The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III) » Cyborgology. On social media and “nostalgia for the present”. (via)
Faux-vintage photo will no longer be able to conjure the importance associated with physicality if the vintage look begins to be more closely associated with smartphones than old photos.
In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber–if you can find one–is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.
One guy’s rules of thumb for books, movies, etc.
4. Long descriptive passages very rarely work.
8. It is wonderful to think you’re watching story X and then discover you’re watching story Q.
17. Enough with the Christ imagery!
18. Don’t speak the subtext!
Shyness had made me so deficient in empathic experience that I could only view social life in terms of risk rather than opportunity. The best way to manage that risk, I thought, was to be unapproachable but legibly fascinating at a distance, to present myself as an object to be read but with a message that’s inscrutable and fleeting, one that could convey the complexity of the real me without reducing it to something superficial. I could not get past the wish to broadcast my identity without having to interact with anyone.
Facebook, of course, caters to that desire.
It’s taken Him so long
‘Cause we’ve got so far to come
Amazing song on an amazing album – but I stand by my tweet. Mental note: tumble music more often.
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
My daughter just turned 16 years old, and you can see it on MTV’s [‘My Super Sweet Sixteen’], where they get cars, and things that depreciate and just don’t mean nothing. I wanted to give my child something that she can grow and build and nurture. So I gave her her own label.
Shotgun Stories. Two sets of half-brothers feud after their father dies. Similar themes of family, justice, resentment, forgiveness, etc. that you see in the v. good Winter’s Bone, which is also set in the same region. None of what happens will surprise you that much, but the way it’s handled is excellent. Great movie. Ebert agrees.
When it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only you around to witness yourself quit or continue.
Via David Hayes, who said it best:
There’s no single solid takeaway from this essay about the culture we feel obligated to consume, but I think it’s a good and valuable thing to think about and pay attention to.
One guy’s favorites from 2010. Just when I was approaching Instapaper Zero again. (via)
A field study, in these Hard Times, of the Homeless (as observed in the H Street Encampment, Fresno, California). Being an examination of who they are, how they think, and what they do.
See also the excellent Homeless in Sacramento: Welcome to the new tent cities.
Most people have excellent necks. Now they cover them with curtains, which is kind of ridiculous.
Great read. (via)
I’ve been surprised—and upset—to find that ideas I had then were very similar to the ones I have now.
Also:
This younger I seemed far more engaged than the venal goon I remembered. Why did I want to judge him as lacking? Jealousy? Fear that what was lacking was my own progress?
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“We also have to acknowledge that these cities that come top of the polls also don’t have any poor people.” (via)
Where before we silently cursed the dumb coach in our living room while remaining unsure whether we were pissed because we were right or because we had had four beers, today we take to the Internet and find thousands of people who also think we are right, and some more who have done the math that demonstrates that we are right, and therefore we know.
Once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary.
Mark Larson 