Rorshach is a friend to animals!
8 months agoCourtesy Rob Neyer’s blog on ESPN.com.
8 months ago
(via tofuttibreak)
8 months agoBut how many people are strong enough to admit to the world when they’re wrong?
8 months agoOnce upon a time, movie stars could be secret divas, berating and belittling all the folks ‘beneath’ them which, apparently, included everyone on set. No more! Christian Bale was recently captured on tape rabid with anger, and now…
Hit the link above to hear the OMG, it’s so amazing, dance remix of Christian Bale’s on-set meltdown.
In a connected world, there’s nowhere to hide.
9 months ago
What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.
Gawking at a foundering vessel
Watching Nick Denton’s Gawker empire has historically been a ton of fun. Gossip! Cheeky writing! Brilliant metatagging! Some of this is still present, but a new formula is emerging: profoundly misleading article titles (“the hook”!) followed up with posts that mistake vitriol for passion and smart ass for smart. I mean…
Marvel as Owen makes the case that the most important office environment in the world should have crap technology and be happy about it!
Snicker as Owen suggests that Microsoft should have stuck to selling Office applications and Windows, cause, you know, nothing ever changes in the world of technology!
For the third example I won’t even provide a link (true, this site generates about two hits a month, but two more hits is two too many) but I’ll just mention multiple posts were made surrounding the death of Jett Travolta, duplicative of original content or news and empty of any insight, wit, or, um, human compassion.
Look, I’m fine by scandalous gossip, contrarian posturing, drunken rants, anything, really, provided it’s entertaining and smart. But this crap? It’s not smart. It’s empty, angry and full of contempt for the world. I don’t find being duped to be entertaining.
Does anyone?
Emma Brockes, of the UK’s Guardian interviews Lynndie England, the female face of the Abu Ghraib atrocities. I hear designers all the time saying no one reads on the web. Reading the piece linked above, I was unable to stop reading.
A thesis: insightful, engaging, relevant content will find an audience online, length be damned. It’s boring (or list type-)content that merits that most attention as far as chunking information up, organizing it and laying it out.
10 months ago