who knew?
June 2010
33 posts
Wish List
- The ability to maintain focus
- A good copyeditor
- Fresh bell peppers (maybe I should just grow them myself??)
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“Public information is no longer public information, because the institutions here in Baltimore, the police department, the school board, city hall, the state police, the state department of health and human services, everybody, the entire infrastructure of government and quasi-government does not have to fear their newspaper. They don’t have to worry about a FOIA or a lawsuit because Chicago ain’t paying for a lawsuit. So tell them to go fuck themselves, and keep the documents. They don’t have to fear being pilloried for not providing public information. Pilloried by who, by a newspaper that less and less people are reading every day? Pilloried by the internet, by bloggers who are supposed to be taking—do you think any police commissioner worth his salt gives a fuck about what somebody blogs about him?”
—David Simon
Okay, so I’m on page 65 of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds and I’ve learned the hard way not to judge an author’s arguments before he’s finished detailing them, but I just have two quick questions.
First, when you’re trying to convince the reader of the academic import of your book’s subject, doesn’t it completely demolish your credibility if you cite yourself to further the argument?
And also, perhaps the most important question because I’ve stared at it for half an hour and cannot figure it out, what does this graph mean?
Can ANYONE decipher that graph?
(Page scans lifted from Google Books.)
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Tigerlily [DYWHAP Blend - feat. Rusko]
Major Lazer & La Roux
Tigerlily [DYWHAP Blend feat. Rusko] - La Roux / Major Lazer
The one thing in Lanier’s book which I strongly disagreed with was when he criticized modern music for being hopelessly derivative. So I’m just going to mark it as purely coincidental that my favorite album of the summer is a mashup/remix of my favorite two albums of last summer.
“Microsoft, which has been losing out to Android in the software market for consumer phones, said it is planning an upgraded version of the Windows Mobile 6.5 software for businesses later this year. This will be branded as Windows Embedded Handheld.”
—Reuters, reporting that Microsoft is adding yet another mobile OS to its roster to join Windows Phone 7, Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Mobile 6.5, and the Microsoft Kin OS. How Ballmer manages to criticize Chrome OS for shifting Google’s resources away from Android is beyond me.
“Our goal is over time at some point having content parity. The tools aren’t mature yet—security needs to be there, second thing we need is all the tracking and measurement. If we can’t track, we can’t monetize.”
—Anthony Soohoo, CBS Interactive’s SVP/GM of entertainment, on offering HTML5 video along with Flash. Seems to be the consensus among a lot of major content producers.
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Just started reading a novel this morning. Flipped to the copyright page to see when it was published, and I accidentally looked at the Library of Congress catalog information. One of the subjects listed was “Cloning”. There’s no mention of cloning - or any sort of science-fiction conceit whatsoever - on the front or back cover or in what I’ve read so far and I’m terrified that I just spoiled the Giant Twist At The End for myself, and the next two hundred pages will have little to no dramatic impact.
This book better be AMAZINGLY WRITTEN because right now I feel like I might have effectively wasted $10.
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Neglect
This blog sort of all but died in July 2009, since I started shooting the second episode of Condominance. That’s kind of around the point the rate of new posts dropped precipitously, and ever since then it’s been around 30-50% of where it was before. A lot of that is because I’ve been busy, and so I haven’t been reading as much online, so I don’t have as much to post.
What have I done in the past year that’s kept me so busy? Well, I got a job and quit two weeks later due to a nervous breakdown and terrible management, and then I got hired at my current job a week after that. I shot ten hours of footage and cut forty hours of footage together into over an hour of finished video that was apparently horrible as no one proceeded to watch. I attended a few IXDA and BostonCHI meetings and realized I would really enjoy a career in interaction design, so I got some books and started studying. And, oh yes, I watched a lot of television, and a few movies, and bought a ton of books and literary journals, most of which I still haven’t read.
I’ve been losing a follower literally every time I post nowadays, including a few whose posts I really enjoyed reading. So if only to “gain a voice, gain an audience, create a store of ideas, or to establish credibility or expertise”*, I think I’d like to put a real effort into starting this space back up again. Over the past few weeks I’ve been catching up on my feeds and tweaking the blog theme a little bit, in preparation for… what? I’m still trying to figure out what I’d like this space to be.
Anyway, consider this a perhaps self-indulgent attempt at an apology, and thanks for still reading.
*I have really been developing an active dislike of Attention Industry recently but oh boy do I enjoy the accuracy of that quote.
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“The engine of what I was going through was that I wanted to make something that would be really special. I wanted it to seem special to me, I wanted it to stand out, and that kept me from learning a lot of the ways that people make boring stories. I had contempt for those stories. I didn’t know what I was making that was better—in fact, what I was making was a lot worse—but it kept me from going down a lot of paths that would have been boring.”
—Ira Glass [via crumbler]
“We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business. And I tell people that, but it doesn’t seem to resonate well. We bought it for the IP. The WebOS is one of the two ground-up pieces of software that is built as a web operating environment…We have tens of millions of HP small form factor web-connected devices…Now imagine that being a web-connected environment where now you can get a common look and feel and a common set of services laid against that environment. That is a very value proposition.”
—Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett-Packard. A little misguided, perhaps!
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