May 2012
4 posts
3 tags
“We’re not using mortar. We’re using glass and steel.”
– Steve Jobs response to Larry Ellison when, after touring the Apple prototype store for the umpteenth time, the Oracle founder quipped “Don’t you read the newspaper? Bricks and mortar are dead.”
Important quotes from smart people about boring...
Felix Salmon, doing a bang up job documenting the train wreck Facebook IPO:
All of which means that the winners in this whole game were you and I: the quiet skeptical masses who simply sat back and watched the farce unfold. In the game of Facebook IPO, it turns out, the only winning move was not to play.
PS. I did not play.
Mike Shatzkin, writing to the DoJ about the Apple/publishers/Amazon...
1 tag
If you can't beat laser cat, you probably deserve...
An oddly appropriate line from Mat Honan’s piece on how flickr died at the hands of Yahoo. Reading the post is like watching an autopsy: painful and dreary, but necessary in order to grok what went wrong.
This broke my heart:
Flickr is still pretty wonderful. But it’s lovely in the same way a box of old photos you’ve stashed under the bed is. It’s an archive of...
5 tags
"We don’t think of it as Etsy becoming more like...
That’s from ETSY CEO Chad Dickerson’s post on how ETSY has become a B-corp (and raised another $40m).
Etsy is more than just an online marketplace. Etsy is a beacon in the world for running businesses sustainably, responsibly, and profitably, with people at the center. The kind of sharing and cooperation you see on Etsy — what has been called a “sharing economy” that is part of a...
April 2012
4 posts
7 tags
Beginners
Beginners is the movie I’d want to make if I was a director. And Mike Mills is the kind of director I’d want to be: thoughtful, kind, and honest.
This may be my new favourite, pushing aside The Hours and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Gasp!)
2 tags
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Forrester CEO George Colony states the obvious about post-Jobs Apple in Forbes: they will coast, then decelerate.
When Steve Jobs departed, he took three things with him: 1) singular charismatic leadership that bound the company together and elicited extraordinary performance from its people; 2) the ability to take big risks, and 3) an unparalleled ability to envision and design products....
6 tags
March 2012
5 posts
5 tags
Please forward to Fox News.
Kurt Vonnegut to Charles McCarthy, after the administrator authorized the burning of all his school’s copies of Slaughterhouse Five:
Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community,...
2 tags
"Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books."
From Tumblr’s updated ToS:
You have to be at least 13 years old to use Tumblr. We’re serious: it’s a hard rule, based on U.S. federal and state legislation, even if you’re 12.9 years old. If you’re younger than 13, don’t use Tumblr. Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books.
5 tags
About Last Night
Stumbled across Last Night, a gem from first-time director Massy Tadjedin. We both loved it: subtle direction, smart script, solid cast—and a silky cut under the measured hands of Susan Morse.
Last Night stands in stark contrast to the comparable—and wretched—Closer, which was over-cast, over-directed, under-written, and utterly pretentious. Closer desperately wants you to FEEL something,...
7 tags
Getting somewhere.
Two different blogposts featuring people I admire collided today and came to the same conclusion: getting somewhere often requires that you not be too specific about where you’re going.
From David Fincher, talking about Dragon Tatoo and his approach to making films:
I always feel that the best things come out of having just enough time to get into some serious trouble and not enough time...
7 tags
Things that made me smile recently.
This shot of Lauren Bacall.
A new sourdough loaf I tasted just moments after it left the oven.
Opening the mail to find my wife’s royalty cheque and remembering how she’s wanted to write since she was five.
Playing Sarah Jaffe’s Clementine in the car at obscenely loud levels.
Tyler. He always makes me smile, even when I’m cursing his name.
An email footer that included...
February 2012
12 posts
6 tags
“The alchemy of becoming your self is the ultimate act of leadership.”
– A VC: The Management Team
5 tags
6 tags
Comfortable, but not too comfortable.
The New Yorker examines brainstorming, noting that its supportive, considerate framework doesn’t work since it lacks dissent:
Dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt...
3 tags
7 tags
Hey, old media middlemen: No industry is safe....
The headline comes from Andy Baio in the comment thread from Yancy Strickler’s news that two Kickstarter projects hit $1m within 4 hours of each other.
There are crazy days and then there are days like yesterday. Kickstarter has experienced some frantic hours but nothing like what happened in the 24-hour span between Wednesday at 6:54pm and Thursday at 6:44pm. Two million-dollar projects,...
6 tags
Be an enlightened despot.
Terry Gilliam on filmmaking (aka “himself”):
Growing up is for losers.
Film school is for fools.
Auteurism is out.
Fil-teurism is in.
Put your ideas in a drawer. Take them out as needed.
All you’ve really got in life is story.
Command the audience with your lens.
Nothing can defeat a director who is one with his actors.
Surround yourself with improvisers.
Directing is not...
2 tags
Angels.
Assistant #1: They might enjoy their lives more if they could, say, soundtrack it.
God: Soundtrack it?
Assistant #1: You know—have music accompany it.
God: That's what the angels are for. Do you know how much they cost?
Assistant #1: They can't hear the angels anymore. They use iPods.
God: So put the angels on their iPods. God, I'm so fucking tired of Jobs. What a prick.
Assistant #2: iPods are incompatible with angels.
Assistant #1: And they brick any iPhone. We tried.
[Long pause]
God: Fine. Give them Sigur Ros.
Assistant #1 & Assistant #2 nod, sharing a smile between them.
7 tags
Say it with Chocolate. →
Katy Leen:
Over the holidays, a Montreal design studio called Dynamo decided to use their typographic skills to create unique gifts: a selection of chocolate bars inscribed with positive mantras for the new year. And they didn’t just use any kind of chocolate for their sweet sayings, they teamed with…
4 tags
4 tags
I understand that some copywriters have much...
Master ad man David Ogilvy explains his flabby copywriting skills in this letter to Mr. Ray Calt, noting:
At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her.
Ogivly would get along famously with Gene Fowler, who once quipped: Writing is easy. All...
6 tags
Code wins arguments.
From the letter accompanying Facebook’s filing, Zuckerberg writes:
Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins...
January 2012
32 posts
4 tags
6 tags
Love me now or forget me later.
Warner Brothers, struggling to hold onto diminishing DVD sales, has opted to cripple Netflix users who actually want to watch their films. Venturebeat reports:
Warner Brothers is now imposing additional stipulations for its DVD movie new releases. Starting Feb. 1, the company has decided to restrict Netflix users from adding any new DVD releases to their queue until 28 days after the DVD goes on...
3 tags
It doesn't end well.
Amazon is now licensing their books to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for real-world penetration and to work around B&N’s “we won’t sell this unless you do that” stipulation.
Watching this ongoing relationship between New York and Seattle reminded me of the relationship between John Hurt (pictured, on table) and what is about to emerge from his sad, infested body.
A...
3 tags
Empire.
Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher dig into Apple’s supply chain:
Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China,...
1 tag
7 tags
Stop watching.
Marco Arment thinks we can beat the MPAA by not watching their member’s films:
Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And...
5 tags
Drown the drowner.
Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if...
4 tags
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“We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our...”
– The Technium: Making Holes in Our Heart
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I schlep, therefore I am.
Paul Graham of YCombinator writing about founders who don’t shrink from the tedious or unpleasant aspects of the business:
A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you’d deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if...
“Charlie has taken ownership of the chocolate factory!”
– Tim Cook speaks! | brian s hall
5 tags
“Under the guise of launching a Facebook clone, Google has actually embarked on a...”
– Google Plus Is Going To Change How The Web Works
6 tags
Best use of a Harry Potter reference in Android...
Perhaps more people will relate to this: I hate Android for the same reason that Severus Snape hates Harry Potter — the very sight reminds me of something so beautiful, that was taken. Except it’s worse. It’s as if Harry Potter has grown up to become Voldemort.
Paris Lemon’s post on why he hates Android is a bit whiny, but he’s right about Google. Their strategy to enter the phone...
2 tags
4 tags
Writer robots
Lyn Hilt:
We teach students to write too methodically. We allow adherence to form to trump creativity. We assess according to state-issued rubrics that call for a certain structure to be followed. We score students on their abilities to be focused, include enough content, stay traditionally organized, use proper grammar and spelling, and use “style.”
[But] We neglect audience. We’re churning...
“Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can...”
– Post-Medium Publishing
5 tags
4 tags
Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right...
Vint Cerf, writing for the Time’s about the internet and human rights:
The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations...
“therein lies the paradox and the proof that the “if you love somebody set them...”
– Amanda Palmer on marrying Neil Gaiman
5 tags
The new girl
That’s Elizabeth Meriwether with the glasses, the creator of the Zooey Deschanel-fronted New Girl. THR listed her show and Suburgatory as the freshest feminine comedy on TV. Couldn’t agree more. New Girl gets cute without cutesy and perfectly balances the male cast with Deschanel. If Tina Fey and 30 Rock set the standard, Meriwether and New Girl are the alt-covers.
1 tag
Oh Bernie—what hath thou done?
Corporations are people, according to the Supreme Court. That makes the publishers backing SOPA the Bernie Bernbaum’s of their industry.
Remember Bernie? He was the sleazy maladroit who lied and cheated his way to an ignoble end in Miller’s Crossing.
Here are 13 of the world’s biggest publishers supporting a bill that cripples the internet and installs legislation on par with...
“When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists...”
– Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA « Steve Blank