Month: July 2013

Connecting with Mishka Shubaly on the Internet

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When Hanny (@beradadisini) wanted to read one of the Kindle Singles she found on Amazon, she realized she could not because of an Amazon restriction on her country of residence, Indonesia. So she reached out to the author, Mishka Shubaly, on Twitter. “My Saturday with Mishka” is a beautiful account of what happened next:

I judge people from the way they write (including the type of font they choose). I fall for their writing style, their choice of words, their inner voice, the way they place the right punctuation marks, as well as the wonderful feeling of reading those sentences out loud and thinking about how smart or funny or dark or interesting or intriguing the writer must be.

I also fall for Mishka Shubaly this way.

The Long Run is indeed a story about struggling with addiction–but it is more than that. Mishka’s addictions to drugs and alcohol is our addiction to a certain guy. To political power. To a branded bag. To be skinny. To a lighter skin-tone. To self-pity. To wealth. To the Internet. To an unresolved love affair. To a past.

We’re all dealing with our own addictions. We’re carrying these things inside, hiding it like a well-kept secret–so that no one will find out. Everyday, we’re all trying to run away from something that anchors us down, and run towards the freedom to be who we truly are.

I just love stories of connections like this. I haven’t read The Long Run, but I will now.

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(via Freshly Pressed)

The $17 Billion Dot Kosher Battle

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Bloomberg has details on the battle over the .kosher top level domain that’s been happening ever since for-profit business could apply to get a top-level domain of their own. Five organizations have banded together to oppose the sole applicant for dot-kosher, Kosher Marketing Assets:

Icann — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — began accepting applications for generic top-level domain names, or gTLDs, in January 2012. In November, Kosher Marketing Assets, the OK Kosher unit, filed an application for dot-kosher, with a mission to “promote kosher food certification in general, and OK Certification and its clients in particular.”

While only clients who pass “rigorous certification” tests would be allowed to use the gTLD, OK Kosher said in its application it expected to have more than 600 licensees by its third year of operation. OK Kosher supervises products including Fruity Pebbles cereal and Maxwell House coffee.

Applying for a gTLD doesn’t come cheap, at close to $200,000 including the evaluation fee and legal services, OK Kosher’s Levy said in a telephone interview.

More general details on the handling of these top level domains is further in the article:

Icann has begun to announce the awarding of some 1,930 proposed domain names this week, primarily non-English ones. Early gTLDs established include the word for network in Arabic, the words “web” and “online” in Cyrillic, and the Chinese characters for “game” or “games,” according to Cyrus Namazi, an Icann vice president.

Potentially key to the dot-kosher dispute is the fate of an application for the “dot-halal” domain name. Halal refers to the Muslim set of rules on food preparation and consumption.

The United Arab Emirates, India and Saudi Arabia have all registered their opposition to any one entity owning dot-halal though Icann’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which provides countries with a forum to protest domain names. The five Orthodox groups have asked Icann to use the same logic in the dot-kosher decision, while Kosher Marketing Assets argues that no country has complained about its bid.

 

Are TV Shows Better than the Movies?

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David Haglund argues that we should stop saying TV is better than the movies:

Who was the first person to say that TV is better than the movies? It’s probably impossible to say, but the argument in its contemporary form may date to October 1995, when Bruce Fretts—with “additional reporting” from 10 (!) of his colleagues atEntertainment Weekly—offered, over several pages, “10 simple reasons why the small screen is superior” to the big one. Even if you didn’t read it at the time, the piece will feel strikingly familiar: Replace NYPD Blue and The X-Files with Mad Men and Breaking Bad and the argument made by Fretts is more or less identical in its essentials to the one that over the last six or seven years has appeared in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly (again!), and on blogs too numerous to count.

The TV-is-better argument is, above all, an attempt to narrow the range of what sophisticated viewers feel obligated to watch. Yes, such polemics sometimes serve other purposes. (Shaming Hollywood studios out of making another board-game-inspired blow-’em-up and turning to taut, Breaking Bad–style thrillers instead, for instance.) But generally the TV-is-better argument is a way of saying, “I don’t have to keep up with the movies anymore, and neither do you.”

I disagree!

But I do think Mr. Haglund has a point here:

For one thing, when we talk about television, we are almost always only talking about American television. Maybe we’ll include a few British shows, but rarely do we grapple with foreign-language efforts, the way serious moviegoers have been doing for decades. And while the source of most cinematic creativity in the United States has for the last few decades probably come from independent filmmakers, there is not really any such thing as independent television. (The medium, for the most part, just doesn’t work that way.) So while the best movies come from an intimidating diversity of sources, and present a similarly wide range of aesthetic approaches and aims, the best TV shows tend to come from three or four American cable networks and frequently follow a familiar model. (It’s like The Godfather, only in modern-day New Jersey—or in the advertising world, or the New Mexico meth market, or in Hollywood …)

Read the entire argument here.

Writing Tips from Joyce Carol Oates

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This afternoon, Joyce Carol Oates took to Twitter and dispensed ten bits of writing advice:

10) Write your heart out.

9) Read, observe, listen intensely!–as if your life depended upon it.

8) Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader–or any reader. He/ she might exist–but is reading someone else.

7) Be your own editor/ critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

6) Unless you are experimenting with form–gnarled, snarled & obscure–be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

5) When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler’s advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

4) Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”3

3) You are writing for your contemporaries–not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

2) The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.

1) Write your heart out.

I also enjoyed her addendum about writing workshops: “Something magical can happen in a writing workshop. Don’t know why–but I have seen it countless times: writers are inspired by one another.” I think it’s not just inspiration, but accountability that matters. When you’re presenting your ideas to (with) others, you feel compelled to do a good job (rather than procrastinate or give up altogether).

The best writing book I’ve ever read is Stephen King’s On Writing. Much of the advice from Joyce Carol Oates’s is explained deeply in King’s book.

The Hikikomori around the World

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Two weeks ago, BBC published a piece about the hikikomori, those people in Japan who “refuse to leave their bedrooms.” There are as many as one million of them in Japan.

This week, BBC compiles a sampling of other hikikomori people around the world. A sample below:

I am a retired professor of astrophysics. I have only just avoided being a hikikomori myself. Since I was a child I felt awkward in society, and have tended to avoid human contact. I was fortunate to live in a rather short period of time when mathematical and scientific skills, which are easily acquired with minimal human interaction, were reasonably well rewarded. But I always felt that I was clinging to a cliff by my fingernails. Both my ex-wife and my wife have commented on the fact that I don’t seem to have any friends of my own. That’s not quite true, but not far wrong. I remain with the feeling that in the long term I am going to end up living, and dying, on the street. P, California, US

 

In sixth form I more or less stopped going to school. My grades were always good, but by the time I finished at 17, I had an attendance rate over the two years of less than 30%. I retreated to my room, became obsessive, paranoid. I wanted to go out and be social but felt that it was difficult. When I did go out, I tended to drink heavily, which made things worse. I went to uni immediately after finishing school. Those three years were a black hole of drink and isolation. About halfway through my second year I was diagnosed with “some sort of agoraphobia”, but no one could decide on treatment. I’m not sure how or why things changed. Some days I feel it start to take over me again, usually after a period of enforced confinement due to illness. I drag myself out for a walk. In a way this is confinement – I’ll often walk on my own, listening to music. I’ll arrange to do things with people, which helps. Eddie, Merseyside, UK

 

I loved withdrawing myself from the whole world, which includes my family and best friends. I found isolation a safe retreat. But it was eating me up, I lost 9kg (20lb) and knew that eventually it would kill me. I tried to fight back by reading books which made me laugh because essentially I was depressed. Facebook, games, slowly opening up to friends and telling them I was down. I sought help and said a lot of prayers. But the first step is to say I want to come out of this darkness. Watila, Tamil Nadu, India

 

I withdrew from society for at least five years, maybe longer. Honestly, that time is mostly a blur. For the most part, the farthest I’d travel was my mother’s backyard, and maybe to the store. I have social anxiety disorder, and it almost ruined my life. Crippling anxiety most of the time that is somewhat managed now by medication and therapy. I also go to group therapy sessions so I don’t isolate myself again. Maybe meeting Eric, now my fiance, on the internet brought me out of my shell. It gave me a reason to go out. I suppose I needed that push. Andrea, Wisconsin, US

Of course, the true hermits are selectively excluded from this compilation: they aren’t checking the Internet and could not have responded to BBC’s query.

In case you are wondering, hikikomori is in the Oxford English Dictionary as “In Japan: abnormal avoidance of social contact.”

On the Origin of the Smiley Face :-)

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A fascinating piece in Symmetry Magazine traces the invention of the smiley face to the physics professors at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982:

The use of the smiley face may be frowned upon in professional communications, but it’s an essential part of the lexicon of the Internet. It didn’t take long after the invention of the message board for people to start using it. According to alumni of Carnegie Mellon University, it all began with a joke in a conversation about physics.

On Sept. 16, 1982, Neil Swartz, a computer scientist at CMU, posed a physics problem to his computer science colleagues on the department’s “bboard,” a form of early online message board similar to today’s Facebook group. Bboard users often posted science puzzles for one another to solve and had been discussing the riddle of whether a canary could fly in an elevator during free fall.

Swartz presented a new scenario, which involved a lit candle mounted on an elevator wall and a drop of mercury on the floor. “The cable snaps and the elevator falls,” Swartz wrote. “What happens to the candle and the mercury?”

That evening, fellow computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” “Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury,” Gayle wrote. “There is also some slight fire damage. Decontamination should be complete by 08:00 Friday.”

Despite posts noting that the warning was meant in jest, some people apparently took the notice at face value, believing a mercury spill had actually taken place. Various bboard users began joking about different symbols that could identify posts that weren’t meant to be serious. Eventually, Scott Fahlman, then a computer science research assistant professor, proposed using 🙂 for joke posts—or, given the preponderance of joke posts, simply using 😦 for serious ones.

Read the rest of the story here.

A Handy Guide to Jack Handey and “Deep Thoughts”

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Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts were pretty popular when I was in college. With that in mind, I found this New York Times piece by Dan Kois a very handy (haha) guide to his development as a joker:

Handey initially had a great deal of difficulty persuading the show’s producers to run “Deep Thoughts,” which he previously published in National Lampoon and in George Meyer’s legendary comedy magazine Army Man. “They were reluctant to give a writer something with his name on it, you know?” Handey said. “The ironic thing, of course, is that people still think Jack Handey is a made-up name.” He submitted the jokes to a read-through, where “Lorne gets his big basket of popcorn, and he reads the stage directions, and then the actors would read the parts.” Joan Cusack read the Deep Thoughts, and, Handey recalled, response was so-so. Still, he kept lobbying for the spot to make the show. “I would go through Jim Downey, and he would take it to Lorne. ” The answer was always the same: “No.” (“Lorne wasn’t as big a fan of them as I was,” Downey remembered.)

“I guess eventually they sort of felt like, let’s throw him this bone,” Handey said. “Deep Thoughts” made its debut on Jan. 19, 1991, in an episode hosted by Sting. It was this gem: “To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kinda scary. I’ve wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time when I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.”

Jack Handey has just published a novel, The Stench of Honolulu. Joke-writing was easier, though: “For each one that works, I throw away 10. I find that easier than rewriting. I’d rather just scrap it and start over. That’s why the novel was so hard — I really had to rewrite things over and over.”

How to Love Facebook Again

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Jessica Hische published a great post explaining how she fell in love with Facebook, then started to hate it, and the process she went through to love it again. It helped that her future husband became an employee of Facebook, but her number one advice is to be selective in the friending.

  1. Only friend people you actually want to be friends with.
    This sounds dumb, but is amazingly hard to adhere to. As mentioned above, I only friend people that I would be happy to see if they stopped by for an unexpected visit. If you follow this rule, there are a lot of Facebook services (like check-ins) that you will feel a lot more comfortable using.

  2. Set your privacy settings to a level that makes you happy.Facebook isn’t a leather-bound diary you stuff under your mattress. It’s a public place. Privacy is the thing people complain most about on Facebook, especially since the launch of Graph Search—which makes all public content on Facebook a lot easier to find (note the emphasis on public—if you’ve marked posts or photos as only viewable by friends, these won’t show up when non-friends search for things). Truthfully, Facebook would be a very boring place if every person had his or her privacy settings all the way up. Searches that are now possible because of Graph Search (like “restaurants my friends have been to in Portland” or “friends of friends who used to live in Brooklyn and who now live in San Francisco”) wouldn’t be possible, and this new tool would be a whole lot less useful.Yes, Facebook isn’t “free”—we pay for it by sharing personal data about ourselves—but all other “free” services (like all of Google’s products) operate similarly, they’re just better at making us feel good about how they sell our information to advertisers (I mean, how amazing were those commercials with the dad and the guy who gets married? They make me cry every single time.) I do get a kick out of the Facebook sidebar advertisements and how amazingly off they can be (rehab and egg donation in the same sidebar? Who do you think I am, Facebook?!).After spending a lot of time with the people that help make Facebook what it is, I can say that I haven’t met a single employee that didn’t think they were making the world a better and more connected place by working there.

  3. Don’t mix business with pleasure.I choose Facebook to be my friends-and-family-only social network, but some people have found it to be incredibly beneficial if used as a business network. My only advice is to use separate social networks for friends and for business. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to befriend work peers on Facebook if you choose it as your “friends only” zone, it just means that the person you present there is you. I’m a very open person and don’t think that my professional self is different from my personal self, but there are still things that people that know me in real life would care to read about that total strangers would not. I share almost everything that pops into my brain with my Twitter followers, but sometimes if I need some real friend advice about a personal matter, I’ll only ask on Facebook. It’s my opinion that Twitter is an amazing work-centric network, and Facebook is best used for personal interactions, but every person is different. I don’t advocate one over the other, I think that the two work in tandem to create a well-rounded online social experience.

  4. Don’t be afraid to hide people.Hiding is one of the most wonderful things Facebook has introduced. If someone starts showing up in my newsfeed that I don’t regularly talk to or see in real life—like a friend from high school that I would love to reconnect with when I’m home for the holidays but don’t want to see frequent updates from—I will hide them. I can still check in on them when they pop into my head on a rainy day or I can message them over Thanksgiving when I’m back home, but I’m not flooded with their baby pictures on a daily basis. Hiding people (checking or unchecking “show posts in news feed” when you hover over the friendship button) will change your life. You have control over who shows up in your newsfeed.

  5. One word: stickers.Now on Facebook, you can use these things called stickers, which are like elaborate emoji, and they will cause you so much delight you will never want to use traditional text messaging again. There are days when Russ and I communicate only in “Pusheen”.

Worth reading.

Jim Buck, The First Professional Dog Walker

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I had no idea that dog walking could be pinpointed to one person. But according to this New York Times obituary, the claim belongs to Jim Buck, who professionalized dog walking in New York City, and by extension in the United States, in the 1960s:

Starting in the early 1960s, Mr. Buck, the scion of a patrician Upper East Side family, rose each morning at dawn to walk passels of clients’ dogs, eventually presiding over a business in which he and two dozen assistants walked more than 150 dogs a day.

When he began that business, Jim Buck’s School for Dogs, it was the only one of its kind in New York. Today, the city has scores of professional dog walkers.

During the 40 years Mr. Buck ran his school, he was an eminently recognizable figure: an elegantly turned out, borzoi-thin man of 145 pounds, he commanded the leashes of a half-dozen or more dogs at a time — a good 500 pounds of dog in all — which fanned out before him like the spokes of a wheel.

Jim Buck, the man who professionalized dog walking.

Jim Buck, the man who professionalized dog walking.

Jim’s school is no longer in existence. But his legacy lives on: some of the city’s professional dog walkers are his former employees.

Post-Scarcity Economics by Tom Streihorst

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Tom Streihorst, a filmmaker and writer who publishes articles on finance and economics, pens an excellent essay titled “Post-Scarcity Economics” in The Los Angeles Review of Books:

We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures of Mars. Much the total accumulated knowledge of our species can fit on a hard drive that fits in our pocket. Even the poorest among us own electronic toys that millionaires and kings would have lusted for a decade ago. Our ancestors would be amazed. For most of our time on the planet, humans lived on the knife-edge of survival. A crop failure could mean starvation and even in good times, we worked from sun up to sundown to earn our daily bread. In 1600, a typical workman spent almost half his income on nourishment, and that food wasn’t crème brûlée with passion fruit or organically raised filet mignon, it was gruel and the occasional turnip. Send us back to ancient Greece with an AK-47, a home brewing kit, or a battery-powered vibrator, and startled peasants would worship at our feet.

And yet we are not happy, we expected more, we were promised better. Our economy is a shambles, millions are out of work, and few of us think things are going to get better soon. When I graduated high school, in 1975, I assumed that whatever I did, I would end up somewhere in the great American middle class, and that I would live better than my father, who lived better than his. Today, my son doesn’t have nearly the same confidence. Back in those days, you could go off to India for seven years, sit around in an ashram, smoke pot and seek spiritual fulfilment, and still come home and get a good job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. Today kids need a spectacular resume just to get an unpaid internship at IBM. Our children fear any moment not on a career path could ruin their prospects for a successful future. Back in the 1970s, pop stars sang songs about of the tedium and anomie of factory work. Today the sons of laid-off autoworkers would trade anything for that security and steady wage.

Most of us are working harder, for less money and with no job security. My father and I both worked at the same large corporation but there was a difference, a difference determined by our respective eras: he was staff, I was freelance. When he got sick, the company found him doctors, paid his salary, put considerable effort into his recovery. Had I ever gotten sick, they would have simply forgotten my name. He yelled at the CEO habitually without any fear of losing his job. I mouthed off once to a middle manager and was never hired again. He had a defined benefit pension paid for by the corporation, the government gave me a tax break should I choose to save for my own retirement. The company had legal and moral responsibilities to him, which both he and they viewed as sacrosanct. All they owed me was a day’s pay for a day’s work. His generation gave their you to a corporation, and the corporation took care of them in their old age. Today loyalty, if it exists at all, goes just one way. Many of my college buddies, are unemployed at 50, or earning less than they did ten years ago.

He discusses economics in the context of Paul Krugman, Keynes, and Alan Greenspan. Worth a read.