The Pool Room
“Everybody should write the stories that matter to them and then we’ll figure it out once everything exists.”
—DAVID SIMON - - Vice Magazine
December 2009
47 posts
“But I guess where I was originally going is that nobody wants to write endings in television. They want to sustain the franchise. But if you don’t write an ending for a story, you know what you are? You’re a hack. You’re not a storyteller. It may not be that you have the skills of a hack. You might be a hell of a writer, but you’re taking a hack’s road. You’re on the road to hackdom and there’s no stopping you because stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
—DAVID SIMON - - Vice Magazine
“We’ve given ourselves over to the Olympian god that is capitalism and now we’re reaping the whirlwind. This is the America that unencumbered capitalism has built. It’s the America that we deserve because we let it happen. We don’t deserve anything better. The Wire was trying to take the scales from people’s eyes and say, “This is what you’ve built. Take a look at it.” It’s an accurate portrayal of the problems inherent in American cities.”
—DAVID SIMON - - Vice Magazine
“I completely missed this brouhaha. There is no possible way in which actually using braces is worse for jQuery. It standardizes the code base and it makes it easier to understand. We’re not going back to the dark ages of mixed braces and multi-level deep no-brace statements.”
—Commit ddb86f8d5bd1bd21b2beeeea55baf505b47dfed5 to jquery’s jquery - GitHub
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“In an open system, a competitive advantage doesn’t derive from locking in customers, but rather from understanding the fast-moving system better than anyone else and using that knowledge to generate better, more innovative products. The successful company in an open system is both a fast innovator and a thought leader; the brand value of thought leadership attracts customers and then fast innovation keeps them.”
—Official Google Blog: The meaning of open
jstn:
I didn’t get the impression it was literally called “unobtainium.” Giovanni Ribisi utters the only instance of it in the entire movie and it sounded pretty sarcastic to me. At the very least I think it was left intentionally ambiguous.
I don’t know. Given the apparently unironic use of “enhance” it didn’t feel like they were angling for geek in-jokes. In fact, it felt to me like they were blissfully unaware of how their movie might be received.
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Tonight Tonight by The End Level Baddies
originally by Smashing Pumpkins
(posted by Nathaniel James)
A perfect song to listen to in the dark.
“This is not a new or revolutionary idea. In fact, you probably do something close to this already. The problem is that “close” isn’t good enough. Without compliance to some sort of formal specification, version numbers are essentially useless for dependency management. By giving a name and clear definition to the above ideas, it becomes easy to communicate your intentions to the users of your software. Once these intentions are clear, flexible (but not too flexible) dependency specifications can finally be made.”
—Semantic Versioning
“The prime, principle difference here is that this is to be implemented by a secret list that just makes certain publications on the Internet silently disappear. With the newsagent example, nobody is checking through every magazine before it goes on sale, and secretly burning the ones that don’t make the grade. Instead, I can publish anything I like, and I simply have to face the consequences if I publish something illegal. Everyone gets to see me have my day in court, and the Government has to make its case that what I published was wrong. That’s an open, accountable model of censorship where the decisions made to censor are done so out in the sunlight, in front of an impartial judge; the Internet Censor is a secretive, unaccountable model of censorship, where the decisions are made behind closed doors, by nameless functionaries.”
—Kevin Rudd wants to filter your internet – Pollytics
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eceu:
Cecilia/Amanda - Elliott Smith
Kill Rock Stars announced yesterday that they will be putting out re-issues of Elliott Smith’s very first record, Roman Candle (1994), and his final, posthumous record, From a Basement on a Hill (2004). Both records will be put out on April 6th, and will also be available on vinyl (Roman Candle for the very first time!). As a way of drumming up a little bit of extra attention around these releases, KRS has also just made available a previously unreleased song of Smith’s from 1997, entitled “Cecilia/Amanda”.
If you’re a Smith obsessive, as I obviously am, the song isn’t particularly new - a live version, played exactly once by Smith in 1997, circulated among fans for years under the title “High in the Sky” (and even prompted fans to ask him in an online chat/interview about the song possibly appearing on an upcoming record), and this unreleased demo also started making the rounds among Smith nerds a few years ago, as part of a collection known as “The Jackpot! Demos” (though today’s release certainly sounds much cleaner - and better - than any version previously available online).
Still, it’s quite nice to see this get an official online release and push from KRS, as it’s always been a song I’ve had great affection for, though I actually prefer the live, acoustic version better than this studio demo (the keyboards just don’t really do it for me on the demo, and I think the song is much better fit to a more stripped-down, intimate rendering).
I didn’t know, however, that the song - or at least its melody - actually originated with Elliott’s high school band, Stranger Than Fiction, and was recorded by the group under the title “Time is Ours Now” with completely different lyrics. Who knew?
“Everyone’s fixation on real time. Streams of info. Now time. All far less interesting to me than the ever lengthening data shadow we’re casting. I took too much Foucault once, & I’m in love with the archive.”
—Deprecated
“Pownce was sold & shut down. More URLs sundered. Until today, I’ve had my Pownce link at the bottom of this blog, like a phantom limb. Not that I used the service all that much, but it was a rel=me. I taught friends & search engines that that was part of who I was. Poof.”
—Deprecated
Eyes Of The South
Down
Eyes of the South, from Down’s classic debut NOLA.
Crank it up and feel it build.
