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March 20, 2018 / 0 Comments

Another Day

“I used to scream when a whisper would do.”

— Jamie Lidell


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It’s weird to have your birthday in 2018, the day of significant revelations about Facebook and privacy and bad actors in the 2016 American Presidential Election. We recognize birthdays now with posts on social media. I got a few texts, a voice mail, an audio message, several tweets and IG DMs and a hundred notes on the Facebook.

I received one physical card this year. It didn’t come through the mail.

I’m not complaining; this is just the way we are now.

Okay, maybe I’m complaining.

I’m complicit in this. At the beginning of each year for probably a decade now, I’ve had designs on a physical calendar filled with the birthdays I want to acknowledge. Each month, I would take the first weekend and write cards. I’d adorn a stamp, visit the post office, and do the smallest thing: send a note. Whatever the message, I would intend to convey this idea

“I appreciate that we exist at the same time and know each other.”

Instead, I’ve already had to issue Happy Belateds over text message and probably forgotten a few altogether.

Your birthday is what you make it, though. 43 years of waking in the morning and I can count my most memorable birthdays: London. New Orleans. SXSW. SXSW. The poppies. Circus Circus. I often say and mostly believe that my best birthdays have been in a strange city, by my lonesome, doing something unusual. I don’t want people making a fuss.

Correction: I don’t want people making a big fuss.

Without Facebook, few would have made a note of my existence today.

It would have been any other day.

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With Facebook, it mostly felt like that anyway.

Except with more emojis.

November 1, 2015 / 0 Comments

A list of things I’m doing while my wife is away being awesome

 

 “I just can’t wait to get you home with me.” – Tuxedo, Get U Home

Tiffany is off to Washington DC for a few months doing good works. She’s been doing cool shit all year (ed. note: Have you bought CSS Master yet? Stop reading right now and improve your code life) but this is the first time she’s left for an extended period since our union.

It’s only been like three days but dang. The house is too quiet. Time has slowed down. And, I need projects.  

Yesvember

Kid President tweeted this just this morning, and I’m on board.

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  • Say yes to invitations, requests for my company, requests for my service, and the like. When in doubt, Say Yes.

Things to which I have already said yes:

    21 Day Challenge

    I’m focusing on my fitness y’all. The eight or so people that actually watch my snaps with any regularity know I’ve been toying with a fitness challenge. I tried one at the beginning of October: a 30 day commitment that died on day 14 when my legs gave out. This month, I’m going to give it another go.

    • 21 Days of running or biking. At least 20 minutes. Preferably 30. No Days Off.

    I’ve also been wanting to try a meal service. I have proven over 40 years that I don’t really have the personal discipline to manage my own eating in a healthy manner and with Tiffany not here cooking regularly, the risk of lots of Chipotle and Popeye’s runs is high so…

    I just had some breakfast tacos. Not bad. Not bad at all.  


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    Netflix and Clones

    Derrick peeped me to this chronological list for viewing the animated series Star Wars:The Clone Wars which I’ve watched in bits & pieces over the years but never consistently. It’s been much more enjoyable this way.

    I also plan to finish Narcos and finally watch Amazon’s Transparent and then get immersed in Marvel’s Jessica Jones which looks even better than Daredevil which I very much enjoyed  

    Tool Time

    There are projects around the house that need tending. I’m going to make a list of them and…probably send them to our landlord. I’m not Fix-It Felix. I may do some re-organizing, though. Sorry, Tiffany.

    Reading List

    Books and everything in my Pocket. I cleared so much out of my backlog yesterday afternoon. I felt smarter and unburdened.

    Currently Reading

    On Deck

    Blogging

    Oh, and writing right here on this blog. Ideally, every day.

    Hi. 

    December 18, 2013 / 0 Comments

    Drunk on Beyoncé

    “I get filthy when that liquor gets into me.” – Beyoncé, Drunk in Love (feat. Jay Z)

    I’ve talked about little else other than this album since it released Thursday night. Beyoncé’s self-titled visual experience is worthy of all the acclaim and as people, like myself, have spent an inordinate amount of time listening to it over the last few days, the critical discussions have been interesting dealing with a wide variety of topics far more lofty than simply what is good music, what makes a pop star, and is non-marketing the new marketing.

    In the case of the first single, Drunk in Love, I got caught up in a facebook conversation  (of which I’m not going to quote others directly because it’s not a public thread) with Oliver Wang and some other knowledgeable music folks over Jay Z’s below average guest verse on the track. Specifically, the lines

    “Catch a charge, I might, beat the box up like Mike/Baby know I don’t play…I’m Ike Turner…now eat the cake Anna Mae.”

    — Jay Z

    Mia McKenzie of Black Girl Dangerous argues that this is a glorification of violence against women and pretty much indefensible. This seemed to be the take of those in our FB conversation as well. 

    I have a more forgiving take. Here’s what I said in the thread

    “I’m not here to defend the rhyme because it is pretty weak sauce but I think I get the POV. There’s a lot of drunken sexual aggression in the song as a whole and jay z’s rhyme furthers that reckless abandon. They are f’n up the fine art. He’s too aroused to remove her clothing. He’s “beating the box up like mike”. In the context of their relationship and this moment, he’s “in charge” and maybe because the power dynamics of their relationship are well understood and agreed upon by both parties, this metaphor, while lunk headed is part of their sexual role play. My less kind take is that on an album filled with moments of Beyoncé’s power and dominance, that’s his moment to express his own power in an ugly, mysoginistic way. I’d like to think its the former.”

    — me

    The retort from others is that there are lines that are hard to defend once crossed like Lil’ Wayne’s usage of Emmitt Till earlier in the year. I was going to respond in the thread but felt like this was now blog worthy, so, here I will say I struggle less with this particular Ike Turner reference than I do with Lil’ Wayne’s invocation of Emmitt Till or Rick Ross’s date rape line or Robin Thicke’s questionable wordplay earlier this year because of Beyoncé’s agency in the creation of this song, her music as a whole, in how she presents herself, and in her relationship with her husband. Perhaps without that context, I would find it more offensive but the imagery associated and the lyrical content of the song and the album as a whole diffuses it a bit for me. 

    Not just a bit. A lot. As me and Samhita Mukhopadhyay discussed later on twitter

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    I respect the idea, particularly in a week when we are revisiting the awful-ness that are R.Kelly’s aggressions against women, that we shouldn’t make light of domestic abuse and referring to myself as Ike Turner or threatening to “beat the box up” aren’t really part of my own bedroom playbook (but I’m terrible at dirty talk so what do I know. Also, I’ve said too much) but I’ve found it difficult to look at any parts of this album through anything other than Beyoncé’s POV. Even in this video, as her husband raps, it is she who stares into the camera. I read this as the night talk of two people expressing how they are drunk on each other. A love and lust so deep that statements and actions clearly inappropriate in mixed company are okay here. Desired even. In a relationship of equals you can get as nasty as you wanna be. Because the respect is a given.

    Jay Z and Beyonce are not only partners—they’re artists. They both seem to respect each other’s creative freedom and expression. I have to imagine that they’ve both done or said things in their music that the other doesn’t love, but if this is your spouse, the person you face the world with, aren’t you supposed to let them be an individual? Jay Z clearly supports Beyonce being her own woman and likewise, Beyonce respects her man. That’s not a ho conceding to her pimp. That’s adult understanding and compromise.

    -Kara Brown for Vice

    December 2, 2013 / 0 Comments

    Ephemera

    “Now she’s long…long gone.” – The Black Keys, She’s Long Gone

    When there are events in the world, the event and the conversation surrounding it unfold on Twitter, the entirety of the experience of that event can be much more rich and engaging and deep on Twitter…The challenge when you try to put these event experiences on Twitter in front of people is they need to both capture all the best tweets, you really want the best tweets so you don’t miss those, and yet if you only show the best tweets, you lose the roar of the crowd that really makes Twitter awesome.

    –Dick Costolo

    I’m at my mother-in-law’s house in Greensboro, North Carolina. We arrived last Monday after a red eye flight from Los Angeles. My internal clock was still adjusting. So, when 8pm rolled around—or whenever it is that Sleepy Hollow comes on, I DVR it at home so I really don’t know—I wasn’t watching. My twitter friends were, though. The running commentary in that moment was more frustrating  than entertaining as I wasn’t sharing the experience at the same time.

    I watched the episode a few days later via FOX’s iPad app. It would’ve been nice to be able to replay what my friends were saying when  they had watched it. But twitter isn’t built like that. Neither is facebook or most of our social web, for that matter.

    Most tweets have a lifespan of less than 30 minutes. A facebook post maybe an hour. Instagram limits how far back you can scroll into the past. So, if you’re not on those services right now and someone is writing/posting about something you care about, you’ve missed it. I’m sure this seems mostly okay in this digital world that we’ve been playing in over the last ten years.


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    This is a world where people willingly, perhaps gleefully, dump their history as they jump from service to service or account to account. But, I wonder. Maybe we go with this because we haven’t been given other options.

    Maybe this is why a service like Pinterest is performing so well. Pinterest provides the “river of news” but that’s not why people use it. People use it because its boards are memory books. You know what you post there will be easy to find later. It will be categorized. And everyone else is doing the same thing. Pinterest collects ideas, wants, and desires and stores them. You could use Tumblr in a similar fashion by searching tags or exploring an individual tumblog.

    But who is collecting and collating thoughts or images around a topic in an easily searchable, inherently social way? How do I relive the Jessie Ware concert I went to two weeks ago via all the pictures, videos, and tweets that I know were posted because I saw them getting created? I’ve tried to do this several times over the last 6 months and have always felt unsatisfied with the attempt.

    What about an important news event that happens while I’m sleeping or in a meeting? Why can’t I timeshift the social web like I can my favorite tv shows?

    We’ve made the modern web ephemeral and, in doing so, I think we’ve robbed ourselves of turning shared digital experiences into true memories that have meaning beyond those brief instances when we’re all tapping away at the same time. I hope the next wave of big digital ideas tackles this.

    It’s the kind of stuff I get excited about it in my own work conversations. 

    Projects like Thinkup make me think I’m not the only one.