anthillz

• Up With Grups - New York Magazine
  Somebody hurry up with the abrasive music that adults can’t stand!
  (tags: culture)

• Mr. Natural - The New York Review of Books
  R. Crumb
  (tags: crumb art review lit)
• Fear Factor - Bill O’Reilly’s Baroque Period - The New Yorker
  (tags: media news read)
• Hedi Slimane - The New Yorker
  (tags: fashion read)
• Hail the king of colour - Ellsworth Kelley - The Guardian
  (tags: art reviews minimalism)
• Marimba Ponies
  (tags: funny music video)

• In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse - New York Times
  More scandal
  (tags: politics iraq)

…is that files aren’t sorted by genre. Fuck genre. What a load of shit. What an idiotic thing to base your primary sort on. It’s called racism.

It makes some sense for a bookstore. I probably don’t want to look through a bunch of psychotherapy texts looking for literature. It actually does piss me off that I can’t find anything in Powell’s. But a record store is not a bookstore. The fact that there is a black face on the record cover doesn’t mean I don’t want to see it when I’m looking for early NOFX EPs. Think about the lives it could save! Does anyone else buy things because they look cool anymore?
Both bookstores and record stores need to change their focus from helping a person find what they are looking for to helping them browse things they never would have otherwise found. If I knew what I wanted I wouldn’t be looking there, it would be in the mail already.

Destroy all physical borders!

• Infinite Jest - The New York Times
  (tags: lit wallace reviews)
• Buckminster Fuller: Everything I know
  (tags: fuller read architecture)
• Six degrees of Wikipedia
  (tags: cool games programming wiki)

• Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
  Werner! Werner! Werner!
  (tags: herzog funny film)

• What does “OK” stand for? - The Straight Dope
  (tags: entymology english)

Usability is a way of looking at programming that in very basic terms says that if the user makes a mistake, it is the programmer’s fault.

If they lose all their data, the application should have been saving it. If they enter the brand of toilet paper they use instead of their email address, the application should know the difference and tell them to enter their email address. The other short version of what usability is is that the program should do what people expect.

As a programmer this might seem like something that would be a huge pain in my ass. If someone else fucks up then I did? Are you kidding me? But no: it’s a whole new scope of blaming things on other people.

I’ve been finding myself in this mindset more and more. “This program doesn’t work the way I want it to. Whoever made this is an idiot.” I’m still not totally convinced, but it provides an out for my own incompetence.

If someone can delete their data and blame the person who built the program that they did it in, then I can certainly make a shitty ass application and then blame the person who asked for it.

I certainly COULD build something great if someone knew what they were looking for before I started building it. That’s is the excuse system that I’m living under right now.

I suppose it’s better than saying I’m an outsider because I don’t believe in the inside, another excuse system. People don’t like me because I don’t care if they do or not. That’s a good one too. I could stop doing this if I wanted to, I just don’t want to right now. I’m too smart for this. I’ve thought that. This will be over soon. I’m sick of thinking that and finding it untrue.

Samsara.

• inkling
  (tags: internet cool)
• Giving the lie to five Oscar pics - Los Angeles Times
  The lies of the Best Picture Oscar nominations
  (tags: film lies)

• Perfect
  “No room for argument, very little for vermouth”
  (tags: cool booze)
• Mutado Studio
  (tags: design work)
• Embattled Underground - New York Times Review of Books
  The Crying of Lot 49 review from ‘66
  (tags: lit pynchon reviews)