popchartlab:

With football season over, it’s time for NFL Off-Season Shenanigans Bingo.

[via Mandatory]

I cannot tell you how much I wish Matt Taibbi was still writing the Sports Blotter. The most interesting things these thugs ever do are the things they do off the playing field, where they reveal their true selves. But the sports fans either never catch on, or have long since decided that they must suspend all assessment of moral character so they can be assured of getting their brain candy during the season.

nevver:

1979

Fun fact: Robert Tinney, from Baton Rouge, LA, drew over 100 Byte magazine covers, is still working, and yet has never been able to improve much beyond the style of a primitivist who doesn’t fully understand perspective or anatomy.

Yes, I’m being mean. (The shirt and the hand in the illustration above are pretty good.) But the fact is, I saw a lot of Byte when I was younger and nerdier, and his cover illustrations were usually ugly as hell - and those, along with the rest of Byte’s conscious, even deliberate, lack of aesthetics, contributed a lot to my impression of computing and circuit nerds as people who were unfit for the rest of society. Reading Byte reinforced my overall impression of the world: If this is how we shape our own personal slice of culture, then no wonder no one else wants anything to do with us. Byte is what I knew I would have to escape from if I didn’t want to die alone. (There were no girl nerds back then.)

I’m a much stabler person now than I was when I was a teenager, and my general outlook hasn’t been that bleak for a long time. But lest you think I was being overly harsh in the first place, I’d like to point out that nerd-dom has met the real world halfway too. Most of you don’t remember what the 1979 model nerd looked like. I’ll remind you: He looked like Bill Gates, before his wife made him get a decent haircut and dress better. The 1979 nerd got a serious relationship for one of three reasons and three reasons only: 1) his partner felt he was a steady source of reliable income 2) his partner respected intelligence above all other criteria 3) he was unexpectedly very good in bed. And Byte pandered to his fantasies. Amid the arcane articles were a whole lot of ads featuring impossibly pneumatic women who almost, but not quite, managed to look erotically fascinated with the circuit board or CRT display they were embracing.

starstealer:

astrangedevice:

as—-you—-wish:

Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter… ♥

I would initially been stuck between “Oh god he’s a serial killer” and “Oh god that’s adorable and sweet”

Unlike another couple we won’t mention in this space, I’ve never had issues with THIS Brooding Dark Creator In Love With Talentless Actress Ego relationship. Oh, sure, I will maintain until my dying breath that HBC has no genuine ability whatsoever, but the relationship seems sincere and genuine. Besides, they kinda deserve each other (unlike that other couple, where the gent should have dared to dream bigger). After all, it becomes increasingly obvious to everyone (as I began saying some years ago) that Burton is kind of a one-note hack too.

[So, I started writing this in response to a picture of a house and yard absolutely festooned with American flags. Flags on the fence, flags hanging from the roofline, everywhere. But while I wrote this, that picture was taken down. And the only other such picture I could find like that in recent Tumblr posts had an old woman putting the flags in place, with an actual name and a story, and I don’t want to hurt the feelings of a specific person, this is about generalities. So pretend you are looking at a house covered with American flags instead of vintage tackiness. OK?]

As if I weren’t already in a shit mood from the other aspects of my life that aren’t working properly, along comes the fourth of July to provide the coup de grace.

Understand, I wouldn’t like this holiday even if I were strongly pro-American, because I distrust nationalism - I think a nation is a particularly nasty group to base a personal identity on, in second place for odiousness behind religious identity, but slightly ahead of racial identity*. I think a national independence day is a stupid thing to commemorate in the first place, but the real problem is the way the people with jingoistic tendencies use it as an excuse to wave their “love it or leave it” tendencies openly. These are the people I want to punch in the face. The house in the picture above inspires in me utterly unhealthy desires to burn it down, or at least vandalize their yard.

America is a horrible, horrible country full of horrible, horrible people. And the most horrible thing about it is, as bad as it is, it still beats all the other alternatives. Except possibly Canada. Which has become too smart to let Americans in.

* I distrust identifying with any groups, because I think all such identifications are suspect - they create a false sense of commonality, and they are too often an excuse for snobbish back-patting - “yes, we share this, therefore we are better than everyone who doesn’t.” But if you must identify with groups, identify with groups where you actually do have some known common ground; it’s a whole lot saner to put yourself in, say, the “rabid Doctor Who fans” group - where at least you know you share that - than to put yourself in the “Americans” group, where you could possibly have absolutely nothing in common with anyone else near you in that circle of the Venn diagram. The smaller and more specific the assumed commonalities, the better for everyone involved.

nevver:

Weekend Plans

thiswolf:

Smart. 

Only works with Guinness.  

Yes, except for an obvious flaw, which I am going to state in as profane a way as possible so as to give it appropriate emphasis:

WHO THE FUCK GIVES A SHIT ABOUT A QR CODE ON A FUCKING GLASS OF BEER?

I’m going to assume this is some student design project or some other type of demo work which will forever remain blessedly unrealized, because I believe the Guinness people are intelligent enough to realize that if they’re going to supply bars with promotional glassware, they might as well JUST USE THE GUINNESS LOGO, which is one of the most well-recognized brand names/logos in the WORLD, and which does not require some idiotic smartphone app to look up and translate into the Guinness URL WHICH ANYONE COULD HAVE DEDUCED ALREADY.

If some marketeer at Guinness really wants to put the URL on the glassware, then just put the URL on the glassware. UNDER THE LOGO.

This is the problem with QR codes. They translate to a URL. But their information density is actually LOWER than just printing the URL as text - they take up more space on a page/glass/screen/wall than the URL-as-text would - and they are opaque; you can tell where an URL goes just by reading it, but you can’t tell where a QR code goes until you scan it (hope it doesn’t lead somewhere you didn’t want to go!) It adds a needless extra step to a process that was already simple and transparent. It’s a fix that makes things worse.

The only reason QR codes are hot right now is because of the number of people superficially fascinated with smartphones who 1) need amusing things for it to do so they can show them off to other people and justify the price they paid for their status gadget and/or 2) are too lazy, or frustrated with the difficulty of typing input on those little things, to just type in a URL.

But as smartphones become so ubiquitous that they just become “phones,” the use cases will divide into two groups of people: the power-users, for whom the other capabilities of the phone are genuinely essential to their everyday life, and who have learned to use their phones efficiently and intelligently … who, in general, will be smart enough to realize the inherent problems in QR codes and not bother with them, especially as input methods for text improve; and the phone-focused users, for whom the extra features in smart phones are occasional and ancillary, and who will quickly lose interest in gimmickry like QR codes once their phone becomes just a phone to them and they stop wanting to show it off every five minutes.

QR codes are a fad, and one with a very short shelf-life. You read it here first.

EDIT: Of course there are all sorts of nuances and wrinkles to this, and a very interesting conversation on Twitter has ensued which unfortunately I now have neither the energy or the patience to duplicate here. I will point out one thing, though: I don’t think QR codes are useless, and I never said they were. There are a whole lot of applications where they are much better than bar codes. I just am tired of seeing them plastered on every single wall and advertisement in the universe, and I think - I hope! - that soon the rest of the world will get tired of them in that aspect as well.

ROFLCon is this weekend. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s a gathering of people to discuss dumb internet memes and the people behind them.

The Boston Phoenix, which some months back apparently fired its entire editorial department (unproven, but I can find no other explanation for its decline in quality) and is just barely getting by on the basis of a few remaining writers with more poverty than pride, has built this week’s entire issue around a ROFLCon theme. I reserve comment on what a dumb idea that was, and will instead address some specifics having to do with ROFLCon and the general subject of nerdery.

Even if you don’t care for my rant, the rest of this contains several article links which you may find of interest anyway, especially the last two which I have provided as a positive, cheerful countermeasure to all this bile.

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The lead paragraph, in old-school newspaper style, is supposed to tell you everything the story’s about, while simultaneously piquing you enough to get you to read the rest of the story - a challenging task. But a lead also has another purpose: Sometimes, you read one and you realize there is absolutely no point in reading the rest of the story because 1) it’ll just piss you off 2) it is founded on an incorrect premise. (Usually, #1 is because you think #2.)

The lead in question (in case you don’t want to give io9 your clicks, and really, who could blame you?) is:

Watch a Disney production originally spearheaded by the mighty Roger Allers (right off of Lion King fame) with a soundtrack by Sting and the voice talents of Eartha Kitt, David Spade, and John Goodman crumble into the wasted opportunity comedy The Emperor’s New Groove.

Here’s the thing. I happen to know a fair bit about the history of Kingdom of the Sun and I know exactly what it would have been - another grandiose, overblown Disney tale with Big Heart and a Happy Ending and An Incredibly Sticky Song By A Celebrity Performer That You Only Hear Over The End Credits. Instead, the production crumbled under the weight of its own pompousness and ended up as the fast-paced, witty, screwball buddy comedy that it became. The Emperor’s New Groove is probably the only time in twenty years that I have nearly busted a gut laughing at a comedy piece in any Disney film that does not have the word “Pixar” on it. The film is utterly frenetic; it starts moving instantly, never stops, and is not bogged down by pathos or sticky or musical dead weight.

“Wasted opportunity comedy?” They made the bold decision to scrap a time and production effort that was clearly going down a blind alley and instead came up with a film which - for once - was lean and mean and, dare I say it, edgy. It’s one of the few times Disney has ever allowed itself to Break Its Own Rules, something that they usually do to great effect (the other that comes to mind was throwing out the tired old visual design of Hercules and bringing satirical artist Gerald Scarfe in to shake everybody up).

It’s true it didn’t do blockbuster box office, but no Disney cel animation film at the time did - this is about when they were beginning to consider scrapping the huge cost/time investment of traditional cel work - and it has more than proven its legs, even spawning a successful kid’s TV series.

So why does Sweatbox paint the decision to rework the film as such a disaster? Because Sweatbox was made by Trudie Styler. Styler is married to Sting. And Sting was the person most pissed off by Disney’s production decision, because it left most of his songs on the cutting room floor (and because, as we all know, Sting has an ego the size of Mongolia). He said

At first, I was angry and perturbed. Then I wanted some vengeance.

In other words, while Sweatbox may not be an outright smear piece, it definitely has an axe to grind. But you won’t find that discussed anywhere in the io9 article. (Yes, I did read the rest of it.) Interesting, eh? But that’s io9, which has always been more about sensation and hit-count-mongering than actual content or analysis.

nevver:

Blackout

It was apparently pretty consequential if you were in the Back Bay, but over in Medford I did not need twenty minutes of Jeopardy! interrupted to listen to people yammering in a content-free way about it.

WBZ is already on notice with me for how fast and loose they play with Jeopardy! during football season. Dear WBZ: Jeopardy! should only be interrupted by THE FUCKING TRUMP OF DOOM, and even then, I’d prefer you do it during the contestant interviews, which I mute anyway, because I don’t watch Jeopardy! to hear the players talk.

So there’s this guy named Joshua Rothman who writes the so-called “Braniac” weblog for the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. What he does, he finds interesting things on the internet and then he re-summarizes the interesting thing in a few paragraphs of his own words, adding no value whatsoever. For this, he presumably gets paid some modest amount of money. He also apparently has no trouble sleeping at night.

Sure, there are plenty of cases here where I just relink or resummarize something without adding value, which I justify because this is a spare-time activity for me which does not pay. But there are also plenty of times where I do add opinions or commentary of my own, often going out of my way to write a few hundred words of generally well-formed opinion from scratch. These are the items which are least likely, past statistics tell me, to get relinked, commented-upon, or even read - which is why I don’t write them more often.

Still, I usually manage to stifle my resentment of people like Rothman, who make money doing something I regard as so stupidly easy and useless that I’d feel guilty taking cash for it while I’m over here providing actual ideas for free that no one is interested in … ahem … as I say, I usually manage to choke down my bile.

But I would like to point out that, if you only read Rothman’s parroting of Bret Victor’s “Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” (I’d link Rothman’s blurb, but can’t - see postscript), you missed my discussion of some good reasons why Mr. Victor is at least partially talking out his ass.

This particular case riles me because I have seen the Victor essay linked all over the web in the last few days, and none of those link/ers bother to point out ways in which it might be dead wrong. People spouting ideas off the tops of their heads are a dime a dozen on the web; people shining a critical light on those ideas and pointing out the weak spots are perpetually in short supply.

If the idea is, “Well, I just link it, people can decide for themselves whether they think it’s bullshit,” I sympathize - but we can only take that so far. I hate the idea that an idea might acquire prestige or authoritative weight simply because no one bothered to publicly challenge it.

I’m waiting for my link, if you’d like to start changing that status quo, Boston Globe. And anytime you want to pay an Ideas columnist to write about interesting web stuff every week and actually add value, give me a call. I’ll do it for less than whatever pittance you pay Rothman.

P.S. to Rothman: You should have linked “The Social Graph Is Neither” instead. Better article and contains much more truth.

P.S. to Globe: The link you give in print for the Braniac weblog now no longer works. By the by, a weblog behind a paywall is about as useful as socks to a snake.

Of the two computery items I link today, the other one is far more useful, profound, and funny. If you read only one of the two, read the one in the previous post instead. This one is also simple, lucid, and at least mildly entertaining - but on closer inspection, I think you’ll find Bret Victor has nothing to say.

[The rest of this might make better sense if you go read the article first and then come back. Go ahead. I’ll wait. -V]

OK, so, here’s the thing. I found this via a link to an io9 article. Now, it is never a surprise when an io9 article is useless (like all other products of the Gawker media empire, their signal-to-noise ratio is extremely poor). But this one contains what I think is a fundamentally incorrect assertion in its very title: “Why We’re All Wrong About the Future of User Interfaces.”

Really? Do we actually think that all these shiny little touchpads are the end-all-be-all of UI design? Do we actually think we have reached some kind of endpoint, or even a long layover, on the technological progress bar? I sure as hell don’t.

Although Victor is too good to say it as sensationalistically (is that a word? it is now) as io9, he definitely feels a need to stress and defend the point that the current ideas of touch UI design are a transitional technology - a way station on the path to better things. Which is dandy, and I agree - the problem is, I never DISagreed; I never thought that current touchpad design was anything other than a way station, and I didn’t think anyone else seriously thought so either.

In other words, I feel that Victor has mounted a massive rhetorical army … to fight against an enemy that didn’t bother to show up for the battle and which may not actually exist at all.

More importantly, Victor totally blows off the part where he is supposed to tell us what he thinks should come next, what proper haptic design will look like when applied to computing tasks, the part where he prophecies what comes after we get past where we are now.

This is, in my opinion, for two reasons: 1) he knows perfectly well that we don’t have anything like the sort of technology yet to do the things he thinks we should be doing - because he knows that this is actually a very hard problem that we may not solve for decades to come - and 2) because he doesn’t have the slightest idea what such devices should look like.

Here’s the thing. It is one thing to say that hands work best when given a holistic, haptic experience and not just Objects Behind Glass. I agree with that statement, although I find it a pretty self-evident one. It is another thing entirely to take an information task - a data-manipulation task - and translate it convincingly and well into an object-manipulation task. It may not be doable. I cannot, for example, see how a full-contact haptic experience would improve the act of editing a document or rearranging blocks of information.

The places where full haptics actually do revolutionize the experience - specialized situations like running large equipment or piloting a plane - are already invented (if expensive and poorly distributed); they’re just not something the general public sees very often, because they are specialized. The one place I can think of where haptics might actually improve a common, consumer-level data-manipulation task is in playing games - and frankly, you can already get pretty close to Achievement Unlocked on that if you’re willing to spring for the right, very expensive, controllers.

Of course, you can’t carry those controllers in your briefcase easily - which brings us to the third problem with Victor’s rant - which is that people make tradeoffs. While I think the future of touch UI design still has a lot of evolving to do, I guarantee that any haptic design which sacrifices price, durability, or portability concerns to the altar of Better Usability is probably guaranteed not to succeed.

In summation: it annoys me when UI visionaries neglect practicality or implementablity in favor of ideals, and yet they do it all the time. Mr. Victor is no exception.

You may not have realized it, but Roger Ebert and his wife tried this past year to revive an “At the Movies” style two-critic television film review program. It was apparently pretty well-received, but it turns out they were funding it themselves. Now they can’t afford to do that anymore, and they’re looking for a way to keep it alive.

I love Ebert. He’s going to be the last real film critic* left standing, I think (and I’m sorry to say I expect that to come to pass in my lifetime, just as I don’t expect Ebert to last too many more years either). But I have some serious reservations here.

First off, as I noted elsewhere, I’m surprised that this arrangement ever happened in the first place. Ebert can be naive about business, I gather, but his wife is not, and it startles me that she would ever agree to a financing arrangement that looks like it was pretty much guaranteed to be a loss for them no matter what. Very strange.

Second, and more germanely, I’m really not convinced that any televised film review show has a niche/purpose in the world anymore. I’m sure it’s a good show. Did you watch it? I didn’t either. Do you get your film reviews from television anymore (if you get them at all)? Nor do I.

It’s worth noting at this point that a significant number of the comments on the article linked above distill, with varying degrees of force, to “Roger, why the hell aren’t you doing this online where the audience is and avoiding dealing with all those idiotic, expensive TV folk?” I agree with these comments. Ebert has been remarkably bright about establishing a web presence for a man his age - you usually don’t find someone of that generation understanding the importance of the web nearly as well. To go back to television seems like a deliberate reversion to me; the atavism surprises me. Ebert is much given to nostalgia these days; maybe this is his way of trying to recapture some of his past? If so, I forgive him. But I’m not convinced it’s an idea worth saving.

More to the point, film criticism as a whole is a dying genre. I agree with the commenter who said

Roger. I love you. But film criticism is dead. You’re fighting a losing battle.

It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

The corporate owned studios, combined with the shallow geekification of the culture, have destroyed the art. It’s all marketing & recycling now. If you don’t live in one of four American cities, you may go years without seeing a truly great new film.

Yes, moviegoing still exists. But nobody goes into a multiplex these days expecting something great. Just a quick escape. A reason to get out of the house.

That’s why the conversation in the past decade has changed from criticism to weekend box office reports.

Focus on your online reviews. Let go of the past.

Ebert already has the loyal audience he needs to continue until his death, to be the last of his breed standing. He should stick with that and not try a doomed crusade to revive film criticism. It’s a lost cause, in my opinion.

And now it’s time for that asterisk.

* I think there are plenty of people writing intelligent and interesting film reviews, if you can find them among the noise in a genre that is increasingly “oh, anyone can write a film review” crowdsourced. I have a good friend who writes intelligently and entertainingly about films. She has friends who write intelligently and entertainingly about films. I have been known to write intelligently and entertainingly about films myself.

But the film critic who actually writes analysis of the genre - who is interested in the study and the history of film, who wants to fit films into the context of what has gone before and what will be next - that’s a very hard sell these days. Ebert survives by not dipping his toe any further into that pool than he believes his audience will tolerate, and by being a good writer. That’s a hard line to walk - the line between “bring deep ideas” and “don’t discourage your readers” - and it gets harder to walk every day as the audience gets shallower. And Pauline Kael, who will never be equalled at walking that line, is dead and forgotten.

Film analysis is now an academic discipline, practiced by wonks who write in a format which is not especially entertaining and unsuitable for the public, especially a public which - collectively - has less sense of or interest in the history of anything than any generation that has come before them. We live in the world of NOW now, and what the public wants from a film critic is not analysis but just whether they should waste their money.

And since increasingly everything from Hollywood is a waste of money, and films not from Hollywood don’t get marketed, distributed, or seen (at least not in theatres), the more general question of whether even the shallowest of film reviewers will continue to have value in the future remains an open one.

Seems to be my week for talking about literature.* You all survived my rather pissy Shakespeare post - or, at least, you either survived it or sensibly did not read it - so I’m going to let another one fly; after that I think I’ll be sufficiently disenchanted with sharing ideas for a while that you won’t have to worry about seeing another one of these horrendously boring all-text items for some time to come.

(If you’re one of the people who looks forward to the all-text items, I do apologize. But I’ve become acutely aware that on Tumblr, most people are here for a picture and perhaps a brief caption, and anything else gets skipped. And I’m tired enough that rather than try to lead those people to content, I’m putting it all behind a cut, where only true believers will bother to go find it.)

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Time once again for one of those rants - the rants that five people say they miss when I don’t do them more often, and everybody else skims and/or ignores. Well, that’s okay, I’m not hurt. In fact, feel free to ignore this one too. I just have something I need to get out of my head so I can go back to doing important things.

Why the hell do you care whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays?

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merlin:

Brand New!

From the folks who brought you “You Should Do Whatever Makes You Feel Better, I Guess” paper towels, and “Well, Apparently, Now That’ll Just HAVE To Be Okay With Me” toilet tissue—it’s “If You Care.”

I mean. I know you obviously don’t care—or you’d act really differently toward me, you know?

Anyway. Whatever.

Passive-Aggressive Brand® Hippie Products: “We Hope You’re Happy Now. No, Really. We Do. If Anything, Maybe We’ve Always Wanted TOO Much For You To Be Happy. So, It’s Probably Our Fault, Right? Sure. That’s Fine. Really. Just…Don’t Even Worry About It.”™