Nick's blog

I saw this the other day and I wondered how the original artist...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:33:00 -0800

I saw this the other day and I wondered how the original artist — the kid — would feel about the new-and-improved version of his picture.

Do little kids know that they draw like shit? Would they get mad if older people drew like them?

That’s essentially what happens with kids and language during the overregularization phase. Kids begin to learn grammar rules like “add -ed to make it past tense” and start screwing up words (eg., throw => throwed) that they used to get right when they were just relying on memory (throw => threw). But if mom or dad says “throwed,” the kid will get pissed off because even though he can’t prevent his own mistakes, he knows it’s wrong.

At first glance the comparison is pretty limited because drawing is all about imagination and aesthetics, while grammar tends to be a little more normative.

Still, there’s something kind of appealing to a unified theory of childhood spazticity, this stage where kids want to do or draw or say one thing but are forced by their overeager brains to sputter out embarrassing juvenilia that gets cruelly mimicked by unsympathetic elders.

i took a few snapshots on my phone while visiting los angeles and remembered how much i love...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:20:53 -0800

i took a few snapshots on my phone while visiting los angeles and remembered how much i love photography.

i spend very little time actually composing a photograph, framing it just so or finding the correct settings. that’s not the part i love.

the part i love happens when i get all those megapixels on my computer. i love sweetening my memories with supersaturation. i love all those sliding scales from 0 to 100; i love injecting secrets into photos by picking numbers meaningful to me. i love zooming way the fuck in and discovering an accidental portrait of her and me reflected in the trashcan, our faces pixellated beyond recognition.

i don’t care about the noise. i love stitching photos together and i don’t care about the ghosting. i don’t want lifelike, i just want life, and when i spend hours playing with my utterly insignificant pictures i get that same vertiginous thrill i got at the end of men in black one when we find out the universe is a marble, that life is just someone’s plaything, and that embedded within our own playthings are universes.

(the ending of men in black two tries to convey the same message but is comparatively lame.)

devins: laughingsquid: 15th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:01:43 -0800

devins:

laughingsquid:

15th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair

Who wants to go?

see you there

monkeytypist: “If this is tea, please bring me some coffee. If this is coffee, please bring me some...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:45:00 -0800

monkeytypist:

“If this is tea, please bring me some coffee. If this is coffee, please bring me some tea.”

— Abraham Lincoln

This quote just reminded me of my #1 favorite hot non-alcoholic drink, coffee-tea, which is readily available in the Chinatowns of New York and Philadelphia but apparently has not made its way to San Francisco yet.

It’s some kind of mix of coffee and tea, but after tons of experimenting with the office K-cups I can testify that it’s not as easy to prepare as its name suggests.

— I read that first sentence as “In his steroid...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:05:09 -0800

—

I read that first sentence as “In his steroid baseball career…” Not sure whether that says more about my reading skills or the state of baseball when the Red Sox juiced their way to World Series victories in 2004 and 2007.

hipsterpuppies: the summer after his senior year, mr. chow...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:00:56 -0800

hipsterpuppies:

the summer after his senior year, mr. chow traveled europe by train for a month, and now aggravatingly insists that “it’s barthelona.”

[photo via micki m]

RAoK

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:42:00 -0800

RAoK:

nsbarr:
…
Hey, you never indicated that the piece on $31 at DMV supposed any feedback, but I just thought that I’d still chime in.

The great idea behind the RAoK is that they happen out of the universal abundance of humanity in people around us. And therefore when you encounter one, you…

Thanks for your response, and your words of encouragement. Sorry for the slow reblog, it isn’t entirely unrelated to the original subject =)

Anyway, I got my act together and sent her a note with the $$. Here’s what it looked like (with a car to mark the DMV occasion. I don’t know which end is the front):

As for what you said about life being a non-zero sum game, I believe it. I just can’t live by it. I am so deeply wired for zero-sum that I don’t even recognize my own success unless I can locate someone else’s failure. Likewise the success of others tends to make me feel like a failure. I would really like to change!

Someone did something very nice for me the other day and paid the $31 I owed for my California...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:05:24 -0800

Someone did something very nice for me the other day and paid the $31 I owed for my California driver’s license. My credit card wasn’t working and the DMV employee was about to cancel the application, which I had waited an hour to submit. A woman standing next to me happened to overhear and insisted on covering it.

And even as she was swiping her card and signing the receipt for me, my mind lurched forward to everything I’d have to do…

go to CVS pick out a thank you card or make one but i’m not 6 years old write something “thank you so much!” gay “thanks!” flippant “thanks so much” ok I guess put in $40? demeaning? exactly $31 like grateful but need the cash? Does she more than me? “thanks with interest ;)” no idiot need a stamp give email address? Please confirm you. Start sending me chain letters… etc.

And now it’s 3 days later and I still haven’t sent her the money and the dread is kind of paralyzing. This is why I’m ambivalent about random acts of kindness. It’s not because it puts me in a position of weakness or because I’m suspicious of altruism or anything like that.

It’s because the nausea of having to pay it forward or just pay it back, the utter joylessness in scanning walls of Hallmark cards, the impersonal sense of obligation that will poison whatever I do, these things point strongly to me not being a very good person, especially compared to someone who unblinkingly swipes her credit card for a total stranger at the DMV.

Johnny Depp reprises his role as Hunter S Thompson in Fear &...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:33:18 -0800

Johnny Depp reprises his role as Hunter S Thompson in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas 2: Tangled Wires. With a memorable cameo from Benicio del Toro as a spaced-out JVC maintenance worker.

nostrich:

This recording of a phone call an angry Hunter Thompson made did the rounds recently, and you’ve already heard it, but I spotted this comment in a Metafilter comment thread that made me smile just as much as the phone call:

Some years ago I needed to talk to Thompson for an article. I cadged his home number from a friend of a friend, who would not give it over until after he had spent fifteen minutes warning me about how a call to Hunter was likely to unfold. Hunter will probably be drunk. Hunter will be angry, or unintelligible. Hunter will ask you to send him something odd, or send him money. Hunter will ask you to come to his house to fix something that’s broken. Hunter will almost certainly not answer your questions, but if he does he’ll do so only after shouting at you for many minutes, so just buck up and bear it. “And for god’s sake don’t dare tell him how you got his number!”

Properly prepped, I dialed the number. Hunter answered. He sounded perfectly sober. I very gingerly explained who I was and what I wanted. We then spent a very enjoyable half hour on the phone, Hunter politely answering every question. When I was done I thanked Hunter and told him how much I appreciated the interview. “My pleasure. Happy to do it. One last thing, though, before I forget.” Yes? “How did you happen to get my number?” Oh, through a friend of a friend. “Hmmmm. Well. May I ask a favor?” Of course. “Throw that goddamn number away and tell that fucking friend of a friend of yours that if he ever gives my goddamn phone number out to another sonofabitch stranger I’m going to find him and fuck his eyeballs out.”

I’ve been home for a week now and I still don’t...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:26:09 -0800

I’ve been home for a week now and I still don’t having anything insightful to say about Las Vegas, about why despite myself I like it so much or about why it makes me feel so optimistic.

monkeytypist: unburyingthelead: Argentina Which is why I do...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:20:35 -0800

monkeytypist:

unburyingthelead:

Argentina

Which is why I do better with one.

… and why I’m trying to break mine, every day.

If nothing else, the attention this Pitchfork thing received is a good indicator of how on fire...

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:36:00 -0800

If nothing else, the attention this Pitchfork thing received is a good indicator of how on fire Tumblr is. I’ve been following along, but not because I want to declare the death of Tumblr or because I want to be sort of vicious to a girl who pours herself out on the Internet. I’m just into community management and I like to analyze fuckups — especially when they aren’t mine.

Gawker does a pretty good job of breaking down what happened and where key mistakes were made. But there’s something else to the story that they didn’t really cover — you could call it the problem of realtime transparency.

if you’re a successful service like Tumblr, you set up the expectation for speedy responses and total transparency. But when you combine the two, and speedily/openly respond to a serious issue from a pissed off user within the framework of a whimsical microblogging platform, you are making a mistake. You’re not giving yourself the time to be thoughtful, you’re not giving yourself the time to get — and check —the facts. You’re committing to realtime transparency and you’re setting yourself up to fail.

As far as I can tell, community management is not what Meaghan’s blog is for and an issue like reclaiming a sub-domain ought to be handled elsewhere. But let’s say a higher-up demands that Meaghan respond to the uproar and says she needs to do it on her blog because the staff blog gets too much exposure.

OK.

It would have been fine to write something in this vein:

“Hey all, you may have heard about the drama around the Pitchfork launch.

We hate drama as much as you do. That’s why we have a well-defined and fair policy about reclaiming subdomains of abandoned Tumblrs. Right now we’re trying to understand the frustrations of a user who says that his Tumblr, while dormant, wasn’t actually abandoned.”

As soon as the dust settles and we’ve resolved the support ticket with this user, I’ll update this post with the details. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.”

It sounds super stiff, but it’s ok. Right now, all you’re trying to do is quiet things down and get some breathing room.

Sometimes community management can feel like the wild west, and at this stage I think it requires a lot of intuition. But like any other job, I think eventually it crystallizes into a bunch of set pieces, and so long as you are empathetic you can pull them off without sounding disingenuous. In this case, the appropriate set piece would have been acknowledging the situation and setting up the expectation for an update when the facts are straight.

Photo

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:27:36 -0800

Remember that scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where Steve Carell gets ready to masturbate by lighting a...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:39:00 -0800

Remember that scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where Steve Carell gets ready to masturbate by lighting a bunch of candles and turning on some mood music? When I saw it, I didn’t get the joke and someone had to explain to me that it’s funny because this is how women pleasure themselves, and Steve Carell is a guy.

Since then I’ve been kind of fascinated by the mores of masturbation among men and women. So it struck me as noteworthy that Firefox employs 2 features that seem to accommodate both the classically male and female approaches to self-pleasure.

The “Clear Recent History” feature (inexplicably found under Tools, not History) is decidedly masculine. It’s like the tissue torn too late from its box. The deed has been done, all that’s left is to shamefully try and clean up the mess you’ve made. It’s a feature designed for spontaneous outbursts of onanism.

In contrast, Firefox’s “Begin Private Browsing” feature has a more feminine touch. It requires thoughtful foresight - it’s the internet equivalent of closing your silk curtains or softly locking the door of your bedroom before you dim the lights and get down to it.

PS: I enjoyed reading Mozilla’s reminder that pornography is just one of many illicit use cases for these features:

Many people believe that the primary use case for private browsing mode is viewing pornography. While viewing pornography may be a popular use case due to the nature of content on the Web, assuming that this is the only reason that users need private browsing trivializes the overall feature. For instance, users may wish to begin a private browsing session to research a medical condition, or plan a surprise vacation or birthday party for a loved one. Use cases will range from users cheating on their spouse, to users buying engagement rings. Given the breadth of our user base, specific use cases are likely to be extremely varied.

meaghano: him: MEAGHAN. me: What? him: Nothing I just miss you. me: You do not. him: Okay fine I...

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:49:50 -0800

meaghano:

him: MEAGHAN.
me: What?
him: Nothing I just miss you.
me: You do not.
him: Okay fine I don’t. I’m just feeling super feelingsy today.

At first I just thought this was funny, but the phrase “feeling feelingsy” stuck with me, and now for lack of a better word it’s become part of my sparse emotional vocabulary.

I guess I’d define “feeling feelingsy” as feeling something for the sake of it, feeling something because the part of you that feels is bored and wants something to do, feeling something to prove to yourself and others that you are in fact capable of feeling anything at all.

Unlike that dude, I usually can’t tell when I’m feeling something real and when I’m just feeling feelingsy, which isn’t really a good feeling at all.

I hope someone does some nice analysis on how the Twitterverse...

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:13:42 -0800

I hope someone does some nice analysis on how the Twitterverse reacts to various Super Bowl advertisements this year. I just caught a fairly racist and unfunny MetroPCS ad, it’s really interesting to see what people are saying.

afishwick: possible spoilers NSBarr should stop reading...

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:33:21 -0800

afishwick:

*possible spoilers* NSBarr should stop reading here.

Thanks dude! I was reading with interest and then saw this and stopped. Then I dexterously reblogged and with my eyes half-closed deleted everything under this line.

That said I’m not super-pumped to see this movie and probably won’t unless an attractive girl wants to take me to it and use me as a medium to carry out her George Clooney fantasies.

"There was a time you know when we’d eat lunch at Bryant Park. We’d sit by the merry-go-round..."

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:39:12 -0800

“There was a time you know when we’d eat lunch at Bryant Park. We’d sit by the merry-go-round and behold Manhattan’s midtown splendor for half an hour. Models and artsy types and sleek Euro girls with sunshine bouncing off their sleek Euro hair. 24 year old marketing or publishing or PR assistants, making 40 grand and living in Murray Hill, all big eyes and toothy smiles, chatting away happily. Everyone checking out everyone. Everything a coy precursor to eventually becoming naked. No one saying shit about fish tacos.”

- Not that I endorse this blog or that it even resonates with me or anything.

Exploring Tumblr today, I accidentally ended up getting a funny little ribbon on the bottom-right...

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:46:00 -0800

Exploring Tumblr today, I accidentally ended up getting a funny little ribbon on the bottom-right corner of my avatar. This signified that I had donated money to Haiti relief, which I hadn’t done. To remedy the situation, I tried to remove the ribbon. This proved to be impossible. Left with no other options — except hypocrisy — I gave some money to Doctors Without Borders.

A bad user experience created a good outcome. Go Tumblr!

PS: I really do wish I could easily remove this ribbon. It’s not a big deal, but I just don’t like:

Joining some faceless online army for any reason
Changing — or even noticing — my avatar. Avatars are like small, mean mirrors that pop up on your computer screen with minimal warning. I guess this is rooted in deeper issues.
Gestures of support that inevitably conclude. Remember when Iran had that election and everyone on Twitter made their avatar green? I don’t see any more green avatars. At this point, a green avatar would be ridiculous and dated. But I would hate to be the Twitter user deciding who, for the sake of aesthetics and timeliness, changes their avatar back to normal and in so doing essentially withdraws support from Iranian dissenters.

PPS: I might have donated money anyway, even without the ribbon! But we’ll never know. The events that transpired rendered impossible any understanding of my own actions; forever — at least in this particular case — closing the door to self-knowledge.

I had to read “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” my...

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:03:17 -0800

I had to read “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” my freshman year of high school and when I figured out who the “Nacirema” were, it blew my mind.

And even though I recognized that the point of the paper was to demonstrate that a biased outsider can make just about any culture sound alien and ridiculous, the vivid and frightening depiction of oral hygiene actually made me question the value of going to the dentist at all.

So when (at the behest of my mom) I finally saw a dentist the other day after a multi-year hiatus and he told me he would need **THREE** appointments with me just to fill all those cavities and deep-clean those gums, this paper came to mind.