#culture (178 links)
- Mono no aware - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
Mono no aware (物の哀れ?), literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence (無常 mujō?), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.
- Lifestyle Programming successfulsoftware.net
If you aren’t going to be satisfied with anything less than being a multi-millionaire living in a hollowed out volcano, then an all-or-nothing, VC-backed start-up crap shoot is probably your only option. And there are markets where you have very little chance of success without venture capital. But really, how much money do you need? Is money going to make you happy? How many meals can you eat in a day? How many cars can you drive?
Via russelldavies.
Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to emulate. Startups stopped seeing themselves as just one part of a bigger web. Now they wanted to be the only service that their users would ever need …just like Facebook.
I miss the old days.
- My Interview Questions for Potential Employers | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- When Bowie met Burroughs | Music | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
- Trickle-Down Distress: How America's Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety Epidemic - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
To the question of anxiety: Should we be thinking about ways to make America more of meritocracy in the hopes of quelling our stress? Says McNamee: "A pure meritocracy is not possible and may not even be desirable." (Just ask Harrison Bergeron.) Far more important, he argues, is debunking the myth of meritocracy, harmful "because it provides an incomplete explanation for success and failure, often mistakenly exalting the rich and condemning the poor."
- The Death of the Cyberflâneur - NYTimes.com nytimes.com
Frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable. It’s one thing to find an interesting article and choose to share it with friends. It’s quite another to inundate your friends with everything that passes through your browser or your app, hoping that they will pick something interesting along the way.
Via blech.
- BLDGBLOG: Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson bldgblog.blogspot.com
Let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- Japanese Cooking/Cookery Lessons : Make Beautiful Healthy Dishes yukiskitchen.com
- In Search of Number One « Adventures in the infraordinary jameswe333.wordpress.com
My plan for this project is to make my way down and back up Essex Road in Islington from number one to number 400-odd visiting every business along the way.
- What Happened to Yahoo paulgraham.com
"So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software."
- Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme knowyourmeme.com
- The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com nytimes.com
In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.
My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.
- russell davies: cognitive surplus - blog all dog-eared pages russelldavies.typepad.com
This helps me understand what happened to blogging when the prospects of financial reward crept in. It changed everything. And, presumably, unless people read and understand this, it's going to happen again when new creative tools are invented.
"I remain convinced that _in principle_, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."
This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."
Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change.
Via russelldavies.
- h+ Magazine hplusmagazine.com
Covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing - and will change - human beings in fundamental ways.
Via paul.irish.
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
- Charlie's Diary: Merciless antipope.org
There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.
- Kigurumi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
"Full-body animal pajama with hoods or hats styled after animals are also called Kigurumi, but do not have the same "costume" connotation as the full-body suits. They are worn non-commercially and are another form of Japanese street fashion. People who choose to wear kigurumi in public are often referred to as "kigurumin", and the consumer-level costumes they tend to wear are known as "disguise pajama"."
- John Resig - Eulogy to _why ejohn.org
I tend to see _why more as an artist. He used a wide variety of mediums for his exploration: Written word, drawings, code, and even music.
The procession of technological discoveries is inevitable. When the conditions are right — when the necessary web of supporting technology needed for every invention is established — then the next adjacent technological step will emerge as if on cue. If inventor X does not produce it, inventor Y will.
So what is the organisation's end goal? Bowdler puts it simply: "To engage people with science who would not otherwise choose to immerse themselves in the subject."
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule paulgraham.com
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
- THINGS MARKETING PEOPLE LOVE thingsmarketingpeoplelove.blogspot.com
It's funny because it's true.
- Skeuomorph - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
a term used in the history of architecture, design, and archaeology. It refers to a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines."
- Scope (Schulze & Webb) schulzeandwebb.com
Another brilliant talk from Matt Webb.
- Kiddie Records Weekly kiddierecords.com
Kiddie Records Weekly began in 2005 as a one year project devoted to the golden age of children's records. This period spanned from the mid forties through the early fifties and produced a wealth of all-time classics. Many of these recordings were extravagant Hollywood productions on major record labels and featured big time celebrities and composers. Over the years, these forgotten treasures slipped off the radar and it became our mission to give them a new lease on life by sharing them with today's generation of online listeners.
- Dear Dustin Curtis | Dustin Curtis dustincurtis.com
If the UX architect at AA.com is actually pretty good, then why does the site suck so much?
This website contains over 650 posters from the National Theatre Archive. Beautiful photographic quality prints are available in a range of sizes and prices, supplied ready for framing and delivered to your door.
- tweenbots | kacie kinzer tweenbots.com
Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
- The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent independent.co.uk
Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.
Via tomtaylor.
- Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
"An example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average."
"Wired, [Albert Read] suggests, may not really be a tech magazine at all. "It's a magazine about innovation and the future, and should not be narrowly confined to technology in people's minds," he says. "You read Wired if you see yourself as a forward thinker or an early adopter." I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
Via blech.
- Best Buy shows the importance of culture in the modern corporation | The Equity Kicker theequitykicker.com
It turns out that Best Buy has embraced the use of social media to empower it’s employees and reaped massive productivity gains as a result.
The old digital agency model is not helpful today. Instead, the industry can learn a lot from social start-ups (like Vimeo - who I am in love with, or SoundCloud) and work as fast as possible, being entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and nimble [...] People in traditional agencies - ‘old new media’ and our cousins in advertising - say they find all of the above quite challenging - which is weird because these agencies are stuffed with really smart people.
Via markrocky.
- CR Blog » Blog Archive » The Designers Republic Is Dead; Long Live The Designers Republic creativereview.co.uk
Designers Republic goes under. "I’ve never liked that agency model - it’s not where creativity lies. DR accidentally ended up there in order to service bigger clients. I’m not being ungrateful to the people who ran the business side at DR – it wasn’t their fault. I’m glad we did it - it took getting there to make me realise that it wasn’t where I wanted to be."
Via blech.
- The art of noise refined - Times Online entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
Take a springtime stroll through the streets of Belbury. This provincial English town, created by CS Lewis in his allegorical novel That Hideous Strength, is also the imaginary home of the electronic eccentrics Belbury Poly. There are Tudor buildings next to modernist municipalities; spots of Arcadian reverie and pleasant public gardens with fountains and statues of nymphs; and, on the outskirts, green fields, unexplained crop circles, haunted woodlands and ancient stone monoliths dedicated to pagan deities. Listen to Belbury Poly’s most recent album, The Owl’s Map, and you’ll find all of this invoked by some of the most delightful electronica to arise in Britain since Aphex Twin, the Black Dog and Global Communication in the early 1990s.
Via daneastwell.
- Web Worker Daily » Archive Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive « webworkerdaily.com
"The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous product
- Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too - Harvard Business Online's Bill Taylor discussionleader.hbsp.com
Looks like Zappos is doing things right.