February 2012
9 posts
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...
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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,...
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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...
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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.
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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
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“Under the guise of launching a Facebook clone, Google has actually embarked on a...”
– Google Plus Is Going To Change How The Web Works
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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...
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Nobody understands debt
Here’s the 101 from Krugman:
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt....
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Monsanto, creating shareholder value since 1901
From the Guardian:
The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any Euroxpean Union country which opposed genetically modified crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.
State-sponsored rough-housing at the behest of private corporations. What else is new?
The choice bit:
The cables show US diplomats working directly for GM companies such as...
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“The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s...”
– I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping… :: rogerebert.com :: News & comment
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"Think of PBS as premium television on the honors...
PBS wants to be HBO but without forcing you to pay for an upfront subscription. As Federal funding continues to drop, and by asking for money “some of the time” from viewers, that makes freemium the broadcaster’s business model of choice.
The challenge of freemium is scale. You need a lot of members if you can only depend on 2-3% of them to pay for the entire service....
