Djchall's Micro Blog

In principle, production cost puts a ceiling on its value, but there is no floor. No protection from competition, unlike the dollar.

via www.igmchicago.org

My father's take on bitcoin.

"...she wants to kill everybody."

Game Of Thrones does something much cannier, in that it all but forces us to see things from multiple points of view. We really like the Starks, but if they ever got hold of Tyrion, they’d probably have him arrested for treason. We really like Tyrion, but he’d almost certainly kill some of our other favorite characters. We really like Dany, but she wants to kill everybody.

via www.avclub.com

Best description of the appeal of Game of Thrones I've found. I can't think of another TV show that is quite like it in that regard. Maybe The Sopranos, if it had developed the FBI agents more.

Announcing Maura Magazine

Bloggers by nature are readers, writers, editors, social media experts, system administrators, designers and publishers. As tools improved, some of these specializations became less necessary and the barrier to entry lowered — for instance, TypePad and Wordpress obviated the need to be your own designer and system administrator. With tools such as Measure Map (which became Google Analytics) and Chartbeat, bloggers became statisticians as well.

via hello.typepad.com

The future of professional text-based content (ie, "writing") may look like this, so I continue to track 29th Street Publishing Company's progress with great interest.

"It's the Mets fan in me"

It's the Mets fan in me that recognized success and failure in a variety of ways.
The aspect of being a Mets fan that I think is helpful to me is contrasting it with the stereotypical Yankee fan who thinks that to not win the World Series is to equate that with failure. I feel, at this point, like [Mets owners] the Wilpons are my friends in ways I never realized. I'm now thinking these guys are looking out for my best interests and saying, "You've spent a lot of time worrying about New York sports teams, and maybe it's time to stop caring and move on to other things. And as deplorably as ownership has behaved over the years, we're gonna be even worse and keep being even worse until you stop caring and really get the message that there's no earthly reason to invest any of your emotion in these teams." And I appreciate them looking out for me that way.

via www.spin.com

This made me think of @djacobs. btw, the person speaking is Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. 

Tuning 77: The Grateful Dead tunes their instruments for 92 minutes. (AUDIO)

Yesterday Boing Boing plucked this curiosity from the magnificent Internet Archive: "Tuning '77," which was created by Michael David Murphy, and which the Archive describes as "a seamless audio supercut of an entire year of the Grateful Dead tuning their instruments, live on stage. Chronologically sequenced," the site adds, "this remix incorporates every publicly available recording from 1977, examining the divide between audience expectation and performance anxiety."

via www.slate.com

This sounds (obviously) like the most ridiculous thing ever, but listening to it is an odd experience. You keep expecting something to happen, but then... it doesn't.

"Game of Thrones is perhaps best read as a meta-textual critique/parody/travesty of the epic fantasy series form, particularly its multiplicity of viewpoints, fetishistic proliferation of back-story/history and secondary creation, and sprawling geopolitical action. The characters in Game of Thrones seem curiously self-aware about the absurd nature of their world... while the hobbits and elves in Lord of the Rings seem to take as a matter of course the fact that they live in a world where people will break out into many-versed songs about five thousand year old love affairs between elves and men, the people of Westeros (and Easteros, and Southeros, etc.) tend to be slightly exasperated at the proliferation of houses, sigils, and house mottoes they are forced to live with, as if they are uncomfortably, perhaps subconsciously, aware that they are trapped in a fictional matrix that is more and more fraying at the edges."

You know, comrades," says Stalin, "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.

via urbanlegends.about.com

Takeover > 99 Problems

If I were in a white rock band playing with Jay-Z, I'd ask to do "Takeover" instead of "99 Problems" because how fun would it be to play the crazy guitar and organ riff from "Five to One" over and over? Also, because it's pretty much the best dis song of all time. A truly comprehensive dismantling of mediocrity.

 

 

Cutting Through the Kudzu

This pattern began to manifest itself most nefariously in what we call the web kudzu of 2010 and 2011 — inline ads that turned keywords into links, URL shorteners, video ads that took over an entire page without warning, and so on. We continued (and continue!) to spend significant time with clients and partners managing community sites and blogging software, and all of them felt frustrated with these “products” whose smothering of the web seemed inevitable. Over and over, our clients told us, “We want a way to give better tools to our audience to see and read our work, and to give us feedback.”

via www.29.io

Since I left (read: was forcibly ejected from) the web 2.0/dotcom world in March 2010, this is exactly the feeling I've had. There has to be a better way to monetize content for writers to support themselves than the solutions that exist now.

In the past two and a half years I had collected notes about my ideas of how to solve the problem. I lacked the vision, skills, and energy, though, to do anything other than capture them. I'm glad to see that people I trust are also working on this problem. David Jacobs, Natalie Podrazik and Liz Letteri (to name the three people at 29th Street Publishing that I've worked with directly) are exactly the kind of people who can do this. Kudos to them!

"Well, I'm a big pussy. I'm like Brian Wilson singing about surfing."

Charlie: It's funny you don't like to fly, when so many of your songs are
filled with flight imagery. (everyone laughs)
Bob: Well, I'm a big pussy. I'm like Brian Wilson singing about surfing.
(everyone guffaws) You know, he does all those surfing songs--he doesn't
know how to surf. He's afraid of the water. All the flight imagery is just
because we come from the birthplace of aviation.

via www.gbv.com

Amusing insight from Robert Pollard.