February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
6 posts
“One of the reasons I like Svpply so much is I have found it to be helpful in...”
– Chris Tackett, The Atlantic. This was exactly my goal for Svpply: to assist in what I hope becomes a broad cultural shift where people acquire fewer, nicer things.
“Creatives have an inherent affection for every process involved in realizing...”
– (via fieldstudy)
“The grass roots they can generate is, frankly, concerning.”
– Cary Sherman, RIAA. Please pause for just a moment, and reflect. Have you ever said something massively, callously, inappropriately stupid? If not, I would suggest that perhaps you are lacking in self-awareness. Think harder.
If so, did you immediately realize how stupid you were at that moment, or...
“George Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the...”
– NYT. I will show up for every goddamned one of these navel-gazers.
I would say [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] is the Gen Y equivalent of modern myth to Gen X’s Star Wars “fighting Daddy” obsessions. — Jacob Clifton
Darth Vader tells Skywalker he has to made a decision: He can keep fighting a war he will probably lose, or he can compromise his ethics and succeed wildly. Many young adults face a similar decision after college, and those seen as...
“To begin with, you long for money. Then you develop a liking for work. Work has...”
– Coco Chanel (via mollycrabapple)
December 2011
3 posts
zen kōans for NYC cyclists
The city of New York has deployed a series of signs at locations where bicycle accidents are common. The signs feature haikus, the purpose of which is to capture the attention of bicyclists en route and… is this a social Darwinism thing?
The use of haiku is inappropriate; if they really want to paralyze the minds of cyclists, the obvious solution is Zen Kōans. I submit for your meditation:
The...
November 2011
10 posts
TiGr bicycle lock review
Last summer I had the opportunity to participate in a Kickstarter for the TiGr bicycle lock. I received my lock last week and couldn’t be happier.
The TiGr is a long titanium bow and a pocked-sized latch. It’s stronger than a Kryptonite D-Lock and weighs less than a bottle of water.
It looks a bit unwieldy out of the box — as long as a bicycle top tube — but in practice, I’ve found that...
“I think the big problem with The Simpsons is that the world that they were, in...”
– In which a blog post comment by one “lightning louie” overshadows and obliterates everything I’ve heard w/r/t the topic ever.
Andy Inhatko’s latest podcast is a retrospective on the career of Douglas Adams. I was surprised to hear that his favorite Adams book is also my favorite — Last Chance to See, a nonfiction travelogue where he took a year off from science fiction to travel the world in search of the rarest and possibly most-fucked of the world’s endangered species.
Back in 1992 I emailed Douglas Adams to ask if...
“I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls CEO Mark Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”
Citing industry sources, The Wall Street Journal reported today that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, along with his top executives, decided last year as they were preparing for an...
“The reason Lulu is so terrible is because the people making this music clearly...”
– If I had never heard music before, and played the new Lou Reed / Metallica album, I would write off “music” as a lousy idea and go back to listening to car alarms and my upstairs neighbors bonking all night for entertainment.
After two years of on-then-off-then-on development, my new project has gone live.
Lookwork is an RSS reader for visual content. It’s a bit odd and apparently RSS is dead but a lot of my favorite things are dead so that won’t stop us.
Dozens of people in the fields of design, illustration and photography have been using Lookwork for an awfully long time and call it indispensable. If you work...
Yelping With Cormac McCarthy: Taco Bell Review →
guy:
The priest asked the man why he lay there in the square and if perhaps he could be convinced to leave. The man said he had eaten a thing which he should not have and he could not move because the world was revealed to him in its evil and in its beauty. That if he moved he might fall into the sky and never return. The priest assured him that it was not possible to fall into the sky and that...
October 2011
14 posts
blah blah Apple TV blah
If Apple does introduce an AppleTV App Store for video content (as Kottke and Gruber are predicting), that also opens up the possibility for games, effectively turning the AppleTV into a console.
Last I heard, the video chip in the AppleTV was about the same as in the iPad, which has been described as not quite PS3-quality, but much better than the PS2 and the Wii. And HD. So there’s that.
An executive who worked at both Apple and Microsoft described the differences this way: “Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them. Prototypes and demos always come before spreadsheets.”
I’m no expert, but is this not sort of the difference between supply-side...
Can you see?
Have you read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain? It’s a thirty-year-old book that uses certain insights into neuroscience to teach the reader how to draw. Following a few basic exercises, anyone — no really, anyone, even you — can execute a drawing at least this decent.
DRSB explains how the brain thinks in terms of symbols, which inadvertently blocks people from actually seeing...
“In general Sony’s engineers seem to have the free hand in designing the...”
– “L2GX”, quoted for posterity and inevitable link rot.
“If Snow Crash was a platformer, and the Baroque Cycle was a sprawling epic RPG,...”
– If my friend Bo Fahs weren’t such a goddamn luddite he would be my favorite blogger.
Know Your Trolls 2
Last summer I cited Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe to illustrate the concept of a “newspaper columnist,” the pre-Internet incarnation of a troll, the intellectual equivalent of a child who throws feces at the walls in a desperate cry for attention and pageviews.
Along a similar vein, Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post declared that the man who co-invented the personal computer, which put...
“Okay after a decade we’ve finally got solid progress on web fonts. Awesome. And CSS transitions are like hey wow neat-o. Can we turn the focus to CSS filters now? Just some basic stuff like desaturate and multiply, maybe a gaussian blur?” — a post I’ve been meaning to make Omg.
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the...”
– Andy Warhol. I discovered this quote in a bit that compares Jobs to architect Normal Foster, the subtext being that in some parallel universe, Jay-Z could afford a better cellular phone that you. This is not currently the case.
This a double-edged sword for the American Experiment. If you agree...
Mad Steve
I didn’t want to add yet another “what Steve means to me” to the noise but it’s on my mind so here are some unstructured thoughts.
—
There were always computers around my household. I grew up on MS-DOS. I had some friends with Apple //’s and didn’t see what the big deal was. (I still don’t.)
I used a Mac in junior high for desktop publishing and...
September 2011
7 posts
putting the cursor over there and holding Ctrl...
Upon getting a new computer, the first thing I do is set up a small number number of interface tweaks:
Bottom-left hot corner: no sleep mode. I throw the cursor down there when I’m watching a movie, or doing some important operation, and don’t want the computer to dim the screen or enter sleep mode absolutely no matter what.
Top-right hot corner: Exposé Desktop. Which a flick of the...
2 tags
“Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your...”
– Henry Rollins
(via Jimi Axelsson)
Watchfitness + game mechanics + storytelling + goddamned zombies
brilliant.
2 tags
August 2011
4 posts
I know when the retarded, bad-ideas lobe of my brain is talking.
The bad-ideas mind was wondering if we could hit 120mph coming downhill from Park City. We hit 112. The bad-ideas mind wondered if we could climb a twenty story vertical fire escape at 2am. We did.
The bad-ideas mind has always, always wondered what it would be like to be in a hurricane.
—
Fighting the urge to run out and buy a...
3 tags
July 2011
9 posts
“Civilization isn’t business, it’s pleasure. It starts happening when...”
– A Cold Day in Hell, Barbara Flanagan writing for I.D. Ignore the haters, it’s a beautiful week in NYC.
Bicycle-free Boston
So I guess newspapers still exist and with them “newspaper columnists.” Columnists are like trolls, but born ten years too early to figure out how to install Wordpress.
Brian McGrory, a columnist of the Boston Globe, just penned a fun rant where he suggests that Boston ban bicycles because they interfere with the enjoyment of his Filet-O-Fish sandwich. You should read the whole thing, there...