randomWalks

To be on the Newsstand you have to program an iOS app. The tech hurdle is high, and hiring isn’t cheap. iOS programmers are in extremely high demand. Now is a great time for another Movable Type. Writers would love a way to push serialized content straight to tablets, and the experience would be a boon to readers. Tablets are the best way to read, and Newsstand is the equivalent of RSS for non-geeks.

Few people know this, but Community Chest is real; there are real cards, drawn in secret by the powerful and the occult — in darkened living rooms in penthouse apartments — in small clearings near running water — behind certain colonial buildings in the coastal northeast — cards whose instructions and gifts are printed in blood and considered mystical bonds.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

How about I build something that buys me things completely at random? Something that just… fills my life with crap? How would these purchases make me feel? Would they actually be any less meaningful than the crap I buy myself on a regular basis anyway?

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If Buy Nothing Day gets you down — forget about Buy Nothing Year — how about a more positive crusade: Buy More Stuff!

Previously: create something day (randomWalks, 2002)

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"Maybe 300 or 400 years from now, everything will be gone, we’ll all be gone, and they’ll be the four faces in the Black Hills and the statue there symbolizing the Native Americans who were here at one time."

A memorial for Crazy Horse 64 years in the making … so far - CNN.com

I thought it would really be exciting and sort of progressive for a big game company like ours to [create] a minority, someone who’s an outsider, who’s pretty underrepresented in most media.

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matthen:

Draw some random points on a piece of paper and join them up to make a random polygon. Find all the midpoints and connecting them up to give a new shape, and repeat. The resulting shape will get smaller and smaller, and will tend towards an ellipse!  [code] [more]

Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there’ll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won’t care much, because they’ll have been born into a planet already wrecked.

You’re only able to get to a certain depth of creativity if you’re being constantly distracted. And I think you can cross further if you’re alone for, say, eight hours with no distraction. You can cross even deeper if you’re alone for a week. I found that it really wasn’t until about two days into any given stretch that I was able to get to a place of inspiration — that I had anything valid to say.

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"Occupy Hanukkah" cards by zoecohen on Etsy

ALF was the minstrel it was politically correct to love even as you shrank from him. He was the camp Semite redeemed by his ability to be more clever than the goyim. His appetite for the most helpless icon of the home, the kitten, updated the blood libel to slapstick.

Enough. This is just sex. This is nothing more than the odd, notable penis or the odd, notable vagina staggering off the marked path and rubbing against the wrong tree. This is just people.

Republican strategist: “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

Before election night 60 years ago, the race between Stevenson and Eisenhower looked close. But early in the night, with just over 3 million votes counted, UNIVAC predicted the odds were 100 to 1 in favor of Eisenhower.

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A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.

For such a critical app, there’s really very little that’s being done to innovate on the experience. It doesn’t wake me up to my favorite song. It doesn’t let me decide how long I want to snooze between alarms. It doesn’t check my calendar automatically and set an alarm based on what my day looks like. It doesn’t give me the weather forecast for the day when I wake up.

For instance, my mother is 89-and-a-half years old. She lives in Northeast Philadelphia and reads the Inquirer every day. She doesn’t own a computer. Her knowledge of computers, I would say, is minuscule. If there were no Inquirer in print, she would have to buy a computer, and at the age of almost 90, master new technology, or go to the Daily News, or stop reading.

The long-awaited results of a study in which patients were given complete access to their doctors’ notes do more than shed light on what patients want. They make our current ideas about transparency in the patient-doctor relationship a quaint artifact of the past. … All three hospitals in the study are working to allow those patients who participated to continue to have access to their doctors’ notes.

To which Big Bird interjects: “That’s not fair!” I am absolutely not fucking kidding. This is the part of the program where Big Bird defies a god and argues justice for the tormented soul of his little buddy.

If it actually were my friend, a large, online book retailer might say, ‘Look, you’ve been spending too much money on books recently. Don’t you think you should get out a bit more, and not sit there buying stuff?’