Much like life, Write or Die gives you two options: Write, or Die. The main difference between Write or Die and real life is that in real life your two options are “write, then die” or “then die” so if you think about it, Write or Die actually is a bit generous.
I’m not a big believer in magical rituals for writing. Thinking about writing is where I get the sudden ideas that I want instantly to turn into words and the best places for this are showers, drives, cooking, and reading, but if I’m sitting in front of a blank screen I feel like I should be outputting words at an incredible velocity, turning all those ideas real. What I actually do, however, is look at animated gifs of cats posted on twitter.
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Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman sounds like an interesting book:
“Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like “vomit and banana.” […}Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep—and sometimes frightening—insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more. –JoVon Sotak
Thinking, Fast and Slow received some good press (selected as one of the best books of 2011 by New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal), which means more people searching Amazon for the book. Except they might find something else by accident.
Thinking, Fast and Slow was published on October 24th, 2011, the same day that Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels became available on Amazon. Read more »
Last year, music downloads exceeded CD sales. Netflix took a step toward stopping its red envelope service. Even my grandfather bought an Ipad. E-book sales exploded into a billion-dollar market. The “cloud” became an important word in software update reminders.
I saw an ad for app called “Shoebox” that allows you to take photographs of those old-fashioned Kodachrome photographs and store them in the great warehouse in the sky. The idea being that you could remove that nasty clutter—in this case, family memories—from your home.
Some articles discussed the birth of the cumulus, death of materialism. One interviewed an employee of Powell’s Books, the world’s only used bookstore where you need a map. The employee once owned an impressive collection of 3,000 hardcovers. Then he bought a Kindle and parted with all of his books except the first editions. (Did he sell them back to Powell’s I wonder.)
“I missed flipping pages for about a day,” the employee was quoted saying. “I don’t have CD or DVD racks anymore. Having things stored in the cloud just fits my lifestyle.”
“Take a look around,” the articles urged, “Your stuff is disappearing!” Millennials are a self-obsessed generation, according to every psychological report covered in the news. At the same time, Millenials aren’t interested in collecting things, because the cloud takes care of it for us. It seems like a contradiction because what are collections but an excellent way to define yourself to the world. In self-broadcasting terms, there’s me and then there’s who I want you think I am. A good collection can navigate and reinforce both of those identities.
As I thought about what a confusing lot Millenials are to perform premature studies on, I remembered an old roommate. In our old apartment, she had a massive collection, one that came by chance. She had one of those unfortunate names that rhymed with an animal, and so for the duration of her childhood, the panda was forced upon her as a favorite animal.
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Aside Magazine is something to get excited about: created entirely in HTML5, it’s an app-like magazine that can be read on any tablet.
Since it’s only HTML5, there’s no App Store, no approval or 30% commission necessary–it can be download straight from the web. The designers explain: “We love the AppStore. But in our world, magazines are press content, not software. And we don’t want a big company to decide whether our content is allowed to be published or not. Also, it makes it much easier to publish on other platforms such as Android Honeycomb.”
It’s fully responsive with all the touch-patterns we’ve come to learn, like flip, swipe, and drag, and the design supports multimedia content without Flash.
The prototype is in German, but regardless of your language skills, you should check it out for the awesome design.
With 80 million tablets sold, I wonder if coding if the future of typesetting, and before long all small publishers and lit mag interns will be adept at writing commands like <blockquote>.
After the jump, there’s a video of someone browsing though Aside for those of you who don’t have tablets yet (do you exist?). Read more »
copyright Pinterest. duh pinning
Pinterest doesn’t care if you had a bad day or if your boyfriend sent you flowers or if you finally nailed that sweeping updo hairstyle only to have it fall before noon. This is because, unlike other social media sites, there’s no way to update a status! Glory! I say Glory Hallelujah! Haven’t heard of Pinterest? Don’t worry, it’s probably not for you anyway. For those of you (ladies) who worry about missing out on the “Next Big Thing” I’ll let you pretend to be Early Adopters of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory between now and the moment I hit post. After that you become a part of the Early Majority. (see diagram for help)
if you've never heard of Pinterest = Laggard
In a fan base over 90% women (and obviously upper/middle class women), Pinterest (or Pin Interest a friend still calls it) has found the perfect niche for itself. Maintaining the sharing aspect of Facebook through with the rapid and constant changes of content comparable to Twitter, the crafting, recipe-sharing, fashion savvy, photo pinning site is a quick addiciton for the unsuspecting web-surfing lady. I’ll admit I got sucked in. Read more »
Hold on to yer Monday pants, people. You know which ones I mean.
Apparently procrastination is the perfectionists’ way of getting out of achieving perfection, because they’re afraid they’ll fail. Wait until the last minute, and they have an excuse for not being perfect. And yes, I did get paid for them to write a study about me. In Skittles, but hey.
I want to read this book.
Somehow I got on an email list that fires urgent updates at me about where/when Girl Scout cookies are being sold. Do you think they used my Target shopping habits to determine the likelihood that I’m a fat kid? The cheap side table and bath mat I bought at Target must have screamed Thin Mints.
I’m a little disappointed you guys didn’t let me in on the awesomeness that is Dropbox. Am I the only one who is light-years behind on this? This tool could have saved my office a fair amount of time over the last six months. I thought there was a reason I surrounded myself with nerds.
In case you missed it, Ann Patchett was on Stephen Colbert talking about independent bookstores and the evils of Amazon. I’d never watched an interview with her. Most times authors are pretty awkward on Colbert and can’t get any banter going. She was the complete opposite. My fan-girl writer crush grows.
Just found out this hotel in Chicago is supposedly haunted by a guy named Peg Leg Johnny. Knowing the four people I’m rooming with in Chi-town makes me confident we’ll be able to get at least 32 jokes out of Peg Leg Johnny references. Read more »
Bot courtesy of Creative Commons, Mattie B
Amazon gets stranger by the day. Robots are in the middle of crazy bidding wars while we sleep. These “bots” are dropping the price of books to $0.01 or raising them to $2,198,177.95 while we mess our way through discussions on how much a cup of coffee should cost if you bring your own mug. But while the market (well, the cafe here) isn’t listening to customer opinions on cost, it (well, Amazon) is following the advice of the algorithms or bots.
It’s not new that Markov chains collect information from Wikipedia, curate the articles, and sell the finished books on Amazon. Betascript does this kind of publishing all the time. Narrative Science kind of does the same thing with basic sports/business articles/reports.
One computer program, donning the human name Lambert M. Surhone, created and sold such a book about computers pretending to be human. And I don’t think it was a memoir. The Lambert bot was selling its book new, print-on-demand, for $47. Before you knew it, there was a used/like one available for $46.99. The bot bidding war had begun.
Last year a human software engineer at Facebook, Carlos Bueno, wrote a children’s book where the main character, Lauren Ipsum, meets the Wandering Salesman, fends off Jargon, etc. Even though you can read it on a tablet, it’s “a computer science book that doesn’t involve a computer.” He self-published as print-on-demand and set the price to $14.95. Enter the bots. Read more »
When my car stalled in the middle of MacDade Blvd, near the Nautilus Fitness Center, I saw my future.
The Plymouth Duster had been patched together for years. Literally. Once I found myself epoxying chicken wire over a dent in the right passenger door and painting it with Rustoleum. Then I lost myself again, and for years she took me to and from class, climbed the Allegheny mountains and transported kegs of beer to mythic realms where Bon Jovi and Madonna still reign as King and Queen (no one can convince them otherwise).
Anyway, it was a sad day when the tail pipe fell off and careened along the median strip, causing mayhem for the traffic coming in my rear-view mirror. But the day that I’m recalling — that time of the infamous stalling in the midst of rush hour — is not that day…
During that particular turn of the Earth’s axis I called my father, an automobile mechanic for over forty years, and asked him for help. I called him from the counter of the fitness center where I belonged and where the body-building guru had once taken a look at my torso and asked me if I’d left “my chest at home.” My dear ol’ Dad could be just as calloused when it came to my feelings, but as I described for him the car’s diagonal position in the road and how we were about to make the evening news, he seemed downright cheerful and calm. ”I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said at 5:35 in the afternoon, and with the Fidelity Bank sign blinking the digits of 5:45 he appeared in his greasy overalls and got to work.
First on the agenda involved a problem I failed to mention over the phone. That is, in my haste to exit the vehicle and run across the parking lot, I had locked the keys in the car. (Don’t ask me how.) And so, with the trusty bent-clothes-hanger technique, Mr. Fix-It opened the door. He then popped the hood and stuck his head into the guts of the engine. He yanked, twisted, tightened and told me to get in the driver’s seat and try to start her up.
I did and nothing happened. Nothing…
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- Let’s Talk -
I need a new cell phone. My current cellular telephone is a lemon. I’ve had it for almost 6 years. During our time together I have spent more money on new batteries than it would cost to get a new phone.
It’s age means the following 1) Randomly turns itself off 2) Freezes when the camera is activated 3) Is unable to send pictures to certain smart phones 4) Sends texts to wrong people, sends multiple copies of one text, unscrambles big words sent from newer phones.
I know I need to move on. But I love my phone. And each time I walk into a Verizon store I’m reminded of the way our culture chants: build something a lil’ fancier, now convince the peoples to buy it.
I’m hoping to reach our 6 year anniversary, then I will gracefully find a new partner in crime.
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Earlier this week , my fellow Barker Scott experienced my greatest fear as a blogger. Okay, I have a lot of fears as a blogger:
1. That my terrible grammar (syntax, diction, voice) will convince readers that I am not fit to be a blogger, let alone a graduate student in an M.F.A program,
2. Therefore I will shame or make my M.F.A program look bad.
3. I might write a post that offends or insults someone.
4. I will seem self-involved and conceited (without fail).
5. I’ll get into a debate with someone who disagrees with what I’ve written and not be able to successfully articulate my side of the argument. Read more »
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