Category: Culture

Blog / Culture

The Science of Self-Care

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I liked Corey Marie’s comic on the science of self-care.  You get closer to middle aged and you really have to be more careful about managing yourself to get anything more than just getting by done.  I like the idea of keeping an inventory of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual progress — they’re all parts of being healthy. But it helps to be realistic, set goals you can reach (you can set stretch goals too but you’re going depress yourself if you never hit ANY of your goals).  I just saw John “Old Man‘s War” Scalzi’s post on his …

Blog / Culture / Music

Galaxie 500

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It really is a culture of plenty we live in (which is hard for a pre-Internet baby like myself to always fully comprehend).  I was vaguely aware of BANDCAMP before but upon discovering that Galaxie 500 had put all of their albums up on the site/service for streaming was the FIRST TIME I felt compelled to check it out.  Listening to one of my favorite albums from my college years as I type.

Blog / Culture

Clay Shirky on a Git-ized Government

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Clay Shirky is a professor and a keen observer of how technology is changing society.  This talk at TED on how open source may change government is an interesting overview of some of the changes the Internet has already wrought and how unpredictable more changes will be to us. In particular he focuses on Git which was developed to manage the messy process of open source development.  His buzzword is “cooperation without coordination” or rather I’d say a tremendous reduction in the cost of coordination.  Shirky looks at Git as a new form of argument and puts forth that changes …

Blog / Comics / Culture

KickStopped? When The Starting Goes Bad

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Kickstarter is easily one of the bigger stories of the year in terms of Internet ecology, webcomics, even the larger arena of culture generally.  Recently there have been several stories (especially this NPR story) on what happens when a funded Kickstarter project at some later date does not deliver on its goals.  Enough bubble and squeak online that Kickstarter itself addressed the issue. I think for the most part when I’ve backed projects on Kickstarter I had a good sense that the creator(s) was going to deliver on it.  I’ve never backed a project that is more of a pre-order …

Blog / Culture

Why I Also Love Reading John Scalzi

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I am a big fan of John Scalzi’s science fiction stories – have been I guess since reading Old Man’s War after it got the nod for the Hugo.  But I am also a fan of what are essentially philosophical posts on his blog Whatever.  This recent post on how John succeeded in life illustrates the interconnected of almost everyone’s life (in fact a lack of connectedness is probably a sure sign of failure) and plainly without invective gives the lie to the ideology of behind those who claim they accomplished everything in their life on their own.  It doesn’t …

Blog / Culture

IPO: Initial Person Offering

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Somewhere between joke, art project and odd sincerity is Mike Merrill’s life as a publicly traded person with his very owner investors and stock exchange.  Kottke or Baio linked to this Motherboard profile of Merrill — it’s weird, fascinating, basically a compelling read.  Let’s put some context on this story upfront: Merrill lives in Portland. Sorry Portland, but Portlandia has given me the notion that weird things do happen there. I guess Merrill has raised some money from this but I’m not sure that’s really the point of it.  Is there a point? I’m not sure there needs to be. …