02 8 / 2011
How are our media changing in response to new technology and what is on the horizon? Watch this video for some expert ideas on that question.
NExTWORK: Kevin Kelly (by wired)
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02 8 / 2011
The Secret of the Mystery
Here’s my second most easily exploitable secret: Put your request in the form of a mystery that needs solving and I’ll do just about anything. I need to solve mysteries. Einstein Anderson, Encyclopedia Brown, DuckTales and Batman messed me up as a kid. I had the whole junior private eye shebang: rear-view glasses, magnifying glass (classic Sherlock Holmes), handcuffs, fingerprint kit, jaded detachment, memories I couldn’t forget no matter how much I wanted to.
Despite early career setbacks such as “The Case of What Mommy and Daddy are Doing in There and Why Does it Sound Painful?” and the entanglement of complex clues and suspects that was “The Case of Does God Exist?” and the ensuing follow-up cases it spawned, I remained enamored of the mystery-solving role.
Even as an adult, I’m irrationally compelled to solve mysteries whenever they pop up around me. I’ll go out of my way to step in a mystery. Sometimes I overhear mundane things and mentally turn them into a mystery, which of course means I have to get involved. Here are some common phrases that trigger my mystery-solving impulse:
- “Where did I put my phone?”
- “Who took my beer?”
- “Why hasn’t she called? It’s been two weeks! I thought we had a good time. Am I that unattractive?”
- “What is that smell, where is it coming from, and how can we stop it?”
- “Are you even listening to me? Sometimes I wonder whether you ever listen to me.”
- “How old are these potatoes? This one looks a little like a fetus.”
- “Where did you go in your head? What’s more important than what I’m saying to you?”
- “Who put the cookie in the cookie jar?”
- “Who murdered my best friend?”
- “I swear to god — you’re daydreaming about that Sam Spade bullshit again, aren’t you? Are you that obsessed? Why can’t you solve the mystery of why I’m so boring to you that you have to tune me out, like you’re some kind of…” (My memory usually stops around here)
- “I can’t tell if my hamster is a boy or a girl. I’m pretty sure it should be obvious.”
- “Instant oatmeal—where does it come from?”
I sometimes think it would be wonderful to solve real cases, but that’s just a pipe dream. The private dick game is nothing like the movies and books. It’s not even like Bored to Death—although I like to believe I’m roughly Jason Schwartzman’s character but younger. No, PI work sounds like a lot of paperwork, doing boring cases, going through the rigmarole. Actually, it sounds like doing homework.
For now, I’m content without extra homework.
Props to Anthony Clark for the title of this post. I stole it from His Nedroid Picture Diary book Beartato and the Secret of the Mystery because I liked it so much.
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11 5 / 2011
Twitter Rules
Too many interesting voices were drowned out by the noise, so I unfollowed about half of the people I was following on Twitter today. To save myself from the hassle of doing this again, I came up with a few simple rules for determining who to follow and who to avoid.
| Rule | Result | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| StUdLyCaPs | DoN’T FoLLoW | StudlyCaps users are repeat offenders. If you do it once, I’ll probably have to stomach it again. Not worth it. |
| ALLCAPS, frequent typpos, kreative spelling, txt-like abbrvs, and multiple exclamation marks!!! | Don’t follow | See above. It’s an English major thing. |
| 100% self promotion | Neither follow nor download free ebook | If I wanted advertisements, I would turn on the TV |
| Profile begins: “Check out our new…” | Don’t follow, don’t check anything out | Same as above except with even worse salesmanship |
| No tweets | No follow | No brainer |
| Default user photo | No follow | No egg has ever said anything valuable to me |
| Tweetstream littered with short truisms | Don’t follow | Inspiring quotations are one thing, but broadcasting your own bite-sized bits of wisdom as prima facie truths doesn’t sound enlightened |
| Following more than 10,000 people | Avoid being one of them | You probably aren’t Robert Scoble. Exception: Robert Scoble |
| Make money with _____! | Don’t follow | Get rich quick schemes are so tedious |
| Your tweets’ value is greater than the cost of following | Follow | Disregard everything else. This is what matters most. |
I’ll keep adding rules here as I think of them.
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21 4 / 2011
Dislike: Poking - Why Facebook is Not a Safe Place
I got poked for the first time in years. I didn’t want it.
Facebook’s poking feature is creepy. I hate it and I want it to die. I thought it disappeared in one of their frequent and inexplicably controversial updates, but it seems I was tragically mistaken.
If you’ve ever poked me, notice I have never poked you back. I wouldn’t do that because I am a good person. I don’t want to be poked and I don’t want to contribute to the epidemic of poking in this world.
Here’s my suggestion, Facebook: poking should be consentual. Instead of getting notifications that I just got poked — like it or not — I should get a notification that someone tried to poke me. Then I can choose to dodge, receive poke, or blast pepper spray into their eyeballs and hope the police arrive.
What’s fun about my argument for consentual-only poking is this: if you disagree with me, you sound like a monster. As you should. Because you are poking me without my permission, and that is wrong.
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18 4 / 2011
Shared: How do colors affect purchases?
I want to avoid merely rambling about my disgusting human feelings — which obviously need to be subdued with cybernetic augmentation. In fact, I always write posts with fellow 20.something Silicon Valley neophytes in mind. This infographic should only appeal to that demographic, but I assure everyone else it’s fan-fracking-tastic.
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31 3 / 2011
Remixed Comics
By now the blogosphere is likely ablaze with Peanuts Without the Punchline buzz. If you’ve already been exposed to this existential masterwork of remix culture, go ahead and skip the next part.
From 3eanuts.tumblr.com:
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.
So if Peanuts didn’t already tempt you to throw yourself before an oncoming train, try it without the punchlines to sugarcoat all that despair.
Of course, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. You remember how Garfield Minus Garfield exposed Jon Arbuckle’s crippling schizophrenia and bipolar disorder? Peanuts Without the Punchline is a lot like that, except decidedly monopolar in its depression and without all those voices getting in the way of the characters’ incessant self-brutalization.
On a lighter note, the Internet culture has had a lot of jollies with Dinosaur Comics. It’s not difficult to do, considering Dinosaur Comics is already heavily dependent on a formula featuring static imagery. Don’t get me wrong — I have a lot of respect for Ryan Noth. (Mostly because he gets away with it.) But with a comic like his, some friendly ribbing is deserved. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Dadasaurus Rex randomizes Dinosaur Comics panels and serves up a fresh remix every minute of the day.
- Dinosaur Remix lets you take control of the Dinosaur remixin’. Look at that! Now you’re an accomplished comics artiste.
- Finally, there’s a mashup of Twitter and Dinosaur Comics that draws dialog for the comics from the Twitter public timeline. The results are hit or miss, but I’ve seen some hilarious ones in my limited time with the mashup. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if this is where some Dinosaur Comics actually come from. Good thing I know better. Hmm…
With all this remixin’ city folk are doing, I thought I’d give it a shot myself. Here’s a project of mine I call “Questionable Content Without the Crappy Comic.”
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30 3 / 2011
Geeksanon
Hi, my name is Jeremy Mattocks. And I’m a geek.
I started geeking out about… well, right out of the gate. See, my dad was geeky too. He fell into the Trek real bad in the 70s and, well, he’s been hooked since. Sometimes he’d share it with me, or he’d leave it lying around and I’d get into it. You know how kids are. Anyway, I got into the heavy stuff quick. I had a Star Trek encyclopedia when I was 9. I even had a Enterprise hanging from my bedroom ceiling.
It all spiraled out of control. By the time I knew what was happening, it was too late. You catch yourself making a 1.5-foot long model of a Galaxy-class vessel out of Legos, suddenly you wake up to what your life has become.
I don’t mean to blame everyone but myself. I know it’s more my fault than anyone’s. But have you seen the way the media glamorizes geekiness in men? Tell me the plot of the movie She’s Out of my League. Have you seen The Guild? That little letter from the Netflix reads:
Dear Nerd,
If you spend all your time playing MMOs, you have a good chance of either sleeping with Felicia Day or being Felicia Day. Either way, not bad.
Love,
That’s What You Get When You Let Geeks Write Your Shows
Thing is, half the time I think I’m better off this way. Being a geek caused me to commit libraries of trivia to memory. At least 60% of what I know is utterly useless, yeah, but isn’t useless knowledge better than ignorance?
Yeah, maybe not. Did I mention I was homeschooled?
So there’s another thread in this awkward tapestry of existential angst. Behold! The 20.something confronts real life and social situations way beyond his training. And now he’s supposed to piece together some kind of career while dodging living shrapnel on the fiery warzone of early adulthood? Come on. That’s just sick.
29 3 / 2011
Possibly Inaccurate Title: “World’s Worst Entrepreneur”
If she was actually the “world’s worst” entrepreneur, wouldn’t she at least fail to show up to her own pitch? At least she’s dressed — and not only that, but she’s Bedazzled!
Seriously, though, this isn’t such a terrible idea. Look at the thriving pseudo-medicine industry in the USA. Homeopathy is just as contrary to all evidence and common sense, but that doesn’t stop “homeopathic” businesses from selling vials of water for obscene markups. Plus she’s already halfway through the tried-and-true BS pseudoscience business plan:
1. Get a cute, young, nonthreatening woman to promote your product. Voodoo hippie name is a plus. Check.
2. Start spouting nonsense about healing “energy.” Be sure to avoid talking about any kind of real energy that can be demonstrated with valid science so as to avoid falsifiability just in case your customers have rational friends or family who would dissuade them from making such poor investments. Check.
3. ??? (Most likely trick a dull-minded celebrity into endorsing your product.)
4. Profit.
I am of two minds on this. Half of me wants to be repulsed. Half of me thinks these people deserve to be conned out of their social security and fair trade coffee shop paychecks. At the end of the day, I’m far more comfortable making a living with honesty and authenticity.
27 3 / 2011
Celtx - #1 Choice for Media Pre-Production
Celtx is a fantastic tool for your writing projects. I’ve been using it to script comics and a few short film drafts. It appears to be based on Mozilla code, and I’ve never had any trouble with it crashing or running slowly.
What made me want to talk about Celtx, though, is their revenue model. They offer the full-featured product for free download with no restrictions or 30-day trials or anything. You get the real deal. However, if you want Celtx to do more, you can purchase nifty add-ons.
Essentially, this is exactly like trial versions of other software. But they don’t tease you with grayed-out features you can’t access, they don’t hit you with a nag screen pop-up whenever you load, and their “Hey you should buy this” ad sits in a small bar at the bottom of the window. At not point when I’m using Celtx do I feel hassled to support the developer. They made Celtx easy to love using, and that makes me want more.
Today I bought the $14.99 add-on bundle. Not because I felt coerced to, but because I could easily imagine enjoying the new functionality. The new paradigm Celtx (the company) offers is basically “you get the full product for free, but you can buy additional things if you want” instead of “you get a little of this for free, but for the really good stuff you need to pay.” Even though these are the same, practically speaking, the way they are presented feels like one step closer to the gift-based economy. Again: the presentation changes the experience dramatically.
This reminds me of the way Guild Wars distinguished itself from World of Warcraft and every other subscription-based MMO. Sure, the gameplay was different, but was it so different as to make Guild Wars seem unique compared with every other fantasy MMORPG? No, I think the free online play with purchase along with additional content for purchase is what makes Guild Wars so memorable outside its primary fan-base.
We see a lot of this in the web entertainment world, too. Web comics and podcasts usually offer their media for free, foster community goodwill, and then cash in their fans’ love by selling merchandise. This is partially why the web comics industry is so appealing to me. It’s a model based on open community participation and a sincere relationship between creator and patron. Web comics and Celtx show that by winning enough good faith from your viewers, you can build a sustainable career from patrons willingly and knowingly supporting you — not in order to trade one scarce resource for another — but because they wish to support you as an end in itself.
It’s sort of beautiful, isn’t it?
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25 3 / 2011
Navigating the Quarterlife Crisis
The journey toward crisis begins at college graduation, when the typical student has about ten thousand dollars in loans and no skills to land a decent job. Frank Furstenberg, professor of sociology at University of Pennsylvania, says the transition to adulthood is “more arduous today than it was fifty years ago.” Employers are not hiring people in their early 20s for staff jobs. “Employers hire temps for positions that don’t require experience. Society can incorporate people only when they get some experience working and there is a better match between employee and employer.”
With little to lose, most twentysomethings use their post-college time as an opportunity for finding oneself, seeing what’s available, and trying a lot on for size. (Which translates to more than eight jobs before turning 32.) The new behavior, which looks remarkably like flailing, is appropriate for the new workplace. Jeffrey Arnett, psychologist at Clark University and author of Emerging Adulthood says, “People have different personal time tables and it’s nice that people can make choices that are right for them.”
Penelope Trunk, from her blog post “Navigating the Quarterlife Crisis.”
