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there's only alice
But I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
There's only Alice
– Tom Waits
{ 11:00pm }
florence and normandy revisited
Ten years ago, when LA was still burning, The Fish Rap was there. This was the year before I joined the paper, and one of the things that made me want to work for them. While the official campus newspaper kids sat in dorm lounges and watched CNN, the Fish Rappers got in a car and drove seven hours to LA (six, if Kurt was driving).
With all the 10-years-after coverage of the LA Riots this week, it's important to remember that the mainstream press missed the real story back then, and they're still missing it today. It took a band of freaks from Santa Cruz to see the hope in all that rubble. I wonder if it's still there today.
{ 9:04am }
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here we go again
 Mark your calendars: Fray Day 6 has been scheduled for September 14, 2002, with venue announcements coming soon. Wanna throw a Fray Day in your town? Get in touch now!
{ 10:04pm }
ratta tatta
This is me today, wishing the jackhammers and sirens would stop. It's a strange day in Cole Valley. Everyone seems suspicious, tentative, and depressed. Maybe it's just me.
{ 1:49pm }
we don't need no water
Every version of Fireland is more beautiful than the last.
Oh, and the words are good, too.
{ 10:41am }
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notes from sunday night teevee
Three things I can't believe:
- I can't believe they killed off the Lone Gunmen! When the end is near, people do stupid things.
- I can't believe how lame the Simpsons have become. A half hour of repurposed clips ending with a taunting song about how they'll never go away? I'd rather see them all die in a cloud of bioluminescent shark hoo-ha than have to suffer through another season of aggressively bad, tauntingly stupid, Simpsons episodes. I'm reminded of a short blip from better times: newsman Kent Brockman says, "meet a man who's been hiccuping for 45 years," and they cut to a man saying: "*hic* Kill me! *hic* Kill me!" That's the Simpsons now. Kill them. Quickly. It's the only humane thing left.
- I can't believe I waste my time thinking about shit like this.
{ 5:21pm }
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a year ago today
Happy four-twenty, everyone. And, also, I like cheese.
{ 5:57pm }
welcome back, old friend
A warm "welcome home!" to Kaliber10000. How I've missed you.
K10k is back and more impressive than ever. Congrats to Mschmidt, Toke, and Per!
{ 12:15am }
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new in dfc
I just posted a new essay to Design for Community: Community-friendly advertising: With text ads and sponsored sections, community sites are surviving by not annoying their members.
{ 6:20pm }
go deep
I'm taking part in a stimulating little conversation on Joshua Kaufman's site about Deep Linking. Usually when we hear about this issue, it's because some control freak corporation that Doesn't Get It is squawking. And, yeah, they're idiots. The link is the very heartbeat of the web, and it goes where it wants.
But there are times when deep linking might, in the least, be impolite. Not illegal, mind you, and not actionable, just impolite. Like linking to the middle of a personal story, for example, or into a frame of an art project, or to an image or sound on someone else's site, taking it out of its context.
The web is many things to many people, and, as always, it depends.
{ 12:56pm }
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the p is for publishing
Does anyone here have any experience with pMachine? I haven't installed yet, but it looks like the first personal publishing tool to come along with the feature I've been longing for: memberships. I believe that the offspring of the marriage between weblogs and community sites will be the Next Big Thing, and it looks like this tool brings us one step closer.
{ 6:37pm }
how to be bad
My top three tips for reading Nick Hornby's How to be Good:
- Stop reading any paragraph over three sentences. They never get any better.
- Ignore all parentheticals, and skip any paragraph that begins with one.
- Better yet, save yourself the trouble and skip the whole book. It's 300 pages that begin with an unhappy married couple considering divorce, and end with an unhappy married couple looking out into the cold, dark night. Ugh.
I loved High Fidelity, so it pains me to say it, but this one just ain't worth the time it takes to read it. It was better than staring at the back of the seat in front of me, sure. So I read the whole thing on Sunday while hopping from San Francisco to Denver to Dallas. But when the time came, I couldn't be motivated to cart it off the 737. Hopefully whoever wound up in 18F after me liked it more than I did.
{ 11:03am }
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referer log find
I really like the design of lostpixel.com. Be sure to reload it a few times and play with the "more" toggles. Neato.
{ 11:22am }
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pseudoptimism
The glass-half-full approach: Man, it's so nice to be doing client work and design something you're really proud of.
The glass-half-empty approach: Damn, I hate it when I design something for a client that I like better than my own site.
The working-the-web-in-2002 approach: Golly, it sure is nice to have a client.
{ 11:52pm }
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current audio obsession: gling-go
There aren't a lot of performers I'd enjoy listening to while they sing in another language, let alone sing to what's essentially big band music. But Bjork isn't like any other singer. Back in 1990, Bjork recorded Gling-Glo, an album of folky jazz classics with a three piece band (mostly drums, bass, and piano), all in Icelandic (save the last cut, which is in English). The result is strangely listenable, and an absolute must-have for hardcore Bjork fans like me.
{ 5:48pm }
local bridge makes good
San Franciscans love sticking it to LA. So it's no wonder everyone's feeling a little glib this week, since the new California stamp was revealed. And instead of the Hollywood sign, it features our own humble Bay Bridge. Not to be confused with its flashy colleague, the Bay Bridge is all steel and function, working class cool, connecting The City to Oakland and beyond. The Bay Bridge has always been an inspiration to me and many others, so it's wonderful to see it finally get some props. Lick that, LA!
{ 5:01pm }
drawings doodles sketches
Sam is looking for links to sites with "drawings, doodles, or sketches." He's posting them as they come in, and I've already found some amazing illustrators there. If you know of someone who should be on the list, be sure to tell him.
{ 4:28pm }
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three hours later
In these rare moments, I can savor the quiet. For this moment, this tenuous, ephemeral time, I can almost relax. I can almost sit still, knowing that all is right. We're even, the world and I. Complete.
No more little dots, no more open windows, no more voices crying out for attention.
Yeah. It feels good to have all my email responded to. Yeah, it does.
But I'd better quit Eudora while I'm ahead. Tomorrow there will be new email to respond to, and the cycle will begin again.
{ 1:58am }
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thanks
I sent all this off to the NY Times as a Letter to the Editor today. Thanks to everyone who contributed! I can only hope that we can improve Ms. Guernsey's outlook on the web, so that she might stop torturing us with her misguided malaise.
{ 2:16pm }
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pousser
Canada has nice toilets.
{ 9:21pm }
live from fray cafe 2
Rcom.TV did a fantastic report from Fray Cafe 2. Check it out! (Quicktime required.)
{ 3:13pm }
kvetching down under
What I wonder is, if Kvetch! crashes her computer so much, how did it become one of her "favourite sites"? (I also wonder what exactly she's got running on that mac of hers, since I made the site on a mac and have been using it on a mac for, oh, four years. But wondering about that kinda thing will just sound bitter, so I'd better ... uh oh ... was I typing or thinking? Oops.)
{ more » } { 10:37am }
black and white and ...
The Morning News has been relaunched (in "broadsheet" format) and it looks amazing. Kinda like an alternative Salon, but with a soul. Congrats to Rosecrans and Andrew!
{ 10:21am }
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