July 2009
40 posts
June 2009
80 posts
“As last week began, the continuing protests in Iran, now into their third week,...”
– Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism
“A man alone always talks too much.”
– Ferdinand Griffon in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou.
Jonathon Coulton & GLaDOS (Ellen McLain),...
The singularity is now
Speaking of sunsets, there’s apparently a cloud event happening in Brooklyn as we speak:
katiebakes
andrewpile
eastofeden
@shafferj
jstn
@laurenfarmer
@gawkerdotcom
It’s been a treat to sit here in Boston and see this unfold from so many different sources, some friends, some strangers. This is all making me feel much better about the collective spontaneity of the web than...
There is a phenomenology of sunsets; it took moving to a city center with a rooftop view before I realized this. To the east, the Hancock tower and the State St. building blend delightfully against a backdrop of azures, ceruleans, cobalts. To the west, across the Charles, the predominance of brick edifices eases the eye’s motion as it traverses that vermilion incandescence of the horizon.
A...
Post-mortem
Among the many internet casualties yesterday following news of Michael Jackson’s death was AOL’s Instant Messenger, which suffered forty minutes of outage due to unprecedented levels of traffic. AOL released this statment in response:
Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth. Historically, celebrity news prompts...
A return to normalcy
Twitter’s architecture successfully scaled to support a massive Iranian uprising, yet it crumbled as soon as Michael Jackson went into cardiac arrest.
“Instead of watching TV or playing Grand Theft Auto, work on your idea. Instead...”
– 37signals on not quitting your day job (via marco)
The Hood Internet, “North America Walk It...
“If you find you’ve been doing it for six months and you’ve never...”
– Merlin Mann, in a truly inspiring talk on the creative process, has a little fun at the expense of the “seduction community”.
Dear YM,
One other thing one should not do past the age of 25 is buy one’s “Appetite for Destruction” t-shirt at Hot Topic.
I won’t piss on your childhood nostalgia if you don’t piss on mine.
xoxo, Langer
“It’s kinda weird how news is becoming like indie music-–we can’t tell the...”
– Carles, HRO: Who is the more authentic victim of violence?
Paradox
When you’re a child you’re not allowed to stay up until 12:01 to go see a new Transformers movie.
When you’re all grown up you wonder if you’ll be able to stay awake past 12:01 to go see a new Transformers movie.
Great moments in homophony
Charles Baudelaire: “Mallarmé m’alarmaient”
Jacques Lacan: “Homophony’s capacity to designate another object is precisely the metonymic function, which, as the key to the rebus, makes it possible to attend to the signifier without regard to the referent, that is, to attend to the pure sound of language.”
Time Magazine: “Joe Klein” / “joke...
Brainland fashion consultancy.
Me: Were trenchcoats such a cringeworthy fashion statement before Columbine?
Brainland: Always.
Me: Really?
Brainland: They always said "over compensating alpha nerd".
Brainland: You know, the nerd that tries to insert himself at the nexus of nerd hierarchy. Usually he's tall, with Mountain Dew gut, a high level Palladin and uses absurd affections in speech like "bloody hell."
Brainland: His name is usually Arthur or Thad.
[I link to a hot picture of Rihanna in a black trench]
Brainland: WHOA WHOA WHOA
Brainland: Trench coats are crazy hot on girls, duh.
Me: Yeah but on girls they're just "trenches"
Brainland: Boys can't wear them unless they're vampires, cyberpunk antiheroes, or child molesters.
Brainland: You are none of these.
Me: I'm a pea coat guy, you know that. I like the way they say "hipster", but with money.
Brainland: Really? I think they always say "carries around dogeared copy of Penguin Classics Rimbaud to get girls" or "white supremacist."
Me: Remember the story I told you about how I used to keep a copy of Rimbaud (in the original French, of course) on me at all times "just in case" and then a beautiful French girl in galoshes patterned like late-twentieth century French impressionism and a bright red raincoat and a soggy mop of beautiful blonde hair approached me in a coffee shop and tried speaking to me in French and then I froze and then her face fell because she could tell I didn't understand her and so she turned around and walked away and now all these years later I still spend my nights sobbing gently and alone beneath the sheets while reading a ragged copy of "À une passante" and thinking of her each time I get to "Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!"?
Me: But I'm not a white supremacist.
Me: Also, I'm blogging this.
Brainland: You're gay.
The Kills, “The Good Ones”
Related:...
One of my favorite things about the internet is...
Metric, “Help I’m Alive”...
“[A week] without Tumblr has made me realize that the internet is just an...”
– Brainland
“Plato, in all his striving to imagine an ideal training school, failed to notice...”
– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
I’m all in favor of supporting good parenting and asking all parents to play an active and meaningful role in the lives of their children.
I’m most certainly not in favor of President Obama going on TV to read off a laundry list of parental responsibilities that “only fathers can do”.
Metric, “Stadium Love”
This is the...
Shevardnadze fell in the Rose Revolution, Yanukovych was unseated by the Orange Revolution, tens of thousands of Burmese monks marched in a Saffron Revolution, Hariri’s assassination in Lebanon sparked the Cedar Revolution, supporters of Kuwaiti women’s suffrage marched in the Blue Revolution, while the events unfolding in Iran are being widely referred to as the Green Revolution.
The...
They say that we in our generation define our identities with the products we buy, that we’re only capable of individuating ourselves in the marketplace, and that the only societal roles we’re truly passionate about are our roles as consumers.
Yeah, whatever.
It’s really only because I don’t want to be late for work that I’m waking up at 5:30 on Friday to get a new...
Thesis
The majority of Twitter accounts opened in the last week are the result of heightened publicity brought on by nightly news coverage of the Iranian election. These accounts will remain dormant until their respective owners find themselves in the middle of a natural disaster/terrorist attack/school shooting/hostage situation/Michael McDonald concert/political uprising/etc and remember that...
Dear Microsoft,
You’re a bunch of jerks.
Your little marketing stunt would be merely innocuous and stupid if it weren’t so symbolic of all the years you’ve spent releasing browsers that don’t adhere to open web standards. Instead of releasing a browser for which HTML 5 and CSS 3 don’t remain hidden, you’re running a contest for a hidden treasure that can only be seen in IE8.
...
Attack Attack, “I Kissed a Girl” (Katy...
Slowblogging Ulysses →
The novel Ulysses at the speed of 1 word per day—by Sous-vide Dedalus. This is a project in patience, appreciation and absurdity. It will wrap up around noon on the 27th day of April, 2741.
Incontrovertible proof that Raynor Ganan is funnier, wiser, and probably better looking than all of us.
Improper elevator etiquette
entering an ascending elevator after me and selecting a floor below mine
entering a descending elevator after me and selecting a floor above mine
entering an ascending or descending elevator wearing pungent cologne and/or perfume
asking me to hold the door for you
asking me to push the button for your floor
bringing your St. Bernard on the elevator
allowing your St. Bernard to sniff my...
Top Twitter hashtag: #IranElection
Top Y! Buzz story: Five Reasons to Suspect Iran’s Election Results
Top Technorati article: Ahmadinejad hails new era of hope - amid protests in Tehran
Top Tumblr post: a husky swallows a puppy’s head
Pavement, “In The Mouth a Desert”...
“I have noticed that it’s of no great use telling myself, when I go online,...”
– Benjamin Kunkel, “Lingering”, for the n+1 Book Review.
The custom among thoughtful literary types is generally to respond to the oppressive ephemerality of the internet with a dismissive and almost reactionary nostalgia. Yet Kunkel strikes the perfect balance between calling out the...
“From me alone, Achilles of all Achaeans, he seizes, he keeps the bride I love....”
– Homer, The Iliad, Book IX, line 406. Literature’s first recorded phallic allusion.
You can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater
—but shouting hateful rhetoric over the airwaves that stirs up irrational frenzies that sometimes end in murder is totally legit.
Das Racist & Wallpaper, “Combination...