The reason the old media is having a masturbatory field day over this thing is that  it’s a vertically integrated, closed architecture. Their business model has always been built on controlling the distribution of information and this seems like a way to return to that. But calling Jobs the next Gutenberg would be incorrect, this is a step backwards, not forwards.

by su_anna

The Gutenberg press was democratizing because you no longer had to have resources of the government or the church to produce written work. But despite that, it was still expensive. As an individual you couldn’t afford to own and run a printing press on your own, only corporations had that kind of money. And of course, being a corporation, they want to make the most money possible. So over the last two centuries the corporations have merged, and merged again until basically a handful control 90% of the media in any given geographic region. As the competition decreased, the prices and profits increased to where we are now.

by 4rilla

For the last few decades old media has become accustomed to making billions of dollars because they are the only way for you to get entertainment or information. But the internet came along and broke that business model. It’s the next step in the democratization of information. It’s the Gutenberg press in every house, and it’s free. Of course the old media is not too happy about this. The control they used to have is rapidly disappearing and they are having to face actual competition for the first time in 200 years. They can’t compete because the content itself was rarely worth paying for in the first place, you were mostly just buying access and now that access is free.

Their response has been to try to develop new ways to bring back that control they had. You see that in things like copyright lawsuits and DRM, or in developing new forms of physical media like BluRay or 3D TV. The iPad is another way to control distribution. It is an almost completely closed system. You cannot install the software of your choice on this, only applications specifically approved by Apple.

by FHKE

That is a huge deal and it means that this isn’t a Gutenberg device, there is no freedom here, there is no democratization. This is fascism in it’s purest form. Maybe beautiful, functional fascism; but still fascism. It’s a corporate dictatorship where Steve Jobs tells you what is and is not permitted, secure in the belief that his judgment is superior to yours. His claim is that this control is necessary to ensure quality, but coincidentally it also ensures a healthy profit margin.  Their hope is that Apple will control the books available for you to download and the place you buy them from.

That’s why the media is praising this like it’s the second coming. It represents a chance to turn their sinking ship around, and have it sink in a new direction, at a slightly slower rate.

by amateur_photo_bore

Old media is hoping that this point of control will mean people will start buying newspapers and books in iPad form. And even better, those won’t be transferable to any other device, or any other person. So you can’t lend books anymore and you can’t sell your used copies. And on top of all of this, they are priced almost the same as the dead-tree version despite costing nothing to copy or distribute, so profits per unit sold are much higher.

by I am I.A.M.

Thing is, these companies are incredibly naive. Apple’s profit margin is the only one that is going to improve, and in the long run, this will mostly just add to the demise of old media. Music is a good example. iTunes offered music companies the opportunity to sell their stuff through a controlled channel to the consumer at higher profits, but the iPod didn’t save the music industry, it killed it.

Once people started using iPods they may have bought some digital music, but for a variety of reasons, they pirated way more than they bought. I’d say that 97% of the music on the average persons iPod is pirated, and there is no reason to suspect that written content will be much different.

Not only will the iPad lead to a huge rise in book piracy, it’ll be the content industries own fault too. All this control only produces a false sense of security for the content creator and pisses off the consumer. The App Store was
notorious for banning content Apple thought was inappropriate, both pornographic and political. That’ll happen in the book store too. These books will also be laden with DRM, and only certain books will be released to certain devices. On the whole this means that if I want anything mildly ‘inappropriate’, want to move my books around devices, share them with friends, or don’t want to pay a physical price for an digital product, I’ll have to pirate it.

by de_coder

The iPad isn’t revolutionizing anything by itself. The internet and digital content are revolutionary. The iPad is just one way to get that content, and in my opinion not even a very good one. It’s basically just a really big iPod Touch and the only thing unprecedented about this it is the hype.

It is not a computer, it’s an e-reader with extra features. It has no useful ports, you have no access to the OS, you can only install approved software, and loading it with non-Apple video or books will be a pain if it’s even possible. Want to chat and watch a movie at the same time? Too bad, no multitasking. Want to download podcasts or movies over 3G? Not allowed. Want to download anything from anyone other than Apple? Are you kidding?

The Kindle is the main thing getting targeted here. The Kindle is the king of e-readers though it’s admittedly ugly and very limited in function by comparison. But if Amazon drops the price of the Kindle to like… $150.. they are still solidly in the game. The Kindle has far more books, it’s cheaper, the books are cheaper, the battery lasts 2 weeks (not 10 hours), it’s easier to read, and the Kindle doesn’t require you buy a monthly data plan.

by oskay

The exception to this is the gaming. The gaming will be impressive, different and new. Playing a strategy game like Civilization or Red Alert on this would be a really awesome experience with multitouch.

In summary it’s a very pretty e-reader and gaming device. Not a revolution. Old media is still fucked, Apple is just slowing it down and taxing it.

And I still want a Macbook Pro in tablet form.

by Kent K. Barnes / kentkb

So someone online asked me about love. What follows is the gigantic response to her simple question.

I’ve never really identified with the concept of love as an completely pervasive and continuous feeling about someone. It never seemed realistic. And I know love isn’t supposed to be rational, but it’s never seemed possible to completely be enthralled with someone all the time. And if that did happen, it seems like that would be more of a symptom of mental instability than of romance.

by littleREDelf

Instead I think of love as a momentary feeling. Something that occurs in reaction to someones actions, words, or memories thereof. They do something and it immediately provokes a strong feeling of lust, affection, or closeness. As a result, you can say you’re “in love” with someone when those moments come often enough that they overwhelm any negative qualities on the whole. It’s a rational and pragmatic approach, but I think it’s valid.

by Let Ideas Compete

The alternative is complete adoration, believing the person is more or less infallible, and I’ve never been comfortable with that. I want a girl to be with me despite my flaws, not because they can’t see them or refuse to acknowledge them. I’m honest person and expect honesty in others, and blind love seems like a form of lying. An unwillingness to acknowledge the truth of each other.

by louisa_catlover

I think the most important thing to me is that my concept allows you to love someone and let them go, that’s important. Just because you can’t make a life with someone doesn’t mean they don’t mean anything to you. So dismissing as a failure every relationship that doesn’t last a lifetime is cynical and archaic. If you can come out of it knowing you’re both better for having been with each other, than it’s win’s all round in my book.

by Zellaby

The newspaper industry deserves to die. Or at least be substantially cut down. And this is yet another example of why. Another article by Zosia Bielski. It’s basically another gender role-boosting opinion piece that is framed as being based on fact, when in reality it’s just a puff piece for a couple authors that make money off reinforcing stereotypes.

I could rant for hours about this but I’ll attempt to control myself. Stay on target. My point is that this shouldn’t be in a newspaper. This is a blog post, not real information. And a huge amount of what I see in newspapers falls into this category. They might as well not even have a technology section, by the time they write an article about anything I’ve already heard of it months ago and know all the details. The same goes for most of the actual news as well. In a world with Twitter and Google Reader I know about eveyrthing the moment it happens, waiting till the tomorrow to get a piece written yesterday makes no sense.

“What about real journalism?” Well this argument may be slightly valid if the media did real journalism anymore. They don’t. Most news outlets these days are composed of reprinted AP pieces, reprinted corporate press releases, week-late coverage of YouTube memes, sports commentary, and celebrity cutlure info lifted from Perez Hilton. In any given paper there might be one or two genuine articles that don’t fall into one of those categories. And frankly, there are bloggers that are willing to produce this information much more quickly, more accurately, and for free.

If the news system did not currently exist no one create it in it’s current form. Who would suggest employing hundreds of people for the purposes of writing a piece, having it edited for format, edited for content, shrunk to fit within a certain portion of a physical piece of paper, sent to a factory for printing onto pieces of deadtree in massive quantities, then place this deadtree into trucks to physically distribute it throughout an entire country within one night. No one would do that. Because instead of all of that mess, you could take just the writer themself, give them a blogspot account, and they have instant worldwide distribution for free. Oops, I just broke your business model, time to get a new one.

But they aren’t getting a new one. Instead they are trying to force that existing massively unnecessary infrastructure into the digital age and then bitching that it isn’t working. Rupert Murdoch wants a pay-wall to get into all his news sites to force people to buy their content. He has already decreed it will be so. (I think it’s quite telling of their maneurvrability that it’s still not implemented 8 months later, but I digress.)

Almost no one is going to pay for online news. It won’t happen. I’ll pay for National Geographic because it’s beautiful and well produced unique content. I will pay for an in depth piece on the movie industry in Nigeria and how it functions without effective copyright. But I will not pay any amount of money to hear the latest update on balloon boy. In fact, I’d pay NOT to hear about that. (Maybe there is a business model there, having people pay to not be subjected to your bullshit pointless slow-news-day stories.) And that’s the problem, those first two are not anywhere in The Globe and Mail, the third was front page.

The music industry dealt with the threat to their business model by adpating slowly, while frequently using their monoploy over artists and the copyright club to beat down any new competition. The news industry has no such weapon and are not adapting nearly fast enough. At the moment they are pretty much  only riding on the fact that old people don’t like the internet, and advertisers haven’t yet completely abandoned them. They have to lean down and start producing real journalistic content that surpasses that of your average blogger, or they’ll be driven out of business in the next 5 years. My bet is on the latter rather than the former.

The newspaper industry deserves to die. Or at least be substantially cut down. And this is yet another example of why. Another article by Zosia Bielski. It’s basically another gender role-boosting opinion piece that is framed as being based on fact, when in reality it’s just a puff piece for a couple authors that make money off reinforcing stereotypes.

by bitchcakesny

I could rant for hours about this but I’ll attempt to control myself. Stay on target. My point is that this shouldn’t be in a newspaper. This is a blog post, not real information. And a huge amount of what I see in newspapers falls into this category.

They might as well not even have a technology section, by the time they write an article about anything I’ve already heard of it months ago and know all the details. The same goes for most of the actual news as well. In a world with Twitter and Google Reader I know about everything the moment it happens, waiting till the tomorrow to get a piece written yesterday makes no sense.

by respres

“What about real journalism?” Well this argument may be slightly valid if the media did real journalism anymore. They don’t. Most news outlets these days are composed of reprinted wire pieces, reprinted corporate press releases, week-late coverage of YouTube memes, sports commentary, and celebrity culture info lifted from Perez Hilton.

In any given paper there might be one or two genuine articles that don’t fall into one of those categories. And frankly, there are bloggers that are willing to produce this information much more quickly, more accurately, and for free.

by Bill McIntyre

If the news system did not currently exist no one create it in its current form. Who would suggest employing hundreds of people for the purposes of writing a piece, having it edited for format, edited for content, shrunk to fit within a certain portion of a physical piece of paper, sent to a factory for printing onto pieces of deadtree in massive quantities, then place this deadtree into trucks to physically distribute it throughout an entire country within one night.

No one would do that. Because instead of all of that mess, you could take just the writer themself, give them a blogspot account, and they have instant worldwide distribution for free. Oops, I just broke your business model, time to get a new one.

by AKMA

But they aren’t getting a new one. Instead they are trying to force that existing massively unnecessary infrastructure into the digital age and then bitching that it isn’t working. Rupert Murdoch wants a pay-wall to get into all his news sites to force people to buy their content. He has already decreed it will be so. (I think it’s quite telling of their maneuverability that it’s still not implemented 8 months later, but I digress.)

Almost no one is going to pay for online news. It won’t happen. I’ll pay for National Geographic because it’s beautiful and well produced unique content. I will pay for an in depth piece on the movie industry in Nigeria and how it functions without effective copyright. But I will not pay any amount of money to hear the latest update on balloon boy. In fact, I’d pay NOT to hear about that. (Maybe there is a business model there, having people pay to not be subjected to your bullshit pointless slow-news-day stories.) And that’s the problem, those first two are not anywhere in The Globe and Mail, the third was front page.

The music industry dealt with the threat to their business model by adapting slowly, while frequently using their monopoly over artists and the copyright club to beat down any new competition. The news industry has no such weapon and are not adapting nearly fast enough. At the moment they are pretty much  only riding on the fact that old people don’t like the internet, and advertisers haven’t yet completely abandoned them. They have to become leaner and start producing real journalistic content that surpasses that of your average blogger or they’ll be driven out of business in the next 5 years. My bet is on the latter rather than the former.

I see this crap all the time and it never ceases to make me angry. (They’ve changed the title now, it used to be Women and Money, and this used to be the image beside it.) For me, it’s not a feminism issue, it’s a logic and reason issue. Do you think it’s even remotely accurate to judge a full 50% of the population (male or female) based on one massive generalization or another?

by kenjimori

It’s everywhere all the time, in all forms of media, and many conversations. The poster for The Ugly Truth is a great example. It’s a visual distillation of one type of BS that’s constantly spouted by those devotees of gender stereotypes. Women are morally elevated above petty concerns with sexual desire and follow their heart, while men are brutish, crude and follow their crotch.

I don’t see why they didn’t take the extra step of making their message even more obvious and just have Katherine Heigel bathed in white light and suspended in the air by her own smug sense of superiority as Gerard Butler grovelled on all fours drooling, trying desperately to sniff her butt with his unshaven face.

by urish

Anyone who has had open conversations with their friends and partners about current and past relationships knows that there are orders of magnitude more difference between any two people than there are between the sexes in general. Yet for some reason most people feel the need to seek out and attribute certain qualities to the gender as whole rather than the individual specifically, while conveniently ignoring the exceptions that disprove the rule. It’s classic example of confirmation bias.

by mary hodder

You say anything you can think of being true for men in general, and I’m sure I could personally name half a dozen guys that would disprove that stereotype. How about a bit of a reality check? Write down the relationship histories of 100 men and 100 women under 30, complete with details such as cited breakup reasons, real breakup reasons, opinions of sexual chemistry, any commitment issues, and so on. I would bet real money that you couldn’t accurately guess the gender of each history with more than a 50% accuracy.

Fully 50% of the women I’ve dated have have had a higher libido than me and I’d consider myself an average person. Sometimes I’m more into the relationship, sometimes they are. The only detail that’s reasonably consistent is that I’m generally the more emotionally stable person in the relationship, but that’s because I’m borderline empathically inert as an individual, not because I have a penis.

by Springsun

I read this article in the Globe and Mail, and while there is a hint of historical accuracy to it, that’s clouded over by the smog of ignorance and casual sexism, re-enforcing traditional gender roles as it goes. Without citing any studies, statistics, or even a crappy internet survey, Zosia Bielski proceeds to make all sorts generalizations about the role of women in home finance for the last 50 years.

The fact that women may have had disadvantages forced on them by societal pressures not to pursue post-secondary education is never mentioned. And forget that encouraging women to be housewives and never letting them handle money may impact their ability to balance a check book 30 years later. Those are minor insignificant details. What’s important is to continue the perception that somehow the women of today have just recently gained the genetic ability to use currency. Hurray! They’ve finally evolved!

by Farther Along

Gender stereotypes may have had a place in our society 100 years ago when there were huge differences between the life choices available to a man and a woman. Making sex-based assumptions then may have been occasionally accurate, not because of chromosomally imposed differences in ability, but because of socially imposed ones.

But suffrage, the women’s movement, WWII, the pill, and anti-discrimination laws have changed all that. Not just for women, but for men too. We may not have equality yet, but at this point any assumptions based on gender roles are more likely to be wrong than right. Continuing to reuse, reenact, and generally re-enforce these myths only serves to belittle both sexes, and should be beneath any modern member of our society.

by dorywithserifs

A little over a year ago I wrote a post about being addicted to change. That post is consistently one of my most popular and receives the most emphatic comments. But what’s interesting to me isn’t that a lot of people identify with what I said, but that over half of those people seem to want to squash their need for a dynamic lifestyle. 

by toastycakes

Our society breeds conformity and stability. Public education is designed to ensure that everyone is marshaled to the same pace as everyone else and everyone meets the same established milestones of knowledge at the same time. Deviation from the norm is met with reprimands or ostracization from the group. And don’t think that this changes as you get older, you just get better at coloring inside the lines and fooling yourself into thinking that you’re doing it because you want to. 

by atibens

University may allow you to pick a field of interest rather than having one forced upon you by the government in public school, but then you’re held to even stricter definitions of what is acceptable for that narrower slice of society. The enforced mediocrity of one institutional holding pen is replaced with the enforced elitism of another.

by directorebeccer

The corporate and professional working world may claim to do looking for new ideas and paradigm shifts and blue-sky solutioneering, but socially speaking it’s often about as conservative as it’s possible to get outside of a theocratic state. There are expectations about your behavior and lifestyle, both at and outside of work, that you have to meet in order to escape criticism. 

by inju

The fact that I’ve dated three women in the last year seems to make me a ladies man in this environment. Using a ceramic plate instead of tupperware, and washing and reusing my plastic forks gets me comments and side glances. And even suggesting that you might want to go to school just to learn is met with looks of incredulity and confusion, as if I had suggested just setting $7000 in cash on fire. And I’m a single white male under 30, I don’t even have to factor in the well documented sexism and racism that’s rampant in corporate culture.

And that assumes that I have the sort of job that the rest of society attributes some level of respect to. If I quit my job as an aerospace software developer to become  a waiter because I like people, well…. try explaining that move to about 95% of the human population. Everyone knows that your total worth is equivalent to your high score in pin-ball machine of life, so to them, choosing to make less money is like choosing to fail. It doesn’t matter if you are more happy with less money and responsibility, your score is lower, so you lose.

by radcliffe_photos

So really, given all of this I probably shouldn’t be surprised that people are ashamed of their addiction to change. In this sort of society you can’t even wear pink if you’re a guy without getting comments, let alone desire something as mind-blowing as wanting to experience a new city every 12 months.

I mean if you don’t have a steady job what are you going to do without a company gym membership and dental plan? Just run outside and brush your teeth consistently? That’s crazy. You need some soul-destroying stability in your life. 

by Ouij

I find that functioning in society is sort of like walking in tightly packed crowd of people all moving in the in same direction. If the direction or speed you want to move at is even a little different you’ll suddenly find yourself coming up against resistance. It probably won’t be violent, it might just be passive or occasionally verbal, but it’s there. The thing is resistance doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it just means you’re doing something different.

If you’re going to dance in a crowd you might step on some people’s toes, and some people might think you’re crazy, but that doesn’t mean you should stop dancing.

by Stuck in Customs

The Canadian telecommunications industry is essentially a oligopoly, group of corporations in collusion that strive to maintain consistent profit margins by cooperatively screwing the consumer from as many angles as possible. There are piles of evidence for this. Telus and Bell (the only two CDMA carriers in the country) insistuted fees for incoming text messages at exactly the same time. So now they get to charge twice for the same tiny packet of data. The equivalent of charging you to mail a letter, then charging the recipient to pick it up.

In a healthy competitive environment Rogers would have seen this as an opportunity to differentiate their service by not implementing the same pricing structure. That way they could take customers away from Bell and Telus. However, that didn’t happen. Rogers knows that they stand to make more profit by implementing the same fees than they would by engaging in a price war, so starting in July, they will. This is price fixing. It may not be conspiratorial or organized, but it’s still price fixing.

This adds to the already ridiculous idea that we are paying extra for text messaging to begin with. They are not charging for this service because it costs them money. It doesn’t. In fact it’s built so deeply into the cellular system that it actually costs them more money to monitor it and bill you than it would to just let you have it for free. When you pay a premium for an unlimited messaging service you are essentially subsidsizing the cost of tracking and billing other customers per message. At 20 cents per message you are paying $1300 per MB for that data, and because they bill twice for every message, they get $2600 per MB. This is price gauging at an unbelievable level.

And text messaging is just one facet of a hugely complicated prcing structure thats designed specifically to prevent you from directly comparing competitors and get you to pay the largest possible amount for the littlest possible service. They fracture the service into as many small pieces as possible and charge ridiculous prices for them individually in order to make the bundles look cheaper by comparison. 

They charge separately for call display, text messaging, email, voice, long distance and internet even though it’s all similar data all travelling over the same network. (And charging for long distance is just lying, as if it costs more $0.35 a minute more to send data to Waterloo than it does to send data to Mississauga.) It would be as if when you purchased an internet connection you had to pay for a certain number of IM’s per month, extra for accessing sites from the US, extra for watching video, extra for uploading files, and extra for using Skype. There would be protests in the streets if that was attempted, but it’s tolerated on cellular service because we’ve been beaten by them for so long that we don’t think to call the police anymore.

But changes are coming. There is no technical reason that you even need a voice plan or call display or voicemail or text messaging at this point. All you need is a smartphone, a data plan, Skype, and Google Talk. You could get about 1000 minutes of Skype on a 500MB data plan. But oh right, I almost forgot, you also need the cellular service providers to allow Skype on their network, and allow you to install it on the phone that you own. And that won’t happen without a huge increase in competition or a government intervention.

The Canadian telecommunications industry is essentially a oligopoly, group of corporations in collusion that strive to maintain consistent profit margins by cooperatively screwing the consumer from as many angles as possible. There are piles of evidence for this. Telus and Bell (the only two CDMA carriers in the country) insistuted fees for incoming text messages at exactly the same time. So now they get to charge twice for the same tiny packet of data. The equivalent of charging you to mail a letter, then charging the recipient to pick it up.

by dulcie

In a healthy competitive environment Rogers would have seen this as an opportunity to differentiate their service by not implementing the same pricing structure. That way they could take customers away from Bell and Telus. However, that didn’t happen. Rogers knows that they stand to make more profit by implementing the same fees than they would by engaging in a price war, so starting in July, they will. This is price fixing. It may not be conspiratorial or organized, but it’s still price fixing.

by sashafatcat

This adds to the already ridiculous idea that we are paying extra for text messaging to begin with. They are not charging for this service because it costs them money. It doesn’t. In fact it’s built so deeply into the cellular system that it actually costs them more money to monitor it and bill you than it would to just let you have it for free. When you pay a premium for an unlimited messaging service you are essentially subsidsizing the cost of tracking and billing other customers per message. And at 20 cents per message you are paying $1300 per MB for that data, and because they bill twice for every message, they get $2600 per MB of what is essentially pure profit. 

by aresauburn™

And text messaging is just one facet of a hugely complicated prcing structure thats designed specifically to prevent you from directly comparing competitors and get you to pay the largest possible amount for the littlest possible service. They fracture the service into as many small pieces as possible and charge ridiculous prices for them individually in order to make the bundles look cheaper by comparison. 

They charge separately for call display, text messaging, email, voice, long distance and internet even though it’s all similar data all travelling over the same network. (And charging for long distance is just lying, as if it costs more $0.35 a minute more to send data to Waterloo than it does to send data to Mississauga.) It would be as if when you purchased an internet connection you had to pay for a certain number of IM’s per month, extra for accessing sites from the US, extra for watching video, extra for uploading files, and extra for using Skype. There would be protests in the streets if that was attempted, but it’s tolerated on cellular service because we’ve been beaten by them for so long that we don’t think to call the police anymore.

by malthe

But changes are coming. There is no technical reason that you even need a voice plan or call display or voicemail or text messaging at this point. All you need is a smartphone, a data plan, Skype, and Google Talk. You could get about 1000 minutes of Skype on a 500MB data plan. But oh right, I almost forgot, you also need the cellular service providers to allow Skype on their network, and allow you to install it on the phone that you own. And that won’t happen without a huge increase in competition or a government intervention.

by acroll

The CRTC has opened up an online forum for the next month to get the public’s input on net neutrality and the protocol-discrimination policies of large ISP’s in Canada like Rogers and Bell.

by SMN

I strongly encourage everyone to go take a look at these comments to get an idea of how the internet is being manipulated by the corporations in this country. Vote for the comments you agree with and add your own comments if at all possible. 

While I seriously doubt that the CRTC will actually read every comment on this site, if we are able to deluge them with enough input they will be unable to ignore it, and will be forced to realize that no internet user thinks that protocol-discrimination or traffic shaping based on content type are acceptable ways of dealing with network congestion.

We should be entitled to use the connection that we paid for in whatever manner we’d like within the law, and no ISP should be permitted to determine what content we are and are not allowed to produce or consume online. 

Like many people, I have difficulty doing any sort of creative writing in a deliberate fashion. If I’m not able to immediately put my fingers on a keyboard at the moment inspiration strikes, the passion will miss me and the moment will pass. 

In an attempt to get around this I got a notebook to write down ideas in the hopes that I’d then be able to recall this inspiration at a more convenient time and place. But it doesn’t work that way. 

by gr33nt4u (more behind than ever!)

In the moment I will get excited. Ideas and words will rush through me, everything seems brilliant, important, and essential. I jot something down and then go about my business. I get home, look in the notebook and see “yell out stupid shit”. No word of a lie. That’s in there. And I’m not sure what it means.

So rather than being this repository of my genius, it’s a record of my dementia. It’s a written analogy of the situation where pot smokers record their conversations thinking they’re profound in the moment, and then realizing afterward that maybe their thoughts on the subjectivity of existence are not that novel. In fact I seem to remember that topic already being covered by someone else a little while ago.

by @BB

And even in the event that the thought was recorded accurately and actually seems to have some sort of substance to it, I find it hard to rekindle the enthusiasm I may have had not but 2 hours before. It just doesn’t seem important anymore, not worth the effort.

If I try to force the issue, insist to myself that it’s crucial this thought be shared with the world, I only get something garbled and lacking passion. I get the facts but not the feeling. Suddenly what I wanted to be an impassioned rant on the public’s perception of their security in a modern world becomes this dry recitation of the capabilities RFID technology. And no one get excited about RFID technology.

by bre pettis

But enough introspection already. The point of all of this is that I’m beginning to see that the mark of a successful writer is someone who not only writes when they feel it, but also when they don’t. 

So what keeps me from writing? That’s one area where I think almost everyone is the same. It’s a combination of procrastination and a fear of inadequacy that feed back on one another. I don’t write because I’m tired, then because I haven’t written in awhile I don’t write because I feel I’ve lost my audience and don’t have anything worth saying.

Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine refers to negative voice in his head as the little hater that fuels the feedback cycle of laziness to self-doubt to more laziness. My little hater makes it difficult to justify my own voice when it seems that there are so many genius’s out there doing what I already do, but better.

by ɹǝɟɹnsןןıɥ sɐxǝʇ — WW Tribe Wanderer

And that’s the where a new kind of thinking is needed. In her TED talk Elizabeth Gilbert refers to genius not as any specific special kind of person, but as something that could potentially happen to anyone who is already engaged in a creative process. This is a critical distinction. 

If you believe genius is an inherent quality then you may decline to create something because you fear you are not the genius that others may be. But if you force yourself to think of genius as a condition, as something that happens to someone who is dedicated, then there is no barrier to entry and the only way you’ll succeed is by frequently putting yourself in a position where that genius can find you and act through you.

To paraphrase her, if you show up for your part of the job often enough, sooner or later the genius will show up too.

by Nicholas Gray

Dating is a weird and wholly unnatural sort of situation. Online dating even more so. I think Seinfeld had a bit where he compared dating to a job interview, except that if it goes well you both take your pants off at the end.

by spudgunner

Up until very recently I wouldn’t really say I had ever dated. For the most part I’d just sort of meet someone and a relationship would somehow just organically grow out of it. No special fertilizers or grow lamps required. While I have met two of my previous girlfriends through Lavalife, in both cases they were the first people I went out with and in both cases the first date turned into a relationship in short order.

This is why my current situation is new to me. For the first time in my life I’m actually going on dates in the stereotypical sort of way, and it’s a completely novel experience.

by enggul

It starts with the online application process. You read the job description and provide your resume along with a cover letter that you try to tailor to the qualities they are looking for. You want to seem pleasant, eager and qualified, and not desperate for any position you can get. Too much or too little of anything is bad at this point.

Which is why my first instinct at this stage is already incorrect. I want to essentially write the person a long winded and grandiloquent blog-post-like response extolling my knowledge of some factual minutiae that they included in their description.

And it’s sentences like that that prevent women from sleeping with me.

I think that an appropriate response to “I like Woody Allen movies” is a half-assed doctoral thesis on the subject, made up of some random facts and some random made-up facts. Instead of, you know, just saying I liked Annie Hall.

by chesswithdeath

At this point I’ve discovered that the key to getting over the first hurdle is just sending a quick message that I don’t think about and is no longer than about four sentences. No one wants to read through a dissertation length message from someone you don’t know.

And this isn’t dishonest or hiding my true personality. In fact I’ve come across it naturally. I’ve gotten to the point now where I can’t be bothered to put in that much effort when my experience tells me that there is probably only a 20% chance they’ll acknowledge you.

by nattu

Then the actual date. That thing where two strangers meet in a public location to figure out if they want to meet again in another public location.

Aside from the rare cases where the other person is clearly just conducting an interrogation to find your faults, this is generally where I begin to enjoy the process.

I like meeting new people and exploring their personalities. Having discussions where you have no idea what the other persons perspective will be. You come across these conversational surprises, points of view or opinions you hadn’t considered before. It may be going well, it may be going horribly, but it’s all intellectual gravy to me.

by iambigred

And that’s where the next hurdle comes up. I often become so immersed in discovering this person that I forget that this is supposed to be a romantic experience for some people. Overt flirting may become a secondary concern compared to figuring out why someone thinks the way they do.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m frequently a very flirty person, but I don’t feel the need to steer the conversation exclusively in that direction. For me, psychologically sparing is also flirting, and intellectually respecting someone is essential to me finding them sexually attractive. A good debate is foreplay in my opinion.

by Steve Wampler

So online dating doesn’t seem to mesh terribly well with my personality. And maybe that’s the case with most people.

So why do it? Why not go to AGO or take a cooking class and talk to girls?

Aside from the fact that those two options are kind of creepy, I do the online dating thing because it’s a relatively easy way to meet a lot of interesting people that you otherwise would not come across. At least in these situations you know that the person is single, the person is at least somewhat interested in talking to you, and everyone involved is aware that this is a date.

So I’ll keep trying it out. I’ll keep talking the way I talk and acting the way I act and hopefully at some point it’ll click. But in the mean time regardless of whether or not I actually end up with any of these people, I still enjoy figuring out what makes them tick, as well as what that means for me and what I’m looking for.

This round of dating started off with me looking for someone. But the more people I meet, the more I find out things about myself that are of greater interest and value than if I had hooked up right away. And that may just be me rationalizing my current position, but even if it’s an unintended consequence, it’s still true.

by kxlly

by static416

Bad failure handling.

It would be trivially easy to add a little bit of code to the BIOS that would allow the monitor to at least show a photo of some kind in the event of a disk boot failure.

Although I must say that I’d rather look at this than be inundated with an obnoxously loud Pizza Pizza ad.