simolinic

betterbooktitles: Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves Better...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 02:25:53 -0400

Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves

Better Blog Title: “Most Things Are Easier To Ignore Or Marginalize If I Simplify My Thinking Into Casual Strata And Use Demeaning Language To Obscure The Fact That I Can’t Be Bothered To Think Any Harder About Anything Than Is Allowed Within The Momentary Gaps In My Rigorous Schedule Of Tumble-Logging Condescendingly About Real Efforts Other People Have Made At Understanding And Synthesizing Their Experiences Into Art, Which I Not-So-Secretly Feel I Will Never Approach But Long For Unendingly, And Therefore Must Sap And Leach Possible Strength From The Works Of Others — And Thereby Enable Others To Do The Same, By Posting Said Lechery In Easily-Digestible Chunks On The Internet — By Poorly Manipulating The Covers Of Their Monumental Books To Instead Say Something Degrading And Worth A Quarter Of A Chuckle If Someone Can, God Help Them, Even Possibly Be Amused By Half-Assed Hateful Bitter Book Titles.”

Photo

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 10:56:10 -0400

The other night, at a surprise rock show down the street, an...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:30:28 -0400

The other night, at a surprise rock show down the street, an enormous white dog whose “ownership” I never quite placed began wandering through the crowd, accepting love and inspecting the guitars. It felt like a benevolent spirit protecting us — even though that sounds ridiculous.

That night, plus this video, has bestirred in me an affection for huge dogs that I’ve never even remotely had before. My childhood neighbor Brandon was stricken dumb with fright at the appearance of even a medium-sized dog, and so at around 7 I absorbed that dog-reluctance in order to sympathize with him. Since then, dogs have mostly just seemed gross and annoying, as did all things natural and not-yet-sterilized by electronic capture and transmission. The last few years have seen a gradual shift away from that perspective, and what it most feels like is the opening of previously-locked chest doors; I saw that big dog meandering through a crowd of people enjoying really loud music, and a little cuckoo-flap opened in my sternum and warm light flowed in and out. It’s a great feeling to not be closed up to the world!

Huge dog to protect and soothe human larva? WONDERFUL.

Pretty thorough breakdown of Lady Gaga's "not not dumbness" by Mark Dery on Trueslant.com

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:17:40 -0400

Pretty thorough breakdown of Lady Gaga's "not not dumbness" by Mark Dery on Trueslant.com:

via Warren Ellis.

Tonight, my brother and I (not without a few oblique hints)...

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 00:09:20 -0400

Tonight, my brother and I (not without a few oblique hints) deciphered and acquired the “Painstakingly Concealed Secret Track” from MC Frontalot’s most recent album, Zero Day. Which is so good.

We saw him and his band play twice in one weekend, in Atlanta and Athens, and had the best time, both times. There is no paradox.

His bassist Brandon Patton’s most recent album, Underhill Downs, is really good, too, and I’ve listened to keyboardist Vic-20/Ken Flagg’s other band Edible Norris’s album Ready, Set, Gonads approximately 2 dozen times in the last week.

Exquisite. All of them.

I’m getting tired of my brain being completely filled up by trivia, minutiae, computer-noise...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:10:47 -0400

I’m getting tired of my brain being completely filled up by trivia, minutiae, computer-noise and other people’s drama/business/needs.

I can’t hear my own voice anymore.

Yipes!

The web site I’ve been working on for months (at a fairly...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

The web site I’ve been working on for months (at a fairly consistent pace, give or take) is now public. It’s for a local apartment management company, owned by the father of a friend. That friend also works there. She endured many hardships since asking me to make them a site in… October? Roundabout?

“Can it be ready by the end of November?” she asked.

“Oh, of course,” I said.

… I’ve heard that big projects always take three times the original estimate. That’s about right.

It’s not even that big or complicated, but represents an enormous amount of my time and is without a doubt the most-involved web-related project I’ve ever completed. Plate’s ‘lets took more of a certain kind of work and there’s “more to show” for that, but in terms of web thingamajigs, there’s a lot more structure and hidden stuff involved in GPM’s site. Every other project before this has been essentially a veneer of divs, purely visually-style. This one’s not much deeper, but there’s jQuery, and php, and it was written in haml and sass and then output through nanoc… some of which mired me for weeks, some of which compensated for that lost time through increased efficiency. Mostly I just learned and learned and learned.

I would like very much to document the various drafts and steps, for posterity and my own interest and because Frank Chimero said there’s not enough talk about process on the internet. And I agree. But not now.

That’s quite enough for tonight. Tell me if it seems broken or wrong in any way.

Geekologie linked to a video for the “Dork Anthem,” and I won’t link you to it,...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:48:00 -0500

Geekologie linked to a video for the “Dork Anthem,” and I won’t link you to it, because it’s terrible. My comment, recorded for posterity, because I doubt it will be approved on their YouTube page.

Trite. Same jokes have been made in much better music and with a much higher concentration of humor and originality. See: Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy,” and anything by MC Frontalot, other songs already mentioned in the comments.

Also, does it trouble anyone else that “dorks” seem to define themselves entirely by which worldwide-distributed intellectual property they like best? And how much of the merchandise they are willing to purchase and show off in their rooms? This is bothering me more and more.

It’s fine to be enthusiastic and interested in absolutely anything, as far as I’m concerned. But:

Your value and credibility are defined by your ability to create and originate, not your dedication to consumption.

Been staring at things like this for hours. But not just at...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:36:00 -0500

Been staring at things like this for hours. But not just at them; through them, and into the future.

Wrapping up a 7-ish hour session of web work. The second workday worth of work I’ve done since waking up this morning. I got an awful lot done, though there’s still a good bit to do. Turned out that several things I thought were pointless tangents a couple of months ago (12-column grid css, HAML) came back in a rush tonight to solve a bunch of problems. To facilitate pumping out all of these pages in rapid-fire, I’m going to give nanoc a try tomorrow. I wish I had it in place earlier this evening; might have saved me 30 minutes or so of page-by-page copy&pasting by inserting partials of the navigation bar, footer, etc. No big thang, but since I had to switch to HAML to get something else to work, it won’t take long at all to drop the files into a nanoc project and reap benefits. Reap reap reap.

I listened both of The Protomen’s albums on loop the whole time, which means I heard them both 4 or 5 times. That first album took a while to grow on me, but it’s great work music, especially in context with Act II. They’re playing at the Caledonia Lounge on April 17th, and that is going to be incredible you guys they are so good.

Need answers before 12:30pm EST

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:05:48 -0500

mathicaspi:

What should I have for lunch?

1. Earth fare’s salad bar

2. Earth fare’s hot bar

3. Sandwich from local deli

4. Chic-fil-a kid’s meal (my weakness)

5. Some sort of yummy organic soup

You might have gotten answers if you’d ended this post with a ? mark. Enable answers to get answers!

test

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:04:52 -0500

mathicaspi:

i fucking hate my followers.

If there were a “do not like” button, I would have clicked it. Instead, it’s either “like” or “reblog.” But normally if I reblog something, I like it? It’s either “like and shut up, or dislike and explicate?” :(

do you mean tumblr followers :(

that is sad :(

(from jasonpermenter) Well? Hmmmmm?

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:59:11 -0500

(from jasonpermenter)

Well? Hmmmmm?

Somebody, do something in me. Immediately. Seen in a shop window...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:11:00 -0500

Somebody, do something in me. Immediately.

Seen in a shop window in downtown Athens.

Yes. The first three of Mr. Chimero’s “10 Principles...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:48:53 -0500

Yes.

The first three of Mr. Chimero’s “10 Principles That May Make Your Work Better Or May Make It Worse” from the Thinking For a Living archives.

Thinking for a Living v3.0

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:27:15 -0500

viafrank:

The opinions expressed below are solely my own, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of my peers at Thinking for a Living. Also, cheers and hoorays for my fellow conspirers: Duane King, Shane Bzdok, Bob Borden, and Ian Coyle.

I’d be remiss not to mention the launch of Thinking for a Living v3.0, a site geared at creating and publishing thought-provoking design-related content. TFAL has been a passion project of ours for the past couple of years, and it’s really satisfying to see the site launch to such enthusiastic support. If you’ve gone and visited and read a little, thanks so much.

If you haven’t visited, I hope you can go take a look around. In redesigning the site, we tried to question a lot of the things that we found frustrating about the web: pagination, vertical scrolling (and its effect on the experience of reading), and the lack of a sense of completion as a reader. We wanted to make a place that was quiet and focused for sweet, dignified reading. If the site is called Thinking for a Living, we wanted a space suitable for thoughtfulness.

If you label your audience as “reader,” it changes a lot of your design process. You let the content do the majority of the heavy lifting to establish tone and personality. You obsess over contrast between background and foreground color for type. You think hard about grid structures and measurements. And, more than anything, you focus on the experience of reading the site. More often than not, laymen think interactive design means the interaction of the user manipulating the content at hand. In our case, the interaction wasn’t manipulation, it was consumption. The interaction was reading.

Read More

I don’t remember how I got to Frank Chimero’s tumblr a few months ago, but I rejoiced in his designs and his essays. Since then, I’ve been refreshed and (dare I?) challenged by his continued articulations of life as a… well, as a human, trying to do good work, that happens in this case to be “design.” I just love him, and he recently summed up why.

Then, it turns out, he (co-?)designed and has written for an online magazine that, after opening it, poking at it for a few minutes with the mouse (the “next column” buttons chased me around in a fun way, making the clickable area larger without being intrusive), I realized I could move around it with the arrow keys.

I let out a little yelp of joy.

This is, so far, the best, most readable presentation of text on the internet that I have ever seen. It immediately reshaped several of my old opinions, and at once gelled with thoughts I’ve had about the web. Keyboard-accessible, yes yes yes. Touching one key to keep moving is great.

The only thing I wish I could do is move around the table of contents with the keyboard, also, and select articles from there… I’d also like keys to go directly to the next or previous article, without having to page all the way through the one I’m looking at. Though insisting on that sort of physical presence or progress — like in a paper magazine, getting glimpses of things you didn’t know you were interested in on the way to the one you are — isn’t bad at all.

And the articles look delicious, to boot. Long-form text, presented in a fresh and palatable way… Yes. Yes, please. Yes, forever.

The only problem now is that I want to know exactly how it works and I want to make sites that incorporate these ideas and mechanisms, and try to take them in other directions. And, frankly, I’m kind of busy right now.

… Yes.

A song about body motion. That I made tonight. It was suggested...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:50:51 -0500

A song about body motion. That I made tonight. It was suggested that I create an electronica song based on a particular phrase, and I picked up the gauntlet.

"Sorry, fellow English majors—novels belong to the past."

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:14:10 -0500

"Sorry, fellow English majors—novels belong to the past.":

Should be titled, “And The Award For ‘College Major Which Can Always Be Relied Upon To Shit On Itself Whenever Possible’ Goes To… Of Course, It’s The Fucking English Majors.”

English majors: You have worth, and your skills mean something. Your persistent self-deprecation withered me and drove me away. Don’t let yourselves or anyone say, “Lol, what are you going to do with an English major?” without immediately punching them.

People are always so excited to declare the death of a particular medium. These same people often also believe that the greatest novels that will ever be written were written before 1900. Do not listen to these people. They are spiteful and unimaginative and wish the novel were dead so they didn’t feel bad about never writing one, like they dreamed they would since they were young.

Rant. By Chuck Palahniuk. I read it over the last few days. I...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:09:21 -0500

Rant. By Chuck Palahniuk. I read it over the last few days.

I didn’t expect it to tap into so many of my recent concerns. Which I won’t detail here. Tony and I had an illuminating chat after I finished it this evening.

Personal commitment: Be free of external compulsions, to leave room for the personal.

Periodically, people call my Google Voice number, thinking that...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:46:46 -0500

Periodically, people call my Google Voice number, thinking that it belongs to the rapper T. I. - better known as Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr. - all of whom tell me that Steve Harvey gave out the number on the radio. When I answer, they demand to know where T.I. is. They are almost universally rude to me. When I don’t answer, they leave messages. Here is one message from yesterday.

Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:41:51 -0500

Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login:

marco:

(via Zoya)

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

I will now say two things that will shock most people who know me:

You should follow this link to ReadWriteWeb.

You should read the comments.

You can see the same effect on anything ranked highly by a Google search for “facebook login”, including this.

Please click those links and read the comments.

Then Neven Mrgan’s take on this.

My mouth dropped after 20 comments and hasn’t gone back up yet. WHAT.