Fortune Favors The Bold

NEWS: An incident today on a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight originating in Nigeria…

ME: So the “device” did almost nothing except burn the suspect, everyone on the flight is ok, and it may not have even been remotely possible to take down the plane that way? Plus, there aren’t more than 100 people in the world who would seriously try such a thing, and fewer capable to boot, but there are thousands of flights each hour, right? Great. Good work, security theater! Will be happy to fly again in 4 days. Keep it up.

Merry Xmas! I put pants on for you!

A.O. Scott properly humiliates this movie for its shortcomings while still making me interested in seeing it. I appreciate that!

The 14 Worst Words For A Designer To Hear

clientsfromhell:

“I’m not sure what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

Still think this takes a backseat to, “I can’t pay you this month.”

This thing I’ve got against Yahoo! is swiftly becoming a non-laughing matter. This screencap above is a disaster. The headline: non-factual. The players never spoke out against the award; the writer behind the link simply disagrees with their decision. As for the caption: a completely misleading idea due to its ignorance of context. “Writes a blogger?” It’s a Yahoo! writer, writing for a Yahoo! website… The writer isn’t just some linked jerkoff randomly plucked from the Internet! That’s like the Times publishing a dispatch from Sewell Chan and putting a link on the homepage described as, “sent in by some guy on Second Avenue.” Yahoo! published the opinion, and they should not cite their sources as “a blogger.” The correct phrase is, “our staff writer” or “our sports columnist.”

(And if you wonder why I’m in such a froth about this, it’s because they should know better; people don’t trust “bloggers” because mainstream news sources like Yahoo! constantly speak of bloggers as the proverbial fat-guy-in-mom’s-basement-with-an-opinion like we’re in the 80’s, all computer users are socially awkward and odorifically challenged, and all the people with any sort of writing credibility are in newspapers or magazines. This is not just a self-aggrandizing falsehood of the print industry, but it’s also infuriatingly impossible thanks to the fat fucking Baby Boomer generation who mismanaged the print pubs and put an entire younger generation of journalists out of work when the shit hit the fan, eliminating all career growth except for blogs — and now they get paid to run painfully bland shareholder-raping obsolete Internet “portals” like Yahoo! Fuck them sooooo hard for… everything, really.)

#Yahoo FAIL

Great Moments in Headlines: “Brink of OK”

goldenfiddle:

“Up In The Air is bad. It’s a new depression exploitation picture or unemployment porn, but that’s not exactly why it’s a bad film. It’s a bad film because it’s safe and fails to throw any punches. So, George Clooney plays a caddish, single man who doesn’t want to settle down with a troubled past. Hasn’t Clooney played this character in every other film since his career breakout in “E.R.”? Isn’t Ryan Bingham the same character as Michael Clayton? Instead of crazy undercover lawyer shit, Clooney just does crazy firing people shit. Well, there’s a giant difference between Up In The Air and Michael Clayton though; Michael Clayton is a good film.”

Skeet On Mischa

This is a shame; I was going to see Up In The Air hoping for a movie on the level of Michael Clayton. I may use that two hours of movie time instead for filming my Michael Clayton homage.

ohhleary:

Del’s Lemonade, now available by the bottle.

Is this what you drink when the weekend editor casually mentions all of the free gifts you happily received at your desk from your advertisers?

**LEMON FACE**

» "The fact that people find foursquare more interesting than dodgeball is not because the places where foursquare is gaining traction have become more like New York the city, but because the people that live those places have since learned to use social media in the way that our group of New Yorker friends were back in 2004"

via dpstyles

Forgive my tendency to spoil a perfect quote with personal perspective. Thoughts:

Dodgeball’s connection authorization process allowed for something better than a simple roster of local check-ins; it let you build your own personal feed of people. Call it editorialized, curated, etc. Your friend list was basically a crafted list of other’s personal brands which selectively (and “curated” in the reverse direction) shared information. How you did it was mostly up to you. Some people friended anyone who’d let them. Some people had three closely-linked friends and nothing more. Some people would add friends and immediately move them to the “ex-gf” zone. The point being: social media isn’t just about publishing your own brands, but also about opening possibilities, and setting controls, regarding the brands you wish to interact with. Twitter, of course, blew that wide open; Foursquare also offers innovations in that field. Something to deeply ruminate about.
I find it interesting that, through gradual steps of technology, Foursquare has completed the progression to the (ego-centric) avatar-enhanced social alert list for mobile devices that I (quite literally) dreamed about years ago. This goes way beyond the level of SXSW - this is futuristic, World’s Fair type of stuff. Like personal flight and a cashless society.
For everyone who dismisses these things as useless (I’ve told this story earlier): In 2004 I read on the web (probably via Krucoff or Gawker) about Dennis having a bar gathering the day he sold Dball. I showed up. Clumsily. And recognized everyone but greeted myself to almost no-one, because none of them knew me and I had nothing to offer. I wouldn’t call it a mistake, but it wasn’t effective either. Starting from knowing no-one, it took a couple of years for me to greet myself properly to the people in that room. Not all of the participants are my friends today, but I definitely value many of the relationships I established. Every time I think of that story, I think of myself like the guy who traded a red paper clip up to a house over the Internet. If that sort of thing is possible, you can’t be dismissive of it. (Related.)