June 2013
4 posts
“We all grow up with ten great stories about our families, our childhoods … they probably have nothing to do with the truth of things, but they’re yours. You know them. And you love them. So use them. And that’s what I did. That’s what I reached for, to become a writer.”
—Richard Price (via theparisreview)
“The issue, in the words of the great social media dissenter Jaron Lanier, is that “you have to be somebody before you can share yourself”.”
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Molly Flatt 1000Heads “point of view: identity crisis” Warc (via peterspear)
Timely considering that as professional hierarchies and social priorities fracture, it’s harder and harder to put a finger on the role we’re playing.
May 2013
3 posts
“This whole social media/guru/pseudo-futurist-douchebags-spewing-bullshit-all-day-long culture of manufactured “influence” needs to come to an abrupt end. It isn’t healthy. It isn’t healthy for companies like Google, for VCs, for startups, for product managers, for marketing, for journalism, and it sure as shit isn’t healthy for innovation either. We are so busy trying to find ways to reward well-funded mediocrity that we completely overlook real successes in innovation. We are celebrating all the wrong things.”
—The Brand Builder, “The Difference Between a Gadget and a Product”
“Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage—one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.”
—
Amos Oz (via theparisreview)
I guess that explains why I feel like I’m in a beartrap.
April 2013
9 posts
“[JC Penney & Uk.gov] both involve root-and-branch redesigns, and both redesigns put simplicity at their heart. One has been a roaring success, one a complete disaster.”
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“A Tale of Two Simpli-Cities” @tomewing @brainjuicer
What JC Penney had done was drive for simplicity without taking into account the emotional nature of discounting strategies. By making decisions easy, they had made them less fun.
snip
It’s the same reductive approach JC Penney took – and for them it failed, because fun, fast and easy in retail means more than just price. Gov’s simplicity is emotionless, but paradoxically it shows a better understanding of emotion than most sites. It knows what a happy experience means for its users, and it works extremely hard to deliver one by doing only what is absolutely necessary.
(via peterspear)
“Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning.”
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Seth Godin “The brand is a story. But it’s a story about you, not about the brand.”
(via peterspear)We love ourselves.
We love the memory we have of how that brand made us feel once. We love that it reminds us of our mom, or growing up, or our first kiss. We support a charity or a soccer team or a perfume because it gives us a chance to love something about ourselves.
We can’t easily explain this, even to ourselves. We can’t easily acknowledge the narcissism and the nostalgia that drives so many of the apparently rational decisions we make every day. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not at work.
Why you should move that button 3px to the left →
medium.com
Braden Kowitz on the importance of the details in design:
There’s a curious brain hack at work here. Our minds are deeply tied to emotional states. Being frustrated or happy changes the way we approach problems. I have certainly been in a bad mood, gotten confused by a product, and found myself repeatedly smashing a button to no effect. In my frustration, I try the same thing, justharder. But it doesn’t help me accomplish my goal.
When we’re happy, using an interface feels like play. The world looks like a puzzle, not a battle. So when we get confused, we’re more likely to explore and find other paths to success. There’s a whole book on this topic: Emotional Design by Don Norman. But here’s the important bit: Getting design details right can create positive emotional states that actually make products easier to use.
Things I Like.: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? →
meagan-marie.tumblr.com
So here is the deal. I’m a person. I’m not just a “girl on the internet.” I am not comfortable with you remarking on my breasts. I am not comfortable with you implying that you’d like to have sex with me. And I don’t appreciate you rating my looks against my girlfriends in candid photos.
While I can’t stop these comments and questions from arising when they pop up on random blogs across the web, I can stand up and say that that I won’t accept beingtalked to in this manner anymore. I’m not simply going to ignore you; I’m going to call you out and tell you that you’re being inappropriate. Just because I have a public job and an equally public hobby doesn’t give you the right to ignore my comfort zone.
Meagan Marie’s powerful and brave stand against harassment in cosplay illustrates the merits of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In much more potently than one more Daily Beast article or blog review by somebody who didn’t bother to read the book.
These insidious issues impact everyone, including men, and we’ll be a better society when we can face them with eyes wide open.
Play
March 2013
15 posts
“Our best chance of seeing the future for a brand or a movement is by having a grasp of the codes that give it meaning and understanding the context of how it is evolving.”
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Tim Stock “A face in the crowd” Research.
Researchers are in the habit of letting themselves be distracted by the technological platforms that enable human interaction. Yet the tools of our expression will come and go. First we jumped on MySpace. Then we moved to Facebook. We tweet now - but next year? Technologies are merely supportive systems for our expression. Technologies are not culture networks themselves.
Simply put, a culture network is like-minded individuals connecting, thriving and having impact - no matter how small. It’s these networks and their spontaneous expression that we need to be reading, as opposed to the artificial networks generated by brands. Likewise, reading the network needs to be less about quantifying the movement of the masses and its size, more about qualifying its impact
(via peterspear)
If you're gonna ink the streets, don't forget your apostrophes.
London-based tutoring service The Tutor Crowd decided to take its literacy message to the streets — literally — by correcting the grammar of local graffiti with help from the Leo Burnett Group’s Arc.
The accompanying stickers sends users to a website where they can access a free trial for English tuition. From founder Patrick Wilson:
Good spelling and grammar is fundamentally important to young people. But teaching it doesn’t have to be old fashioned and stuffy. We wanted to engage parents and young people alike, and make them realise that online tuition is an option that’s available to try.
“I think game developers right now consistently underestimate the intelligence of their audience”
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Tom Bissell NYT “Building a Narrative That’s Explosive”
In 2010 Tom Bissell — author of seven books, contributor to publications like The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, darling of book reviewers who compare him to writers like Wells Tower and John Jeremiah Sullivan — announced that he was going to “go game,” in the way that prominent writers “go Hollywood,” in search of bigger paychecks and the challenges of a new form.
snip
“And just the sense that the player gets of how awesome it is to be in that place, surrounded by these monsters, blowing stuff up with incredibly cool weapons. And as a writer your job is to create an atmospheric foundation for all of that stuff to sit on.”
snip
The storytelling possibilities of the shooter are fascinating but they’re also very, very constraining,” he said. “A shooter story, just by virtue of the fact that you the character, you the player, spend 99 percent of the game looking down the barrel of a gun, there’s really only so much stuff you can do.”
(via peterspear)
“I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.”
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What Marie Curie told a family friend who offered to buy her a wedding dress. Respect.
By way of the explore-blog.
(via thenoobyorker)
“As it happens, helping to “humanize the voice” of a brand was very much in demand.”
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Complex on Noah Brier and James Gross of Percolate. #5 in “The 10 Most Important People in The New York Tech Industry”
(via peterspear)Noah Brier and James Gross had a genius idea: Build a platform intended to assist CMOs with managing social media content. And as it happens, helping to “humanize the voice” of a brand was very much in demand. The end result: Percolate has over 30 Fortune 500 clients who pay $10,000 a month for Brier’s and Gross’ expertise. Not bad for a startup that’s only a few years old.
Good and Bad Procrastination →
paulgraham.com
tetw:
by Paul Graham
The most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad?
“
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.
Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.
” —David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness” (via pawneeparksdepartment)
This totally justifies every excuse I’ve been giving myself from not doing that thing I’m supposed to do.
(via aaronmoles)
So who doesn’t procrastinate, then?
“I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you.”
—CEO Andrew Mason’s candid departure letter to Groupon employees.
February 2013
31 posts
And for tonight's insomnia-fueled reflection...
It sometimes freaks me out when GDocs says someone else is looking at my doc … and that other person is me.
“
E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.
ANNE LAMOTT
” —(via kadrey)
Learning to Smoke →
esquire.com
tetw:
by Tom Chiarella
This story isn’t about quitting smoking. It’s about starting. And starting, for me, included thirty-four different brands of cigarette, eleven lighters, spiritual revelations and moments of clarity, gatherings at alley mouths, unions with strangers on the streets of various cities, huddlings on a ragged porch watching the hand-cupped flare of a match in a snowstorm, a perpetual sore throat, a nagging cough, several puking sessions, a six-day headache, an increased appetite, a bout of vertigo, and a wicked case of what I can only call moral confusion. It also meant joining a kind of club, getting bitch-slapped by hegemony, trying to fit in, and not wanting to fit in.
“You should never believe an author if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes.”
—Kazuo Ishiguro (via theparisreview)
“We live in an ideological time that proudly assures us that no answers can be given, that there is only power and exploitation and contingency. No proposition is more questionable or less questioned than this. But it is not true that there are no answers. What is true is that there are many answers we are not prepared to recognize because we have not formulated the proper questions. What is true, and consequently ominous, is that we can choose not to question because we do not want to hear the answer. We do not want to change our lives. And as Plato said, a lie in the soul is the worst of evils.”
—James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (via garbandier)
