Top five TEDxTeen talks. Pay attention to these kids, people. Why? Consider how out of touch with the world your parents are.
Daily Links
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The Eels’ Mark Everett writes a letter to his 16-year-old self.
You poor sap. I know you won’t believe any of this, but you should. How can I get it through your thick, acne-pocked skull? All the stupid things you are so worried about really aren’t very important at all. In fact, they are the opposite of important. What if I told you that all the “winners” around you right now were actually the losers? Well, I just did tell you that, but you still don’t believe me because I’m an adult and 16 year olds can never trust adults.
Also from Draplin, here’s his Creative Mornings talk from Portland last month. Similar to the other one I posted not long ago, but still worth your time. Love this guy.
Aaron Draplin is the only other person I know who collects vintage notebooks. His collection is substantially more sizeable than mine.
Also: The new set of Field Notes are pretty.
Trailer for Ice-T’s documentary Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap. (Though the title on the YouTube page says Ice Cube, which is kind of funny.) [via]
Twitter has killed the really brilliant Fame game. Sad.
Our fifteen minutes are up. Well, our 19 days to be exact. Twitter has informed us that we are violating the spirit of their Terms of Service. So on this Friday the 13th we say farewell.
While fame is fleeting, memories live on. We want to give a huge thank you to our winners, each of whom rose to the occasion and made us laugh, think, and even donate. You exceeded our highest expectations simply by being yourselves. You proved to the world that everyone is worthy of fame and recognition, and that a random number generator is as good a system for deciding who gets to be famous as any used by society.
HighSpeed PhotoBooth captures three seconds of footage and extends it into a one-minute video. As Snarkmarket says: “Obviously I want to be able to print these out on little strips of flexible screen. Little moving portraits in your pocket. When’s that gonna happen?”
A mostly fascinating, sometimes cringe-inducing (note: I’m a prude) and totally safe-for-work history of Goatse.
(Warning: While the article itself is absolutely SFW, click on the links within the article at your own risk.)
Your first Goatse hits you in waves, rocking between confusion and disgust as the physiological reality of the picture resolves gradually, magic-eye style.
[…]
With the shareable domain name, Goatse.cx quickly made the leap from underground inside joke to the geek mainstream. Now you didn’t need a server to host your own image, or get inducted into the Hick Crew: The site was sitting there, begging for its next victim, and noobs were falling by the thousand. Even the New York Times would find itself Goatse’d, in a way.
A fantastic profile on Braid creator Jonathan Blow and his new game, The Witness.
As a developer whose independent success has emancipated him from the grip of the monolithic game corporations, Blow makes a habit of lobbing rhetorical hand grenades at the industry. He has famously branded so-called social games like FarmVille “evil” because their whole raison d’être is to maximize corporate profits by getting players to check in obsessively and buy useless in-game items. (In one talk, Blow managed to compare FarmVille’s developers to muggers, alcoholic-enablers, Bernie Madoff, and brain-colonizing ant parasites.) Once, during an online discussion about the virtues of short game-playing experiences, Blow wrote, “Gamers seem to praise games for being addicting, but doesn’t that feel a bit like Stockholm syndrome?” His entire public demeanor forms a challenge to the genre’s intellectual laziness. Blow is the only developer on the planet who gives lectures with titles like “Video Games and the Human Condition,” the only one who speaks of Italo Calvino’s influence on his work, and the only one to so rile up the gamer community with his perceived pretentiousness that the popular gamer blog Kotaku used him as the centerpiece of a post titled “When You Love the Game But Not Its Creator.”
Andy Baio doesn’t think the $1-billion price tag on Instagram is so crazy when you put it into context.
If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)
(Side note: In the table of acquisition prices, he italicizes “rumoured” amounts. Among those is Upcoming.org, which is “rumoured” at $1 million. It’s just funny because he’s the guy who sold it.)
Instagram and digital classism.
The Web sites that you load every day are just as important as the clothes you wear, the technology you own, the television shows you watch, and the car you drive. Basically the same ‘material things’ that allow us to actively or inactively participate in modern classist behaviors are equally as embedded in our digital behavior.
[…]
Every day, we get to see a bunch of mediocre images captured by mediocre cameras on our overpriced phones, uploaded via our overpriced data plans. But for the digital upper class, it is worth paying to be a participant of this instant cycle of sharing. Instagram has placed itself as a necessary tool in this process, an easy-to-use mobile app that Facebook bets will serve as the definitive photo-editing and -sharing tool of the current digital era.
Why we can’t get over the Titanic.
The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenberg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. The aura of significance that surrounds the Titanic’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper the Onion, in 1999, stomping across the page in dire block letters:
WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG
Facebook is buying Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. That’s one dollar for every crazy scenario we can now consider, including what all this will mean for Flickr given the recent (ongoing?) troubles at Yahoo and whether or not this is a sign that Facebook has finally won the internet (or at least, that they would have won the internet if they avoided that whole going public thing, which I think is going to be bad news for them in the long term).
The New York Times Magazine on the rise of casual gaming.
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”
American Hipster is literally the worst thing in the entire universe.
By all means, bravo to the guys at getting a few million hits off of baseless reactionary jokes based entirely off of other people’s jokes, that’s their business. What should be noted is that “American Hipster” is so far off the mark that it fails on every single level.
What starts as a get-off-my-lawn-and-turn-down-your-loud-music complaint against the current state of film criticism actually ends up making some pretty notable points about how shallow the web is making us.
When a site’s goal is to satisfy the great sucking maw of the Internet with a constant feed of new items, sourced or unsourced, nothing is around long enough to make an impact. When perpetual turnover is the norm, the shallow, silly, and irrelevant rule.
[…]
In many ways, the Web has been a disaster for democracy.
[…]
The rigorous division of websites into narrow interests, the attempts of Amazon and Netflix to steer your next purchase based on what you’ve already bought, the ability of Web users to never encounter anything outside of their established political or cultural preferences, and the way technology enables advertisers to identify each potential market and direct advertising to it, all represent the triumph of cultural segregation that is the negation of democracy.
A pretty epic tale from Lightsaber Academy, which is apparently a real thing. [via]
I like Star Wars. But I don’t love Star Wars. If Star Wars and I were dating, it would be sort of a casual sex situation. Nothing too serious, just lots of sweaty, fast-paced action we’d both really enjoy, despite knowing very little about one another.
[…]
I’m standing next to Gary, talking to him about the huge aftermarket industry for Star Wars when someone hands me a lightsaber. I have never felt cooler in my entire life.
Postmodernism is dead.
Certainly, the internet is the most postmodern thing on the planet. The immediate consequence in the west seems to have been to breed a generation more interested in social networking than social revolution. But, if we look behind that, we find a secondary reverse effect — a universal yearning for some kind of offline authenticity
Get your fill of internet pranks yesterday? After seeing about a dozen, I’ve decided this is the winner and this is the loser.
Sasha Frere-Jones says good things about Twitter. (And calls Franzen “the Kanye West of fiction”!!!)
Twitter is both where the untruth flies first and where it gets shot down. It’s sort of a self-cleaning oven, where the wisdom of the crowd can work out the kinks. A reliable version of events generally emerges because vanity (in the form of a visible number of retweets for the user who posts the canonical version) fuels the process, much as a writer’s byline can press ego into the service of good writing.
Is internet culture turning musicians into content producers?
The result feels like musicians threatening to become content-producers, churning out a steady stream of conversation topics and half-formed ideas without quality control. Being a part of a conversation feels as important as what’s actually said. That’s a sure route to obscurity, racing to appeal to the smaller and smaller audiences willing to follow at the real-time speed of Twitter and, especially, seapunk favorite Tumblr.
Automated Pinterest spam can apparently make you over $1,000 per day. Crazy.
Nope, I have no guilt. I’m not trying to scam anyone, or upload viruses to their computer or anything like that. I simply show products to the Pinterest community. I realize that I’m spamming the crap out of the site, but its nothing personal, just business.
Fame is a pretty brilliant thing for Twitter. Once per day a “winner” is picked and everyone who’s signed up (currently just over 3,000 people) will automatically follow them. 24 hours later, they’ll automatically unfollow. Basically, it gives you thousands of new followers for a day, leaving you to do what you will with that audience.
Several smart people weigh in on what will come after the hipster, which seems like an odd thing for smart people to weigh in on. So it goes.
The best bet for the next thing would be for something to emerge from the Occupy movement: less concerned about music and clothing, more concerned about politics; less concerned about differentiating yourself from the people around you, more concerned about working with them; less concerned about status, more concerned about social change; less ironic, more earnest; less polished, more grungy.
Comments on websites: Totally not worth it. [via]
I turned off comments here back in January. No one seems to have noticed.