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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoThe Talk Show ✪: Ep. 370, With Jason Kottke2023-03-13T01:54:07+00:00
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/03/11/ep-370
robertogrecojasonkottke johngruber daringfireball internet histoty web online blogs blogginghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7835333d115b/WWW: The Way We Were2020-07-28T01:58:39+00:00
https://kottke.org/16/10/www-the-way-we-were
robertogrecoJoe: Berners-Lee wrote HTML to view and edit the Web and HTTP so that it could talk to itself. The chatter could be cacophonous, it could be deafeningly silent. Big picture: What will the World Wide Web become? Short answer: Who knows?
Donna: Ok, so what’s your point?
Joe: It’s a waste of time to try to figure out what the Web will become, we just don’t know. Because right now, at the end of the day, it’s just an online research catalog running on NeXT computers on a small network in Europe.
Cam: So, you’re saying everything we’ve talked about since we got here has been a waste of time?
Joe: I’m saying let’s take a step back. Literally step back.
Gordon: What is this on the board?
Joe: It’s the code for the Web browser.
Tom: And you wrote it all on the whiteboard.
Donna: The online catalog of research?
Cameron: Full of Norwegian dudes’ physics papers and particle diagrams and stuff?
Gordon: And we care about this because why?
Joe: How did we all get here today? The choices we made? The sheer force of our wills, something like that? Here’s another answer: the winds of fate, random coincidence, some unseen hand pushing us along. Destiny. How did we all get here today? We walked through this door. We don’t have to build a big white box or stadium or invent rock n’ roll. The moment we decide what the Web is, we’ve lost. The moment we try to tell people what to do with it, we’ve lost. All we have to do is build a door and let them inside.
When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel and it was basic, concrete and steel, but it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge, it was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip: **the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending.**
This is the first Web browser, the one CERN built to view and edit research. I wrote it up here for you to see how simple it is. It takes up one whiteboard — that’s basic concrete and steel — but we can take this and we can build a door and we can be the first ones to do it because right now, everyone else sees this…
Donna: …as an online research catalog…
Gordon: …running on NeXT…
Cameron: …on a network in Europe.
Joe: And with this handful of code, we can build the Holland Tunnel.
It’s Don Draper’s carousel speech from Mad Men…but for the Web. And it hit me right in the feels. Hard. When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I would sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
Which is why this scene wrecked me so hard. The Web that they are talking about on the show, the open Web, is ailing, dying. It was like listening to a eulogy at a funeral, this thing that I love, poured the best of my self into, gone forever. Of course that’s not strictly true, the Web is still a fabulous place where anyone can set up a site to do, say, or sell whatever they want, but instead of the promise of small pieces loosely joined, what we mostly got was large pieces tightly coupled. Today’s Web browsers and apps are Holland Tunnels that open up right into shopping malls instead of open city streets. Facebook makes it absurdly easy to start your own blog that all your friends and family can conveniently read, but you give up the freedom to say anything you want, it’s impossible to move those words elsewhere if you’d like (I’m talking with URLs and social graph intact), and they sell advertising against your words & images and you don’t get a cut.
Now, I’m not advocating a Make The Web Great Again policy because the open Web of the 90s had many problems, the greatest of which was a lack of access for anyone without the free time and skills necessary to set up a web server, install software, etc. etc., not to mention the expense involved. Today’s Web is much more accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels and as a result you see much more participation across the socioeconomic spectrum, especially in developing countries.
But the open Web enthusiasts and advocates missed an opportunity to take what the Web was in the 90s and make that available to everyone. Instead of walled gardens like Facebook, Pinterest, and Medium (which echo the closed online services like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve that predated the Web), imagine a bunch of smaller services bound together with open protocols where individuals have both freedom and convenience. At this stage, building an open Twitter or open Facebook is nearly impossible, but it wouldn’t have been 10-12 years ago. I hope I’m wrong, but with all of the entrenched incumbents and money pumping into online services, I’m afraid that time has truly passed. And it’s breaking my heart.”]]>haltandcatchfire www openweb 2016 online internet 1990s worldwideweb tv television walledgardens prodigy aol compuserve pinterest facebook medium timberners-lee kottke jasonkottke thewebwelosthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6196db9cb5a3/Halt and Catch Fire (kottke.org)2020-07-28T01:57:30+00:00
https://kottke.org/tag/Halt%20and%20Catch%20Fire
robertogrecojasonkottke kottke haltandcatchfire television tvhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:613a96ee6520/Bong Joon-ho’s Extensive Storyboards for Parasite2020-04-02T17:05:10+00:00
https://kottke.org/20/04/bong-joon-hos-extensive-storyboards-for-parasite
robertogrecoI’m always very nervous in my everyday life and if I don’t prepare everything beforehand, I go crazy. That’s why I work very meticulously on the storyboards. If I ever go to a psych ward or a psychiatric hospital, they’ll diagnose me as someone who has a mental problem and they’ll tell me to stop working, but I still want to work. I have to draw storyboards.
For his Oscar-winning Parasite, Bong has collected the storyboards into a 304-page graphic novel due out in mid-May: Parasite: A Graphic Novel in Storyboards.
Drawn by Bong Joon Ho himself before the filming of the Palme d’Or Award-winning, Golden Globe(R)-nominated film, these illustrations, accompanied by every line of dialog, depict the film in its entirety. Director Bong has also provided a foreword which takes the reader even deeper into the creative process which gave rise to the stunning cinematic achievement of Parasite.
The book has already been released in Korea, and Through the Viewfinder did a 5-minute video comparison of the storyboards with the filmed scenes for the peach fuzz montage scene (and another video of the flood scene)."]]>bongjoon-ho 2020 film storyboarding filmmaking parasite jasonkottke kottkehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4829b5933790/A return to blogs (finally? sort of?) » Nieman Journalism Lab2020-01-10T23:15:47+00:00
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/a-return-to-blogs-finally-sort-of/
robertogrecojoannemcneil 2020 blogs blogging email newsletters archives kottke jasonkottke substack stoop howwewrite writing online web internethttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cd3c6ee64e81/The Secret to Enjoying a Long Winter2019-12-20T06:41:35+00:00
https://kottke.org/19/11/the-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter
robertogrecowinter happiness kottke psychology weather jasonkottke 2019 mindset acceptance via:lukeneffhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9739a70ecdf1/Blogging is most certainly not dead2019-02-19T22:16:46+00:00
https://kottke.org/18/04/blogging-is-most-certainly-not-dead
robertogrecoI also keep it out of spite, because I refuse to let social media take everything. Those shapeless, formless platforms haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it. I’ve blogged about this many times, but I still believe it: When I log into Facebook, I see Facebook. When I visit your blog, I see you.
Social media is as compelling as ever, but people are increasingly souring on the surveillance state Skinner boxes like Facebook and Twitter. Decentralized media like blogs and newsletters are looking better and better these days…"
[See also:
Noticing Newsletter's "Blogging Is Most Certainly Not Dead" edition:
https://mailchi.mp/kottke/blogging-is-not-dead-edition-2575912502?e=9915150aa0
Noticing Newsletter's "The Best Kottke Posts of 2018 B-Sides" edition
https://mailchi.mp/kottke/noticing-the-best-kottke-posts-of-2018-b-sides-edition-12212018?e=9915150aa0 ]]]>blogs blogging jasonkottke kottke 2018 writing web web2.0 internet online rsshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3fa0875978ac/Offering a more progressive definition of freedom2018-09-10T22:05:47+00:00
https://kottke.org/18/08/offering-a-more-progressive-definition-of-freedom
robertogrecoYou’ll hear me talk all the time about freedom. Because I think there is a failure on our side if we allow conservatives to monopolize the idea of freedom — especially now that they’ve produced an authoritarian president. But what actually gives people freedom in their lives? The most profound freedoms of my everyday existence have been safeguarded by progressive policies, mostly. The freedom to marry who I choose, for one, but also the freedom that comes with paved roads and stop lights. Freedom from some obscure regulation is so much more abstract. But that’s the freedom that conservatism has now come down to.
Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge — but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them.
I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.
Clean drinking water is freedom. Good public education is freedom. Universal healthcare is freedom. Fair wages are freedom. Policing by consent is freedom. Gun control is freedom. Fighting climate change is freedom. A non-punitive criminal justice system is freedom. Affirmative action is freedom. Decriminalizing poverty is freedom. Easy & secure voting is freedom. This is an idea of freedom I can get behind."]]>petebuttigieg freedom democracy 2018 jasonkottke everyday life living progressive progress progressivism education water healthcare universalhealthcare health climatechange politics policy poverty inequality decriminalization voting affirmitiveaction guncontrol liberation work labor salaries wages economics socialism policing police lawenforcement consent patriotism wealth familyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:652890c69b94/Old memories, accidentally trapped in amber by our digital devices2018-05-19T20:10:42+00:00
https://kottke.org/18/05/old-memories-accidentally-trapped-in-amber-by-our-digital-devices
robertogrecoI usually like to add the city I will be travelling to ahead of time to get a sense of what it will be like when we get there.
I do this too but am pretty good about culling my cities list. Still, there are a couple places I keep around even though I haven’t been to them in awhile…a self-nudge for future travel desires perhaps.
Kotori switched back to an old OS via a years-old backup and found “a post-breakup message that came on the day i switched phones”:
thought i moved on but so many whatifs flashed in my head when i read it. what if i never got a new phone. what if they messaged me a few minutes earlier. what if we used a chat that did backups differently
Similarly, Richard fired up Google Maps on an old phone and was briefly transported through time and space:
On a similar note to both of these, a while ago I switched back to my old Nokia N95 after my iPhone died. Fired up Google Maps, and for a brief moment, it marked my location as at a remote crossroads in NZ where I’d last had it open, lost on a road trip at least a decade before.
Matt Sephton runs into old friends when he plays Nintendo:
Every time my friends and I play Nintendo WiiU/Wii/3DS games we see a lot of our old Mii avatars. Some are 10 years old and of a time. Amongst them is a friend who passed away a few years back. It’s always so good to see him. It’s as if he’s still playing the games with us.
For better or worse, machines never forget those who aren’t with us anymore. Dan Noyes’ Gmail holds a reminder of his late wife:
Whenever I open Gmail I see the last message that my late wife sent me via Google chat in 2014. It’s her standard “pssst” greeting for me: “aye aye”. I leave it unread lest it disappears.
It’s a wonderful thread…read the whole thing. [https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/996056615928266752 ]
I encounter these nostalgia bombs every once in awhile too. I closed dozens of tabs the other day on Chrome for iOS; I don’t use it very often, so some of them dated back to more than a year ago. I have bookmarks on browsers I no longer use on my iMac that are more than 10 years old. A MacOS folder I dump temporary images & files into has stuff going back years. Everyone I know stopped using apps like Path and Peach, so when I open them, I see messages from years ago right at the top like they were just posted, trapped in amber.
My personal go-to cache of unexpected memories is Messages on iOS. Scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the list, I can find messages from numbers I haven’t communicated with since a month or two after I got my first iPhone in 2007.
[image: screenshot of Messages in iOS]
There and elsewhere in the listing are friends I’m no longer in touch with, business lunches that went nowhere, old flames, messages from people I don’t even remember, arriving Lyfts in unknown cities, old landlords, completely contextless messages from old numbers (“I am so drunk!!!!” from a friend’s wife I didn’t know that well?!), old babysitters, a bunch of messages from friends texting to be let into our building for a holiday party, playdate arrangements w/ the parents of my kids’ long-forgotten friends (which Ella was that?!), and old group texts with current friends left to languish for years. From one of these group texts, I was just reminded that my 3-year-old daughter liked to make cocktails:
[screenshot]
Just like Sally Draper! Speaking of Mad Men, Don’s correct: nostalgia is a potent thing, so I’ve got to stop poking around my phone and get back to work.
Update: I had forgotten this great example about a ghost driver in an old Xbox racing game.
Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first, ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together — until he died, when i was just 6.
i couldnt touch that console for 10 years.
but once i did, i noticed something.
we used to play a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty awesome for the time it came.
and once i started meddling around… i found a GHOST.
See also this story about Animal Crossing. (via @ironicsans/status/996445080943808512)"]]>digital memory memories 2018 jasonkottke kottke traces animalcrossing videogames games gaming flickr wifi marcinwichary death relationships obsolescence gmail googlhangouts googlechat iphone ios nostalgia xbox nintendo messages communication googlemaps place time chrome mac osxhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ec834025a2e6/The respect of personhood vs the respect of authority2018-05-19T20:01:48+00:00
https://kottke.org/18/05/the-respect-of-personhood-vs-the-respect-of-authority
robertogrecoSometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
This is an amazing & astute observation and applies readily to many aspects of our current political moment, i.e. the highest status group in the US for the past two centuries (white males) experiencing a steep decline in their status relative to other groups. This effect plays out in relation to gender, race, sexual orientation, age, and class. An almost cartoonishly on-the-nose example is Trump referring to undocumented immigrants as “animals” and then whining about the press giving him a hard time. You can also see it when conservative intellectuals with abundant social standing and privilege complain that their ideas about hanging women or the innate inferiority of non-whites are being censored.
Men who abuse their partners do this…and then sometimes parlay their authoritarian frustrations & easily available assault weapons into mass shootings. There are ample examples of law enforcement — the ultimate embodiment of authority in America — treating immigrants, women, black men, etc. like less than human. A perfect example is the “incel” movement, a group of typically young, white, straight men who feel they have a right to sex and therefore treat women who won’t oblige them like garbage.
You can see it happening in smaller, everyday ways too: never trust anyone who treats restaurant servers like shit because what they’re really doing is abusing their authority as a paying customer to treat another person as subhuman."]]>culture diversity language respect personhood authority jasonkottke kottke status hierarchy patriarchy gender race racism sexism lawenforcement humanism humanshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d2e36b7476a0/RIP The Broccoli Tree2018-01-27T03:02:26+00:00
https://kottke.org/17/09/rip-the-broccoli-tree
robertogrecojasonkottke 2017 socialmedia internet humans oscarwilde attention obsession societyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:864a353bcf03/On technology, culture, and growing up in a small town2016-04-20T04:10:46+00:00
http://kottke.org/16/04/on-technology-culture-and-growing-up-in-a-small-town
robertogrecoOut on the prairie, pop culture existed only in the vaguest sense. Not only did I never hear the Talking Heads or Public Enemy or The Cure, I could never have heard of them. With a radio receiver only able to catch a couple FM stations, cranking out classic rock, AC/DC to Aerosmith, the music counterculture of the '80s would have been a different universe to me. (The edgiest band I heard in high school was The Cars. "My Best Friend's Girl" was my avant-garde.)
Is this portrait sufficiently remote? Perhaps one more stat: I didn't meet a black person until I was 16, at a summer basketball camp. I didn't meet a Jewish person until I was 18, in college.
This was the Deep Midwest in the 1980s. I was a pretty clueless kid.
He recently returned there and found that the physical isolation hasn't changed, but thanks to the internet, the kids now have access to the full range of cultural activities and ideas from all over the world.
"Basically, this story is a controlled experiment," I continue. "Napoleon is a place that has remained static for decades. The economics, demographics, politics, and geography are the same as when I lived here. In the past twenty-five years, only one thing has changed: technology."
Rex is a friend and nearly every time we get together, we end up talking about our respective small town upbringings and how we both somehow managed to escape. My experience wasn't quite as isolated as Rex's -- I lived on a farm until I was 9 but then moved to a small town of 2500 people; plus my dad flew all over the place and the Twin Cities were 90 minutes away by car -- but was similar in many ways. The photo from his piece of the rusted-out orange car buried in the snow could have been taken in the backyard of the house I grew up in, where my dad still lives. Kids listened to country, top 40, or heavy metal music. I didn't see Star Wars or Empire in a theater. No cable TV until I was 14 or 15. No AP classes until I was a senior. Aside from a few Hispanics and a family from India, everyone was white and Protestant. The FFA was huge in my school. I had no idea about rap music or modernism or design or philosophy or Andy Warhol or 70s film or atheism. I didn't know what I didn't know and had very little way of finding out.
I didn't even know I should leave. But somehow I got out. I don't know about Rex, but "escape" is how I think of it. I was lucky enough to excel at high school and got interest from schools from all over the place. My dad urged me to go to college...I was thinking about getting a job (probably farming or factory work) or joining the Navy with a friend. That's how clueless I was...I knew so little about the world that I didn't know who I was in relation to it. My adjacent possible just didn't include college even though it was the best place for a kid like me.
In college in an Iowan city of 110,000, I slowly discovered what I'd been missing. Turns out, I was a city kid who just happened to grow up in a small town. I met other people from all over the country and, in time, from all over the world. My roommate sophomore year was black.1 I learned about techno music and programming and photography and art and classical music and LGBT and then the internet showed up and it was game over. I ate it all up and never got full. And like Rex:
Napoleon had no school newspaper, and minimal access to outside media, so I had no conception of "the publishing process." Pitching an idea, assigning a story, editing and rewriting -- all of that would have baffled me. I had only ever seen a couple of newspapers and a handful of magazines, and none offered a window into its production. (If asked, I would have been unsure if writers were even paid, which now seems prescient.) Without training or access, but a vague desire to participate, boredom would prove my only edge. While listlessly paging through the same few magazines over and over, I eventually discovered a semi-concealed backdoor for sneaking words onto the hallowed pages of print publications: user-generated content.
That's the ghastly term we use (or avoid using) today for non-professional writing submitted by readers. What was once a letter to the editor has become a comment; editorials, now posts. The basic unit persists, but the quantity and facility have matured. Unlike that conspicuous "What's on your mind?" input box atop Facebook, newspapers and magazines concealed interaction with readers, reluctant of the opinions of randos. But if you were diligent enough to find the mailing address, often sequestered deep in the back pages, you could submit letters of opinion and other ephemera.
I eventually found the desire to express myself. Using a copy of Aldus PhotoStyler I had gotten from who knows where, I designed party flyers for DJ friends' parties. I published a one-sheet periodical for the residents of my dorm floor, to be read in the bathroom. I made meme-y posters2 which I hung around the physics department. I built a homepage that just lived on my hard drive because our school didn't offer web hosting space and I couldn't figure out how to get an account elsewhere.3 Well, you know how that last bit turned out, eventually.4"]]>jasonkottke kottke rexsorgatz 2016 rural internet web isolation connectivity change subcultures media culture childhood youth teens socialmedia college education universities highered highereducation midwest cv music film television tv cable cabletv cosmopolitanism worldliness urban urbanism interneturbanism 1980s northdakota minnesota homogeneity diversity apclasses aps religion ethnicity race exposure facebookhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:efc3b494e225/What do free, open, and peaceful borders look like?2016-02-29T07:56:27+00:00
http://kottke.org/16/02/what-do-free-open-and-peaceful-borders-look-like
robertogrecoborders 2016 jasonkottke valeriovincenzo erasure europe schengenareahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f62380d4cd1f/The centripetal force of life2015-05-16T06:34:01+00:00
http://kottke.org/15/05/the-centripetal-force-of-life
robertogrecoSince we had met, when she was still a teenager, I had loved her with my whole self. Only now can I look back on the fullness of our affection; at the time I could see nothing but one wound at a time, a hole the size of a dime, into which I needed to pack a fistful of material. Love wasn't something I felt anymore. It was just something I did. When I finished, I would lie next to her and use sterile cotton balls to soak up her tears. When she finally slept, I would slip out of bed and go into our closet, the most isolated room in the house. Inside, I would wrap a blanket around my head, stuff it into my mouth, lie down and bury my head in a pile of dirty clothes, and scream.
There are very specific parts of all those stories that I identify with. I struggle with friendship. And with family. I worry about my children, about my relationships with them. I worry about being a good parent, about being a good parenting partner with their mom. How much of me do I really want to impart to them? I want them to be better than me, but I can't tell them or show them how to do that because I'm me. I took my best shot at being better and me is all I came up with. What if I'm just giving them the bad parts, without even realizing it? God, this is way too much for a Monday."]]>parenting cv fathers jasonkottke children self-doubt humans humanness relationships friendships fatherhood families kindness matthewteague death health cancer marriage selflessness lovehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b25fe4bebeea/LOTR's One Ring explainer2015-02-10T18:27:17+00:00
http://kottke.org/15/02/lotrs-one-ring-explainer
robertogrecoFirst, the ring tempts everyone (well, almost everyone) with promises that yes, this little ring can be a mighty weapon or a tool to reshape the world and gosh don't you just look like the best guy to use it. Let's go vanquish the powerful demigod who lives over there to get started, shall we? This is why the hobbits made great ring bearers, because they're pretty happy with the way things are and don't aspire to greatness. Of course, there's Gollum, who started out as a hobbit, but all things considered, he held out pretty well for a couple hundred years. Set the ring on the desk of most men and they wouldn't be able to finish their coffee before heading to Mordor to rule the world and do it right this time.
What's interesting about hearing of The Ring in this focused way is how it becomes a part of Tolkien's criticism of technology. The Ring does what every mighty bit of tech can do to its owner/user: makes them feel powerful and righteous. Look what we can do with this thing! So much! So much good! We are good therefore whatever we do with this will be good!
The contemporary idea of the tech startup is arguably the most seductive and powerful technology of the present moment, the One Ring of our times. It's not difficult to modify a few words in the passage above to make it more current:
First, the startup tempts everyone (well, almost everyone) with promises that yes, this little company can be a mighty weapon or a tool to reshape the world and gosh don't you just look like the best guy to use it. Let's go disrupt the powerful middleman who lives over there to get started, shall we? This is why the nerds made great ring bearers, because they're pretty happy with the way things are and don't aspire to greatness. Of course, there's Sergey and Larry, who started out as nerds, but all things considered, they held out pretty well for a decade. Set the ring on the desk of most men and they wouldn't be able to finish their mail-order espresso before heading to Silicon Valley to rule the world and do it right this time.
Ok, haha, LOL, and all that, but it's curious that nerds (and everyone else) shelled out billions of dollars to watch Peter Jackson's LOTR movies in the early 2000s in the aftermath of the dot com bust. Those were dark times...the power of the startup had just been lost after Kozmo's CEO Dave Isildur was slain by economists while delivering a single pint of Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby to far reaches of the Outer Sunset and had not yet been rediscovered by Schachter, Butterfield, and Zuckerberg.
And these nerds, whose spines all tingled when Aragorn charged into the hordes of Mordor -- for Frodo! -- and whose eyes filled with tears when Frodo parted with Sam at the Grey Havens, came away from that movie experience siding with Boromir, Saruman, and Denethor, determined to seize that startup magic for themselves to disrupt all of the things, defeat the evil corporate middlemen, and reshape the world to be a better and more efficient place. And gosh don't you just look like the best guy to use it?"
[See also: “The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained (Part 1)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgsxaFWWHQ ]]]>jasonkottke kottke lotr lordoftherings jrrtolkien startups siliconvalley technology 2015 economics humorhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:06c71292b294/How to care for introverts2014-12-18T16:15:16+00:00
http://kottke.org/14/12/how-to-care-for-introverts
robertogrecointroverts introversion jasonkottke 2014 privacy management psychologyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:653951e39de1/Policing by consent2014-08-27T04:17:18+00:00
http://kottke.org/14/08/policing-by-consent
robertogrecohistory police politics consent 2014 jasonkottke kottke ferguson robertpeel 1829 lawenforcement power publicservants law legalhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ec19bb441584/One-handed computing with the iPhone2013-11-20T15:03:14+00:00
http://kottke.org/09/10/one-handed-computing-with-the-iphone
robertogrecocomputersareforpeople iphone usability accessibility apple design kottke 2009 timcarmody jasonkottkehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fad63d104618/Webstock '13: Jason Kottke - I built a web app (& you can too) on Vimeo2013-10-02T20:46:55+00:00
https://vimeo.com/63982137
robertogrecostellar stellar.io favorites likes socialmedia vimeo flickr tumblr twitter slowhunches streams webstock 2013 webapps aggregation youtube online internet motivation facebook jasonkottke liking making process text favoriting favinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5c2518b66a49/Stay small or go big?2012-11-13T01:07:31+00:00
http://kottke.org/12/11/stay-small-or-go-big
robertogrecoleadership directing making restaurants blogging sustainability growth business johngruber daringfireball scaling slow small treme emerillagasse 2012 kottke jasonkottke anthonybourdainhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:30ae45e60903/13 ways of looking at Medium, the new blogging/sharing/discovery platform from @ev and Obvious » Nieman Journalism Lab2012-08-18T00:40:10+00:00
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/08/13-ways-of-looking-at-medium-the-new-bloggingsharingdiscovery-platform-from-ev-and-obvious/
robertogrecodanahboyd ownership contents design fftisa jeffreyzeldman svbtle app.net branch digg pyra petermerholz davewiner audience collections scalability gawker buzzfeed auteurtheory auteurs rearrangement jasonkottke johngruber deanallen joshmarshall ezraklein anildash jackdorsey evanwilliams louisck huffingtonpost theblaze talkingpointsmemo tpm politico internet publishing web online pinterest tumblr twitter odeo blogger joshuabenton obviouscorp 2012 authorship medium scalehttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e61d643f8272/The most boring culture on Earth2012-07-28T16:25:12+00:00
http://kottke.org/12/07/the-most-boring-culture-on-earth
robertogrecoAccording to Fajans, the Baining eschew everything that they see as "natural" and value activities and products that come from "work," which they view as the opposite of play. Work, to them, is effort expended to overcome or resist the natural. To behave naturally is to them tantamount to behaving as an animal. The Baining say, "We are human because we work." The tasks that make them human, in their view, are those of turning natural products (plants, animals, and babies) into human products (crops, livestock, and civilized human beings) through effortful work (cultivation, domestication, and disciplined childrearing).
The Baining believe, quite correctly, that play is the natural activity of children, and precisely for that reason they do what they can to discourage or prevent it. They refer to children's play as "splashing in the mud," an activity of pigs, not appropriate for humans. They do not allow infants to crawl and explore on their own. When one tries to do so an adult picks it up and restrains it. Beyond infancy, children are encouraged or coerced to spend their days working and are often punished -- sometimes by such harsh means as shoving the child's hand into the fire -- for playing. On those occasions when Fajans did get an adult to talk about his or her childhood, the narrative was typically about the challenge of embracing work and overcoming the shameful desire to play. Part of the reason the Baining are reluctant to talk about themselves, apparently, derives from their strong sense of shame about their natural drives and desires.
But maybe Americans are becoming more boring as our children's freedom to explore is curtailed:…"
[Peter Gray's article is here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/all-work-and-no-play-make-the-baining-the-dullest-culture-earth ]]]>culture via:lukeneff boredom boringness baining papuanewguinea psychology anthropology petergray 2012 parenting children stoicism allworknoplay play adderall jasonkottkehttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1261e8c2852a/The Setup / Jason Kottke2012-07-19T01:37:37+00:00
http://jason.kottke.usesthis.com/
robertogrecocv slowtypers typing mavisbeacon browsers 2012 jasonkottke thesetup browser usesthishttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e683f7fb813f/“Sometimes the stories are the science…” – Blog – BERG2011-11-23T03:24:12+00:00
http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/11/21/sometimes-the-stories-are-the-science%e2%80%a6/
robertogrecooliversacks learning deschooling unschooling education berg berglondon mattjones timoarnall storytelling design understanding newgrammars conversation meaning meaningmaking glvo tcsnmy classideas art paulklee domains interdisciplinarity interdisciplinary crossdisciplinary multidisciplinary crosspollination perspective mindset wbrianarthur jackschulze mattwebb technology future dansaffer rulespace simulation believability materialquality film video invention creativity time adamlisagor brucesterling vernacularvideo victorpapanek jasonkottke andybaio johnsculley apple stevejobs knowledgenavigator prototypes prototyping iteration process howwework howwelearn communication simulationshttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:375a7d45e33b/Don'ts: walking while texting2011-02-05T21:30:37+00:00
http://kottke.org/11/02/donts-walking-while-texting
robertogrecojasonkottke kottke etiquette attention mobilephones mobile parenting texting walking pedestrianshttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:048104832424/Facebook is Worse than AOL | Tomorrow Museum2010-02-10T07:07:27+00:00
http://tomorrowmuseum.com/2010/02/08/facebook-is-worse-than-aol/
robertogrecofacebook society internet culture socialnetworking walledgardens matthaughey jasonkottke aolhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:15b33860142f/