If you fail, says Watanabe, you will stay in limbo, which means spending the rest of your life developing dynamic solutions for leveraged market-driven global enterprise frameworks across downstream cross-platform industry. If you succeed, I will help you return to your former career as an independent boutique retailer of imported artisanal tapenade.

— So funny in a strange way, even though I loved Inception: Christopher Nolan’s Implementation

I remember playing with my dad’s CDs when I was tiny, and then at school we’d put our projects on to CD-Rs to take home. But I never really owned any— by the time I was getting into music nobody bought them.

— An article about the CD revival of the 2020s. (via The Null Device)

Which I’m actually unsure if it’ll ever happen. It seems plausible at first, but unlike vinyl the compact disc is actually quite a sophisticated and unstable media. It’s unlikely many discs will survive into the 2020s, let alone players in good working order (this is why you’ll never see a Lomography-style revival of late 90s VGA digital cameras). I think CDs will instead go the way of the floppy disk or the VHS tape: charming pieces of retro plastic.

When in doubt, wear black.

— Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-Up Men (via Lifehacker).

I have the same problem the writer of this article had: no pressure at all to dress up. Which all fine when you’re in your twenties and don’t work in a bank. But now that I’m past thirty, even though I don’t intend to start wearing a suit, I think I should start dressing a bit more like my age. So that I don’t become one of those sorry middle-aged fools who dress like they’re not.

Anyway, nice to see I got the dark colors part right.

314. If your art is bad, make it bigger.

— 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son also offers photographic truisms.

As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it – or at least that has been the case for most of its history. What else can we expect from a framework in which the most pregnant moment in the story has for decades been the commercial break […] ?

— David Simon on why he created The Wire (The Times Online) is a great, fifteen page read.

For the last few days I’ve been watching the series back-to-back again and I’m sure The Wire shows television can indeed be a medium for serious storytelling. There are fortunately many other examples of good television throughout its history, but perhaps not as often as it happens in cinema. But I have no doubt in my mind The Wire is surely among the five best pieces of moving image art I have ever seen, besting the best of movies. If you consider its five seasons as a 3000 page, five volume script, it’s perhaps the best piece of writing ever done for an audiovisual medium. Every piece matters as Lester says, and the way everything fits in the end is a thing of true beauty.

While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the hipster – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

— Adbusters calls the ‘hipster’ The Dead End of Western Civilization (via Drive-by Blogging).

I may not agree on this overly dramatic tone, as hipsterism must be seen as something aligned with the fact that in a way Art History stopped somewhere in the late 70s. So, in the same way postmodernism means there are no longer vanguardists fighting both the art market and the previous vanguards, youth subversion too became postmodern, ceasing to truly exist.

I don’t even think hipsters exist. There might just be too many obnoxious douchebags, overgrown tweens caught in a loop of consumerism, peer pressure and a fix for vacuous praise, for as long as their parents can support that. Most will hit head-on against a brick wall after college, when faced with poor salaries and a job economy much worse than the economy that gave their parents material progress and enough of a surplus to generate their hipster douchebag children in the first place. Others will be lucky and have enough money to continue being obnoxious douchebags for the rest of their lives.

Same as it ever was.

892: Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney strapped the head of a defeated foe to his leg, the tooth of which grazed against him as he rode his horse, causing the infection which killed him.

— The Wikipedia’s List of unusual deaths, ranging from the funny and stupid to the appaling and gruesome. Some are all that. (via The Null Device)

It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences.

— Tim Kreidler - The Referendum. There are so many quotable sentences in this article, I just picked one. I may be still thirty, but totally identify with the writer - and the fact that Portugal is still a conservative society doesn’t help either. (via Kottke)

‘If you look at the studies into paternity, even conservative figures show that between eight and 15 per cent of children haven’t been fathered by the man who thinks he’s the biological parent.’ ‘Women are better liars because they’re more psychologically sophisticated,’ says Dr Holmes.

— Via psychobabble: A study shows women cheat more often, but are better at lying about it. Yes, it’s a bit of ‘science reporting’ from the Daily Mail so take it with a very heavy grain of salt. But still, both the writer and the schlimazl in me revel in this kind of news. In related ‘news’, talking to attractive women renders men temporarily less inteligent. Again, it’s ‘science reporting’ from the British press so proceed with caution, but on the other hand - oh! duh!

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries.

— Erich Fromm (via psychotherapy)