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Posts tagged with culture

Vacations, Morons, and Encased Meats

On the Hot Doug’s website (at least on 2012-02-01):

William Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s best-known and most popular authors, wrote, “I do not really like vacations. I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.”

William Robertson Davies was a moron.

THEREFORE …

HOT DOUG’S WILL BE CLOSED FOR VACATION

I love me some Hot Doug’s.


“  The thing is, after college I moved to New York City and became a writer and met some people who shared my obsessions, and I ditched the Forsterian narrator thing, and then I wasn’t that awkward or isolated anymore. According to the diagnostic manual, Asperger syndrome is ‘a continuous and lifelong disorder,’ but my symptoms had vanished.” — Benjamin Nugent on the DSM-5

“  Piracy is when peo­ple use vi­o­lence, or the threat of it, to trans­fer your pos­ses­sions to them­selves (after which you no longer have them), place you in cap­tiv­ity in pur­suit of a ran­som, and in many cases in­flict death on you as a side-ef­fect of their busi­ness model…. [A]ny­one who claims that unau­tho­rized trans­mis­sion of bits is anal­o­gous to piracy is at least a liar and is deeply dis­re­spect­ful of the peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing the ef­fects of theft, kid­nap­ping, and mur­der right now today in the In­dian Ocean. They de­serve your con­tempt, and they have mine.” — Tim Bray writing about SOPA

Apple, Coke, and Cool

When quality returns to scale.


The Great Blogfather (Was Slightly Goofy)

Every once and a while it’s worth remember that social media had to be invented. Matt Haughey, MetaFilter founder, “… had to code all the software so he could “blog” in the first place.” Haughey:

And then I made comments. I’d only seen one other site with comments, so I sort of had to invent how blog comments work. I just thought those four or five authors might want to talk to each other. I thought long and hard about how the comments were going to look and be displayed. I always wanted names at the bottom, so that you didn’t prejudice what someone was going to say. I noticed that early systems like [tech blog] Slashdot just put, “Bob says this,” and you’d go, “Fuck Bob—he’s that libertarian psycho! I don’t want to hear a word he says!” So I put them at the bottom so you can be gently surprised.

These Internet traditions that we have that seem so old and so ancient are so new and so man made. Link via Mike Monteiro.


“  Maybe ‘I downloaded but didn’t share’ will be the new ‘I smoked, but didn’t inhale.’” — Andy Baio on remix culture

Fanboy

A definition of an Apple fanboy and commentary on those who prefer to use the term (from Jim Dalrymple, via Marco Arment).


“  Good people do bad things, bad people do good things, happy people get lost, lost people become heroes. This is the wonderful and depressing and daunting challenge of writing about people. Things don’t always make sense. Mistakes are made. Greatness emerges when you don’t expect it.” — Joe Posnanski on Penn State

“  The rule is: the further you are from your cave, there’s the exponential increase in the chance something will go wrong at the least opportune time. The best example of this is standing in front of 1,000 people who are expecting you to smoothly and expertly talk for the next hour and you’ve just discovered your MacBook doesn’t connect to the venue’s projector.” — Michael Lopp on bags

“  There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov via DF