Nerdology

Dieter hits on everything I’ve been feeling about messaging as of late.

Once upon a time, we created interoperable communications standards like email, Internet Relay Chat, and hell, HTTP. Now, apparently, the only way to create a new way to talk to each other electronically is to wait for a big corporation to do it for us.

Between GroupMe, Hangouts, iMessage, Twitter DM, SMS… I’ve got a lot of chat conversations scattered throughout the Internet. Part of me just wants to ditch everything in favor of SMS. But those were simpler times.

Cool interview with Daft Punk in GQ by Zach Baron.

One of the things that stood is how much Daft Punk is kind of hating on their own record. They do it to the point of evoking Scream sequels:

Only a handful of people have heard the album so far, but the two men already seem resigned to the possibility that no one will like it.

“In Scream 2, they have this discussion about how sequels always suck,” Bangalter says. In this scheme, Random Access Memories might as well be Scream 4. “The thing we can ask ourselves at some point is like: We’re making music for twenty years. How many bands and acts do you have that are still making good music after twenty years? It always sucks—almost always, you know?”

And de Homem-Christo, who has said maybe a few dozen words up to this point, most of them about salad and directed at our waitress, peers over the golden top edge of his sunglasses and says: “So our new album is supposed to really suck.”

It reminds me of Nirvana before In Utero came out. Kurt Cobain went on record saying, “The grown-ups don’t like it,” and that it was “unlistenable”. He also told Circus, “The first time I played it at home, I knew there was something wrong. The whole first week I wasn’t really interested in listening to it at all, and that usually doesn’t happen. I got no emotion from it, I was just numb.”

It’s kind of interesting. And I’d like to go on record saying that Scream 4 was better than Scream 3… so there’s that.

Also, interesting is that this is the writers first article for GQ. So, good for him.

You should read Rolling Stone’s 1977 cover story / interview with George Lucas.

What sets Star Wars apart from its predecessors are the special effects (some 365 separate shots) and the extraordinary richness of Lucas’ imagination. There’s the Cantina sequence, for instance, where the heroes stumble into a bar whose patrons are the scum of a dozen galaxies. And there are ancillary creatures like the Jawas, tiny, chattering beings who hustle used robots for a living. As for the opticals and miniatures, Lucas and Dykstra have come up with a new standard against which all future space-fiction films must be judged. Before Star Wars was released, Dykstra told an interviewer that the final battle sequence would be every bit as exciting as ‘The French Connection’ car chase. He was right.

And from George himself, letting us know right from the start that Star Wars was for kids:

I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had – they don’t have westerns, they don’t have pirate movies, they don’t have that stupid serial fantasy life that we used to believe in. It wasn’t that we really believed in it…
…
I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to make a 2001, I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties.

I was surprised to read that even in 1977 Lucas was trying to get out of filmmaking. He has enough money at this point, I kind of wish he was just making weird experimental films.

Also, I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff.

TC Sottek hits hard. I love this whole thing.

In its complaint, the ACLU writes that carriers “have failed to warn consumers that the smartphones sold to them are defective, that they are running vulnerable software, and that other smartphones are available that receive regular, prompt updates to which consumers could switch.”
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But the major issue identified by the ACLU isn’t new, and has chapped mobile junkies for years: carrier-instigated Android fragmentation.

Sam Grobart takes a long look at Samsung’s past and present. This was a phenomenal read.

In 1995, Chairman Lee was dismayed to learn that cell phones he gave as New Year’s gifts were found to be inoperable. He directed underlings to assemble a pile of 150,000 devices in a field outside the Gumi factory. More than 2,000 staff members gathered around the pile. Then it was set on fire. When the flames died down, bulldozers razed whatever was remaining. “If you continue to make poor-quality products like these,” Lee Keon Hyok recalls the chairman saying, “I’ll come back and do the same thing.”

Alexander Sliwinski has opinions that are directly in line with mine about the SimCity server debacle that has been sweeping the internet.

 With SimCity and Diablo 3, I think the already tempestuous machine of game reviews in this industry has changed forever, and as a collective we haven’t yet determined how to proceed. SimCity and Diablo 3 aren’t just games, they are also services. The question: Should these games be reviewed separately from their service elements or should they be reviewed in combination?

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I do wonder how long as a collective we can keep arguing about how unfair it is to judge a game by how it treats paying customers, especially as we keep being told that games are now a service.

I just read this great report by Chris Ziegler about Mozilla’s Firefox OS. I saw an early version last year at MWC and it has hung out in the back of my brain ever since. I’m curious to see what happens with it.

“It’s a means to an end — a good end, not an evil one. “We are fundamentally in the same place we were over a decade ago where [the web is] being unnaturally controlled by a few parties,” Kovacs said. “The same call that we heard over a decade ago is being asked again of us now, which is to free the web.” Mozilla wants to break the Apple-Google ecosystem duopoly by enlisting strange bedfellows — network operators — to support a low-cost phone that can run any app, published by anyone, anywhere, without restrictions. It just needs to get a little dirty to do it.”

I’m a week behind on this, but here’s a great read by Joshua Kopstein. (With all these link posts you can tell I’m working through my Instapaper back catalogue)

Today’s drones are everywhere and nowhere, an invisible meme metastasizing throughout literature, design, fashion, and social media.

It blows my mind that Nielsen is just getting around to this. This is obviously a company that is out of touch and incredibly bloated if it took them two years to get here.

Nielsen’s decision was the culmination of two years of thinking, a painfully long time for media executives. Their collective sense of urgency has increased as new Web services like Aereo have allowed people to watch TV channels, ads and all, without a cable subscription or an antenna.