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..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:49:00 -0700

“

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,..."

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:47:00 -0700

“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...

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:41:00 -0700

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...

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:42:44 -0700

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

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:46:07 -0700

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..."

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:35:57 -0700

“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

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:54:51 -0700

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.

Video

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:16:56 -0700

Give a man a spoon full of sugar...

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:41:00 -0700

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 —”

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:11:42 -0700

“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)

"Speed Is A Feature · Here’s the thing: Lightroom 1 was insanely ridiculously astoundingly fast;..."

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 01:59:36 -0700

“

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...."

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:45:00 -0700

“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...

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:00:54 -0700

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..."

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:19:51 -0700

“[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

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:50:08 -0700

A Softer World: 566

FaceTime and the widening gap

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:57:00 -0700

Back when the iPod With Video debuted, a tech blogger — who was notable for his coverage of non-iPod audio players and bias — was at a trade show talking to a representative (probably Samsung) about the new features of their latest iPod-killer*. The rep explained all the ways that their unit matched last year’s iPod Nano, so the blogger asked about their plans for video and the newly announced iTunes Movie Store.

The representative was at a loss for words, and the blogger realized that the competition was stuck in a one-year-plus cycle of catch-up with no sign of shortening the gap. His next post** was a screed explaining why he was giving up and buying an iPod.

- - -

FaceTime. We knew videochat was coming, but we assumed it would take the form of Video iChat, not a new protocol. But this makes sense. Video iChat is dependent on AIM, and it works like crap on wonky routers. Video iChat doesn’t always Just Work (a good motto for the iPodPhoneTouchPad, er, iOS platform).

And they’re publishing an open spec, too, which is necessary because an iPhone that can’t do videocalls to non-iPhones would be as lame as an iPhone that can’t voicecall non-iPhones. Will the “Apple likes closed platforms” folks notice?

- - -

Today you can buy a non-iPhone that has a front-facing camera, but it won’t do FaceTime (and probably doesn’t do videochat at all).

You can wait until summer 2011 to buy an Android with a frontcam and FaceTime.

You can wait until Christmas 2011 to buy a Windows Series 7 Mobile CE Phone with a frontcam and FaceTime.

Or you can be using an iPhone 4 with FaceTime, that Just Works***, in three weeks.

- - -

* “iPod Killer” is now in the history books next to “unsinkable Titanic,” soon to be joined by “papal infallibility”

** Google failing me, going on memory

*** caveat: over Wifi; that’s gotta be pissing off Steve like whoa

Retina Display? alright fine

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:15:00 -0700

I hate bullshit marketing terms. Like, it’s just a DVD burner, do we really have to call it a “Superdrive”? What happens when that’s obsolete, we upgrade to Superduperdrives? I get “Retina Display” though.

Now I’ve been obsessing over higher-resolution computer displays for years. PC users have enjoyed 130+ppi laptops for ages; until just a couple months ago only the highest-end Macbooks got them. It appears that Apple has been waiting until they could add “resolution-independence” features to the Mac OS, so the screen resolution could get higher but screen contents would remain the same size and smoother (unfortunate for those of us who find the buttons too large already). A resolution-independent UI was first promised as a feature for 10.4, then postponed to 10.5, and they didn’t pretend that it would be ready for Snow Leopard.

Existing attempts at resolution-independence take the form of scaling applications, and you can even play with it right now. But bugs abound; scaling is a kludge.

I think Apple has come to the conclusion that incremental increases in screen resolution and app scaling are a waste of effort, and are instead picking a simple standard — and that’s what “Retina Display” really means. No resolution-independence, no scaling, just a fixed standard where an inch is 326 pixels and any better would be pointless so let’s call it a day and move on. I’m betting that this standard starts on the iPhone, will probably be part of iPad 2, and will come to Macs with 10.7. Legacy apps would of course operate in a pixel-tripled mode, similar to iPhone apps on the iPad.

It’s easier to sell to consumers. “High-res iMacs” are relative and meaningless to the layperson. “New iMacs with Retina Display” are a selling point.

So I had to load an IE6 virtual machine (Win2k) just to check if Google Pac-Man would work. And it...

Fri, 21 May 2010 12:48:00 -0700

So I had to load an IE6 virtual machine (Win2k) just to check if Google Pac-Man would work. And it does! Swimmingly!

Not only that, but it seemed to be running much smoother than on Chrome or Safari. Spent a few seconds scratching my head… and also noticed that there was no sound because I hadn’t installed Flash in order to keep the VM “lean.”

So, to clarify: Flash impairs browsers to the point where IE6 is outperforming all the SquirrelTraceFishMonkeyV8 awesomeness that folks spent the past ten years working on. Perhaps that’s a gross oversimplification, and we’d need a proper HTML 5 version in order to benchmark. But still, whoa.

Fun times in my home state

Wed, 05 May 2010 17:28:48 -0700

Phoenix Suns wear “Los Suns” jerseys for Game 2

and now I’m twice as excited about Rodriguez’s Planet Terror follow-up. Happy Cinco!

This is the most amazingly romantic thing that I’ve ever...

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:57:22 -0700

This is the most amazingly romantic thing that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.