Eric Jacobsen

one of the more interesting spam messages I’ve seen in a...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:15:47 -0800

one of the more interesting spam messages I’ve seen in a while

barelysarcasm: melancholyjen: mydrunkkitchen: I super don’t...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:27:14 -0800

barelysarcasm:

melancholyjen:

mydrunkkitchen:

I super don’t even need to read this article…

and nor do i.

AND ME EITHER!

"One of the reasons I like Svpply so much is I have found it to be helpful in buying fewer, but..."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:36:00 -0800

“One of the reasons I like Svpply so much is I have found it to be helpful in buying fewer, but better, things. One way I use Svpply is to find high-quality merchandise from small businesses that manufacture goods in the US. When I actually buy something I find there, the digital shopping that takes place on Svpply is still helping to contribute to real-world consumerism, but perhaps a less-bad variety.”

- 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 their creative vision...."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:33:07 -0800

“Creatives have an inherent affection for every process involved in realizing their creative vision. No one that likes to design for the web hates code; they hate the pain associated with not knowing how to code.”

- (via fieldstudy)

"The grass roots they can generate is, frankly, concerning."

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:48:00 -0800

“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 did it take a while before you processed that?

Cary Sherman either does or does not realize that he has a fundamental misunderstanding of Western Civilization.

"George Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0800

“George Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They’ll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem.”

- 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...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:45:00 -0800

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 “responsible” inevitably choose the latter path. However, an eight-year-old would never sell out. Little kids will always take the righteous option. And what’s intriguing about Gen Xers is they never really wavered from that decision. Luke’s quandary in The Empire Strikes Back is exactly like the situation facing Winona Rider in 1994′s Reality Bites: Should she stick with the nice, sensible guy who treats her well (Ben Stiller), or should she roll the dice with the frustrating boho bozo who treats her like crap (Ethan Hawke)?
— Chuck Klosterman

There’s a slightly embarrassing reptile-like part of my brain that would be perfectly happy if I strapped myself to an IV and just consumed cultural criticism for the rest of my life.

You have too many principles.
— a friend, a couple days ago

"To begin with, you long for money. Then you develop a liking for work. Work has a much stronger..."

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:15:17 -0800

“To begin with, you long for money. Then you develop a liking for work. Work has a much stronger flavor than money. Ultimately, money is nothing more than a symbol of independence”

- Coco Chanel (via mollycrabapple)

My favorite videogames are those from which you walk away...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:05:00 -0800

My favorite videogames are those from which you walk away feeling like an utter genius (Portal, Braid come to mind). For your consideration: English Country Tune for iOS.

nevver: Those We Lost In 2011 (from left: Kim Jong-il, Col....

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:57:09 -0800

nevver:

Those We Lost In 2011 (from left: Kim Jong-il, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, Family Circus creator Bil Keane, Osama bin Laden)

zen kōans for NYC cyclists

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:00:00 -0800

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 pupil asked Zhàozhōu, “Is a bike lane still a bike lane when it is only ever occupied by delivery trucks?” Zhàozhōu replied, “Wú.”
Without thinking of good or evil, show me your face before it hit the taxi door.
When a head unprotected by a helmet hits the pavement, does it hear a sound?
A cyclist on a bicycle is as a kitten in a shoebox, neither alive nor dead, in a perpetual dance with a fuckwad cab driver since the beginning of time.
If you meet David Byrne in a bike lane, kill him.

TiGr bicycle lock review

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:27:00 -0800

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 it’s less visually obtrusive than a D-Lock and even easier to haul around. Shedding the pounds of a Kryptonite (or one of those gawdforsaken chains that so many New Yorkers carry) makes your bike feel like a totally new ride.

I expected that the lock wouldn’t be as versatile as a D-lock, but the opposite is true. The bow is incredibly flexible, so you can lock to a post of nearly any diameter, and the long reach of the bow even opens up new possibilities on already-crowded bike racks.

I was also skeptical of the velcro retention straps, but they work just fine. And manipulating the latch is faster than dealing with a D-Lock once you get the hang of it.

(Technically you are supposed to run it through a wheel but I never bother.)

Unless there’s some undiscovered weakness (a la the Bic pen trick), an entire industry has just been made obsolete. Every urban bicyclist is going to want one of these. I hope Mr. John Loughlin patented the hell out of it.

TiGr locks are shipping to Kickstarter backers today. Following that, I believe there will be a second run for public buyers via the website. I imagine that the final stage is a formal, permanent manufacturing company; interested investors should line up ASAP.

"I think the big problem with The Simpsons is that the world that they were, in effect, called into..."

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:44:00 -0800

“

I think the big problem with The Simpsons is that the world that they were, in effect, called into existence to make fun of just doesn’t exist anymore. That post-Reagan, pre-Clinton, pre-Internet Bush I America, with a consensus culture shaped by a handful of TV networks and huge media superstars, just doesn’t exist anymore… I would argue that, like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the show preemptively destroyed the ’80s cultural legacy in such a way that no one would ever be able to celebrate the decade without a cool sense of distance and irony.

… Something about the characters using Twitter or reading George R.R. Martin doesn’t jibe with their basic naiveté. In a way, it’s kind of like what the Beatles would have been like if they’d never broken up after 1970s and kept putting out LPs every couple of years, at least into the ’90s. At first that sounds pretty wonderful. But then you think about what would have probably followed, at least in one form or another: glam Beatles, disco Beatles, cokehead L.A. Beatles, metal Beatles, hip-hop Beatles, ambient Beatles, grunge Beatles, nu-metal Beatles. That’s basically what’s happened to The Simpsons.

”

- In which a blog post comment by one “lightning louie” overshadows and obliterates everything I’ve heard w/r/t the topic ever.

eataku: I have been to Voodoo Doughnuts. I have enjoyed their...

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:17:00 -0800

eataku:

I have been to Voodoo Doughnuts. I have enjoyed their Bacon Maple Doughnuts.

I have been to the Rogue Brew Pub. I have enjoyed many of their handcrafted ales.

But now Rogue and Voodoo Doughnuts have chosen to combine forces and create a Bacon Maple Ale?!?!

SOLD!!!

You can order online here.

Fuck me running.

[update] Tried it. As bad as you can imagine.

Andy Inhatko’s latest podcast is a retrospective on the career of Douglas Adams. I was surprised to...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:32:00 -0800

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 Last Chance to See would ever be available in paperback. He responded over two years later, saying “Yes, it’s available from [some imprint], behind the worst cover in all of history.”

personal notes:

The Hitchhiker books were probably the first “adult” books I ever read.
I heard Dire Straits on the radio the other day and remembered that scene from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. Such a romantic book.
My downstairs neighbor was the director of Starship Titanic. He described Adams as “an interesting guy to work with” and left it at that.
Douglas Adams would have taken to Twitter like a fish to an ear.
Damnit Inhatko, the bird was a kakapo, not an aye-aye. That’s a goddamned lemur.

oh Nat

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:39:43 -0800

oh Nat

“I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls CEO Mark Pincus saying....

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:52:29 -0800

“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 initial public offering (IPO) that they had given out too much stock to employees. But rather than accept that reality, the executives reportedly tried a different tactic: demand employees give back not-yet-vested stock or face termination.

So either the anonymous sources of the San Francisco Weekly and The Wall Street Journal are utterly full of shit, or this guy is a bona fide sociopath. Right?

"The reason Lulu is so terrible is because the people making this music clearly don’t care if..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:45:00 -0800

“The reason Lulu is so terrible is because the people making this music clearly don’t care if anyone else enjoys it. Now, here again — if viewed in a vacuum — that sentiment is admirable and important. But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live on Earth. And that means we have to accept the real-life consequences of a culture in which recorded music no longer has monetary value, and one of those consequences is Lulu.”

- 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...

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:59:00 -0800

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 in the creative industries — or are just obsessed with beauty and awesomeness — I hope you’ll give the demo a look. You can also see what a few of my favorite people like Deroy Peraza, Jon Contino, Simon Goetz and yours truly take in every day.

http://lookwork.com

Yelping With Cormac McCarthy: Taco Bell Review

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:35:47 -0700

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 an earthly cure of ginger and peppermint would surely calm his digestion. The man asked could God make a taco so terrible even He could not eat it. The priest considered this and said no this was not possible and to think so was a sin. The man was silent for some time. Then he said that he had eaten such a taco and that it tasted of bootblack and horsefeed. That if this taco was under God’s dominion then surely all other great evils must be as well. And then the man took the halfeaten and greaseblackened taco from his coatpocket and thrust it at the priest like a broken sword. Eat it, he said. Eat it or be damned.

via the listenerd