Well, changes are certainly afoot. I’ve been deliberately quiet around these parts of late, but I’m going to be posting more often. Some of this is the normal fascinating sociology that you’ve come to expect, but there are more practical things that I’m working on as well. Life, it moves, it moves!
I’m usually delighted to see what Jason Kottke finds around the web, but for what it’s worth, exploding actresses is not funny. What it is, is horrible. Masquerading as funny. It’s not social commentary, or cute, or whatever. It’s just horribly misogynist.
This certainly needs no more link-love than it’s already getting, but for what it’s worth, Kieran Healy’s essay on finding Paul Revere is a model of tone, substance, and timeliness. Really, go read it.
You should spend some time reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reports from Europe (a harrowing pre-departure, and a first report). His writing is excellent. I felt a lot like him, in race- and class-specific ways, when I went to Paris as a student in college. But I didn’t have a way to express myself with eloquence about […]
John Gruber talks about a difference between Google and Apple’s approaches to selling hardware: Google Glass absolutely is generating buzz, but it’s not “the sort of buzz usually reserved for Apple products”. Glass has nerds excited; Apple products get the general public excited, and often annoy nerds by being iterative improvements that press the “familiar […]
A friend asked my opinion about Clotaire Rapaille, whose firm Archetype Discoveries Worldwide promises to “discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave toward a product, service or concept.” In particular, my friend asked to what extent would I guess this is the work of a charlatan or a guru. You can […]
I started reading Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, and I am struck in the first chapters how much I want to be on board with the revolution-as-seen-from-1980. You can read a bit more about Mindstorms here, and it figures prominently in both the Lego’s Mindstorms robotic toy, but also this amazing essay on learning to code. But […]
I was just perusing my pinboard bookmarks from this past year, thought I would pass along the kinds of things that crossed the transom over 2012. I know, listcicles are a little late, and sooo December, but still. Enjoy, and I’m happy to have some conversation about some or all of these things, publicly or […]
These two posts (this one and that one) arrived simultaneously in my news reader today. Ok, so if you are getting paid by Seth Godin or his publisher, or website host provider, or whomever, to provide authentic synergy, or thought leadership, or influencer powerjuice, could you at least provide a bit more differentiation. I mean, […]
We have an ongoing joke in our household about products, marketing, websites, ideas, that purport to be their user’s fantasies, but are actually a brand or product manager’s fantasy. For instance, in an otherwise wonderful application that I use all the time and do in fact love, the new 1password for iPhone has a ‘demo […]