jcksn

surely content is king but there are better ways to present your content than this… it looks like a regular wordpress theme.

I’d be intrigued to know what those better ways to present this content are.

It looks like a WordPress theme because it is one.

WordPress themes spring from Blogger themes. Blogger themes sprang from what Dave Winer, Jason Kottke and I and some of our friends were doing on the web in the mid-1990s. (I also designed some of the default Blogger themes.)

So it makes sense that my blog would look like a blog, and that a retro redesign of my blog would look like a primordial blogging template. It’s a zag away from the modern trend of making blogs look like newspapers or Flash sites or movie posters or other things.

That trend is interesting and those design explorations by other people can really be wonderful and can push web design in new directions.

But that’s not what I’m doing here, as noted in the “blog post” that precedes these comments. What I’m doing here is resurrecting early blogdom, with modern typographical niceties made possible by better standards support in modern browsers—you’re welcome!

via Redesigned – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report.

why do i fall half in love every time i see one of these kinds of girls? my god.

via BONER PARTY.

Don’t lose faith in your inner fire.

via Twitter / Tim O’Reilly: There’s a lesson in the He ….

@robknight horse trainer’s advice: “take the time it takes so it takes less time” (slow down to speed up, etc.) Applies nearly everywhere!

via Twitter / Kathy Sierra: @robknight horse trainer’s ….

Paul Jenkins with a a reasonable take on Rick Warren speaking at the Obama inauguration:

Barack Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration is dreadful. His explanation is, if possible, even worse. He shrinks Warren’s grotesque comparisons down to a “disagreement,” as if we were talking about ethanol subsidies. But we are not. In fact, we are not even talking about marriage rights, we are talking about demonizing an entire group of Americans for the purpose of religious indoctrination, political gain and financial profit. Or doing so out of sheer hatred and idiocy. Or both.

via I am Matt Thomas » Regarding Rick Warren.

Billy Corgan is someone who I really thought understood “the album.” Siamese Dream, and Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness were both masterpieces. It’s a shame to see someone so in tune with “the album as an art form” would say stuff like this:

Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, lead singer Billy Corgan has sounded the death-knell on albums, saying: “We’re done with that. There is no point. People don’t even listen to it all. They put it on their iPod, they drag over the two singles and skip over the rest.”

Ye of little faith, Corgan – nobody would ever do that with the brilliant Siamese Dream, but Zeitgeist on the other hand…

Why are we killing ourselves?

Instead of creating ‘arty’ tracks for albums (read: fillers), Corgan has decided the good ol’ single is the way forward.

“The listening patterns have changed,” Corgan laments. “So why are we killing ourselves to do albums, to create balance and do the arty track to set up the single? It’s done.”

via No more Smashing Pumpkins albums – lead singer blames iTunes | News | TechRadar UK.

…Well, they have cemeteries, but not like this one. You see, they don’t have any wars…

via How-Dare-I.

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.

Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking

via Sara via Quote Details: Augusten Burroughs: I myself am made… – The Quotations Page.

From the man, the myth, and the legend, Hugh:

“The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee.
It permits a number of possible uses and each
designer can look for a solution appropriate to his
personal style. But one must learn how to use the
grid; it is an art that requires practice.”

Josef Müller-Brockmann

via The Grid System – “The ultimate resource in grid systems.”.

“A joyous racket of swirling atmospherics and percussive gunfire”

via Fuck Buttons – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

via Quotes: Heinlein – Specialization is for Insects.

Another thing is that most models are striking but not attractive. Attractive, I mean, in the literal sense of drawing people close: theirs is the kind of beauty you want to appreciate but not engage with.

via In Which Our Bones Protrude In All the Right Places « This Recording.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Banksy

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Albert Einstein

Dean Allen, as he has always been, is my hero:

…and third, that by any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks – unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about – must and shall be filtered out of view.

– Dean Allen

I almost fell off my chair, again, after reading that.

He who is tired of Weird Al is tired of life.

- Homer Simpson

It holds, it embraces. It’s “deep.”

Stephen Henault is a cool dude and a great blogger that I randomly stumbled upon. Here’s what he recently wrote:

“The cup” is deep. Seriously. Could the argument not be made that “the cup” is the defining invention that has lead us to all the great stuff we have now?

It’s the concept of the cup I speak of. Put stuff inside – and save it for later – to be pulled out on demand. Sounds kind of like my iPhone, my Macbook, my DVR, Batteries, etc. etc.

I’m probably oversimplifying, but in drinking this cup of coffee I have a new found respect for the dude/or gal who came up with the concept of “the cup”.

Deep! Eh?

A rich and hilarious take on the actual real life Wii Fit:

“With exciting titles like: roll the ball in the hole.” [via diveintomark

Weren’t video games supposed to be Matrix-esque by now, with jacks in the backs of our heads? All we’ve got is a plastic panel with sensors on it.

BTW: The music on this page, is super fresh. Just let it repeat… over and over again. ;)

I am a very busy and important man. I don’t need to tell you this. The shit I have to deal with every day would make your pubes turn white. Check it: While dictating that last sentence I did something complicated in Excel and pleasured my ex-wife the way that makes her cry and call her mother. OK?

Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven by Joshua Allen – The Morning News