This is Violence

"Yet if death is bad for me, when is it bad for me? Not now. I’m not dead now. What about when..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:18:54 -0700

“Yet if death is bad for me, when is it bad for me? Not now. I’m not dead now. What about when I’m dead? But then, I won’t exist.”

- Is Death Bad for You? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

This is the best thing I’ve read all week.

Daring Fireball Linked List: How Yahoo Botched Its Acquisition of Flickr

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:42:38 -0700

Daring Fireball Linked List: How Yahoo Botched Its Acquisition of Flickr:

Related to the previous post: I feel like Gruber is usually pretty solid in his reasoning, but I have to ask here: why, exactly, “Flicker could have - should have - been to mobile photography what Instagram became.”?

This seems to me to be exactly the same sort of logic that leads all sorts of companies to all sorts of bad strategic decisions. The sorts of decisions that often result in them getting torn to bits on Daring Fireball.

How many people have told Apple they needed to be X? Apple COULD have made iOS an open platform. Android did, and Apple lost a certain number of customers to Google. I don’t think any one would say that Apple SHOULD have done that.

Yes, Flickrs numbers are down. But Flickr has actual paying customers, Instagram does not. That seems important to me.

So yes, Flickr COULD have been Instagram, but whether or not they SHOULD is entirely dependent on what success means for them and the customers they want to serve. Just because a company is successful in an adjacent space doesn’t mean any given company could have or should have been there. Herman Miller shouldn’t be Ikea, Rolex shouldn’t be Casio.

Greatly Exaggerated

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:10:06 -0700

Besides being an inconsistent, not especially skilled, or able-to-think-of-three-things-to-list writer, I’m convinced that my pathological aversion to link-bait-y titles in posts is what’s kept me from otherwise certain fame. So I get why Gizmodo titled their article How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. And I get why it’s been retweeted and reblogged a bunch since then. What’s surprising though is how quickly everyone’s jumping on “Flickr’s Dead” bandwagon.

Look, there’s little room to debate Yahoo!’s mismanagement of Flickr. Frankly there’s little room for debate that Yahoo! has managed anything well at all. Yahoo! was and is the exact wrong company to own Flickr.

But that said, I think Mat Honan has greatly exaggerated Flickr’s demise, and is mistaken about what success for Flickr could have been or might be going forward.

The basic premiss of Honan’s article is that in the right hands Flickr might have been able to prevent YouTube’s domination of web video, Facebook’s domination in the photo sharing/social space, or else Instragram’s domination in mobile photo sharing. But I think that this presents a simultaneously narrow and unnecessarily grandiose view of what success means for a company like Flickr. There’s no doubt that each of these companies owns a space the either Flickr used to (general storage and sharing of photos) or else might have gone into (mobile). What’s not so clear to me is that these two spaces are the spaces Flickr needs to own to be successful.

^{*not a photo I want on my Flickr stream}

Photos, and photography are not monolithic. Like writing, any sort of expression, their meaning and uses are as varied as their content. For me, Facebook/Twitter photos tend to be, like a lot content on those platforms, throwaway shots whose meaning is hyper-focused on either a specific person or time. My Flickr stream is where I try to be more thoughtful, posting shots I’m actually happy with and that I think might actually be enjoyable to someone who doesn’t know me. To expect any single option to be “the answer” is inherently flawed, and trying to be all things to all people is a recipe for disaster. In the same way I don’t expect to wear the same shoes for every event in my life, that there are different places to post different kinds of content seems like the great benefit of the web to me, not a missed opportunity for Flickr. The ultimate irony of the article is that the things the author points to as missed opportunities are the sorts of things that could very likely have gotten Flickr into the exact same trouble Yahoo! got into: always chasing the new thing.

What if instead of trying to support every single application of photography, Flickr did just one thing, but chose to do that better than anyone else? What if, instead of trying to grab millions of new users every month, Flickr chose to cultivate (or, really, maintain, we’re still there after all) a community for a smaller, but dedicated, group of people who are serious about their photography? This doesn’t have to mean just pro photographers, just any one who cares about their photos, the environment in which in their viewed, and the community of other photographers around them? Does that make Flickr smaller? Probably. Is smaller bad? I don’t know. Ferrari is smaller than GM. Leica is smaller than Canon. James Joyce wrote three novels, Danielle Steel has written 31 in the last ten years alone.

People are naturally obsessed with the brand new and the novel, and the companies we tend to hear about are the ones that disrupt the status quo. But sometimes I think the thing a company needs to do is understand how to be the very best at what they are. Sometimes this means watching some of your customers leave when their specific needs are served better elsewhere so that you can give the rest of your customers the very best of what they need.

And to be fair, I’m not sure that Flickr isn’t doing this. Looking around at my options - Facebook, 500px - I still haven’t found anything that matches my needs, either as a product or as a community, better than Flickr.

This kind of focus might mean Flickr doesn’t get millions of new users a year, but it does mean they’ll likely end up with millions of users who will stick with them for years to come and that seems like success to me.

depressedcopywriter: Taken with instagram My new favorite...

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:20:51 -0700

depressedcopywriter:

Taken with instagram

My new favorite site. Obviously.

TIV Sports News!

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:30:11 -0700

“I heard they wanted to be like the Dallas Mavericks, in a sense,” Wade said about an apparent reference to Pacers coach Frank Vogel using last year’s Mavs team, which beat the Heat in Miami for the title, as motivation for Indiana. “I saw their little celebration at the end of (Game 2). I don’t know if they didn’t expect to win, but every night we go out on the court, we expect to win.” Wade then was asked about the celebration, but didn’t elaborate on what specifically irritated him. “They say their identity, they say they want to be like Dallas,” Wade said. “So they celebrated like Dallas, I guess.”

- Dwayne Wade after the Pacers beat the Heat Tuesday.

-Dwayne Wade after the Heat beat the Pacers in October.

Also this happened:

Showgirls, takeout (by ADogNamedPants)

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:07:04 -0700

Showgirls, takeout (by ADogNamedPants)

El Cortez (by ADogNamedPants)

Sat, 12 May 2012 15:39:19 -0700

El Cortez (by ADogNamedPants)

Photo

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:16:53 -0700

shortformblog: slacktory: Text Based Tumblr is exactly what...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:33:42 -0700

shortformblog:

slacktory:

Text Based Tumblr is exactly what you think it is.

Which is awesome, of course.

Pretty much this.

4 Key Insights From The 57-Day, Blitzkrieg Redesign Of Google

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:48:17 -0700

4 Key Insights From The 57-Day, Blitzkrieg Redesign Of Google:

The most interesting part of this article for me wasn’t the lessons outlined (although, if you’re a designer, they are at least semi-interesting) it’s that it really just reiterates something I’ve really come to be certain of in the last few years: as important as good execution is, you can’t really design your way out of bad strategy.

Google+ was better designed that FaceBook from day one, and now even more so - but it’s still failing to pull people over, and it’s failing to pull people over because it’s not solving a critical enough problem.

new-aesthetic: “The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:29:58 -0700

new-aesthetic:

“The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.”

Descriptive Camera, via Tom T

(Uses Mechanical Turk to create human descriptions of photographs.)

“this is a faded picture of a dilapidated building”

Photo

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:11:04 -0700

Photo

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:16:18 -0700

Mad Men, the BitTorrent episode

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:41:46 -0700

jkottke:

This is an episode of Mad Men, incompletely downloaded from BitTorrent.

The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.

(via waxy)

This wins the internet today.

madmenfootnotes: A Meditation on Mailer, Pete Campbell and The...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:56:39 -0700

madmenfootnotes:

A Meditation on Mailer, Pete Campbell and The Language of Men

“His anger often derived from nothing: the set of a pair of far lips, the casual heavy thump of the serving spoon into his plate, or the resentful conviction that the cook was not serving him enough.” —Norman Mailer, “The Language of Men”

Pete Campbell presents a whole different kind of masculinity issue than does our mainstay Don. From S1E1 Pete’s been a mess of insecurities, all stemming from the essential Pete nugget that he simply doesn’t know very much about people. Wavering between the petulance of a child and the brimming over-confidence of a teenager, Pete is his own worst enemy.

He’s quick to lash out — recall this is not the first time he’s been in a fight at the office. He punched poor Kenny for his indelicate comments about fair Pegs back in season 1! Of course, that might have had something to do with his extreme jealousy of Ken — this comes only a few episodes after Ken gets his first story published in The Atlantic. And he’s become so used to shooting off his passive-aggressive sniping comments and being ignored that when Lane actually challenges him to a fight, he’s floored. He’s not used to being directly confronted or spoken to about much of anything, really.

Here’s Mailer again:

“He became aware again of his painful desire to please people, to discharge responsibility, to be a man. When he had been a child, tears had come into his eyes at a cross word, and he had lived in an atmosphere where his smallest accomplishment was warmly praised.”

Pete has some…issues with recognition and pride, no? He craves it desperately, and yet he’s either so unctuous or so biting that even when he does good work, people are reluctant to reward him. This man, who was so spoiled in his youth, finds that his peers don’t like him at all. When he pitifully says at the end of “Signal 30” that “This is an office. We’re supposed to be friends”, we get the sense that he actually means it. That SCDP holds the only friendships he’s ever known! This coming on the heels of Don telling Megan that the people at work are not her friends only underscores Pete’s essential misunderstanding about other people and his innate loneliness that comes from being excluded.

As decent as Pete has become at his job, he’s never gotten over his puppy love with Don Draper, the man he has been trying to get a reaction as long as he’s graced our screens. When flattery didn’t work, Pete turned to subterfuge. None of it seemed to work very well, but Pete is still giving Don the biggest steak.

“…with his heart aching he lunged toward Hobbs. He had no hope of beating him. He merely intended to fight until he was pounded unconscious, advancing the pain and bruises he would collect as collateral for his self-respect.”

“[He] began to wonder about the things which made him different. He was no longer so worried about becoming a man; he felt that to an extent he had become one. But in his heart he wondered if he would ever learn the language of men.”

So then of course, Pete does get called on his pervasive misanthropy and reflex anger toward the rest of the world. And in every glance and gesture, Pete has always tried to ape the standard masculinity: he tries to dress like Don, he blusters through work drinks living up to Roger, he commits adultery after the both of them. And yet even when he’s embraced the trappings of masculinity, he still can’t connect. He hates himself for it because it’s not what he wants, and Don hates him for it because it seems like such a poor imitation of the thing he himself does. Everything Pete does has an air of forcedness to it, because it just doesn’t come naturally to him — the language of men.

*Footnote by Natasha Simons

breakfast

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:39:00 -0700

breakfast

fork

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:38:00 -0700

fork

window plants

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:38:00 -0700

window plants

Sean Young filmed the making of Dune with David Lynch 1983 (by...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:35:00 -0700

Sean Young filmed the making of Dune with David Lynch 1983 (by msyPARIAH)

via boing boing

God I love this sort of thing. Apparently Sean Young does too, because she has Polaroid’s from the Blade Runner set too.

madmenfootnotes: The Man with the Miniature Orchestra by Dave...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:42:03 -0700

madmenfootnotes:

The Man with the Miniature Orchestra

by Dave Algonquin

There were phrases of Beethoven’s 9th symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the composition itself. He imagined Beethoven, deaf and soul-sick, his heart broken, scribbling furiously while Death stood in the doorway, clipping his nails. Still, Coe thought, it might have been living in the country that was making him cry; it was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear.

(image via paleofuture)