Saved (Public Feed)

“It’s a portrait of two black men thinking through the idea of success in America; what happens when your view of yourself as a suppressed, striving underdog has to give way to the admission that you’ve succeeded about as much as it’s worth bothering with; and how much your victory can really relate to (or feel like it’s on behalf of) your onetime peers who haven’t got a shred of what you’ve won. It’s not a topic that deserves to be scrubbed up, either; there are things about Kanye’s tiresome self-involvement and moody debauchery — the way he sounds like some sullen hip-hop emperor, stalking around the crumbling gilded palace of his own psyche, muttering angrily and getting aggressive with the help — that belong in any such portrait.”

“What makes hip-hop such a durable form is its capacity to scramble fiction and fact; the artifice and the realities that art conceals or amplifies become one. In this way, Watch the Throne feels astonishingly different. It captures two artists who no longer need dreams; art cannot possibly prophesy a better future for either of them.”

“What’s worth remembering about Winehouse is not that she had some tortured inner light, or a tragic mien that made her a member of some insipid “27 Forever” club. It’s that she really could be wickedly good at using her brain and her expertise to create music that really worked. There were sad and dangerous things wrapped up in it — fatalism as a cop-out, the romance of failure and sorrow, masochism posing as bravery. But what you tend to take away is good humor, odd clarity, and flashes of actual bravery. At Winehouse’s best, she seemed more than good enough to convey those things without needing a life of tragedy to match.”

More on the link saved directly before this one.

Nitsuh Abebe on a particular review of David Foster Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ on Amazon. “No true human contact is possible without a certain amount of presumption, and these presumptions are precisely what self-consciousness, over time, whittles away at.”

My friend Niko Rivas interviewed me and wrote up this great column on my Lapwing EP.

‘My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.’

An animated video about how to sit well at a computer or laptop.

“The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.”

“My argument: doesn’t someone have to act like this? Like film villains, isn’t it best when those people are over there entertaining us, letting us use them as a dartboard for our own anxieties and antipathies in exchange for our attention and money?”

A great rundown of the charges leveled against Swartz, what they mean, and a thorough examination of the assumptions and preconceptions surrounding this story.

The gamification of Congress, and why it won’t work.

‘At Sea (Honolulu, HI) @ thirtyninehotel, Honolulu, HI. 12th, July 2011.’ ‘Not merely a reunion, but a reinvention, as the band rearranges their instrumentation and song writing style, switching from long-form drone inspired post-rock epics to a more concise semi-pop-structure featuring former cellist (now guitarist/singer), Yvonne Harada on vocals.’

I just helped Anil Dash fix his blog and, in return, he fully funded the writing supplies for this program at the Volcano School of Arts & Science that I selected on DonorsChoose. Go internet!

“Documentation for the Ableton Live MIDI Remote Script _Framework classes, based on decompiled Python sources and docstrings.” Someday.

All orange juice tastes the same because the juice from the oranges has its oxygen (and taste) removed for spoil-free storage and then ‘flavor packs’ are added to the flavorless juice. The flavor packs are loaded with supplementary chemicals but still technically qualify as ‘orange juice’, so there is no ingredient listing requirement for them. And: ‘Juice removed from the fruit is just concentrated fructose without any of the naturally-occurring fiber, pectin, and other goodies that make eating a whole fruit good for you.’ So don’t drink juice.

Infographic on the scientific evidence for effectiveness of popular dietary supplements. ‘Showing tangible health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet.’

The story of Jason Rohrer’s ‘Chain World’, a customized fork of Minecraft of which there is only a single copy available on a USB stick and which is meant to be played only once, following a strict set of commandments, and then passed on to someone else. It’s meant to be a game about religion.

Heartwarming. Sixty photos of the world becoming just a little bit happier.

With a chart that shows what actually happened. “In future decades, when rising health costs with an aging population hit the budget in full force, deficits are projected to be far deeper than they are now. Effective health care reform, and a willingness to pay more taxes, will be the biggest factors in controlling those deficits.”

Basically, he advocates shutting yourself off from the world as much as possible for an initial boot camp-style stretch for as long as you can manage in order to really commit yourself to wrapping your head around the concepts of programming (Rails, in this case). I want to do this, but finding time away from other commitments isn’t something I’m especially suited to do at the moment.

This is 100% true. “Because if your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them.”

“Nerds will still be nerds, and trust me, their adolescences will still be awful enough to provide fodder for a lifetime of creativity and humor, if they’re lucky. The thing that everyone seems to forget is that nerddom, in its purest form, is a teenage affliction, something that many, if not most, people grow out of. They figure out how to be passionate about their interests without being smug and humorless about them. They learn to laugh at their past humiliations, and to celebrate this newfound comfort in their own skins, they proudly take on the epithet so long slung in their direction: they call themselves nerds. And that’s it. If done in the true spirit of awareness and goodnatured self-deprecation, the day you call yourself a nerd is the day you become an ex-nerd.”

Old media (The Epiphinator) is all about stories and endings. New media (Facebook etc.) knows nothing, crafts no careful stories. But we still need those things, so don't expect it to die yet.

“The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidize reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won’t keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved.”

“Still, for the Cool Kids, it comes down to one thing: Mountain Dew provides them with a fair opportunity to usher their music into the world. ‘Any other label, any other situation … you do all the work and they take all the money. I can’t sleep comfortably with that,’ explains Rocks. ‘I would take Mountain Dew any day of the week over that. Money comes and goes, you spend it stupid and it’s gone. But what we are doing, what we’ve made — no one can take that away from us.’”

“And if you want to talk about pop music between 1980 and now, that issue—the question of who’s singing and who’s being sung to—is an important one. The study assumes that hit singles in the eighties and hit singles in the new millennium play the same role in our culture. But over the past 30 years, the weekly charts have seen changes a lot more significant than any surge of ego. It’s not just that pop’s audience has changed; it’s that its whole purpose has.”

“One challenge of adapting Quidditch to real life lies in transforming a literary invention into a balanced contest where skill and strategy matter. The greater challenge involves getting around the lack of, you know, magic. You can't fly. Neither can the bludgers, or the snitch. You can pretend to fly, though. And you can throw the bludgers. But the snitch is a problem.”

“Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves.”

“Young bands including Animal Collective, Blues Control and others are incorporating sounds from the much disparaged genre.”