Assorted bullshit about video games, language, music, and some other unabashedly personal shit. And maybe some stuff that's kind of funny? I don't know. I just don't fucking know, alright? Would you give me a fucking break? Jesus, Mom.
You can also find me:
I also write Britishisms, a blog about moving to the US, and Tuneage, a music blog I co-founded. I curate Give Me Something to Read. I started Word Journal, and I occasionally contribute to The Small Picture.
nostrich at quisby dot net
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Money shot from Marco’s reply to Merlin’s original post:
The bigger message isn’t that everyone should write bookmarklets or attempt to send automated emails to Amazon’s Kindle conversion service, but that they should choose to consume (and, if you can, produce) high-quality work in their preferred medium. Mine, and Merlin’s, is text.
I can’t understate the importance of this demand. Instapaper is useless without the two key ingredients that it was created to bring together: high-quality text content and people who choose to read it. And neither ingredient can exist without the other.
Quoting this for two reasons:
The “make cool shit” mantra is oft-repeated among, well, a lot of people. Smart people, to be sure, but it’s only half of the story. Two things.
One: it’s sad, but true, that not everyone is capable of making cool shit. Which is not to say that those people are idiots, just busy, technically challenged, technologically challenged, uninspired, all of the above, a multitude of other reasons, and, in some cases, just plain idiots. The idiots are probably lost causes, but there’s no reason for everybody else to stare helplessly at a blinking cursor.
Two: people that make cool shit need an audience. Vincent Van Gogh made cool shit (a woefully inadequate descriptor, but I started with it so I’ll stick with it) for most of his life, but nobody noticed until he was dead. Lucky for us, he never gave up. If nobody’s consuming the good shit put forth by the talented few, the talented few get discouraged and stop making cool shit (or die). Dig?
There’s a woeful deficit in people making cool shit online, and the few that are need to be supported, praised, given attention, and generally convinced that it would be in their best interests to continue to make cool shit.
We need to be better consumers. Going back to Marco here, to finally get to the point:
I often hear people defending their “guilty pleasure” habit of subscribing to awful blogs or reading tabloids or watching bad TV with phrases like “It’s good sometimes” or “It’s not that bad” or “I have to follow what’s happening.”
There’s only so much time in the day, and only so many days in our lives. There’s enough great work out there that you don’t need to waste any time with anything that isn’t great.
Exactly.
Stop wasting time and find, read, consume, enjoy, appreciate, support, and — importantly — share, cooler shit.
I don’t profess to be the expert on these matters — I don’t have an Instapaper or a 43 Folders to give any weight to my opinion — nor do I pretend to be even remotely as smart as Marco or Merlin, and I’m not the first to say something along these lines, but this is what I think is true.
You know what to do.
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