August 2009
58 posts
Katrina's Wake →
Five days after Katrina struck I scribbled this missive and printed out a few dozen copies and scattered them around my college campus. Surprisingly, it actually managed to get people talking, volunteering—even taking in refugees.
I remain eternally furious about this chapter in our history. Heckuva job, Brownie.
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”
– T.S Eliot (related)
(via @jacecooke)
A brief account of a thankfully brief elevator...
Me: What floor?
Him: We tend to all travel on an ellipse, wherever we're going.
Me: Pardon?
Him: Around the orbit, you know.
Me: ...
Me: Right. What floor?
Godwin's Law 2.0 →
By now we’re probably all familiar with Godwin’s Law, but for those of us who aren’t, it’s an old internet adage which states: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Godwin’s Law can be easily reformulated for the advanced text styling of the World Wide Web, as a similar degradation...
lol@Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein—or “Wiggy”, as I used to lovingly call him back in college when we’d get trashed on heffeweizen and spend hours on end lolling at Cantor’s continuum hypothesis and jaykaying over Bertrand Russell’s affliction with chronic masturbation—used to talk a lot of nonsense about how there was no such thing as a “private language”....
mills:
While I loved Tess Lynch’s essay on the ostensible Internet archive, I think no such archive exists: the ever-increasing availability of documentary material has done little to make us intelligible to one another…
[…]
Only enacted imagination -art-, which is made wholly within us by the effort of others, can communicate from these interior spaces, and art remains as rare now...
1 tag
THE INTERNET, Aug 26 — In a response to growing consumer demand for less journalistic integrity and more useless crap in online reporting, the Silicon Alley division of Business Insider is repositioning itself as “the next TechCrunch”, according to internal company memos obtained by Langer.
The SVI’s recent strategic shift made its public debut yesterday as the blog...
tesslynch:
I waste some time, now and then, thinking of how our generation will deal with the day our children discover the archives of Our Internet Lives. Usually this wasted time is spent sliding down an emotional and theoretical hill: at first, amusement (having children! That’s for older siblings! Man, I’m just trying to live for today! But okay, okay, what if); then, perhaps, a little bit...
I think I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I had to read The Catcher in the Rye and really the only memorable thing I took away from the book was how intensely I hated Holden Caufield. But here I am fifteen years later and a friend’s been pressuring me to revisit the book and I thought, you know, what the hell, I mean I’m twenty-nine and I’m not exactly a fan of that...
“I shun the predominant styles of coding because that would go against the very...”
– Excerpts from “a letter from _why”, via aberant space.
All mentions of “programmer” and “code” in this quote can be easily substituted with whatever it is we’re passionate about, whatever it is we hope to improve, wherever it may be we wish to leave our...
On Shame (in which he is witnessed in public...
Cashier: Did you find everything alright today?
Me: Yeah, but I mean they're not even for me--a girl is making me read them.
...
Cashier: Would you like a bag?
Me: Double-bagged, yes, please.
The elevator in my office building—like so many other American office buildings I’ve seen—has a small TV screen tucked in one of it’s upper corners. I’m not sure who ever thought these were a good idea, but it’s just one of the inevitable results of our distraction-starved society, I guess, that we can’t be expected to travel (in the case of my building) a...
“when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than...”
– why the lucky stiff, quoted two weeks ago by christmasgorilla.
Today, why vanished from the internet.
So yeah I’m kind of drunk and—at least...
“The internet is becoming this thing where it’s just people trying to...”
– Merlin Mann
me: Haha, gg.
meaghano: Bye.
me: You always say that.
meaghano: I have never said that.
me: 'gg' != 'g2g'
meaghano: I KNOW
meaghano: ...
meaghano: Oh.
meaghano: Does not.
meaghano: != means does not equal.
meaghano: What does it mean lol
Top Ten Things I Am Eternally Grateful I Do Not...
a polo shirt embroidered with my company’s logo
“This is the message that most people miss with counter-cultures and mainstream...”
– beautifulordinaire, on the subject of this.
So here’s something: I don’t want world peace. I don’t wish for it when I see a shooting star and it never comes to mind when I’m blowing out my birthday candles. It’s not that I prefer war and strife and collateral damage or any of that shit, it’s just that every time I hear someone talk about “world peace” it’s usually some Ms. America...
It’s been forty years since the original Woodstock, which means it’s been ten years now since my Woodstock.
Fuck. I wasn’t even supposed to be there.
I remember in ‘94 when the 25th happened and I was in the eighth grade and all the Janis and Jimi I’d been listening to had me thoroughly convinced that Woodstock must have been the closest thing to Rapture mankind had...
“Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast...”
– Charles Kuralt, via travelhighlights.
So to add to the ongoing list of little known facts among those who little know me, when I was eighteen I was going to go to college just like every other overly privileged upper-middle-class suburban white kid I knew but I was “different” and a...
“One is incapable of appealing to a strictly rational, amoral response to a...”
– Jace Cooke
It’s impossible to discern any precise...
One of the most cited mantras at startups goes something like this: “ship now, iterate later”. This rite emerged as the salah of startup culture for a number of reasons, but the one I’m thinking of in particular is this warning that no matter how smart you are, no matter how brilliant and novel your idea, it’s safe to say, statistically speaking, that someone out there had...
“How imbecilic can we be but to conjure Nudawn’s description of self? There...”
– Mills, via Markov random text generation.
The Grateful Dead, “Sugaree”, Hartford...
So an internet personality that a lot of people pay attention to got his hands on some digital audio production software and a couple of high-end cameras and started making stuff. Power to him, I say: all of us should be making stuff.
But because this person is an internet personality that a lot of people pay attention to the stuff he’s been making has resulted in a lot of buzz. On the one...
So this oomb guy is seriously one of the brightest...
KEEP SCROLLING.
So in the office on Friday I pulled off this epic hack that was at once so poignant and so profound and yet so thoroughly soul-crushing that it took me somewhere in the vicinity of eight vodka drinks after work to erase those roughly six hours from my memory, during which time I sent a text message to Mills reading “HI I GOT YOUR PHONE NUMBER FROM AN EMAIL SIG BECAUSE I REALLY WANTED TO...
Actual conversation overheard tonight in the...
Dude 1: So yah I mean I'm like rly starting 2 think a lot about getting in2 video games u kno.
Dude 2: Yah rly? I hear video games do really good in a down economy. But like I hear the recession is turning around so I don't know maybe this isn't the best time 2 get in2 it?
Dude 1: I mean, I hear that, but u kno like I'm just so passionate about them and anyway I found this really gr8 looking job at this place called Conduit Labs.
Dude 2: O yah rly?
Dude 1: Yah ttlly they make this awesome game with all this awesome music it's rrrrllllllly cool.
Dude 2: So r u going 2 apply?
Dude 1: I mean I don't know! The job description said you needed 2 kno all this stuff and be able 2 do all this stuff and ur supposed to have studied computer science and all this stuff and I mean I haven't even gone to college, u kno? I mean I just really luv games is all.
Dude 2: U should ttlly still apply tho, I mean, most of the time employers are ttly willing to train u if ur a good fit I mean we didn't kno n e thing about H&M before starting. amirite?
Dude 1: Yah u rite I don't kno I just feel really discouraged.
True Story.
Apparently Thomas Pynchon, the legendary recluse who’s only ever seen in the flesh by his wife and his agent, is a total foodie and a serious Mario Batali fan, and as it turns out Pynchon’s wife and Batali’s wife have the same OB-GYN, and when Pynchon’s wife was about to deliver the doctor refused to cut any cords without the father-to-be in the room and despite the pleadings of his wife...
The Hood Internet, “Tambourine Reckoning...
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who...”
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Hong Kong...
