Dressed to Kill. This was excellent. Love the wordless moments, just guided by soundtrack to clue you in and shape the emotion. That museum scene! The tension! De Palman surveillance and paranoia in full force. And something about all those clocks? Nancy Allen is a hoot. And Dennis Franz! Perspectives on psychosis and the trans community haven’t aged well. It is of its time. Filed under: Brian De Palma.
The Bookmark represents what we wish for. It’s the earliest indicator of intention, and the most vulnerable; by definition, the act of saving something for later means that whatever we hope for hasn’t happened yet. Bookmarks are placeholders for the future. By thumbing through them, we can start to see what might happen next.
Internet writers live on Twitter and it greatly distorts their understanding of reality.
As someone who loves Twitter, this can be hard to admit, but ultimately Twitter is an ephemeral online forum that nobody really uses, and our tiny politics subpocket of Twitterdom almost certainly has no effect on anything.
Not only did “problematic” become popular because it suits identity politics and sounds smart, it’s also highly shareable. “Problematic” bundles urgency, seriousness, and debatability into a single vague word, which is great for both sound bytes and tweets.
Vigilante justice is a tricky thing.
In the end it’s just fun to break shit every once in a while and see what happens. Cutting Twitter out for an extended period is definitely going to break some shit. I can’t wait to see what happens.
I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure – this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate – or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains … everything we have lost?
Oldie but a goodie. William Gibson in 1996.
Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator’s dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you’re working.
People ridiculed George W. Bush when he called them “the internets” but he had it right. Technically, the internet is one huge interconnected network. Linguistically and socially, it is many networks, and they are very distinct. For example: There are 40 million Brazilians on Twitter. Do you follow any Brazilians?* This is a significant fraction of a service that many of us consider our internet front porch—and yet, unless you speak Portuguese, it’s invisible. It might as well be a different service entirely.
Making culture for the internets—all of them — The Sea of Fog — Medium
On trolls: Remember that foul words or blows in themselves are no outrage, but your judgement that they’re so. So when anyone makes you angry, know that it’s your own thought that has angered you. Therefore make it your first endeavour not to let your impressions carry you away…
Love me some Epictetus.
“All I want is to go to a website, enjoy it for the time I’ve decided to spend there, and then move on with my life,” he continued. “Is that so much to ask?”
Focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one’s present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you.
Q: What are the incentives you think artists are responding to?
Money and fame and sex—the same as always—but now there’s a difference. You can’t perfect your masterwork for 20 years. There’s a bit of a hurry. There’s a sense that things are changing. You can end up obsolete.
Q: How about from the audience perspective? How different is consuming art versus other consumption?
I think it’s changed enormously in the last 10 years. You see it in movie theaters, but it’s everywhere: people text or tweet and don’t pay full attention. They’re in some ways quite fussy. The attitude is, I’m already in control of my own informational life and entertainment. What else can you bring to the table? Not in a hostile way, but in an entirely legitimate “what have you got for me?” way. A lot of creators aren’t really up to it.
This is what RSS is for, these days: you set a snare, leave it, and trap for yourself the words you want to read most.
I always love reading Anil’s perspective.
The danger with a digital guidebook, used in isolation, is the same as the problem with all electronic media: You might find exactly what you’re looking for, and not much else.
What Does It Mean When Smartphones Replace Travel Guides? | The New Republic
We are far from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with being offline more than ever before. We have never appreciated a solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or even our boredom better than we do now.
Dance the flip-flop – Robin Sloan.
the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once
Mark Larson 