away an understanding of the claim’s importance over the shareholder, bearing in mind, of course, the value of positive quarterly dividends.

— A Curmudgeon Reviews Pixar Movies. Incredibles is a weird movie. “Syndrome,” the hero, is a Prometheus who wishes to deliver the fire of superpowers to humanity; the Parrs are an indignantly deposed oligarchy who use him as a distraction to engineer a return to power.

A Softer World: 566