Thoughts from John Karahalis
“What is truer than the truth? A story.”
I can't remember where I heard this, even though I heard it very recently. The speaker claimed it was a Jewish proverb. I can't find much information about the quote online, but this blog post similarly calls it a Yiddish saying.
The origin doesn't really matter. It's… true.
I tend to dislike, at least on some level, movies like Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and now A Complete Unknown. They're called “biopics,” but they're more hagiography than biography. Sometimes I call them “hero worship movies.” The acting is often exceptional, and they can be fun, but I dislike that they portray their subjects as perfect, saintly figures. It's too much. Watching them feels like developing cinematic diabetes.
Last year, I bought copies of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and donated them to Little Free Libraries in the late fall, hoping to inspire people to quit social media as a New Year's resolution. This year, I decided to do it again. That makes it a tradition!
New paperback copies are cheap on Amazon, and I was able to buy 9 before they cut me off. That's right, they won't let me buy any more. I thought about asking the publisher for a bulk discount or even a donation, but I'd rather vote with my money and send a signal to the market: publish more books like this!
Extremists fuel extremists.
I love The Claypool Lennon Delirium. With their focus on weird and wacky stories from the news (see “Amethyst Realm”, “Boriska”, and “Bubbles Burst”, among many others), I think they've even invented a new genre: tabloid rock.
My favorite song of theirs is probably “Blood and Rockets”, but “Amethyst Realm” is a close second.
“As a Facebook user, I want to have my personal information stored and utilized in very specific ways so that I can be manipulated into attempting to dismantle democracy.”
For those who don't get the joke, user stories are used in software development to describe features that should be added to applications. They describe the features concisely, but they are also supposed to be written from the point of view of someone who would want that feature (“As a… I want… so that…”). In practice, however, most user stories are written to add some feature that some manager wants, even though no reasonable human being would ever want such a thing. In those cases, the user stories sound extremely awkward. Another might be, “As a user, I want to pay more for the software so that the company can make it better over time.” That's the basis of the “Shit User Story” humor. It's funny because it's all to easy to imagine some product manager at Facebook actually writing this.
Apparently, Dan Nigro, who I saw twice around 2004 with As Tall as Lions at the fun but ill-fated Downtown in Farmingdale, who joked on stage about being from “Massapequa Pawk,” is now one of the world's biggest pop music songwriters. That's kind of inspiring. He probably didn't end up where he thought he would, but he still ended up doing good work he seems to love.
I think a former coworker named Brandon claimed to have signed As Tall as Lions, or at least worked on their management team in some capacity. I don't remember exactly. Small world, though.
ATAL was pretty great. I didn't like them at first, but they grew on me over time. I especially loved their self-titled album and “Goodnite, Noises Everywhere”. I also wrote about “Maybe I'm Just Tired” in an earlier blog post about playlist functionality.
“Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.”
—Jaron Lanier in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
I was pretty excited recently to speak with a customer support agent who knew the NATO phonetic alphabet. Finally, some clarity! With a last name like mine, it really helps.
If I were king for a day, I'd address many of those little annoyances we face every day by requiring that everyone…
On my second day, maybe I'd mandate Unix line endings and outlaw feedback requests. We'll see.