“He dispensed starlight to casual moths.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:
Harpo Marx and Amelia Earhart
In 20 years Michael Cera will direct and star in a biopic about Harpo Marx. He will win ALL THE OSCARS.
Ever see something that’s really only barely funny but for whatever reason it just hits you just the right way and you find it totally hilarious. But you also realize it’s not that funny? So this.
GoDaddy Faces boycott over SOPA support -
Major Internet companies have formed a united front in their opposition to the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. Well, almost. One exception has been the domain registrar GoDaddy. In a op-ed published in Politico shortly after SOPA was introduced in the House, GoDaddy applauded the bill and called opponents “myopic.”
Need to move my domains over to another domain registrar, post-haste!
I just dropped GoDaddy - you should too.
(Source: azspot, via gregbabula)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-11) -
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
[video]
(via theoisjonesing)
More on the case of Crystal Cox: A good decision made poorly?
The “blogger-not-a-journalist” thing still sticks, but … In the past few days, there’s been a bit of an uproar on the decision by a federal judge to decide, in a defamation case, that investigative blogger Crystal Cox isn’t a journalist protected by shield laws. We were ticked, too. However, Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill disputes the way the story was first presented by Seattle Weekly, which broke the story: “The facts in the case are far more complicated, and after hearing them, most journalists will not want to include Cox in their camp.” Hill points out that it appeared Cox was attempting to engage in reputation damage, not journalism, including sending out the e-mail shown above, in which Cox reportedly offered reputation-protection services. And ultimately, Cox’s claims —the ones that hit court after she was forced to give up her source — didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The fact of the matter is, the shield law element of this shouldn’t have even come up in the case: Even without it the claims wouldn’t have held up, according to Kevin Padrick, who claims ruin at the hands of Cox’s many sites. source
ALSO - weird capitalization issues.
(Source: shortformblog)
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-12-4) -
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-11-27) -
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-11-20) -
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
these books were great. i just reread the house with the clock in its walls (and it’s literally been 15 years since i read it) and it totally held up.
I read these multiple times when I was between the ages of 8 and 13. I’d forgotten about them until now. I can’t wait until my kids are old enough for me to read these to them. The re-prints don’t have the Gorey covers, so I’ll have to start searching for the old paperbacks…
last night i went to a party for “The World’s Perfect Zine,” which is a zine that was just put out by a guy called “David Shapiro,” but who is actually named something else. a zine is like a self-made magazine. the party was at a downtown record store called Other Music, and it was sponsored by Tumblr, because David Shapiro writes a well-known Tumblr called “pitchfork reviews reviews,” on which he used to post comments, every day, on the five record reviews featured on the music website Pitchfork. for a while, people read the blog to see his commentary on what pitchfork said, because it was good commentary, and often funny, and really earnestly engaged with the records and the writing Shapiro was talking about. then gradually he started writing more pieces that weren’t just commentary on pitchfork, and more people read them (because they were good — this is all just about a year and a half ago, by the way), and they moved away from just being “thoughts on music” and toward more personal narratives about shapiro and his relationship with music and also about nightlife, narratives about things he went and did. a lot of them were about what it was like to go to cool shows, or attend parties where there were well-known people, or DJ the kinds of events where people feel like they need to hire someone to DJ. usually he would say he was “brought” to the party by a friend with a media job, and then he would write from the position of an amused or nervous outsider watching what people did in these environments, or trying to get them to answer questions about music. the parties and events got noticeably more high-powered as the site grew. shapiro started writing the same sorts of things for a great website called the awl, and the awl filed them under the category “nightlife reporting.”
shapiro’s stuff was always good at capturing feeling and also much better written than lots of people wanted to admit, with really tight structures and running themes of use of little dramatic images, though that stuff was hidden by having a very strong voice that acted more unkempt and run-on and personal. this blog post is written in a vague imitation or affectionate parody of the voice in question, but i’m not really committing to making it a great imitation, because the point is not really to be “funny” or just make an obvious joke. it’s meant to be mildly depressing. the main fixation of the writing, all along, was the main thing that most young new yorkers tend to get obsessive about, which is basically status. you know that there are certain people in the city who do things you find “cool” and might want to do yourself, like maybe playing in bands or working in media, and you know they’re walking around you, or drinking at the same bars as you, and when you are young you cannot really tell if you will ever slide across into their circle, whatever it may be, and become one of those people, or what you have to do to get there, or what it would be like anyway. shapiro’s writing had a close eye for that set of concerns, as is probably natural when you are a young person thinking about what it’s like to stand at a party with famous or hip people or models or whatever, but is maybe more special when you’re just at an exclusive Yeah Yeah Yeahs gig and thinking about the people who work the door, and who they are, and what their place is in the whole realm of status and power and cultural capital and so on. there was a really interesting period when i think Shapiro’s writing was sort of equally about music and status at the same time, which i liked, and then it became more just about the social part, and then eventually he stopped writing as much online because someone hired him to write a film, which he told me at the party is set to begin shooting soon.
Best thing I’ve read all day - hands down. Although it’s missing the “Sent From BlackBerry” tag at the bottom.
The Random Analogy Generator and other literary devices from Grant Snider:
(via This Isn’t Happiness)
