++good

I am Gavin, I tweet at @tamewhale. That is all.

Quote

1 year ago

"Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people who don’t like you have to admit it’s good."

- James Danziger (via kottke)

Quote

1 year ago

"
I mean, seriously. I’ve stood in several general areas on more than one occasion—and, yes, haters—I’ve been diligent about ALWAYS programmatically notifying the API of a web server as to a) where I’m standing, b) what I’m doing while I’m standing there, c) whether it involves eating (or waiting to eat) something, and d) whether the thing I’m eating (or waiting to eat) turns out to be more properly declaimed as “nom nom” or “fail.”

Duh. Okay? I get the personal responsibility aspects of thorough and consistent self-reporting.

But I guess I just feel like…what? I guess I just feel like why bother standing anywhere if programmatically notifying the API of a web server about it doesn’t inevitably lead to one of the computers eventually rewarding my careful standing-reportage by conferring the prestige, gratitude, and—yes—basic fucking human decency and respect that can only be accorded by triggering a ruby script that alters a small graphic on my phone.
"

- Merlin Mann - Communities Erect: Thoughts on the Intrinsic Value of Saying When You’re Standing Near Something

Quote

1 year ago | Notes: 200

"In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command."

- Nick Paumgarten: Up and Then Down.

Source: marco

Quote

1 year ago

"Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern."

- Eric Hoffer

Quote

1 year ago

"What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can’t, it’s just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV."

- Douglas Adams

A taxonomy for books

1 year ago

All books can be classified as

those that can be used as makeshift steps
having moved a reader to tears
in need of colour photographs
miscellaneous
those whose author has exhibited extreme political opinions
on the meaning of life
biography
having been hurled
written partly in an invented language
of interest chiefly to its own author
having a misleading title
coming to no conclusion

Inspired by the probably fictitious taxonomy of animals quoted or invented by Jorge Luis Borges, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’s Taxonomy.

Quote

1 year ago

"Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever."

- Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Source: liquidnight

Quote

1 year ago

"I love when I post something on Twitter and a bunch of people unfollow me. It delights me, because that is the sound of my audience getting better."

- Merlin Mann interviewed by Colin Marshall

Link

1 year ago

Intelligence is like a knife

Max Klein explains why being intelligent is not enough

Quote

1 year ago

"…everybody wants to belong to the current club. There’s safety in that, I suppose. And they want to show they’re smart enough to recognize what’s good, what’s “in.” They think being current, being fashionable is being new. And it’s really the opposite of new."