Every week, I listen to Kevin Roose and Casey Newton’s podcast and I’m flabbergasted by the complete lack of incredulity these two bring to the world of technology, so it’s great to read a thorough dunking like this:
And I was thinking about Kevin Roose, serially and with apparent enthusiasm donning each next pair of gigantic clown shoes handed to him by this or that Silicon Valley titan, and dancing in them long past the point when everybody else figured out it was all on behalf of a grift.
But this paragraph also resonated with me, after a week of reading so many “Nintendo Switch 2 vs Steamdeck” arguments:
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data. I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said.
This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I’d like to remind you that our company policy is pro–Plagiarism Machine™. We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences.
I spent a good part of the weekend playing Type Help, an incredible Twine game by William Rous. Each chapter of the story is told in files with the format <timecode>-<two-letter room code>-[list of code for the people in the room at the time], e.g. one of the first you are given is 02-EN-1-6-7-10. It’s been compared to Return of the Obra Dinn and that’s a fair enough comparison – in both games, you progress by analysing the story – but I feel like Type Help is probably the game that will stick with me longer because of the metatextual element. I’m also SO impressed with the mechanics of this. I’ve been working with hypertext for 30 years now and this was pretty new to me (other people have done the “guess the address of the page” before, but never to tell a story like this).
Rob Shearer outlines some of the issues he sees with Mastodon as it currently stands and, as much as I want Mastodon to work, it’s hard to disagree with a lot of his complaints.
Plus you just have to look at the subtoots his post have generated to see how right he is about the worst of that place.
The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region.
I was not expecting to see such a pro-Europe article from The Economist of all places.
Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
YET, Economist. No EU leader has launched their own cryptocurrency YET.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, Bill Gates has released this really terrific memoir of how they got started, including the source code for the original Microsoft Basic, which he claims is “the coolest code I’ve ever written”. It’s such a great artifact and the presentation is chef-kiss perfect.
We always get asked “why don’t you ever come to play in XYZ”, and, though flattered, I personally also feel frustrated that there’s a lack of understanding as to the financial restrictions touring bands often face.
Los Campesinos! lay out the economics of what it cost them to put on their recent show in Dublin and it’s pretty eye-opening stuff.
Unplatform is an interactive guidebook, online library, and recommendations database intended to help you escape social media and join the indie web.
A great set of resources to help people of all levels of technical expertise detach from the modern web. Or, as they put it “return to web 1.5”. I really like that as a phrase.
Danny O’Brien on mystery of whether Elon Musk is Adrian Dittmann:
I feel like I’m spoilering about a week or so of social media entertainment for you here by not trying to lead you down the rat-hole of evidence in favor for Dittman-Elon, but this Spectator piece, apparently based on research conducted by crimew and frends, lays out the counter-argument — in that they kinda doxxed the real Dittmann. It’s not as the lawyers say, dispositive, but I think it holds water better than the pro-Dittmann!Elon arguments. (I’m using the fanfic bang notation here, where Dittmann!Elon is an official variant of the canonical Elon).
Every year, my wife and I do an escape room for my birthday (this year’s was Incognito’s “Prohibition”, which was ace!). Morty is like Yelp but for escape rooms and immersive experiences. Very handy for nerds like me!
This is a great tool for learning about the different sorting algorithms but also if you bump the delay enough, you get the kinds of beeps and boops that make for some wonderful nerd ASMR.
Hugh Grant has fully entered his idgaf stage and I love it
What is your idea of perfect happiness? Drinking a pint of London Pride while munching Twiglets and reading about Colin Firth having a critical and box office catastrophe.
What or who is the greatest love of your life? Scandiwife. Sociopathic children. Cunty cats.
Erik Braa’s train series on Calm, specifically his Nordland Night Train sleep story has been the thing I reach for whenever my anxiety spikes pretty hard at night. And I guess it’s influenced me enough that now I really want to go on a sleeper train around Europe. I realise this isn’t likely to happen any time soon, at least until my kids get a bit older. But this map makes for some wonderful daydreaming.
For olds like me, you might remember playing Lucasfilm adventure games back on EGA displays back before they got uprezzed to glorious VGA. This is a collection of comparison shots between the 16-colour EGA and the 256-colour VGA versions of Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade so you can appreciate the amount of work that went into the more limited display.
As the father to a smiley little gnome, I desperately want to shield her from the negativity that will swirl around her as she grows up. I won’t be able to do that. But what I can do is continually redirect her attention to the rocket, showing her all the ways our species is incredible. I can use “rocket launch emotion” as a parenting compass and try, as many times as I can, to give her experiences that fill her with that particular magical, high-minded feeling.
This morning at breakfast, my son was asking me if we could bury some of the conkers we’d been collecting and grow a tree. And I was explaining that we could, but we’d have to wait a while. He’d probably be my age and it still wouldn’t be a proper “tree” yet. But that’s okay, because sometimes we do things for the people that will come after us. I feel like space exploration is like that.
Anyway, go read Tim’s whole piece, it’s beautiful.
I love the idea of the 8bitdo Retro Mechanical Keyboard but its config software is Windows-only, so I never pulled the trigger on it. Now they’ve released the NES keycaps as a standalone product so I could use them with my Moonlander. Bought.
This probably won’t replace my precious Source Code Pro as my main editor font, but as a terminal font, it’s gorgeous and crisp and it’s making my iTerm look like Slackware in 1995 and I love it.
(I started using Linux in 1995 from a multi-distro set that included RedHat, Slackware and SuSE but settled on Slackware because it was the only one that let me choose the raw console font, which made the whole thing feel extra special.)
Kenji Lopez-Alt uses a computer model to figure out the best way to cut an onion.
By plotting the standard deviation of the onion pieces against the point below the cutting board surface at which your knife is aimed, Dr. Poulsen produced a chart that revealed the ideal point to be exactly .557 onion radiuses below the surface of the cutting board.
You want to watch a TV show from your youth so you check a streaming service, but it is not there, so you check a second streaming service but it is not there, so you check a third streaming service and it is not there. You search for it on Blu-ray but it doesn’t exist, so you search for it on DVD but it is out of print. You find a seller on eBay who has it, but the listing reads ambiguous as to whether it is the real thing or a burnt copy. You message the seller and they reply with an automated response thanking you for your interest.
Seeing all these little papercuts laid out like this, I sometimes wonder what DFW would have made of life in 2024.
Bruce Perens, speaking at the State of Open Con in London earlier this year:
Open source had taken over the business software world, he said, at least for a particular set of applications. But in many areas, and certainly outside of the business world, it is not nearly as successful.
Moreover, he said, “We have a great corporate welfare programme. Our users are the richest companies in the world. Indeed, we’ve enabled companies like Google to be created.”
A really great, in-depth article about the physics of the main character’s jump in Psychonauts 2. I love the idea of using a MIDI controller to quickly and visually tune parameters.
This is a great list of some principles that would make the internet more pleasant for everyone. This one, in particular, stood out as one I think about a lot:
You aren’t obligated to reply or participate in any discussion. Don’t feel bad about not engaging if it doesn’t serve you. Arguing on the internet is rarely healthy, dialogue and discussion certainly can be.
Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence. 100%.
If Cory Doctorow can fall victim to a phishing scam, what hope do the rest of us have?
Coincidentally, someone on the Irish Tech Community slack reported that they were the victim of an attempt where their “bank” read out the first 8 digits of their virtual card and was asking them to read out the last 8. Turns out that you can basically construct the first 8 digits of any card if you know the card type, the issuer and the issuing country.
I’m a reluctant Visual Studio Code user. It’s got a lot of great design ideas but it’s so slowwwwww and I miss the speed of something like Sublime Text. Zed (from the makers of Atom) is an editor that prioritises speed but copies a lot from vscode. It’s just missing vscode’s massive extensibility, but now it’s been open sourced maybe that will change? One worth keeping an eye on.
This is pretty huge - Casey Newton’s is taking his newsletter off of Substack because of its ridiculous policies on hate speech.
In 2023, we added more than 70,000 free subscribers. While I would love to credit that growth exclusively to our journalism and analysis, I believe we have seen firsthand how quickly and aggressively tools like <substack’s newsletter promotion features> can grow a publication.
And if Substack can grow a publication like ours that quickly, it can grow other kinds of publications, too.
Wes Anderson has started a movie club/streaming site, where each month’s films are curated by different people like Mike Mills and Ari Wegner. So kind of like Mubi used to be? But it’s $10/month and the films are only streaming in the US. Cute idea but kind of a shit deal for non-US people.
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
Bookmarking because I’m trying to collect as many recommendations for new music as I can. As I write this (21st December) they haven’t revealed their #1 slot, but if I was a betting man, I’d say it’s going to be Lankum’s False Lankum.
But without Sony’s complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav’s war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn’t been released yet. Thanks to Sony’s awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn’t even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.
Moving country multiple times will change your relationship to physical media. I got rid of over 2,000 DVDs in 2012 because I couldn’t face the idea of packing and unpacking two dozen boxes of little shiny plastic discs one more time. But now in 2023, I’ve started buying physical media again because streaming is a fuckin dumpster-fire and even “buying” digital media is a minefield.
Maybe instead of spending money on blu-rays, I should invest that money in bigger hard drives for my NAS.
The rule I like is ‘one hundred pages minus your age.’ Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap.
This post comes perilously close to one of those insufferable LinkedIn “if you’re not reading Marcus Aurelius from a beat-up paperback, are you really reading?” humblebrags, but I liked this rule in particular. The older I get, the more likely I am to DNF if a book isn’t holding me.
Government ministers had theatrical fits of the vapours at a piece of art depicting the police attending an historical eviction. They needn’t have worried. The image was clearly too subtle.
No artist would be so crude as to simply show the police force of the state standing guard at Bank Machines, protecting money against the people who own it.
And now, no one needs to.
I usually try to avoid anything too political over here, but this whole situation is just too bonkers to ignore, and Simon McGarr’s take is spot on.
Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer recorded a commentary for the special edition of Monkey Island 2 and now you can listen without having to play through the game. A great rambling conversation with three old friends about the process of making a classic game.
When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
Pretty insane that Oppenheimer, of all films, would be the exception that proves the rule.
It’s incredible how things have changed in the last twenty years.
Sally: You had to plan more ahead and hope it worked out. People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you.
Dan: Even if you didn’t feel like it, you just showed up. If you didn’t show up, people would stop inviting you out. And then you would have fun! Or maybe it would suck, but next time would be fun.
Matt: You’d be late or they’d be late and you’d just talk to whoever was there. It was a whole skill, taking to a person you don’t know.
DuckDuckGo was encouraging for focusing on privacy, but the quality of results has been underwhelming. Google has seemingly devolved from a genuine search engine to some sort of recommendation engine with low-quality generic “answers” surfaced by scraping content from sites.
Everything has just felt either sleazy, low-quality, or both.
If you’re anything like me and have been feeling pretty bummed out at the state of search on the modern web, you should read this. I hadn’t heard of Kagi before but I’ve been getting some good results from it so far.
This is a good thing happening to a great book and better people — but/and, there’s something unsettling about these algorithmic lightning bolts. From afar, watching the flash, it feels like the activity of a classical god. The algorithm’s choices are exactly that consequential; exactly that capricious.
I—a nerd—actually really like Mastodon most of the time, but I would like it so much more and feel like it was doing a lot more good in the world if it were more welcoming and easier to use. When I raise these points on Mastodon, I get a steady stream of replies telling me that everything I’m whining about is actually great, that valuing a “pleasant UI” over the abstraction of federation is shallow and disqualifying, and that that people who find Mastodon difficult don’t belong anyway, so I should “go join Spoutible” or whatever.
And of course this stuff shows up in much worse ways for at least some Black and brown people on Mastodon.
I hate it that I can’t in good conscience encourage Black friends to get on Mastodon, because I know they’re going to be continuously chided by white people if they mention race or criticize anything at all about Mastodon itself. I hate that “a difficult sign-up process keeps out lazy people with bad culture” is a thing in so many Mastodon conversations. (Fun fact, if you hold this idea up to your ear, you can hear them say “sheeple.”)
I feel like Mastodon is a return to the internet of the 2000s, both for good and bad. It’s decentralised, and not owned by a billionaire whose sole metric is “engagement”. But also its interpersonal frictions are like being on Livejournal as a teenager with mods constantly sub-tooting their ongoing dramas and it’s exhausting keeping up with it all. Worse is the old guard of Mastodon who refuse to see the problems with their platforms. I had hoped that the influx of genpop using it in a non-standard way would reluctantly drag the platform into addressing some of its problems (e.g. grassroots quote-toots, even if the software doesn’t actually offer that functionality) but I really don’t know if that’s actually going to happen now.
And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again.
I’m on Mastodon, but I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.
I’ve enjoyed the freshness of Mastodon. I really liked starting with a blank slate on a smaller social network. But as things have gotten bigger there, I’m finding Mastodon is starting to exhaust me just like Twitter used to. I guess I just don’t have the energy to stay connected to the firehose of the unconnected thoughts of strangers.
A great essay about how the vinyl resurgence appears to be cresting because of the greed of the music industry. Interesting fact I learned from this – only half of the people buying vinyl actually own a record player. I mean, I’ve bought a few records I’ve never actually put on my player because I streamed the album so much and wanted to support the artist. But even still, 50% is staggering.
At the end of the day, we don’t know what is going to happen next with Twitter or any of these platforms. We don’t know what changes Web 3.0 is going to bring to the internet. We do know that we will all still be here, wanting to share our thoughts, talk about anything and everything, and commune with our people. Personal blogging is the simplest and fastest way to do all of that.
I don’t know if blogging is as easy as The Verge are making out in this article. They talk about owning your own platform so that you can be sure that your content won’t go away. But to do that, you really need to host your own blog, and that brings its own set of headaches (Ask me what my backup strategy is for this blog! Ask me if it’s something I worry about!) And toxic social media has made me extremely reluctant to share intimate details of my life on the internet. And the whole rise of AI has made me extremely wary of contributing anything to the corpus of things that will help train them.
But, all that being said, it’s a noble goal. Godspeed.
Oh wow! Spycraft was one of my favourite games of the 90s but it’s been pretty well forgotten by most people, despite the fact it did some really interesting things both narratively and gameplay-wise. And it had Charles Fuckin Napier!
So fair play to Polygon for going back and revisiting it now for a making-of documentary that sounds like it’s been in the works for a while. The documentary is coming in 2023 but you can watch the trailer now. And if you want to play the game, it’s available from Steam and GOG and it runs pretty well in Dosbox, even on a Mac.
I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.
With the implosion of Twitter and the move towards Mastodon and the federated web, the internet of late 2022 is feeling more and more like the internet of 2002: ours.
A wonderful deep-dive into a tiny, tiny moment that had a lasting impact. I also love that as well as interviewing game developers and critics, they also spoke to people like Katie Mack and Yanis Varoufakis.
Bo Burnham has put up an hour-long video of the outtakes from Inside. But it’s more than just your usual outtakes – some of it is really cleverly done. Like showing all the takes of a song all at once, and turning off the unused takes as he messes up, so that at the end it’s like a Super Meatboy level replay and you’re just left with the take he used in the final film.
I wasn’t originally taken by Inside (although this might have been overly harsh because of, you know, everything) but I really appreciate the amount of work he put in.
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.
…
I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.
Many people don’t want to [quit Twitter] because they worry: without my Twitter account, who will listen to me? In what way will I matter to the world beyond my apartment, my office, my family? I believe these hesitations reveal something totally unrelated to Twitter. I don’t have words for it, exactly, but if you find yourself fretting in this way, I will gently suggest that it’s worth questing a bit inside yourself to discover what you’re really worried about.
Simply stated, the proper pronunciation of the acronym GIF is with a ‘soft g’ sound. As in, ”it is a gigantic waste of your time to try and debate me on this, because I’ve worked out all the angles.”
In the interest of full disclosure, my editor has requested that I mention that I was Mr. Coen’s writing partner, producer, and creative collaborator on the aforementioned 18 films. I am also his brother. We parted ways prior to Macbeth in a split that the press described as completely amicable. Despite my prior association with Mr. Coen, I feel that I am entirely capable of reviewing his work in a fair and objective way.
Macbeth is Joel Coen’s shittiest movie by several billion light years.
By 1980, Margaret Thatcher had been elected, the band had broken up and punk had dissipated into synthesiser groups, so A New England was my way of saying that I needed a hug as well as a new ideology.
Never argue on the internet. No one will remember whether you won or lost the argument; they’ll just remember that you are the sort of person who argues on the internet.
“I’m at the stage in my life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5. You’re right, have fun.”
“It’s really cool to have it affirmed that music is a gigantic conversation between all generations,” Darnielle says. “I am a father of two. There is a certain joy in sort of feeling like, well, the kids have got a thing going on that I’m not going to fully get. But I can just enjoy watching. I think people fear getting older and fear that they’ll feel left out, but there’s a kind of buoyancy in that left-out quality sometimes, if you ride it the right way.”
After all, as well as tasting of nothing, all that gold leaf will pass straight through the body. So let me leave you with this image: Salt Bae’s customers, the morning after the night before, getting off the throne, looking down and clocking that all their money has bought them is a bunch of glittering turds.
This whole review is worth reading. It’s like jazz - all about the food not reviewed.
The always-on-point Rebecca Jennings for Vox last year actually wrote about this weird trend that mvnicx is a part of. It’s not about being nostalgic for the 90s, nor is it about being nostalgic for the early-2010s. Instead, it’s about being nostalgic for being in the early-2010s being nostalgic for the 90s. It’s a lot to wrap your head around.
My kids do weekly GAA training and there’s one “problem” child in my daughter’s group who disrupts everything and none of the trainers can control him. Except for one. The minute she starts speaking, every kid, even the problem child, is hooked. Being able to talk to children like this is a gift and Fred Rogers was a master.
I love reading about how other people work. It’s a great way of finding new tools, new sites, new people to follow. Workspaces is a good example of this. Uses This is a great example of this. And along comes embedded, a newsletter about being Very Online. It’s got a great recurring feature called “My Internet” all about how famous internet-people use the internet, asking everyone the same questions like “what podcasts do you listen to” and “what are you willing to pay for online”, and it’s always really revealing and helpful.
Nicky Case has a genuine gift for being able to explain technical things really well. In this case, they’re explaining RSS, the glue that holds the internet together. The only thing I’d add to what they say here is that you don’t need a subscription service to start enjoying RSS! Modern apps like Reeder and NetNewsWire allow you to scrape feeds from your own computer!
I sometimes half-joke that I really hate the Dad in Bluey because he’s always so fuckin perfect and he makes me feel like a bad parent but the truth is that I’ve learned a lot about being a better parent from watching Bluey. The fact that it’s a genuinely delightful show is just a happy bonus.
What I’m talking about here is “straight TikTok,” the side of the app that can be described as “pretty people filming themselves being pretty.” On straight TikTok, you can be an okay dancer with an expressive face, and one year later, you get a beauty brand, a publicist-concocted friendship with a Kardashian, and the starring role in the gender-swapped Netflix adaptation of She’s All That.
TikTok has been one of the highlights of 2020 for me and one of the things that kept me from Twitter-doomscrolling myself into an early grave. But this is a fairly spot-on evaluation - it’s interesting to see who bubbles to the top on that stupid clock app and I wonder how much of this is an algorithm thing and how much of this is just the mediocrity of aggregated opinions.
Trent Reznor, answering the question of what art he’s turned to during the lockdown:
I’ve stumbled into the world of YouTube tutorials for various bits of musical gear. I’ve really found some comfort in curling up with a nice long video of someone demonstrating an obscure guitar pedal or synth at length. I’m usually watching and forgetting all information simultaneously but it feels like some kind of accomplishment.
This site features a curriculum developed around the television series, Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017), a fictional narrative about people working in tech during the 1980s-1990s.
I can think of few TV shows that deserve a syllabus like this. I can’t wait to dive into it.
For the last four years, Vanity Fair have been doing an interview with Billy Eilish where they ask her the same questions each year year. They first caught her in 2017, right before she blew up, so it’s amazing to watch the changes as she’s become one of the biggest pop stars in the world.
A hilarious thread from someone who hated the first book as much as I did. But what’s with the random, selective takedowns of pictures of her highlighted passages from the book? Who is the copyright holder in cases where it’s a photo of a book that only contains whole passages from other, better things?
Browsing Twitter the other day, I once again found myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, and it occurred to me that social media is an orthographic camera.
This has been stuck in my brain since Robin mentioned it because I think he’s hit the nail right on the head. I look at my Twitter timeline and see jokes and breakfast updates and outrage given the same space and importance as world-changing news events. No wonder we’re all so exhausted.
My (least?) favourite part of this story is that some people noticed it might have been written by an AI because there was nothing substantial being said and it was pure regurgitation and these people got downvoted for being rude.
I love Hey a lot, but I’m not really sure this needed to be a platform as opposed to just an extension of a client. Andrew Canion does a great job of showing how close you can get with just MailMate.
To commemorate his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly came up with 68 bits of unsolicited advice. Knowledge he’s gathered over his 68 years. And they’re all wonderful. My absolute favourite is
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
This is something I’ve only recently come to realise and I’ve been trying to apply it wherever I can. Go read the rest, they’re worth your time.
There’s an old, not very funny joke about the two hardest things in computer science being cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
But I’d like to add that the real hardest thing is taking complicated concepts and explaining them in simple language so that even non-computer-people can comprehend them. And that’s something Nicky Case is great at. Along with security & privacy researcher Carmela Troncoso and epidemiologist Marcel Salathé, Nicky came up an explanation of how DP-3T works that is so great, so understandable that I’d feel comfortable showing it to my mother so she could make sense of it.
The reason I’m linking to it, besides it being a great example of how to do explainers like this properly, is that this is kiiiinda like the model proposed by both Google and Apple for their contact tracing protocol, and that’s probably something that’s going to become incredibly important over the next few months so it’s important people understand it.
What the idealized iPhone user and the idealized Gmail user shared was a perfect executive-functioning system: Every time they picked up their phone or opened their web browser, they knew exactly what they wanted to do, got it done with a calm single-mindedness, and then closed their device. This dream illuminated Inbox Zero and Kinfolk and minimalist writing apps. It didn’t work. What we got instead was Inbox Infinity and the algorithmic timeline. Each of us became a wanderer in a sea of content. Each of us adopted the tacit—but still shameful—assumption that we are just treading water, that the clock is always running, and that the work will never end.
This might be one of the best essays on technology (and my favourite topics: the internet that was and the internet that could have been) that I’ve ever read.
I’ve already mentioned how much I don’t like Cards Against Humanity as a game, but I really admire them as a company. They’re constantly doing interesting things like buying a private island and giving 1 sq ft to each of their subscribers. This time, they’ve bought ClickHole and turned it into an independent, majority employee-owned company.
I work remotely with a team that’s spread across Europe and I just before Christmas, I calculated that I lost a full third of my week to video calls, most of which should have been emails. So I read this and shouted OMFG YES to almost every point. Obviously, every team is different and this guide isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution (nor does it claim to be) but there’s so much in here to take on board.
(Until I sort out my professional blog, you’re just going to have to put up with the occasional work/devops related post on here, sorry about that.)
Leaving aside the sexism in this article, I feel like it’s articulated a lot of things that have been bothering me subconsciously. My job is 100% remote and I work from home, so there’s a sort of expectation in our house that I’ll do almost all of the the cooking. And that’s sort of fine, because I genuinely enjoy cooking. But it’s also extremely stressful because it’s not just cooking. It’s the planning (two small picky-eating children who even smell garlic and complain “it’s too spicy!”), it’s the shopping, it’s the prepping. It’s the mental and emotional labour around cooking that makes it so stressful.
I wasn’t fully taken with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (On my letterboxd ranking of Tarantino films, it’s second from bottom), but Priscilla Page makes a pretty great argument for the film, explaining a lot of the smaller details that idiots like me might have missed, such as:
… their front gate opening to him like the pearly gates of heaven as Maurice Jarre’s “Miss Lily Langtry” plays. (When this song plays in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, the title card reads: “Maybe this isn’t the way it was…it’s the way it should have been.”)
You don’t necessarily have to train long for this, just smart. This is true for nearly any endurance event, whether it’s a 5K or 100 miles or everyday life. You have to be creative. You have to steal time from the edges of your day, teach yourself to eat on the fly, learn to function on suboptimal sleep, and keep going even when you want to lie down and cry. In other words, just like parenthood.
I’m not an elite athlete, but I am father to two children under 4 and it definitely confirm what this lady is saying - being a parent makes you very good at two things: ruthlessly prioritising and getting comfortable existing at the edges of what most people would consider ’tolerable living’. I haven’t had an unbroken night of sleep in almost four years. When I finish something for myself, even something as simple as reading a book, it’s because I slowly slowly chipped away at it and it feels like a major accomplishment.
Anyway, this lady’s whole article is terrific and is worth reading.
After the previous update by Barry Crist effectively saying “suck it up, losers”, Chef have announced that they would not be renewing their contract with ICE and CBP. More importantly though, it sounds as though they’ll be bringing a moral element to their business decisions from now on. This can only be a good thing.
Ever since the death of The Oyster Review, I’ve been pretty suck for a good source of book recommendations. The Algorithm is good at many things but recommending things that depend on personal tastes and interests is not one of them. Five Books seems like it might be a good replacement though1. It bypasses The Algorithm and asks real live human experts to recommend, as the name implies, five books on a given topic. For example, 5 Sci-Fi books on the future of Europe, or 5 books on The Art of Living.
In the past few years, I’ve basically given up trusting Amazon reviews. If I’m in the market to buy something, I’ll look for reviews by actual people I trust. thewirecutter hasn’t been 100% successful for me1, but it’s still a lot better than trusting Amazon.
a few people in my office bought their top recommendation for exercise headphones and we saw 100% failure rate within a couple of uses, and saw plenty of people in the comments section reporting the same thing. ↩︎
Instant addition to my bucket list - an underwater restaurant that could double as the lair of a Bond villain:
“If the weather is bad, it’s very rough. It’s a great experience, and to sit here and be safe, allowing the nature so close into you. It’s a very romantic and nice experience.”
(Although can you imagine how sick you’d be if you booked this restaurant and didn’t get a table right by the window?)
A higher number means you’re better at LASERS (technology; science; cold rationality; calm, precise action; mechanisms). A low number means you’re better at FEELINGS (intuition; diplomacy; seduction; wild, passionate action; convincing).
Articles talking about how Facebook destroyed the personal, friendly, welcoming internet are fairly common now, but this one by Brian Philips is actually worth your time.
Before I started writing, I did a Google search for “Facebook” and “annus horribilis,” which showed that dozens if not hundreds of media outlets — The Guardian, the BBC, El Mundo, Die Welt, The Atlantic, the Silicon Valley Business Journal — used this phrase, Latin for “horrible year,” to describe Facebook’s 2018. But 2018 wasn’t an annus horribilis for Facebook. It was an annus horribilis for us, the people who actually faced the surveillance and dishonesty and abuse. It was an annus horribilis for us because of Facebook.
To get on my soap box a little bit here, if none of these stories – the Cambridge Analytica story, the whole Russia thing, this most recent one about giving media companies back-room access to personal private data – if none of these stories make you want to delete your Facebook account, then what will? Where is the line for you?
To go a little further: if you haven’t deleted your Facebook account by now, then you are complicit in all of this shit.
Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.
This is just lovely. My favourite line is “Hope it all goes well with the photosynthesis”.
I have a friend who wears headphones on long solo runs because, he says, “I can’t spend that much time alone in my head.” I disagree. He can, and he should. Spending that much time inside one’s head, along with the voices and the bats hanging from the various dendrites and neurons, is one of the best things about running, or at least one of the most therapeutic. Your brain is like a duvet cover: Every once in a while, it needs to be aired out.
As someone who can’t do basic household chores like washing dishes or folding laundry without a pair of headphones, this cut me deep.
The best part of The Incredibles 2 wasn’t the story but the amazing world they built. This is a great, tiny peek into the design process behind creating that world.
My neck hurts. I am never not looking down. When I am not looking at my phone, I become slightly anxious. And then, when I do actually look at it, I become even more so. It reminds me of how I once felt about cigarettes. I experience the world with a meticulously crafted, tiny computer slab between me and it. I am an asshole. But so, maybe, are you?
Instead of the usual gushing over the new shiny, I wish more people wrote phone reviews like this.
The new Apple Watch OS has improved “exercise detection”. Except when I’m sitting on the couch, rocking the baby to sleep, it will buzz and say “It looks like you’re doing an elliptical workout, track it?”. At least the fall detection looks like it actually works.
I have a really low tolerance for nerdcore, but this is actually pretty good. And it speaks volumes that even MC Frontalot is sorta renouncing nerd culture. From “Internet Sucks”:
I don’t love you any more internet You used to be a safe home for my nerd hard and my intellect Now you got so much hate but you just gotta interject Now you got too many chefs up in your kitchenette
Delighted for Cartoon Saloon. They’re quietly pumping out some of the loveliest animations I’ve seen in a long time – like Ghibli at their finest. If you don’t believe me, check out Puffin Rock on Netflix, which is a genuinely great children’s cartoon that’s full of charm and wit and visual inventiveness and it tells stories about friendship and intelligence that have none of the normal moralising one traditionally associates with children’s tv.
Laura Miller reviews Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, a book about rediscovering the power to actually read – I mean deep read – in the digital world of 2018.
There’s a lot of things that stood out to me in this review, but I’ll highlight this one because it’s so obvious and also so right
One of the reasons that digital readers skim is not because of some quality inherent in screens, as Wolf seems to think, but because so much of what we find online is not worth our full attention.
Anil Dash recently took the step of unfollowing everyone he was following on Twitter. This line in particular stood out to me:
… when something terrible happens in the news, I don’t see an endless, repetitive stream of dozens of people reacting to it in succession. It turns out, I don’t mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.
That’s entirely it. I’ve got a private list of maybe 20 people I follow because they’re the ones that are the least outraged about The Thing That People Are Outraged About Today, and it’s recently become my main view for Twitter because I’m too exhausted (emotionally, spiritually) for the main timeline.
Congrats to Simon Stålenhag, but I can’t help feeling like, culturally, we’ve scraped right through the bottom of the barrel and found more barrel to scrape.
I have a lot of time for Chance the Rapper and it’s precisely because he’s always doing things like this. This is a statement of intent, supporting local, community-driven journalism in his home town.
Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.
Worth noting that today, almost two months since GDPR came into effect, Instapaper is still unavailable for users in Europe. GDPR isn’t a particularly hard thing to enforce unless your entire business model is built around doing shady things with your customer’s data.
One good thing to come out of the heatwave Ireland is currently enjoying: the sun is basically X-raying the ground for underground monuments. Take a look at the rest of the pictures on Mythical Ireland’s Facebook Page - they’re genuinely stunning.
I think the only time I’ve ever actually seen Stanley Kubrick explain the ending of 2001 in such unambiguous terms.
The clip is taken from a series of interviews (mostly with Vivian Kubrick) conducted by Jun’ichi Yaoi while he visited the set of The Shining for an unaired Japanese documentary on the Paranormal. The rest of the video is fascinating.
This is a terrible precedent for the company to set, and you can see why in the reaction from the quote-unquote “fans” on reddit: “We’re literally running the company now… the moment a dev steps out of line or try to talk back to a player, guess what, they’ll know we got their hands on their throat and we can squeeze any time we like”.
This might be old news to other people, but I just found out that DJ Shadow has a podcast. Well, it’s a limited-series podcast of a 7-episode show he ran on an L.A. radio station last year. It’s basically a giant mix/unofficial new album. Two episodes out so far and they’re both really great.
The painting of the original Jaws poster was stolen in 1975, so Mondo hired Jason Edmiston to recreate it. The timelapse video of his process is so great.
My 2011 MacBook Pro finally died (these models suffer from a graphics chip overheating problem) and I’m absolutely gutted because it was genuinely a beautiful machine to work on. It was rock-solid, had every port you’d ever need, and I sprung for the matte display, so it never had any problem with glare. And most importantly, the keyboard worked. The 2017 Touchbar MacBook Pro is the worst laptop I’ve ever used.
Slate is sharing some information regarding their Facebook traffic since the 2017, when Facebook decided it no longer wanted to be a “news” site. One interesting thing to note is that while most news organisations are seeing a dip in their engagement numbers, Fox News’s numbers are actually up. There’s a joke to be made here about real news vs news entertainment, but I’m not sure even I can be bothered to make it.
I do a lot of complaining about Warsaw but the one thing I can’t complain about is the quality of the food coming out of the restaurants here. When we first arrived, I would give out about how there’s not much of a food culture here. Boy, was I wrong. (Also, not really mentioned in the article is how cheap the food is here. Blows my mind every time.)
I’ve drafted a lot of blog posts about the subscription model (and binned them all because I couldn’t figure out a way of saying “not everyone is entitled to make a living from the one piece of software they wrote” without sounding like a complete asshole), but this article from Danny Crichton says pretty much everything I wanted to – subscriptions are probably the new norm, but developers and marketers need to be smarter about the pricing to avoid shooting themselves in the foot.
Frank Chimero has a really great way of organising his Spotify playlists, which allows him to tie a song into a place in time. Sometimes Spotify (other streaming services are available) can be a little like drinking from the firehose, so it’s great to see how other people handle it.
“Wow, Felicity,” he said. My Internet name was Felicity, after the coolest American girl doll. “I never met someone who knew so much about Harry/Draco before.”
I laughed. “Thanks, Sasuke420, I guess not everyone is as serious as I am about the Classic Ships.” Then I turned on the best song, “Spice World,” by the Spice Girls. I saw his eyes go wide as he got my musical reference. He was a keeper.
“In a while, Totodile,” I said, which is a Pokémon.
If you’d told me these were real, I would have believed you.
Facebook is constantly urging you to share your immediate thoughts and reactions to every life event. We were a couple days into the company’s biggest challenge before Facebook’s creator shared any of his thoughts on the matter. There’s probably a lesson in that.
This is the best reaction to the CA/Facebook story that I’ve read.
If this is true, this is an ugly precedent to set as we move more and more to entirely cloud-based storage. You don’t own your data even if you pay someone else to store it for you.
Eric Heisserer describes how he adapted Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life for the screen. What I love about this is that his method for deconstructing the story actually became part of the screenplay.
The films, in addition to having diminishing returns, were causing a physical toll: He was a big man doing stunts, running around in front of green screens, going from set to set. His body began to fall apart. “By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China,” which was 2008, “I was put together with tape and ice”
This is the rawest interview I’ve read in a long time.
That breaks my heart, because so much of my start on the web came from being able to see and easily make sense of any site I’d visit. I had view source, but each year that goes by, it becomes less and less helpful as a way to investigate other people’s work. Markup balloons in size and becomes illegible because computers are generating it without an eye for context. Styles become overly verbose and redundant to the point of confusion. Functionality gets obfuscated behind compressed Javascript.
This is one of the best things I’ve read about the current state of web design. It’s not really an old-man-yells-at-cloud nor a wistful reminiscence. It’s a manifesto for diligence.
The Polybius Conspiracy is a series of podcasts from Radiotopia’s Showcase, and it managed to tickle so many of my pleasure-points all at once. It’s urban legend meets conspiracy theory meets creepypasta. And it’s terrifically well told.
I’m genuinely bothered by the rise of spoiler culture, where any talk about a piece of pop culture – even just mentioning the name – causes normally rational people to start shouting “no spoilers!” Personally speaking, I can think of at least three examples of where learning about a quote-unquote “spoiler” has caused me to actually check out something I otherwise wouldn’t (the most recent of these would be The Good Place, a show that hadn’t even hit my radar until I heard someone talking about the final episode of the first season, which made me want to watch the entire thing. And a good thing too because that’s one of the best shows on telly right now).
Although I almost choked on my cornflakes when I read this part:
Sebastian Starcevic, a journalist living in Australia, has written about his passion for spoilers as well. “I was actually sitting in the movie theater the other day watching a horror movie. I initially decided I wouldn’t spoil the movie for myself so I could enjoy it the way it was intended,” he told me over email. “By the first jump scare, though, I was skimming the Wikipedia page to find out who the serial killer was.“
Good grief Sebastian. Using your phone in a cinema?! Haven’t you read the Wittertainment code of conduct?
Ever fancied pretending you were an alien decoding this weird golden disc that’s travelled billions of miles of space to reach you? Well, with Audacity, you can! This is seriously cool.
After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. … So this wasn’t a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.
Comic artist David Ellis is in the process of creating an amazing twenty-first century ghost story. One that’s told across weeks of tweets and incorporating videos, soundcloud clips and audience participation. It’s so simple, so well done and I couldn’t be more impressed.
This is incredible. Marc Ten Bosch wrote a really fun game about playing with 4D objects. But his video describing how the game works is also the best primer on how the 4th dimension works that I’ve ever seen.
Finally when three planes flew over the area, 4channers were able to triangulate an approximate location of the flag. This area was too large to search unfortunately. The 4channers began looking to the stars, using ancient astronomy to help map the direction of the camera and pinpoint a more precise location.
4chan has some of the best minds of our generation and I honestly believe that they could probably find a cure for cancer if they would only use their powers for good instead of just for being racist trolls and looking at anime titties.
The Ikea Bike (the “Sladda”) is an interesting proposition. It’s a relatively cheap, low maintenance bike with some fancypants pluses (e.g. belt drive, disc brakes, and a modular ecosystem so you can get panniers and a trailer for your new bike). This is the first time I’ve actually heard of anyone’s hands-on experiences with one. And I was totally sold until this line:
What isn’t easy to modulate are the gears on the Sladda. It only has two gears, and you can’t even choose which one you’re in. It runs on automatic transmission, meaning it adjusts between harder or softer gears based on your pedaling.
Dublin isn’t even a particularly hilly city, but the idea of not being in control of your gears sounds insane to me.
Have you browsed Amazon’s “best seller” lists recently? Noticed they’re basically useless? Brent Underwood shows why there’s so much useless junk on there (tl;dr people are exploiting the system to bolster their personal brand).
A while ago, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved “№1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.
How many copies did I need to sell to be able to call up my mother and celebrate my newfound authorial achievements? Three. Yes, a total of three copies to become a best-selling author. And I bought two of those copies myself!
I’ve mentioned before about how individual app subscription is becoming the norm, and how this could potentially be consumer-unfriendly. Well, Setapp have launched what could be described as “Netflix for apps”. You pay $9.99 and you get access to all of their apps. There are 61 apps right now, a handful of which I actually use on a daily basis (Marked, Numi, Pixa, Sip and Ulysses - but that last one is a big one).
This seems like a great consumer and business friendly solution. Really hope this catches on.
Jeremy Keith has written a terrific primer on the importance of embracing the web we have and designing with open standards (“material honesty”) and, more importantly, content in mind. It’s a great read, even (especially?) for non-designers.
Coincidentally, over the last week or so, I’ve been making some changes to my personal websites (here and johnke.wtf) to make them more responsive and behave nicely on different devices. So this has come along at just the right time for me.
Manton Reece wants to make a microblogging site for the open web and he’s running a Kickstarter to help fund that. I don’t know if another microblog can actually take on or even compete with Twitter (has anyone checked to see if app.net is still breathing?) but I’m supporting this because I refuse to lose hope in the idea of the open web.
Vice is getting rid of the comments from its articles
Unfortunately, website comments sections are rarely at their best. Without moderators or fancy algorithms, they are prone to anarchy. Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise.
I predict that lots more websites will be doing the same in 2017.
There were a lot of celebrity deaths in 2016, but none hit me quite as hard as Prince. My sister was a huge Prince fan, which meant I was basically a fan from birth. If there’s one comfort to be taken from his death it’s that – more than any of the other celebrities that died – Prince was incredibly private. Secretive, almost. Which means all we’re left with is everyone else’s stories of Prince. And this is a much more beautiful way to remember him, as a series of impossible-seeming, almost contradictory legends. Like this one from Van Jones, the political activist.
Van Jones: He was very interested in the world. He wanted me to explain how the White House worked. He asked very detailed kind of foreign-policy questions. And then he’d ask, “Why doesn’t Obama just outlaw birthdays?” [laughs] I’m, like, “What?” He said, “I was hoping that Obama, as soon as he was elected, would get up and announce there’d be no more Christmas presents and no more birthdays—we’ve got too much to do.” I said, “Yeah, I don’t know if that would go over too well.”
$20 for 151 of some of the best indie games on itch.io, with all the proceeds going to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Personal favourites: Proteus, Gone Home, Curtain (by Irish developer Dreamfeel), The Temple of No. Oh look, it’s just a great bunch of games for a really great cause. Just buy it.
But the Sketch model seems like a pretty great compromise. Buy a license and you’ll receive a year’s worth of free upgrades. After that, no more upgrades (besides bug-fix upgrades) but your software will continue to work. This seems like a really clever and consumer-friendly way of addressing this problem.
Tony Zhou (of the excellent Every Frame a Painting) takes a look at the difference between the US and UK trailers for the new Ghostbusters and how a few frames can make all the difference between a joke that hits and a joke that lands.
BDC: Do your friends and family know you write these novels, or is it private? You mention your husband in your bio, Does he know?
Lacey: My husband knows. Some friends know. That’s about it. He actually helped with some of the finer football details in the Gronkalish book. But I am the heat commander. I control the boners.
The Witness is a frustrating game. Not just because the puzzles are hard, but because the game demands so much of your time (I’ve spent hours on individual puzzles) and because the world hints at so much but appears to deliver (from where I’m standing, at least) so little apart from more puzzles for you to bash your head against. So it’s nice to step back and just appreciate the beauty of the world they created.
Long one, but completely worth your time. The point SecretGamerGrrl makes about the shared language of hate groups nails what I found so troubling about the recent anti-feminist posts by Scott Adams and Eric S. Raymond. It’s easy to dismiss them and say that we should just expect these kinds of posts from white, cis, middle-age men, but it shows that they’re just a hop, skip and a jump away from something really dangerous.
The producers of Homeland hired a bunch of street artists to graffiti the sets, to make it seem “authentic”. The artists used the opportunity to write a load of anti-Homeland slogans in Arabic and no-one noticed. Just wonderful.
As we continue on, we couldn’t be more excited about the future of ebooks and mobile reading. …
With that, we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months.
This is a real shame. Their product (Netflix for ebooks) was pretty good, but their Oyster Review was one of the best-curated sources of book recommendations on the internet. For proof of this, check out their list of the 100 best books of the decade so far. Can anyone suggest a replacement?
Camera Restricta is a speculative design of a new kind of camera. It locates itself via GPS and searches online for photos that have been geotagged nearby. If the camera decides that too many photos have been taken at your location, it retracts the shutter and blocks the viewfinder. You can’t take any more pictures here.
When I go to a concert (lol, like that’s a thing I still do) and I see hundreds of cameraphones shooting up to take a photo of the lead singer, I wonder: what’s the point of that? There’s nothing tying you to that photo. Anyone could have taken it, so why not just go into Twitter or something and grab someone else’s photo? Maybe even someone shooting with better equipment than you?
I don’t think the Camera Restricta will catch on. People care too much about their fitness selfies. But I still love the idea of it.
Some kind soul on Metafilter has collected together all of Alex Cox and Mark Cousins’ introductions to Moviedrome. You could do a lot worse with your day than to spend a few hours watching these. They’re like a complete film education in short, 10-minute burts. Warning: watching these will make you despair about the fact we don’t have a show like this today.
… I decided to be deliberate about marking achievements by eating one donut. Well, sometimes more than one, if it’s a really big deal. The act of donut-eating has actually helped me feel like I’m accomplishing my career goals.
Have you ever owned anything? This is why you cannot forgive any of your former lovers. Things like “having chairs” is preventing you from living your best life, and also you should throw away any item of clothing you’re not currently wearing. If it’s not on your skin, you don’t really love it, do you?
“I see life as like being attacked by a bear,” she says. “You can run, you can pretend to be dead or you can make yourself bigger. So, if you’re my stature, you stand on a chair and bang a pan and scream and shout as if you’re going to attack the bear. This is my go-to strategy. I really liked being pregnant, for example, because I got to take up more space.”
I smelled a rat with the Holus early on - in the original pitch, they showed a video conference using a side angle, which would require a super-fancy camera on the other end. Joanie Mercier really dug into the project and showed what a goddamn mess this is. Strangest discovery: the “staff pick” badge means absolutely nothing on Kickstarter.
I hated Ernest Cline’s previous book, Ready Player One. I genuinely hated it with a burning passion. It was one of the worst books I read last year. And the fact that everyone else (even the New York Times!) loved it made me wonder if it was just something broken in me. Which is why Laura Hudson’s review of his new book, Armada (and by extension, her critique of RPO), has cheered me up no end.
Armada often feels like it’s being narrated by that one guy in your group of friends who never stops quoting the Simpsons, a tic that feels increasingly tiresome and off-putting in the face of the novel’s supposedly apocalyptic stakes. On more than one occasion, soldiers salute each other en route to world-ending battles by solemnly swearing that “the Force” will be with them, and one character flies to his supposedly tragic and moving death while screaming quotes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is a book that ends with someone unironically quoting Yoda.
I’ve said before that Paul Ford is one of my internet heroes. If you didn’t understand or remained unconvinced as to why I said this, you need to read his latest piece for Bloomberg Businessweek - a spectacular 38.000-word article about programming and computers. Which in the hands of most technology writers would be dry and boring, but this is why I love Paul Ford so much. He’s incredibly smart and intelligent, but he approaches everything from an extremely human point of view, so it’s a wonderful read.
Casey Johnston goes deep to find the best Kanye song, pitting them against each other. Even if you don’t like Kanye or you think brackets are a bad methodology to finding the best anything, the writing here is just great.
Alan Jacobs wrote seventy-nine theses on technology and how it affects and informs our world.
Everything begins with attention.
It is vital to ask, “What must I pay attention to?”
It is vital to ask, “What may I pay attention to?”
It is vital to ask, “What must I refuse attention to?”
To “pay” attention is not a metaphor: Attending to something is an economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain returns.
The whole thing is wonderful. But just as wonderful are some of the responses they have invited. And the responses to the responses. Oh listen, just go read the whole thing, will you?
It may not be a great film, but these photos at least give you some idea of why it’s such an amazing achievement. The amount of care and craft that went into something that would appear on screen for a second or two. So impressive.
This is so good. I could use any one of his answers as a pull-quote here, but this answer hit one of my weak spots:
Why do you EDC?
I like the idea of finding the very best version of some otherwise mundane object, settling on it, having that problem solved well, and then using that object for the rest of my life. This is my watch. This is my pen. This is my wallet.
Based on his terrific books his occasional appearances on Radiolab, Oliver Sacks seems like a really great guy: smart, funny, and curious. So it’s pretty sad to hear that he’s been dealt one last shitty hand. But at the same time, it sounds like he’s totally at peace with it:
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
Nathan Barley is ten years old today and this is a great retrospective from The Guardian on how the show came about and why it’s still so prescient. If you haven’t actually seen the show yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out. And if you’ve already seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch it again.
The amount of planning and effort that these guys put into their little jokes is impressive. Although I kind of wish they’d gone with their previous idea of naming the island “Fuck Mountain”.
When I was about ten years old, I saved up all my pocket money for months and bought myself a hardback copy of Industrial Light and Magic: The Art of Special Effects. And the thing I loved most about this book was all the matte paintings. Such a simple idea, but so powerful and so evocative. I’d get lost in them for hours. And here we are, over twenty years later and they still draw me in, every time.
I don’t know who in NPR thought it would be a good idea to invite the stars of Broad City (one of the best shows on tv right now, btw) to interview Sleater-Kinney, but that person should be given a massive promotion.
One of the things nerds love to do is look at other people’s stacks and say, “what a house of cards!” In fact I fully expect people to link to this article and write things like, “sounds okay, but they should have used Jizzawatt with the Hamstring extensions and Graunt.ns for all their smexing.”
I rarely link to articles that relate to the kinds of things I do at my day job because they’re usually so dry and boring. But remember when I said Paul Ford was one of my internet heroes? Well, this shows why. So terrifically written.
Owning a cast iron skillet requires stability. It requires an ability to think in the long term. Can you live up to it? As you will see, this is not the kind of pan you can expect to cook with for a couple years and throw away once it starts to show signs of use. It’s not goddamn Teflon. Your cast iron skillet will outlive you, and your care is important, even crucial. More than anything, you should only have cast iron in your life if you love it. Now ask yourself, are you ready?
I bought a cast iron skillet a couple of years ago and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. We live in a disposable world of planned obsolescence and to have something that you know will outlast you – well, that’s a special feeling. Plus, it’s an amazing tool to cook with. But this article is totally right: taking care of the skillet is something you have to take very seriously.
Along with Casey Neistat, Paul Ford is one of my internet heroes. They’re both eloquent, creative and prolific. This is a great podcast about one of the things Paul Ford created and why. While you’re at it, you should also check out Reply All’s amazingepisode about Larry Shippers.
Letterboxd is my second-favourite internet community (after Metafilter) and this summary of 2014 shows why. It’s a great snapshot of what the year was like for films. See also: 2012, 2013.
Whittier, Alaska is a town of just under 200 people, nearly all of whom live in one fourteen-story high-rise, a former military barracks built by the US Army in the 1950s … The fourteen-story high-rise—called Begich Towers, or BTI—contains a post office, a police station, a grocery store, a Laundromat, a health clinic, and a church. (There once was a combination video rental store and tanning salon, but it’s been closed for a while now.)
Maybe it’s because I just finished reading Station Eleven (highly recommended, btw!), but this sounds like the perfect setting for a dystopian novel.
For our list of the top 10 title sequences released in 2014, Art of the Title’s editors chose from among film, television, video games, conferences, and whatever category Too Many Cooks fits into.
El-P: Steven Seagal’s the kind of guy whose idea of morality is very clear. Like, when in Out For Justice, Steven Seagal is just this brutal guy who goes around smashing people’s teeth and breaking people’s arms and just shooting people, and then he’s driving and someone throws a puppy out of a car in a bag, and he stops and gets out of the car and gets the puppy, and that’s the moment where it’s like, Seagal is a good guy, because he gets the puppy, and he brings it with him. And then at the end of the movie he finds the guy who threw out the puppy and beats the shit out of him. This is the Seagal perspective on morality. “I’m a good guy, because I found a puppy, and it doesn’t matter that I literally just destroyed someone’s trachea with a pencil. The puppy is more important.” And, you know, I respect him and his delusions.
I guess we’re heading into that time of the year when every site publishes their “best of the year” list. NPR’s list of books looks really tight though. My backlog of stuff to read is pretty terrifying now.
One of the things I loved about living in Rome was that it’s a living history. If you wanted, you could stand on any street corner and unpack the layers of history and yell “STOP EVERYTHING - THIS BELONGS IN A MUSEUM”. But people don’t because they’ve got lives to live. And their lives will add another layer.
I don’t know about you, but I find it really hard to keep up with what’s happening in the news (as Charlie Brooker describes it, it’s like ‘wandering into episode 389 of the world’s longest running and most complex soap opera’). This isn’t helped by the fact I’m more likely to spend an entire day reading the biographies of minor Star Wars characters than actually opening a newspaper. Helpfully, my wife has put together a sort of a bluffer’s guide of podcasts and blogs to keep people like me in the loop without having to try too hard. Thanks, wife!
I loved Guardians of the Galaxy. I loved the design of it. And that design doesn’t come from nowhere - it comes from amazing concept work like this. I can’t wait for the Blu-Ray so I can pore over every frame.
I try not to post about the kickstarter campaigns I support (because there’s not enough disk space in the world for that - sorry wife!), but I’m willing to make a huge exception for this. It’s such a great idea: a game where you write the story of what you’re seeing. And then you get to share your story with other people. And you can read other people’s stories! This sounds amazing. Insta-back.
As I write this, Im starving, but I dare not go out for food. My assassin could be anywhere. Eventually I break down and prepare the meal of the desperate: Two frankfurters scavenged from the back of the fridge, boiled limp and naked. Spoonful of mustard. I am in genuine fear of being shot.
The brother of someone killed in 9/11 visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
I think now of every war memorial I ever yawned through on a class trip, how someone else’s past horror was my vacant diversion and maybe I learned something but I didn’t feel anything. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom’s last round of chemo didn’t take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend’s last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.
Great article about how indie game devs are handling sudden financial success. Favourite line is this, about Davey Wreden, the creator of the Stanley Parable, on how he’d ground himself:
Wreden returned home having decided how, if his game sold well, he would spend the money. “He said that he would go to the store and buy the cheapest and most expensive salmon,” Ismail recalled. Wreden would then cook the two fish side by side and conduct a taste test to see whether the cost difference was justified.
Despite the fact they’re a small team, the Astronauts are pushing the boundary of “whoa” visuals in videogames. This lengthy blog post explains how they’re doing it (spoiler: photogrammetry)
The makers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on how games today are created with an artificial “lure” to pull the players through the level (like the yellow landmarks in The Last of Us) and how this makes the game world feel synthetic and unnatural.
This is amazing. Without spoiling much: his favourite piece of software is the remote control software for the M153 50 caliber machine gun. His second favourite is the Smart Voice Recorder for Android.
I have the weirdest hetero man-crush on Casey Neistat. This behind-the-scenes video of how he works reminds me a lot of Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, just how weirdly obsessive he becomes about every little thing. C.f. Neistat’s organisation of little red boxes according to the relationship of contents of the box to the other boxes around it.
A collection of the people one player meets in Day Z. This is exactly what I love about these sandbox online games - the stories that come out of them are fascinating.
I’ve never much liked their music, but I’ve always admired Noel Gallagher for his glorious, foul-mouthed candour. I love that he can even apply this to his own work.
Interesting. I’ve been getting really spotty sleep for the last couple of months, and I’ve noticed that any time I’m much worse any time I think got bad sleep, even if my sleepcycle tells me otherwise.
Real-world “quest” cards, where almost everything is designed to brighten someone’s day, or at least make it more interesting. The multiplayer aspect almost turns it into a card-based ARG.
The host of one of my favourite podcasts, The Incomparable, has put together a great guide for anyone who wants to watch Doctor Who but does’t know where to start.
Allie Brosh (of Hyperbole and a Half) gave an amazing interview to Terry Gross a while ago where they cover a lot of subjects, including her struggles with depression. It’s the most honest and raw interview I’ve ever heard and I don’t want to ruin it. But she also talks about why she draws in such a deliberately crude style, which I found fascinating.
The reason I draw myself this way is that I feel that this absurd squiggly thing is actually a much more accurate representation of myself than I am. It’s a better tool for communicating my sense of humor and actually getting across what I’m trying to say than, say, being there in the flesh. …
It’s me on the inside. That’s what I’m like when I view myself. I am this crude absurd little thing, this squiggly little thing on the inside. So it’s more of a raw representation of what it feels like to be me.
We called our contact at Amazon and explained the idea for the sale to them. They thought it was funny but were also pretty annoyed - apparently monkeying with pricing on the biggest sales day of the year isn’t as funny to Amazon as it is to us.
I wish more companies were as playful or as honest as the Cards Against Humanity guys.
Agrippa (a book of the dead) is a work of art created by speculative fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh. Gibson's text focused on the ethereal nature of memories (the title is taken from a photo album). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light.
I sometimes worry that my old-man nostalgia is getting the better of me, but looking at these cartridges just nailed it for me. The covers of 8-bit games were things of beauty. Never mind that the graphics could never live up to the promise of the cover = your imagination filled in the details.
For the next 18 days, StoryBundle are offering 7 great DRM-free videogame books for whatever you want to pay. Pay more than $10 and you get 3 more books, including 250 Indie Games You Must Play.
This is really interesting. Even though the song is back in the charts, the BBC will only play 5 seconds of ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead’ on the Chart Show. They’re not censoring a song, they’re censoring a context.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I always find it weird when I read about these “hidden” places that I’ve visited in a videogame (in this case, I think a level of The Darkness took place in this subway station). It’s weird to have memories of places you’ve never visited before.
Dead End Thrills is a lovely blog that takes screenshots of beautiful games and presents them as best they can. For example, to generate this lovely image from Stalker, they used nine graphical mods. These are things you can add to the game to make it look even prettier. To produce the image from Kentucky Route Zero above? None. Just a bit of offline antialiasing in Photoshop to smooth some of the lines.
I’ve been following this routine for a couple of weeks now and, so far, it seems to be working. I process my inbox a couple of times a day and then spend the rest of my time in the “starred” section, clearing out anything that needs some attention. One thing I’ve noticed about this is that I’m much more likely to reply to an email now, even if it’s just a two-word response. I’m usually prone to procrastinating about replying to people, especially if the answer is in the negative. Strange that this email strategy seems to have broken me of this.
Unfortunately, Sparrow seems to be the only desktop Mac mail client to support Gmail keyboard shortcuts. Mail client developers: support Gmail keyboard shortcuts!
Michael Heilemann’s site is to Star Wars what Lee Unkrich’s The Overlook Hotel is to The Shining. Exhaustive and written by a true obsessive. Beautiful.
Even if you’re not suffering from depression (or if you think you’re not suffering from depression), you should play this. Touching and extremely well-done.
This is interesting. Netflix analysed its data and concluded that a lot of people liked political thrillers, a lot of people liked Kevin Spacey and a lot of people liked films directed by David Fincher. And so the first show they’ve bankrolled is a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher. And rather than some lowest-common-denominator, design-by-committee bullshit, it actually turned out pretty good.
I am guilty of this myself, of course. When Half Life started and the creators were showing me the living, breathing world outside of the rail car, I was too busy to notice, trying to jump out of the car through the window. In Half Life 2, when Alyx was telling me something important, I couldn’t hear it over the explosions of the grenades I kept throwing at her.
This week’s This American Life has a story about how babies are like scientists, and by doing things like, say, dropping their forks on the ground, they’re actually working out the logic of the world. Because each game is different, with different rules and different logic, players have to do their own experiments. It’s just a bonus that these experiments so often lead to hilarious, ridiculous situations.
I think that Berg’s Little Printer is a great idea. It’s right in the middle of the junction between magical technology and tactile physicality (I also think its £199 price-point is insane). This is a really nice insight into the design process behind it.
Q: Wait a minute. Didn’t you just buy a house in Northampton?
A: Yeah. We’re already moving. It’s a little more in the country. They want to have chickens and grow flowers and stuff. We got rid of TV, there’s no computers, no electronics. It’s old school. And the kids haven’t said peep about it.
Q: How old are the kids?
A: Three, five, six, eleven, and thirteen. It’s so loud. It’s crazy.
Q: You do loud and crazy.
A: Yeah, yeah. Everybody’s loud. Let me show you some pictures [on his iPhone].
Do you see what happened there? “No computers, no electronics. It’s old school”. But he still has an iPhone. Everyone has a smartphone now, but they’re so ubiquitous that no-one even thinks of them as being a “computer”. Warren Ellis was totally right. People don’t even think about or recognise the magic around them.
(Incidentally, Middlemojo.com is just wonderful. A blog about creative people approaching middle age. Why hasn’t this been done before?)
Storyboard was born of my insane desire to consume videos without actually having to watch them. Normally that would involve putting the TV on in the background and ignoring the video while listening to the audio, but what about the reverse? All visual without the audio. On my kindle.
This reminds me of the line in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs about people turning on subtitles and watching films in fast-forward because it’s more time-efficient.
“The Shining” is a game based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. One player controls the evil and sentient Overlook hotel, the other the Torrence family, winter caretakers of the haunted estate. Using ambiant hedge animals, terrifying phantoms and possibly human possession, the hotel tried to claim young, psychically gifted Danny as it’s own - by killing him!
Speaking of stupid comments, I recently installed the Herp Derp extension for Chrome. It turns every YouTube comment into “herp derp derp”, and it has dramatically improved my experience with that site.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot. What will happen to all my accounts after I die? Will my digital legacy just lie dormant while slowly being eroded by entropy? It’s a sobering thought. All the gold I’ve been dispensing on this blog and on my twitter account – gone. That would be sad. But for this to happen to Aaron Schwarz? That would be absolutely tragic. Dave Winer proposes a solution: that the internet at large takes a role in curating Aaron’s content as important historical artefacts. A lovely idea.
Quietly, ingeniously and, of course, cryptically, the beloved – and sometimes feared – crossword setter Araucaria has used one of his own puzzles to announce that he is dying of cancer.
Above cryptic crossword No 25,842 sat a set of special instructions: “Araucaria,” it said, “has 18 down of the 19, which is being treated with 13 15”.
Those who solved the puzzle found the answer to 18 was cancer, to 19 oesophagus, and to 13 15 palliative care. The solutions to some of the other clues were: Macmillan, nurse, stent, endoscopy, and sunset.
This is very sad, but also strangely uplifting. I hope when my time comes, I can face death with the same playful, pleasant attitude.
I spent six months living away from my wife while she finished up her work in Rome. It was the worst six months of my life. Like losing a limb. Having something as simple as this – a light that tells you when someone is there – would have made the whole thing just a tiny bit better. I think it’s nice because it imitates the presence of the other person, but also because it’s a small way of saying “I’m thinking of you”.
Every Christmas, Stone Librande makes a board game for his family to play. This is a perfect demonstration of why I’m so enamoured with board games - it takes a broad spectrum of extremely specialized skills to make a video game, but with enough imagination, you can easily make a board game with nothing more than bits and pieces you have lying around the house. I especially love the evolution of Librande’s “Maze Game” from a basic cardboard prototype to a gorgeous, intricate wood-and-tile version.
There’s something truly wonderful about Johann Sebastian Joust. It’s a performance-piece that brings video games back to pure play. And it’s so beautifully simple. In the video, Doug Wilson talks about how he came up with the idea for the game and how it was an “oh!” moment.
Plus, now is probably a good time to pimp their Kickstarter, which will help release JSJ to a wider audience.
5 Whys are really useful for sorting out an issue in the correct way, but it’s hard to run a good 5 Whys. Dan Milstein’s presentation is a great starting point.
Dublin accounts for 40 per cent of the population, but nobody speaks for the city in the way Michael Bloomberg does for New York and Boris Johnson for London. Civic governance is incredibly weak, with an array of public bodies, from Dublin Port Company to the National Transport Authority, exercising power in the city. Any chance of metropolitan cohesion was squandered when Dublin was carved up arbitrarily between four local authorities in 1994.
These are some great suggestions. For whatever reason, the city seems to be experiencing an increased period of self-reflection. And that’s a good thing. Articles like these can only help.
In the pre-dawn hours of April 30th of this year I woke to the sound of a bullhorn yelling un-intelligible orders. I ran naked outside and saw a military formation whose uniforms identified them as GSU, creeping slowly down my driveway. I laid down the pistol that I keep for protection and, contrary to Josh Davis’ assertion that I said “Motherfuckers”, said nothing and went back inside. I woke Amy, the 17 year old with whom I was living, and calmly told her to get dressed – that the GSU was invading the property.
Did you know John McAfee has a blog? Did you know it’s the most insane-slash-interesting thing ever?
What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?
Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?
Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?
If you read just one restaurant review today, make it Pete Wells’ review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in the New York Times
Cabin in the Woods is the best deconstruction of the horror genre since Scream. Actually, fuck that. Cabin in the Woods is much better than Scream. Wes Craven was happy enough to just list out the tropes of slasher movies, leading to a nudging, winking circle-jerk of “You know we know these tropes. And now we know you know we know them.”
Cabin in the Woods is better than that. It lists out the cliches – the things we love about horror movies – and gives them context. And not in some po-faced way. It’s got convictions and goddamn if it doesn’t follow through on them. Asked if he had any plans for a sequel, director Drew Goddard answered “Have you seen the ending to my movie?”
You need to see this ending. And the middle. And also the beginning. Multiple times, if possible.
The Barkley is the world’s toughest race you’ve never heard of. With 59,100 feet of climb and decent over 100 miles, it’s considered the most difficult endurance event on the planet. In its 25-year history, only twelve men, the same amount of men who have walked on the moon, have actually been able to finish the race.
Before and after shots of some of the competitors. Look at these faces. These people have stared into the abyss.
The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.
Translation: I am insufferable cunt.
Honestly, there’s not a sentence in his article that I don’t find absolutely hateful. Using Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace to show us how well-read you are is total bullshit (I know this because it’s the exact kind of total bullshit I pull myself).
Horror movie blog, Man is the Warmest Place to Hide takes a look at the huge role the Prophet synthesizer plays in 80s horror. This is why the internet is great.
This really hits home for me. I’ve been slogging my way through books I haven’t been enjoying and I’ve had enough. As the article points out: “The more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.”
I’ve been seeing a lot of links to news articles about this study saying that red meat is linked to a whole range of health-related risks. The part every news article leaves out, and which the original study takes into considerations, is that people who eat a lot of red meat probably have other lifestyle factors that would contribute to their general health level. From the study: “Men and women with higher intake of red meat were less likely to be physically active and were more likely to be current smokers, to drink alcohol, and to have a higher body mass index.”
I think a large part of my secret desire to become a writer is just so I can rock a load of LaTeX and use a Makefile – a fucking Makefile – on my writing.
If you’re someone who doesn’t give the Star Wars films a second thought, you have no idea how much thought us nerds put into the idea of what order we should make our kids watch them. This guy has perfected it.
I’d encourage you to read his whole post, but if you’re still all “TL;DR”? IV, V, II, III, VI. No Episode I at all.
I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year. Given I first used Delicious in 2004, that makes for eight books to date.
Each gift bag was worth about $60,000. And these got handed out to all the nominees. Reminds me of that line from Withnail & I - Free to those that can afford it. Very expensive to those that can’t.
Nicholas Felton has released the latest version of his “annual reports” - a collection of all the data that makes up his life. As someone who has trouble keeping track of the movies he’s watched, I’m very jealous of his ability to consistently keep track of this stuff.
After the internet design community started spooging over these things a few years ago, he set up daytum, a website to help people collect these various discrete bits of information and to present them in a “Feltron Annual Report” kind of way. And yet according to the “about” page of the report, (and even according to his account page on daytum), he doesn’t use it himself. I dunno, I just found that interesting.
Scientists are arguing that the 8-hour sleep is unnatural, and that humans naturally fall into a more segmented sleep cycle. In other words, I should be treating every day like I treat Sunday, with a pre-sleep nap.
Back when we announced FDX Reader, I got a lot of emails asking, ‘When are you going to make a screenwriting app?” Answer: Today. My hope is that we just made a thousand. Fountain turns every text editor into a screenwriting app.
This means flexibility. This means genuine collaboration - people in geographically different locations can edit the same Google Doc at the same time. This means I can write a screenplay on my phone.
This means I don’t really have any excuse not to write any more.
I use nvAlt (synced with SimpleNote) all over the place, from storing little code snippets to keeping track of ideas and lists over time. Brett Terpstra has come up with a great idea for linking notes with individual people in your address book. Love this.
I was saying to my missus on Saturday about how I was really sad that I was living away from Ireland for the entirely lifespan of the Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield. Now it’s Monday and they’re announcing that it’s being re-opened!
So let’s see if I can use my new power for good: I am also really sad that Rubicon and Terriers were cancelled.
I really like Kat Dennings as an actress and was really happy to hear she had landed the lead in a sitcom. But holy shit, 2 Broke Girls is unwatchable. I think they only hired an actual Asian to play the Asian character because they couldn’t hire Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Speaking of Alien, Mubi is hosting a fantastic assessment of all the little things that make that film so great. Love this line: “Even the design concept behind Saul Bass’ (uncredited) opening titles transforms the viewer’s initial perceptions of something seemingly benign into an understanding of a thing that is concretely threatening.”
I have spent an embarrassing amount of time and almost crippled myself trying to contort my fingers into a shape that sounds like a passable version of the first chord of A Hard Day’s Night. Couldn’t figure it out. Randy Bachman has the answer, and it’s beautiful.
If you’re as baffled by the whole Lana Del Rey as I am, this is a good place to start. I just wish the author had expanded it a bit more - five lengthy paragraphs about the ways in which people are hating her, barely a mention of why.
Along with his other show, Hardcore History, Dan Carlin’s Common Sense is one of my favourite podcasts right now. In the latest episode, “The Very Velvet Fist”, he gives one of the best takes on the whole “Occupy” movement, especially given the whole UC Davis debacle last weekend.
A while ago, I was banging on about the random events in the world of Red Dead Redemption and how they helped increase the sense of immersion and my fondness for that game (at least, the first time you encounter these random events. After six or seven attempted horse-jackings, it all becomes rote bullshit).
Skyrim, on the other hand, is genuinely amazing. There’s so much to do – not just story stuff, but random, one-off things – that you find yourself investing deeply in the characters. I found myself nodding along to John Walker’s story of “his” Lydia. It’s a totally accurate description of how this game gets its claws in you and you find yourself doing things (and enjoying doing things) in the game that sound completely cracked if you try to explain them to other people.
Okay, I’ll admit, I’m a little obsessed with Skyrim right now. But look at these landscapes and tell me they’re not amazing. Everyone gushed over how great the facial animation system was in LA Noire. I think the cloud generation system in Skyrim is even more impressive. This one is my favourite of the lot.
In Ireland, “bagels and garlic bread set for sharp price rise as VAT rules change”
The price of bagels, croissants, garlic bread and a range of other similar products is likely to increase significantly in the weeks ahead after Revenue decided they were not sufficiently bread-like to be exempt from VAT.
A joint Senate-House panel of American lawmakers has caved in to the frozen food lobby by voting to uphold school lunch regulations that stipulate that tomato sauce in pizza counts as a vegetable serving.
I never thought I’d say this, but maybe it’s time Pat the Baker and Mister Brennan got together to form a lobby group of their own.
An ex-PM of Google Reader explains why the recent redesign/refactor is such a bad decision.
I’m glad to see someone with a bit of authority complaining about this a reasonable way. For the most part, the only comments I’ve read about the changes have either been from people saying “Eww, who uses Google Reader like that?” or from crazy people calling for an “Occupy Google Reader” protest. I was starting to feel like I was the odd one out.
There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
This weekend was the annual Horrorthon here in Dublin which seems to have lost some of its momentum in the past few yeard. A lot of its programme had me scratching my head and thinking “Is that really a horror film?” (e.g. Play Misty for Me or Akira). As a result, I’ve found myself weighing up the films I’d actually be interested in seeing and the films I couldn’t be bothered with and decided that – guest appearance by Michael Biehn not withstanding – it just wasn’t worth my time.
Edgar Wright’s list might be a bit obvious in places, but I’d be first in line at that marathon.
Since moving home and doing all my work on an easy chair, I’ve started to fetishize desks. This short video is all about the importance of a desk and what it says about the person who uses it. It’s not helping at all.
Ars Technica re-reviews the original iPod. Bottom line: “if you still have one of these original ones lying around, find a FireWire cable and plug it in. You might be surprised at how well it still works.”
Also, the industrial design of the first-gen iPod is still amazing.
For me, this is the destruction of the only online space I truly give a shit about. (Sorry Twitter, Facebook, etc.) I’m actually really upset about this, as it’s eliminating a social space I’ve been participating in for several years.
He also does a terrific job of explaining why “plus” isn’t a great replacement for the functionality.
I don’t care if Google wants Plus to get bigger, I care about me and my friends who seek to read and discuss the entire internet every day. Is there really no space for different kinds of people to form different kinds of social spaces in Google products? Are they really that fucking stupid about how communities work?
Or, as I suspect, is it just that Buzz and gReader aren’t nearly as effective as Plus at collecting data about my internet use?
In fairness, Generation X could use a better spokesperson. Barack Obama is just a little too senior to count among its own, and it has debts older than Mark Zuckerberg. Generation X hasn’t had a real voice since Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, Tupac was murdered, Jeff Mangum went crazy, David Foster Wallace hung himself, Jeff Buckley drowned, River Phoenix overdosed, Elliott Smith stabbed himself (twice) in the heart, Axl got fat.
The Guardian design team shows the various stages of the evolution of their iPad app. This is one of the most beautifully designed newspaper applications I’ve ever used - a perfect marriage of interface and content. I’ll definitely be subscribing.
This is unfortunate. Trauma is a beautiful game, and one that screenshots can’t do justice - you have to see the game in action to fully appreciate and understand it. I’m really sad to read about the amount of hassle the developer went through.
I appreciate Vimeo wanting to keep their site free from commercial abuse, but some of their rules honestly make me worry that pretty soon, their site will be nothing but videos of people testing their cameras.
This is my favorite photo of Steve Jobs. Leaning forward to connect with his wife after his keynote presentation at the 2011 WWDC. You can almost feel the relief and accomplishment radiating from him.
When I see this photo, I see a man who bent every fiber of his will toward a goal so lofty, so seemingly unattainable that no one thought it was possible, and at the end of that race, with the task completed, he closed his eyes and rested.
Thank you Steve. I’ll miss you.
For a man who guarded his personal brand so jealously, these moments – moments where the guard drops just a little and we see the man underneath – are really striking.
Fascinating post about the approach of the ‘internet of things’ - the idea that, with a little bit of hacking, you can shape the internet to do what you want it to and make it more personal and magic. (Incidentally, I think if this then that is pretty close to magic already). He gave this as a talk on the BBC’s Four Thought radio series.
You could almost do an entire article about the many forgotten subplots in Lost alone. I particularly like their write-up of the Tori Scott episodes of Saved by the Bell
When NBC ordered more episodes of the show’s already-wrapped senior year, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and Elizabeth Berkley were already committed to other projects. So, employing its signature logic, Saved By The Bell allowed the characters to disappear completely, bringing in Leanna Creel’s motorcycle-riding tomboy Tori to replace them—and thus creating the “Tori Reality,” a parallel universe centered on Zack and Tori’s awkward courtship, a place where Kelly and Jessie simply did not exist.
Pretty interesting stuff - overall, people who own e-readers read more books each year than those without. Although I’m curious about the 1% of e-reader owners who read 0 books a year. What are they using it for?!
According to these boffins, Facebook hosts around 4% of all the photos that have ever been taken. And roughly 20% of all the photos taken this year will be uploaded to Facebook.
Kids – not even kids, teenagers – are growing up in a world where cameras are ubiquitous, they’re just part of the device you carry around with you. And photography isn’t some arcane, expensive hobby. It’s been democratized.
I can’t wait to see what this means for the next generation of photojournalists.
but honestly, this second season of Louie was one of the best seasons of TV I’ve ever seen. (And “Duckling” was one of the best episodes of any TV show I’ve ever seen). Reading this background on the production of the first couple of episodes is fascinating.
Also, much as I hate to say “X is the new Y”, anyone else get the feeling that Louis CK is taking the reins left over from when Woody Allen packed up for Europe? No-one else is making New York seem so gorgeous.
Boom is a command-line key-value store written by Zach Holman. If you don’t know what this is, you probably don’t need it. Still, I really love the installation instructions:
Hey, run this:
$ gem install boom
See? Now you can do this:
$ boom
Pretty easy. Like your mom.
I wish more software developers were brave enough to make ‘your mom’ jokes in their installation instructions.
Even if you do nothing else to celebrate _why’s anniversary, just read some of the stuff he wrote. I swear, the guy is what I imagine would have happened if David Foster Wallace had gotten really, really hooked on programming Ruby.
Gibsonton is an unincorporated census-designated place in Hillsborough County, Florida, United States. The population was 8,752 at the 2000 census.
Gibsonton was famous as a sideshow wintering town, where various carnival “freaks” would spend the off season. It was home to Percilla the Monkey girl, the Anatomical Wonder, and the Lobster Boy. Siamese twin sisters ran a fruit stand here. At one time, it was the only post office with a counter for dwarves. Aside from the agreeable winter climate, Gibsonton offered unique circus zoning laws that allowed residents to keep elephants and circus trailers on their front lawns.
Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is a thing by a dude, who’s all like, “I’M GONNA MAKE A THING.” And then he did. Or is doing. Or, you know, whatever. This dude can be found on the internet. He websites to put food on his family.
The Mull of Kintyre test was an unofficial guideline said to have been used by the British Board of Film Classification in the United Kingdom to decide whether an image of a man’s penis could be shown. The BBFC would not permit the general release of a film or video if it depicted a phallus erect to the point that the angle it made from the vertical (the “angle of the dangle”, as it was often known) was larger than that of the Mull of Kintyre, Argyll and Bute, on maps of Scotland. (via rajandelman)
I love any Wikipedia entry that includes the term “angle of the dangle”.
Do you like synth-heavy power-rock songs all about fighting for love/survival/glory? Then you’ll love maddecent’s 45-minute mix of all the best songs from 80s action movies. I went running with this just now and loved it. But at the same time, the training montage music from Rocky 4 has been on my workout playlist for years now. That’s just the kind of guy I am.
While it’s certainly not what scholars might consider classic cinema, I’d be willing to bet that Jackass will be shown as classic comedy for years to come. I think it showed a group of guys having the time of their lives and offering much needed release during a time in American history when it needed it the most.
I’ve spoken to a few people about how Osama bin Laden was a handsome man. It’s a difficult topic to untangle. Elizabeth Kiem does a great job of separating the image of bin Laden from the image of bin Laden.
I would spazz right the fuck out if I had to live in just 24 square metres (shit, all my videogame stuff alone probably takes up about 20 square metres), but fair play to this guy, he seems to be totally zen and came up with a pretty good solution.
“The Portal 2 Authoring Tools include versions of the same tools we used to make Portal 2. They’ll allow you to create your own singleplayer and co-op maps, new character skins, 3D models, sound effects, and music.”
Great interview, but lots of spoilers for Portal 2. Favourite line of the whole thing: “I’d really like to make a really credible comedy game. People seem to be skipping straight to the pure art, and yet nobody’s made the Caddyshack in games yet, right? So I’m like, woah woah woah, let’s put on the brakes – let’s make Caddyshack, and then we can make Anna Karenina or whatever.”
I watched two Val Kilmer movies this weekend while I was sick - Top Secret and MacGruber - and I honestly had no idea he was this insane-slash-amazing. E.g.
Time itself is a concept. It’s just because we’re lame, because we can’t see that fast, because we can’t imagine that fast-we think that fast, but it’s hard for us to articulate it. That doesn’t mean you misapprehend it. It just means that you can’t diagnose it with the same language. The human language is lame. It’s lame, I say! That’s as deep as I can get without dinner.
This looks like a great documentary. I went to school with a guy who was big into his magic. His nickname was “Presto”. 18 years old and he would be doing magic tricks for people in the halls before class. Thinking back, he took an awful lot of shit for this thing he was deeply passionate about.
The last time I saw him, it was when Uri Gellar played in Dublin back in 2007 or so. He’d gotten all into Nu-Metal, he’d been arrested a few times and I’m fairly sure he was off his face on meth at the time.
Tons of great tips in here. I particularly like this one from Josh Sprague: ’learning to say “How much,” “That’s too high,” “This one” and “That one” is way more useful to the short-term traveler than “Hello, how are you?”’. And also ‘Eat it before asking what it is.’ (via Justin Mason)
“A One-Armed Salute to 2010’s Most Skintastic Achievements in Motion Picture and Television Sex and Nudity”. You have to admire any awards with a specific category for ‘Best Nude Parasailing’.
Episode of the BBC radio show, Endnotes, focusing on David Foster Wallace. Features a load of interviews with DFW himself, a bunch of other authors and his editor, his agent and his sister. I’ve yanked the audio from the Vimeo so I can listen to it on my iPod.
If the GAME makes me feel like the trailer, hail to the new kings! How amazing!
If the GAME, great as it may be, is nothing like the trailer then here we freaking go again. And I’ll say it again:
If our medium isn’t capable of generating compelling enough content that trailers have to sell something totally different than the actual product they are advertising, then we have a very serious problem.
A collection of the abuse recorded by girls playing videogames. If you’ve ever spent any time on Xbox Live, you know how ridiculous it can be, but you’ve never seen anything like the stuff these girls put up with. E.g. “im going to stick an egg in ur vaginal canal and punch it-”
You have no idea what a big deal The Producers was in my house growing up. I didn’t get half the jokes, and I had no clue what the hell a Nazi was, but goddammit, I knew that Kenneth Mars guy was funny.
If you didn’t think Civilization IV had an embarrassment of riches, last night, Christopher Tin’s ‘Baba Yetu’ – the theme song for Civ IV – became the first ever piece of music written for a videogame to ever win a grammy.
Games like Bulletstorm cause violent behavior and, since rape is a violent crime … ergo, there is no question that [violent videogames] cause an increase in rape.
all this without a single report that links violent videogames to criminal violence of any kind.
By the same logic: “I’m eating an apple. Apples are fruit. Bananas are also fruit. Ergo, I am eating a banana. Q.E.D. PEACE OUT, BITCHES.”
Sources connected to the show tell us they will be scouting locations in Italy – similar to the way they did it in Miami – to find the right locale.
One source connected with the show says they’ve already lined up some of Vinny’s Italian relatives to host the “Jersey” crew for an authentic Guadagnino dinner.
What does it say about a studio whose worst movie is merely great? It says that you can put together a fantastic 7-minute montage of great Pixar moments and still only have scratched the surface.
Come Here To me, easily the best Irish blog right now, talks about the history of Dublin Mean Time, when Dublin was 25 minutes ahead of Britain. “Incredibly, prior to October 1916, there had been some hostility to the idea of synchronizing our watches with Britain. In August 1916, a letter appeared in the Irish Independent arguing against it on nationalist grounds! The writer noted that “the question is whether we should give up this mark of our national identity to suit the convenience of shipping companies and a few travellers”.”
I’d probably join Harry Crane as “Chaotic Neutral”. I have no idea where my wife would be. Also, could there be a whole new alignment, just for Pete? “Really Evil, like a Cold, Dead-Eyed Sociopath-in-Waiting” has a certain ring to it.
I love when porn gets topical (see also: Who’s Nailin’ Palin?), but seriously, did the makers of this Berlusconi-themed porn really think about what they were associating themselves with? Nothing is guaranteed to kill a boner quite like the image of a creepy, demented 74-year old midget throwing a fuck into a bored-looking prostitute.
If nothing else, think of his balls. Ugh. That’s my next 10 boners completely ruined.
Gloriousnoise has come across a copy of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s amazing Corporate Rap from 1987. It’s great, but it’s no KPMG Corporate Anthem.
Also, as an aside: I realise this is entirely a Pavlovian thing, but does the slab font Kentucky Fried Chicken used in the 1980s feel nice and comforting to anyone else? No? Just me? I guess that explains a lot.
Cute video, but it always weirds me out the way that internet nerds romanticise/fetishise manual labour. My first job was in a printing company, and the monotony of it almost drove me insane. For example, that girl sending the bundles of notebooks through the plastic wrapper is a nice shot, but for weeks on end, she probably goes into work and does nothing but that one action. Keep that in mind when you’re watching the video.
In short, a drunken impulsive prank. Favourite line: “To bide me some time, I remember shouting as I snatched the glasses off the bewildered man’s face that I was with Channel 4 doing a comedy stunt. Looking back, I’m not exactly sure what that meant or why I said it.”
‘“Well,” Violent J says, “science is… we don’t really… that’s like…” He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, “OK, an analogy”: “If you’re trying to fuck a girl, but her mom’s home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom’s home? Fuck the mom. See?”’
Alan W. Pollack’s exhaustive analysis of the music of The Beatles. He wrote these over the course of 11 years, starting in 1989, in weekly posts to the rec.music.beatles usenet group. For example, in his ‘Notes on “Hey Jude”’, he says “The bridge features a Bach-like walking bassline which, by the way, is a key source of the perceived contrast between the bridge section and its surrounding verses; the bassline of the verse, after all, simply follows the roots of the chord changes.” Fascinating and edifying. Bonus.
Amazingly useful list of links on how to use Textmate properly, courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman.
For example, did you know you can write a blog post in Textmate, drag-and-drop an image into the textmate window and it will automatically upload and insert the image into your blog post? I didn’t. Mind = blown.
I know I’m repeating myself here, but I thought that Red Dead Redemption had a pretty good score, but its use of Jamie Lidell’s “Compass”, was the second-best musical cue of any game this year (the first being DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam from a Grain of Salt” in Splinter Cell: Conviction).
it’s time to stop DVR-ing the series and start watching it live. You’ll be happy you did, and you’ll be happy to return to the cultural conversation. Let’s bring a return of watercooler culture to the offices, chat rooms, and entertainment blogs of America. We’re not arguing for spoilers; we’re arguing against letting yourself get spoiled. Suck it up, America. Watch the damn shows.
I’ve spent a good portion of today checking out videos from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which just opened in Orlando. Sure, there’s rollercoasters and all that junk, but what I love is the mise-en-scene of the whole thing. The attention to detail. Mobility scooters aside, Hogsmeade looks perfect.
The Ollivander’s spiel made me wish I was 13 years old again (the 31-year old me couldn’t help but see the genius of the scam behind it - what parent is not going to buy a wand for their child after it has ‘chosen them’).
The AttractionsMagazine youtube channel has tons more, if you’re also a giant man-child and fancy wasting a couple of hours too.
Adrian Mole’s first ‘lover’ and mother of Glen Bott (Adrian’s illegitamate son). Adrian and Sharon have nothing in common and were merely intrested in each other for sex. Sharon represents the underclass of Britain.
>
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My name is Sharon Bott. I was born in Oadby Leicester. I have never met anyone named Adrian Mole. My eldest child is the son of his french father. Sue Townsend did not ask me if she could use my name and if she had done so I would not have allowed her. She has defamed my name i am upset and emmbarrassed. and would sue if i could find a solicitor to help me, «email»@live.com.91.XXX.XXX.XXX 13:15, May 7, 2010 (UTC)
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I am ridiculously excited about playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, set in renaissance Rome. The idea of shanking someone outside the Pantheon (in a videogame, of course) seems really cathartic.
New book by Tom Bissell, he of coke-and-GTA fame. Paste describe the book as “the first truly indispensable work of literary nonfiction about society’s most lucrative entertainment medium”. Straight to my Amazon wishlist.
New book by Tom Bissell, he of coke-and-GTA fame. Paste describe the book as “the first truly indispensable work of literary nonfiction about society’s most lucrative entertainment medium”. Straight to my Amazon wishlist.
Why does Sam Fisher hold his gun like that in Splinter Cell Conviction? Because in a real-world situation, it increases your kill rate from 5% to 90%. Chilling.
Secret Lab tells us why the promotional images for the iPad show 9:41am (and the iPhones all say 9:42am). I love that even the trivial, incidental stuff tells a story.
Look how sorry Domino’s was just for their shitty pizza! They had a bad sauce recipe, (and) they’ve been out there nonstop. ‘Oh, we’re so sorry. Here, have some Crazy Bread!’
I managed to catch Avatar in 3D when I was back home last month and I don’t think the 3D helped at all. In fact, the few scenes where it really “worked” for me just yanked me right out of the paper-thin story. I’d rather have seen it in 2D without the 30% colour-loss you get with the 3D glasses.
I know I live here, but you’ve no idea how useful these kinds of sites are. Especially when everyone you meet tells you you’re wrong and the REAL secret best gelato/cappucino/pizza is.
If you’re taking part in Infinite Summer and, like me, find yourself falling behind or losing focus, Kevin Guilfoile has some fantastic, inspirational words:
The first ten pages of this book are remarkable. The first 100 pages are very good (if sometimes frustrating) but the first ten are amazing, and [David Foster Wallace] deliberately put them there, right at the front, in order to make you a promise.
…
He could have just said this: Listen up. I have a freaking great story to tell you.
If you feel yourself getting frustrated in parts, or lost. If you feel Wallace has lost your trust, stop, go back and read the first ten pages. You’ll find a promise.
This awesome teaser trailer is sometimes running in front of screenings of Transformers in the States. Now, as good as Transformers was, it would be hard to keep my attention after that trailer.
It’s probably a movie codenamed “Cloverfield”, which J.J. Abrams is supposed to have been working on for a while now. No real details exist except that it’s a big, dumb monster movie. Hooray! ‘Round these parts, we loves us some big, dumb monster movies. Even the Godzilla remake, but only for that one scene where Jean Reno’s does his Elvis impression.
Cute thing - the official site, which isn’t referenced anywhere in that trailer, or on any other official sources, is tracking visitors using Google Analytics. This word-of-mouth campaign is being dissected, one visitor at a time.
Greg Packer started queueing on Monday, June 25th at 5pm. Outside Japan, is this the first time people have been started queuing days in advance for a PHONE?
I suppose it is funny when you realize you will always be known throughout your life as that bloke in that car where the cheetah pooped through the roof hatch.
Engadget recently ran a story highlighting what a different hand-model can do for the perceived size of the iPhone. The results are pretty interesting. Here are the two images, with the iPhone set to the same size in both.
The guy at 02:30 is my hero. Instead of renewing Dan and Becs, RTE should just give this guy a weekly show where he can sit in a comfy chair and dispense his words of comfort and wisdom.
Or, as one little scamp puts it, "I’ve been waiting for a place for us PS3 owners to congregate and learn about the future of our consoles? You know, with only one bias."
After my family and friends, I’d say the thing I miss the most about home is sitting down to an Irish breakfast on a groggy Sunday morning. Reading this blog is the next best thing.
"God makes a vow He can’t keep, or if He did, He would undo all his good work. …. Is it any surprise that we sin again? And again? And again? All the way down to the present day. You can call this "original sin," but maybe it’s just lax parenting."
This is so well done! I don’t care if this is a real Chupacabra, a crack addict taking a shit in the bushes, or even just a special effect - it’s still going to keep me awake at night.
My girlfriend has a little lady-boner for Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. It’s where she gets her hard-ass attitude from. Except I can’t imagine she’ll be too thrilled about this - it’s a TV show based around the life of Sarah Connor between T2 (where she was awesome and kick-ass) and T3 (where she was dead). Full of embarrassing throwbacks to the movies, including “Come with me if you want to live”.
Needs Linux installed on your iPod, and also needs you to run the exectuable manually. Is it technically still a virus when you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to run it yourself? Kaspersky spent ACTUAL money researching this thing? boggle
Orders Disney to hand over all copies because scenes shot in a nuclear facility could provide information to terrorists. No, it’s still not April Fool’s day.
We recently went through our books and decided what we were and weren’t bringing to Rome. The His Dark Materials books were a definite “bring”, even though I’ve read them all at least twice already.
Well, it was bound to happen eventually, I just wasn’t expecting it so soon. According to an article on thedigitalbits.com, Disney will be releasing Cars on Blu-Ray in June. And because of the amount of extra content and the ridiculously high resolution of the movie on the disc, they’re going to be releasing it as a 2-disc (dual layer) Blu-Ray package.
Just to put this into perspective here, a standard DVD (such as the single-disc DVD of cars that came out last year) holds 9GB of data. A dual-layer Blu-Ray disc holds 50GB of data. And they’re using two of them!
For demonstration purposes, here’s what you can expect the difference in quality to look like:
Cars on Blu-Ray
Cars on Standard-Def DVD
Now if only they had given the Incredibles as a 2-disc Blu-Ray release. Then I might be actually tempted to buy a Blu-Ray player.
Video footage of a Lucasarts presentation of the technology they’re going to be using in the next Indiana Jones and Star Wars games. This includes the latest version of the Havok physics engine.
Besides the killer technology on show, this video is also interesting for the part where they blow up Jar Jar Binks encased in Carbonite.
That high-pitched whine you’re hearing is Sony’s marketing machine spinning this - "We’re not working on backwards-compatibility because we’re working SO hard at making new stuff for PlayStation 3"
For the new Barenaked Ladies video, the band asked a bunch of Youtube celebrities to record a video of themselves performing the song. The results are so very, very cute.
I’m familiar with most of these celebrities but I’ve never seen “Where the hell is Matt” before. So I hunted it down, and let me tell you, it brought a tear to this weary old face.
In a long-awaited announcement, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg revealed today that the fourth installment of Indiana Jones will begin production in June 2007. Harrison Ford returns in his role as the daring Dr. Jones for the new adventure. The film will be produced by Lucasfilm Ltd., directed by Steven Spielberg and released by Paramount Pictures throughout the world in May 2008.
So let me get this straight… it’s shaped like R2D2. It’s radio controlled. It’s got a DVD Player. It’s got a Projector. It’s got an iPod dock. It’s got a radio. It’s got USB inputs. It will play MP4 files. And its remote control is shaped like the Millenium Falcon?
Sweet! I’m going to automate the procedure on my phone so I can send in an application while I’m arguing with the people in the shop. "Hang on a second… wait… that’s it, I’ve got your fucking number, pal."
‘The beam produces what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect," or "prompt and highly motivated escape behavior."’ - because the "OH SHIT MY FACE IS MELTING! YOU HEAR ME? MY FUCKING FACE IS MELTING effect" would have been a much tougher sell
Dude is dropped a double-bombshell. First, he has a half-sister he knew nothing about. Then she turns out to be a porn star he’s jerked off about. Then she turns up at thanksgiving dinner. Miramax is optioning this story for a Owen Wilson rom-com.
People often come up to me and say “So John, what’s the deal with Mike Patton?” and after I get done smacking the mouth off them for asking stupid questions, I’ll tell them to check youtube for Mike Patton videos. Specifically the one of Tomahawk playing ‘God Hates a Coward’.
To save you a couple of clicks, here’s that video:
And as an extra video treat, an interview with Mike Patton Dyke Faggon
Spotted over on the Dublin Community Blog, details of this year’s Christmas events taking place in the city.
Museums? Boring. Nativity with living animals? Opportunity to make my millions on You’ve Been Framed watching baby jesus being kicked in the head by a donkey.
But movies!
Temple Bar will be doing free movies in the square over Christmas. Totally free, don’t even need a ticket, you just turn up. The program includes:
Love Actually - Thursday 7th December, 6pm
It’s a Wonderful Life - Saturday 9th December, 8pm
Miracle on 34th Street - Thursday 14th December, 6pm
The Santa Claus - Saturday 16th December, 8pm
Santa Claus the Movie - Thursday 21st December, 6pm
Scrooged - Saturday 23rd December, 8pm
Now I know where I’m going to be on Saturday 23rd December, 8pm. Anyone else coming along?
Random Google search revealed this little nugget: Frame-a-stock. Okay, so it’s not exactly a great way to invest; you’re not getting in on the “ground floor” of any of these companies, so I’m doubting you’d ever make your millions from this.
“I’m trying to find USA publisher, and I hope I can receive good offer from Hollywood and play my own life and share with my fans, Julia Roberts, Spielberg, David Bowie, or others, this movie.”
Michael J. Fox appears in an ad for Democratic party. Limbaugh accuses Fox of exaggerating his parkinsons - “He is moving around and shaking, and it is purely an act … This is really shameless of Michael J Fox,”
Horrorthon starts tonight! So Halloween officially starts for me at 8.30pm this evening. To celebrate this, here’s Marilyn Manson’s cover of “This is Halloween” (which is making me itch to see The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D.)
There’s times when I regret having a mac. Reading about a windows-only game involving pirates and ninjas fighting zombies and robots is like all of those times at once.
More genius internet marketing from those Snakes on a Plane fellas. With this, you can send a personalised Snakes On A Plane email (or phone greeting if you’re in the US) “from” Samuel L. Jackson to your friends.
As someone who is mortally afraid of bees, wasps and other flying, stinging insects, let me be the first to say FUCK YEAH! TAKE THAT YOU LITTLE FLYING BITCHES.
Now I only saw five minutes of this film but it was enough to convince me of what a desperate desperate place Seventies Britain was. Did they really queue in line for this? Maybe the commies weren’t so crazy after all, at least queuing for bread serves some sort of purpose, what’s the point of queuing up to see a man get hit in the penis with a roller blind?
Frighteningly bad cinema is the only thing scary about Alone in the Dark, which gives video-game movies an even worse name, if that’s possible.
They say that even ugly babies have faces their mothers love, but this is truly a film that not even hardcore genre fans could appreciate.
Saying Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark is better than his 2003 American debut House of the Dead is akin to praising syphilis for not being HIV.
Uwe Boll:
I WILL LITERALLY KICK THE ASS OF ANYONE WHO HATED MY FILMS.
Uwe Boll, worst director in the world, is offering critics of his films the chance to get into the ring with him and settle their scores with fisticuffs. The critics will be chosen by Uwe Boll, flown to Vancouver, put up in a hotel as a guest of Uwe Boll and will finally step into the ring with Boll, where he will film the match to be included in his new film Postal, starring Gary Coleman.
Hidden in Nintendo’s E3 press pack is a picture of a more “standard” controller. The filename itself is “Wii_Classic_0501.jpg”. I’m guessing this answers the question of how we’re supposed to play downloaded NES/SNES games on the Wii, since the Wii-mote doesn’t seem up to it.
Picture links to very high-res image of the controller.
Everyone still watching Lost? No-one given up yet? Good.
With yesterday’s show in the US, the makers also re-launched thehansofoundation.org as part of the Lost Alternate Reality Game (ARG). I haven’t had much of a chance to play about with it yet, so I can’t tell you if there’s any spoilers. But my word, they certainly spent a few quid on the redesign.
God of War was, hands down, my favourite game of last year. Epic brutality. So glad to see they’re bringing it back for a sequel, and adding the bits they couldn’t get to in the original (like a battle with the cyclops)
Another fascinating thread on Archiseek about the tunnels hidden around Dublin city. Not exactly enough for serious Urban Exploration, but still pretty interesting.
Fascinating thread on Archiseek about cycling in Irish cities. As a cyclist in Dublin, I can safely say I have stared into the face of death on many occasions. Interesting to see what city planners think of all this.
Vincent Schiavelli, who died of cancer at his home in Sicily on December 26 aged 57, was a popular character actor noted for his roles in films such as Ghost and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Schiavelli’s somewhat hangdog countenance appeared in more than 120 film and television shows; he excelled at parts which required an eccentric presentation, and in 1997 the magazine Vanity Fair declared him one of the best character actors in America.
You know, it might be a bit hokey, but I’m so glad that the JCB song from Nizlopi is number one in the UK charts the weekend before Christmas. It really shows the power of viral marketing - so many people have sent me the link to the video over the past few months - and now it’s finally made it to the top of the charts. I don’t know if it was the well-deserved success, the amazingly touching song or the fact that I’m a complete pussy, or some combination of these, but I genuinely got teary when I saw them on Top of the Pops.
And it’s keeping the Crazy Frog off the top, so that’s another reason to celebrate.
I have to say, I wasn’t too impressed with The Virgin Suicides, but I really enjoyed Lost in Translation. So I’m willing to give Sophia Coppolla the benefit of the doubt when it comes to her new movie, Marie Antoinette, a biopic about the life of… well, Marie Antoinette. Right now, it looks like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon set to some 80s New Wave music.
And even if the trailer didn’t attract me (and it does), the cast is eclectic enough to pique my interest, with Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, Steve Coogan, Marianne Faithful and Kirsten Dunst all running around in period costumes. I’m looking forward to it.
Ricky Gervais has started a series of podcasts for Guardian Online. And they’re off to a tremendous start. The story of how they taught a monkey to fly a spacecraft had me crying with laughter. Some very, very funny looks from around the office. Those few minutes were laugh-out-loud funnier than the entire series of Extras.
(While we’re on the subject - the uh.. extras.. on the Extras DVD were also funnier than the show)
Microsoft released ‘Microsoft: Codename Max’, a photo-organisation application, just like not at all like iPhoto or Picasa.
I haven’t had a chance to try this out properly just yet (still firmly entrenched in iPhoto territory), but my first impressions are: Wow, Microsoft are really going after the Apple dollar now. Right down to jacking their smooth gradient web style.
Although, I’ll give them this much - the transparent box icon is very cute.
Just wanted to throw a little Google-juice in the direction of GamesAreArt.com. Needlessly fussy site design and current lack of content aside, it’s an important site. The games industry has just entered an extremely difficult time, with critics discounting video games as a medium of entertainment, never mind expression, and it’s important that we, as games players and games enthusiasts, have some way of showing non-games players just how far the games industry has come.
Koyaanisqatsi is the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen, a perfect marriage of visuals and sound. It’s single-handedly responsible for the Philip Glass wing of my CD collection
“I imagine someone told the writers that they needed to give us some of Boone, God’s Friggin’ Gift to Humanity’s backstory, so they used a random number generator to determine the moment in the show where’d they’d throw that information in.”
Some boffins have started playing with a bunch of consumer-level tools (well… 3DS Max is sort of consumer-level) to create photo-realistic images of Half Life 2 characters in real-world situations.
The result is something extremely creepy and amusing at the same time, and strangely reminscent of Charlie White’s Photography. There’s a tutorial for anyone who wishes to give this a go for themselves.
As part of the exhibition going on in the Digital Hub, there are a bunch of games set up in the old Medialab building - for example, Eyetoy hooked up to a large projector screen, World of Warcraft and Halo 2. But the star of the show, for me, was a mechanical version of Pong, which seems to be doing the rounds among the game festivals in Europe.
Being a huge fan of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead (not so keen on the original Night of the Living Dead, but I love the remake. Go figure), I have to thank 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake for bringing zombie films back into vogue. It’s questionable that without those films to lay the groundwork, George Romero’s long-awaited Land of the Dead would have been made.
The official site of Land of the Dead went live last night, including the first trailer for the movie. First impressions suggest that it’s heavily influenced by the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Very kinetic, and very nu-metal. It still looks fantastic though.
I love John Gruber : “Dude, we just bought the only significant competitor to several of our flagship applications. We didn?t buy Macromedia, we bought the market.”
“Zelda Classic is a tribute to the greatest video game of all time: Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda. It has been developed into an exact replica of the NES version and allows the development of new quests that can use either the traditional graphics or enh
One of the reasons I can’t wait for our DSL to be reconnected at home is so that I can spend even more time at ChangeThis. As it is, there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to be able to read everything I would like to over there.
Whoever competes with the iPod has to compete with a lot more than Apple’s device–it has to compete with this great wall of stuff riding in the iPod wake. And these things all make the iPod a lot more appealing and flexible.
The always-effervescent Merlin Mann comes up with yet another ingenious productivity hack: using your phone’s camera to keep a wishlist while on the move.
As a recent Mac convert, I’d like to throw some google-juice in the direction of X vs. XP, a well-researched and well-presented site comparing OS X and Windows XP. As well as presenting a modestly unbiased opinion, it’s also amazing resource for learning about some of the things I’ve been wrestling with on OS X, such as “how do I tab into drop-down menus?” (impossible to navigate xe.com without this ability).
It seems Microsoft has made LookOut available as a free download on their site. LookOut was a pretty fancy plugin for Outlook that made it possible to search a giant mailbox in a couple of seconds. Word on the street says that Microsoft bought LookOut to get at the search algorithm, which they intend to use on msn.com to compete with google.
Outlook Quotefix is a standalone module that “fixes” many of the problems people have with Outlook - specifically the way it handles quoting. Goodbye top-quoting! Goodbye shoddy line-breaks!
From their site:
Outlook-QuoteFix can modify MS Outlook’s message composition windows on-the-fly to allow for correct quoting and to change the appearance of your plain-text replies and forwards in general: move your signature, use compressed indentation, customize your quote header, etc.
johnke.me
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