Digging up the source of a fireside chat clip

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Haven’t seen the whole fireside chat, but had to dig up the source when came across this great Jeff Bezos wisdom around 4.5 minutes in, on anticipating future business needs:

I very frequently get the question, “What’s going to change in the next ten years?” And that is a very interesting question. It’s a very common one. I almost never get the question, “What’s not going to change in the next ten years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices. And I know that’s going to be true ten years from now. They want fast delivery. They want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher”. “I love Amazon. I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up… we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers ten years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

There’s a life metaphor in there somewhere.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack

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I read Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack and had felt many feelings. Overall a bit dry and academic. If you were obsessed with games of the era (I’m guilty), you probably know too much industry history to find anything new here in the first half, and you’re already sold on the cultural import. The second half focuses more on the music itself, and digs into music theory a bit more… but if you know a good bit about music already, it also feels like… just not enough. It still made me very nostalgic, though, and for a while I convinced myself I need to buy a Wii U or something.

Magic Mike XXL

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Magic Mike XXL. My appreciation for it grows as time passes. It’s more aimless than the first one (which I really liked), and I think that “this isn’t gonna be like last time” shift is pretty obvious right away with the “Pony” solo. This one seems more gentle and… appreciative? Everybody learned some lessons over the years since the last one. Now it’s time to celebrate, honor that time, and move on. It’s a shame their crew only has like 1.5 decent dancers, but it kinda works. I really enjoyed Kameron Hurley’s series of tweets about the movie, which had me shouting in agreement. Filed under: Magic Mike.

Three Colors: Blue

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Three Colors: Blue. On grief (+ separating yourself from it) and human connection (+ separating yourself from it). I dig it. It doesn’t play like a weepy melodrama because our lead is in such a shambles, she’s unpredictable and hard to read. Never gonna argue with a Binoche movie. This is the first I watched from the Three Colors trilogy.

Enlightenment on Your iPhone

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To pluck some things from the list, while ignoring others, strikes many Buddhists as absurd. McMahan said, “It would be as if somebody went to the Catholic Church and said, ‘I don’t buy all this stuff about Jesus and God, but I really dig this Communion ritual. Would you just teach me how to do that bit? Oh, and I want to start a company marketing wafers.’

Enlightenment on Your iPhone

Balancing Frames and Canvas at Viktor & Rolf

thecuttingclass:

Balancing Frames and Canvas at Viktor & Rolf | The Cutting Class. Viktor & Rolf, Couture, AW15, Paris.

Viktor & Rolf, Couture, AW15, Paris. In a show that saw artworks exploding off the wall to form couture gowns, Viktor and Rolf created garments that exaggerated the balancing acts that lie at the heart of all clothing. On everyday clothing, common pattern shapes are regurgitated so that designers don’t have to deal with pesky things like gravity. However, once materials become harder, heavier or stiffer the ability to shape and control the structure of a garment to form extreme silhouettes becomes more and more important. Keep reading

Previous favorites from The Cutting Class.

Rapping – and rocking – with Matt Bonner | Concord Monitor

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“You’re about to get an exclusive here,” Bonner said. “I hate to make excuses, I was raised to never make excuses, but I went through a two-and-a-half month stretch where I had really bad tennis elbow, and during that stretch it made it so painful for me to shoot I’d almost be cringing before I even caught the ball like, ‘Oh, this is going to kill.’ ” […] “Everybody is going to find this hilarious, but here’s my theory on how I got it,” he said. “When the new iPhone came out it was way bigger than the last one, and I think because I got that new phone it was a strain to use it, you have to stretch further to hit the buttons, and I honestly think that’s how I ended up developing it.”

See also: Matt Bonner’s sandwich metric.

Rapping – and rocking – with Matt Bonner | Concord Monitor

Reading War and Peace on my iPhone

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Loved this essay from Clive Thompson. The part about exporting his marginalia into a little mini-book is very intriguing. And how compelling reading changes our habits:

The phone’s extreme portability allowed me to fit Tolstoy’s book into my life, and thus to get swept up in it. And it was being swept up that, ironically, made the phone’s distractions melt away. Once you’re genuinely hankering to get back to a book, to delve into the folds of its plot and the clockwork machinations of its characters, you stop needing so much mindfulness to screen out digital diversions. The book becomes the diversion itself, the thing your brain is needling you to engage with. Stop checking your email and Twitter! You’ve got a book to read!

Reading War and Peace on my iPhone

When you’re an actor, you can act on your own

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heidisaman:

“When you’re an actor, you can act on your own, but you kind of need to get hired. You need to be chosen. And when you’re chosen to act in something, the thing itself is already validated—it’s already real in some way. But for the most part, people who are creators—writers and directors—are always starting from zero. Nobody is asking them to make what they make. Every time you set out to create something from nothing that nobody has asked for, you feel the void more than you do in any other art form. I do, anyway. I’d never experienced that with a film before Frances Ha, where at first there was nothing, and then there was something because we made it. Frances Ha felt like I gave birth to it. And then I realized that that’s what you have to do on every single project for the rest of your life, if this is what you want to do.”

– Greta Gerwig on writing and acting in Frances Ha

Still from Frances Ha (2012, dir. Noah Baumbach)

Reading Amazon reviews of Magic Mike

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balltillifall:

Reading Amazon reviews of MAGIC MIKE reinforces my view that it might be one of the most incredible acts of cinematic subversion of our time. Soderbergh tricked a bunch of horny Midwestern housewives into watching a super dark treatise on modern American culture by cloaking it in the trojan horse of a “sexy Channing Tatum movie” (and made a bucket of money while doing it).

FURY ROAD getting a bunch of bro’s to watch a dystopian, feminist revenge flick and SPRING BREAKERS tricking tween Disney fans into seeing a fucked up Harmony Korine neon fever dream are the other other recent examples that come to mind.