venomous porridge

To Behave Like the Fallen World

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:09:08 -0400

To Behave Like the Fallen World:

sinker:

An amazing essay about Romney’s high-school bullying, adolescence, guilt, and redemption.

Do not miss this extraordinary piece of writing.

Replies, promoted tweets, and a crazy idea

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:16:00 -0400

Indulge me in a fantasy.

Currently, reply scope on Twitter works like this:

If Alice replies to Bob’s tweet, everyone who follows both Alice and Bob will see the reply.

What if, instead, it worked like this:

If Alice replies to Bob’s tweet, everyone who follows Alice and saw Bob’s tweet in their timeline will see the reply.

The difference is subtle but significant, because following Bob isn’t the only way I might see Bob’s original tweet. Someone else I follow could have retweeted it into my timeline. Alice herself may have done so, in fact. So one effect of this change would be to eliminate that awful “dot-reply” cheat: instead, just retweet the original before replying and all of your followers will see both.

Another effect is that it gives us a way to meaningfully interact with promoted tweets. Today, replying to a promoted tweet is all but pointless. The promoter won’t hear me — they’ll have thousands of replies to sift through, if they even bother to look — and beyond that, only those who already follow both me and the promoter will see my reply. That’s not likely to be very many people, since the whole idea of promoting a tweet is to put it in front of people who aren’t following the promoter. But under this new rule, all of my followers who saw the promoted tweet would also see my reply. Now we’re getting somewhere.

That’s step one. Step two is where this dream gets crazy:

Using an algorithm similar to that of Top Tweets, when a reply to a promoted tweet receives a large number of retweets and/or favorites, the reply should also be promoted to the same audience.

It might look like this:

(Original tweets.) Completely nuts, right? Why would any advertiser ever go for this? It’s not fair, you may be thinking: Microsoft paid good money to have their tweet promoted, so why should any random nobody get to ride that train for free?

Here’s why: like it or not, by introducing promoted tweets, Twitter has declared that popularity and money are equivalent currencies. Your tweet can gain exposure organically, by virtue of your own following and the viral nature of retweets, or you can just pay up and they’ll stick it in everybody’s stream (or some large subset of everybody). What’s unfair is that due to the way replies currently work, the paying voice speaks alone. It’s paying to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.

Which, of course, is what advertisers want, so this will probably never change. But to me, that’s an unfortunate failure of imagination. Banksy, or possibly Sean Tejaratchi, writes:

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

What if this idea of freedom to rearrange and reuse were baked into the concept of what ads are? What if online ads became less like discarded flyers blowing down a busy street and more like living, breathing fragments of human conversation? What if users were treated like thinking beings and not like credit cards with eyestalks? Wouldn’t everybody win?

Naturally, not all replies to promoted tweets will be favorable to the promoter, and that’s OK: when you barge into a crowded room and start shouting through a megaphone, people don’t always say nice things. That’s part of the deal. And the longer ads continue to live on a weird plane of their own that barely intersects reality, the less effective they’ll continue to be, and the sooner the things we love that depend on ads will stop being able to exist.

I’d rather Twitter didn’t have ads at all, but if we must have them, let’s at least try to do something better than throwing rocks at heads.

These are OK: Telling a true story, with objectivity and...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:26:00 -0400

These are OK:

Telling a true story, with objectivity and accuracy. (Documentary.)
Telling a story that’s not entirely true under the pretense of accuracy, or while obscuring its nature as fiction. (Mockumentary: This Is Spinal Tap. Exit Through the Gift Shop.)
Telling a story that’s not entirely true, but that concerns real people and events with details changed or fabricated to serve a dramatic purpose. (Docudrama: The Social Network. HBO’s Rome. Historical fiction. Gonzo journalism.)

This is not OK:

Telling a story that’s not entirely true, but that concerns real people and events with details changed or fabricated and representing it as truth. (We call this propaganda.)

Mike Daisey could have performed a monologue about going to Taiwan to visit the Wolfconn factory where they make the Orange ePhone. He could have played a character not named Mike Daisey, or he could have presented his story as “inspired by real events” rather than as some new form of investigative theater. The artistic value of the piece would have been the same, though it may have received less attention. But instead, Daisey put himself in the story, he made up stuff about China and Apple and Foxconn, and then, offstage, he told everyone it was objectively true.

Daisey’s defense echoes Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck: he’s an entertainer, not a journalist. Sorry, Mike. You’re a propagandist, whether you meant to be one or not.

And now I’m afraid the aspects of the story that are true won’t be heard.

The biscuit story from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:16:00 -0400

The biscuit story from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams (read by the author). 04:32.

I doubt any author has influenced me more than Douglas Adams did when I was a teenager. I’ve read all of his books half a dozen times. Last Chance to See, a nonfiction travelogue on endangered species, may be the most painfully beautiful book I’ve ever encountered.

He was the kind of writer who possessed such vast knowledge and such monstrous insight that he could completely change the way you thought about things just by telling a funny story. Take, for example, this brilliant speech he gave in 1998 about the ages of sand:

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the Universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; ‘life’, something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given — and that’s the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it’s yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we’re not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. …

I can remember the first time I ever read a programming manual, many many years ago. I’d first started to encounter computers about 1983 and I wanted to know a little bit more about them, so I decided to learn something about programming. I bought a C manual and I read through the first two or three chapters, which took me about a week. At the end it said ‘Congratulations, you have now written the letter A on the screen!’ I thought, ‘Well, I must have misunderstood something here, because it was a huge, huge amount of work to do that, so what if I now want to write a B?’ The process of programming, the speed and the means by which enormous simplicity gives rise to enormously complex results, was not part of my mental grammar at that point. It is now — and it is increasingly part of all our mental grammars, because we are used to the way computers work.

So, suddenly, evolution ceases to be such a real problem to get hold of. It’s rather like this: imagine, if you will, the following scenario. One Tuesday, a person is spotted in a street in London, doing something criminal. Two detectives are investigating, trying to work out what happened. One of them is a 20th Century detective and the other, by the marvels of science fiction, is a 19th Century detective. The problem is this: the person who was clearly seen and identified on the street in London on Tuesday was seen by someone else, an equally reliable witness, on the street in Santa Fe on the same Tuesday — how could that possibly be? The 19th Century detective could only think it was by some sort of magical intervention. Now the 20th Century detective may not be able to say, “He took BA flight this and then United flight that” — he may not be able to figure out exactly which way he did it, or by which route he travelled, but it’s not a problem. It doesn’t bother him; he just says, ‘He got there by plane. I don’t know which plane and it may be a little tricky to find out, but there’s no essential mystery.’ We’re used to the idea of jet travel. We don’t know whether the criminal flew BA 178, or UA270, or whatever, but we know roughly how it was done. I suspect that as we become more and more conversant with the role a computer plays and the way in which the computer models the process of enormously simple elements giving rise to enormously complex results, then the idea of life being an emergent phenomenon will become easier and easier to swallow. We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it’s not a mystery.

Stephen Fry wrote a touching remembrance some years back, and it’s collected here with quite a few others:

He was a huge man: when he was in a house it rattled and you always knew he was there. He did the same to the earth. It doesn’t rattle any more now that he’s gone.

Douglas would be 60 today. I miss him so much.

R.I.P. self-reblogging

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:45:46 -0500

I haven’t seen it announced anywhere, but Tumblr recently made a couple of changes to the way reblogging works. You can now reblog any post, including your own — “Reblog” buttons appear on everything — but you can no longer reblog a post to the same blog where it was originally posted. I don’t really understand why they’d actively prevent this, since it’s handy in some cases and anyone who abuses it can be easily unfollowed. But Tumblr is Tumblr, and who but mere Users are we.

Back when the solar system was still forming, I wrote a bookmarklet that gave you a universal reblog button, expressly for the purpose of self-reblogging. With these changes, the bookmarklet isn’t useful anymore. You may therefore now gently delete it, dallying for a moment to reflect on simpler days, when the wind blew cool and sweet and the reblogs flowed like summer wine.

Onward.

Photo

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 23:04:25 -0500

This potted citrus, immature in the hallway at the top of the...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:13:50 -0500

This potted citrus, immature
in the hallway
at the top of the stairs
cannot yet bear fruit
of the literal kind
at least.

My mother-in-law, visiting
(last name Watson)
botanically inclined
as to its species
earlier this morning
inquired.

An innocent question
posed innocently
caused the cosmos
for a moment
to align—

—Six words spoken
A lemon tree, my dear Watson
and into the pages
of pun history

I insufferably

stepped.

Easy with the alerts

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:20:00 -0500

Neven Mrgan notes an inappropriate use of modal alerts in Amazon Mobile:

When you view an item in the Amazon app and tap the button to add it to your wish list, it comes back with this:

alert, n an alarm or warning, esp. a siren warning of an air raid.

It’s really not that big a deal that I added an item to my wish list. There’s no need to lock me into a modal dialog. Just add the item and move on.

Neven’s right, of course, but as I clumsily observed on Twitter, this alert abuse is in stark contrast to Amazon’s web design, in which they’re usually great at not bothering the user with needless shrill error messages. For example, when you add an item to your Wish List from the website, this is one possible outcome:

I would change the icon to be more btw and less omg, but otherwise, see how polite that is? Instead of interrupting me to point out that I asked for something dumb, Amazon helpfully did something else that better matched what I probably wanted in the first place. It’s like mistakenly asking for an extra fork with your ice cream and having the waiter just go ahead and bring an extra spoon, rather than needlessly correct you.

We expect that sort of intelligent interpretation in human/human interaction, but in human/computer interaction it’s so vanishingly rare that when it actually happens, nerds write blog posts about it. Ta-da.

Couple of months ago, we rounded the corner into year three...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:45:10 -0500

Couple of months ago, we rounded the corner into year three without Favrd. I still miss it. Favstar serves part of its former purpose now, but only the uglier, vainer part. The better part — the community — is mostly absent.

Favrd gained a vibrant community pretty much accidentally, which is notable because that’s hard to do even on purpose. Things tend to spring up these days, spend years and minor fortunes building a community, then turn on that community and ransom it because oh yeah we were supposed to be making money, weren’t we. Other things exploit social psychology to steal your life from you in momentary increments, selling your partial attention to an advertiser while you click on pictures of carrots. But Dean Allen just built a room, put things in it that interested him, and invited people in to look at them. They brought their own things to look at, and before long it was a party.

Every so often I load up the old Favrd home page just for the hell of it. I did that last night, and something in Dean’s farewell note struck me: “Sites like this one now serve mainly as fuel for emotional up-fuckedness in the guise of a game.” You see, Mr. Allen’s room also had mirrors in it, and lots of people were showing up just to preen. They would stare at themselves for hours, and — if you’ll allow me to switch metaphors somewhat ungracefully — reload their mirrors over and over, clicking on carrots, ignoring everyone else at the party.

Dean believed he had made Farmville by accident, so he shut it down.

For a man of his talents, it wouldn’t have taken much effort or imagination to monetize this accidental community. But for a man of his character, profiting from the encouragement of what he saw as an emotional bad habit was unacceptable.

We need more folks like Dean.

An honest question for the TSA

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:01:31 -0500

Every day at your airport checkpoints, you screen thousands of passengers for objects that could conceivably be used as a weapons. If you find one, you confiscate it, and the unfortunate traveler continues on her way, cupcakeless but no longer a threat to national security.

You’re also looking for explosives, which is understandable. If you found a live bomb — I mean, not that you ever have — but if you did, well, that would clearly be one terrorist caught and many lives saved, right? That is, assuming you actually remembered to do something about it, of course. But everybody makes mistakes and I won’t blame you for that. I’m sure someday you’ll stop being a complete waste of money. Really, we’re all pulling for you.

But here’s my question. Suppose I, a normal taxpaying non-terrorist type guy, were to bring through a checkpoint something relatively harmless but still against the rules: not a bomb but, say, a pocketknife. You’re going to take that away from me, right? But why? If I’m not a terrorist, how is it dangerous for me to have a four-inch folding knife in my trousers? It’s staying there until well after we land, unless Amazon Prime really improves. Or do you think I might suddenly decide to abort my vacation, abandon my family, and throw my life away in a fit of deranged violence when the captain interrupts the in-flight Mad About You for the seventh time to announce that one of the shittier Great Lakes is on the other side of the plane? Right when Murray the dog is about to make Paul Reiser get a little bit annoyed?

Of course not, because you are an organization of highly intelligent cupcake confiscators. The only logical reason for you to take my knife from me is that you think I’m a terrorist. You’ll smile and shake your head at the dopey terrorist, and you’ll go tsk tsk, and then you’ll let me through to board my flight.

So, TSA, answer me this: why are you allowing suspected terrorists onto planes?

Intent Doesn’t Matter

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:42:00 -0500

John Gruber wagers that Apple doesn’t mean what it says in the iBooks Author EULA:

I’m willing to bet cold hard cash that Apple has no intention to and will never try to stop a publisher or author from taking content written in iBooks Author and publishing it elsewhere in another format. No one will ever hear from Apple after exporting from iBooks Author to text or PDF.

But I think the license is crummily written, because it’s not precisely clear what Apple is saying. If Apple wants to make bold and far-reaching licensing restrictions, they should express them clearly and succinctly. Whereas I think, much like with the App Store, their lawyers seek to express the legal restrictions in terms far broader than what they actually seek to enforce. I’m willing to make the above bet based on my understanding of the company and the way Apple thinks, not the language of the EULA.

I agree; I don’t think Apple plans to restrict anything but its own .ibooks format. But that doesn’t matter because, as Mike Ash puts it, “Unless we’re friends, your intentions don’t matter to me at all, only your actions.” Apple isn’t anyone’s friend but Apple’s, and its actions so far are to reserve a broad swath of rights pertaining to everything iBooks Author is capable of “generating” (whatever that means).

Even if we’re right and Apple doesn’t care about PDFs or plain text files, that’s still the Apple of today. The Apple of 20 years from now might turn out to be a completely different company, and this EULA has no expiration date. That’s a dangerous situation for authors and publishers who care about long-term distribution rights. It would be best for Apple to clarify the terms now — and, I hope, loosen them — rather than prolong the uncertainty.

UPDATE (3 Feb. 2012): They just did.

Why I like shopping at the corner store

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:23:00 -0500

Customer: Is that Etta James you’re playing?

Clerk: You bet. All Etta, all day long. It’s Friday, girl!

Customer: Nice tribute. It’s so sad that she died.

Clerk: She DIED?

Common Misconceptions about What I Wrote Yesterday

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:18:00 -0500

In a probably-futile attempt to stem the tide of redundant comments, I’ll address some of the more frequent reactions to my last post:

If you don’t like it, don’t use it! Duh.
You’re missing the point. The issue is that this is a software EULA which for the first time attempts to restrict what I can do with the output of the app, rather than with the app itself. No consumer EULA I’ve ever seen goes this far. Would you be happy if Garage Band required you to sell your music through the iTunes Store, or if iPhoto had license terms that kept you from posting your own photos online? It’s a step backward for computing freedom and we should resist it.

Plenty of EULAs restrict what you can do with software. That’s the whole point.
Yes, restricting use is what EULAs have traditionally done. This one does something different: it restricts what you can do with the output of the software after the software is closed and put away. If you make a document using iBooks Author, you aren’t allowed to sell that document except through Apple, ever, for the rest of your life.

Interestingly, as the author of the document and presumed signatory to the iBooks Author EULA, you’re the only person to whom that restriction applies. If you gave your iBook to a friend, Apple would have no control over what your friend did with it. And you could sell your friend’s iBooks too, because you aren’t the one who used iBooks Author to generate them.

Yeah, but that only applies to .ibooks files. You can also export .pdf and .txt and those are unrestricted.
Not true. The license defines “Work” as “any book or other work you generate using this software.” That definitely includes PDF and plain text, and it could be construed to include the very words you type in. So if you use iBooks Author to write your novel, you might be legally barred from ever selling that novel in any format, not just as an iBook. UPDATE (3 Feb 2012): Apple has clarified the license to indicate that only the .ibooks format is covered.

Wait, so Apple’s taking my copyrights away?
No no no, just your right to sell the output of iBooks Author on your own or through any other store.

But why would you want to sell iBooks anywhere but in the iBookstore?
It doesn’t matter why, since I made the iBook myself and should be free to do as I please with it. But if you must have a reason, here are five: because Apple’s cut is too high; because I already have an arrangement with another publisher or online store; because I want to sell my work in a country the iBookstore doesn’t serve; because the iBookstore doesn’t let me offer academic pricing, bulk rates, or loyalty discounts; because I tried selling through Apple and they refused.

iBooks Author is free, so Apple deserves a cut.
How on earth does that follow? Xcode is free, and software companies have been using it and the tools that preceded it for decades to build Mac software that they’ve distributed without Apple’s help, and without paying Apple for the privilege. We buy hardware from Apple, and Apple provides the tools to enable us to make that hardware more useful so that more people will buy it. The same virtuous circle could exist for the iPad and iBooks if Apple hadn’t overreached with this ridiculous license.

That’s what the EULA says, so quit whining!
Do you really want EULAs to be able to say anything they please? Do you want copyright holders to have unlimited control over what you can do with legally obtained copies of their work? It’s not even clear that EULAs can be enforced at all. So even if you’re on Apple’s side in this argument, wouldn’t you rather they based their money grab on a sound legal theory?

It’s the same having to sell iOS apps through the App Store.
No, it’s not. The license terms for Xcode (PDF link) don’t contain any language restricting the use of files generated by Xcode. And when you join the iOS Developer Program, there’s a separate contract you’re required to consciously agree to, once a year and each time it’s updated, before you can download your development certificate. But if you don’t join the program, nothing stops you from continuing to use Xcode’s output however you like.

Like I said: unprecedented.

But It’s Free

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:43:00 -0500

Watts Martin:

So Apple’s “audacity” is that they’ve created a snazzy creation tool that, from all appearances, only works with their viewers. Wineman is correct in that it’s the license, not the technology, that prevents you from taking a .ibooks file and selling it somewhere other than Apple’s store. But you don’t have much reason to sell something this thing creates outside Apple’s store, ’cause it ain’t gonna be creating those snazzy multimedia books for your Kindle Fire.

You wouldn’t be selling iBooks for Kindle Fire, you’d be selling them for iBooks on the iPad, which last I checked wasn’t just a vending machine for Apple content. And there are plenty of reasons to want to do so, chief among them being that 30% is a lot. If I’m capable of doing all the marketing and payment processing and hosting of my .ibooks documents, why shouldn’t I get to keep all the profits?

Before anyone else points out that Apple deserves its cut because iBooks Author is free, remember that this argument applies equally well to app distribution outside of the App Stores. (At least on the Mac, where that’s still a viable way of doing business.) No one contends that Apple should get a cut of non-App Store app sales simply because Xcode is free.

There’s nothing wrong with selling tools that help people make money. I’m sure there’d be a market for a non-free iBooks Author, just as there is for Aperture, Final Cut, Logic Pro, and the rest of Apple’s professional content-creation tools. But giving the tools away for free and then using semi-hidden legal terms to wedge yourself into an exclusive middleman position? That’s shameful.

The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:47:00 -0500

Apple just released iBooks Author, a free Mac app for creating digital books for the new version of iBooks. I haven’t played with it much, but so far it looks like a very good tool. However, a curious thing happens when you go to export your work in iBooks format:

This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level. You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app.

But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top:

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

And in section 2:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

In other words: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

Here’s the problem: I didn’t agree to it. Apple wants me to believe I did, of course, just by using the software:

PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE. BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT INSTALL AND/OR USE THE SOFTWARE.

But that language is in the EULA itself, a contract of adhesion which I was not required to sign (or even indicate my agreement to by clicking) before installing the software. So, to paraphrase: By using this software, you agree that anything you make with it is in part ours. But if it can say that and have legal force, can’t it say anything? Isn’t this the equivalent of a car dealer trying to bind you to additional terms by sticking a contract in the glove compartment? By driving this car, you agree to get all your oil changes from Honda of Cupertino?

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

When I make something myself, no matter what software I use to make it, then — assuming it doesn’t infringe any copyrights — it’s my right to distribute it however I want, in whatever format I choose, for free or not. I don’t lose the right to publish my novel if Microsoft determines that I wrote it using a pirated copy of Word. Would I lose that right if I tried to sell my iBook outside of the iBookstore and Apple got wind of it? I don’t know; we’re in uncharted waters here. Or how about this: for a moment I’ll stipulate that Apple’s EULA is valid and I’ve agreed to it implicitly by using the software. Now suppose I create an iBook and give it to someone else who has never downloaded iBooks Author and is not party to the EULA, and that person sells it on their own website. What happens now?

In ensuring that the App Store remains the only legitimate market for iOS apps, Apple doesn’t claim any legal rights to the content I create using its Xcode toolset. Instead, they enforce technical restrictions; apps must be cryptographically signed by Apple in order to run on unaltered iOS devices. Is this a good situation? For Apple and for novice users, maybe, but for developers it sucks and causes massive headaches. But in a way it’s better than a world in which software can assert whatever rights it wants over your stuff just by hiding a few paragraphs in its glove compartment.

UPDATE: I’ve addressed some common misconceptions. Please read this before commenting.

My friend Aaron Epstein is the director of photography on this...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:50:40 -0500

My friend Aaron Epstein is the director of photography on this amazing Grammy-nominated music video.

“Yes I Know” by Memory Tapes

So there’s this iPhone game in which you defend a daffodil...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:45:46 -0500

So there’s this iPhone game in which you defend a daffodil patch from hordes of rampaging Vikings by flinging a traditional bladed woodcutting implement. It’s called Axe In Face. When you lose, your guy cries a river of woeful, manly tears (see above).

My daughter, who is two and a half, loves this game. She’s even kind of good at it. It’s a little violent, but it’s only cartoon violence, so no big. But I didn’t want to tell her it was called Axe In Face, because what kind of monster do you think I am. My mistake was that I neglected to come up with a substitute name.

Nothing about being a two-year-old’s parent is easy. The messes, the tantrums, the impossible questions. You get used to meeting the confused stares of strangers; you develop this sort of whaddyagonnado shrug that smoothes everything over. You shrug; you smile; you move on. But the judgment, the recrimination. That hurts.

So I’m begging you, dear friends. Say you’re at a diner, or the doctor’s office, or in line at the bank. You’re munching a french fry, you’re filling out a deposit slip. Then a tiny voice floats up from somewhere: “Daddy, can we play the crying game?” Look away.

Look away.

Oh nothing, just my kid holding a glacier.

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:58:18 -0500

Oh nothing, just my kid holding a glacier.

Anil Dash: Questions for the Republican Candidates

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:40:53 -0500

Anil Dash: Questions for the Republican Candidates:

These are gold. My favorites:

Do you pledge not to pursue war crime prosecution against the Taliban when they waterboard our soldiers?
What Sharia laws do you support other than criminalizing homosexuality, shaming assault victims & legalizing theocracy?
When you slash funding for the NIH, how will you notify parents that their children’s cancer treatments are being ended?

Read them all.

Senators who voted against the National Defense Authorization Act

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:07:00 -0500

Senators who voted against the National Defense Authorization Act:

squashed:

This act enshrines the practice of indefinitely detaining people who are suspected by a Presidential Administration of terrorist connections without trial. It overwhelmingly passed the Senate. Here are the few senators who still believe that the Constitution prevents you from being locked up indefinitely on a mere suspicion.

Sen. Thomas Coburn (R, OK)

Sen. Thomas Harkin (D, IA)

Sen. Mike Lee (R, UT)

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D, OR)

Sen. Rand Paul (R, KY)

Sen. Bernard Sanders (I, VT)

(If we can persuade Obama to veto this act, Congress will probably reconsider the problematic provisions and this number will grow.)

There’s a seventh nay vote missing from the above list, and it’s the other gentleman from Oregon:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D, OR)

I’m proud to live in the only state both of whose Senators voted against this atrocity.