There is nothing harder than naming a band.

The single biggest reason that I'm not playing in a band right now, aside from the fact that I live in a musical dead-zone, is that I don't ever want to name a band again. 

via Eric via Retroberry

Roger Ebert on His Rules for Twitter

Roger Ebert, back in 2010:

My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting.

Via Daring Fireball

The Hummer Saw its Shadow—6 More Years of Recession.

I spotted this H2 out for a drive a few weeks ago. It seems like it's been a few years since I'd last seen one. But I've noticed more and more of them on the road since then, returning from the dark recesses of McMansion garages where they've been slumbering since 2008. Clearly, someone forgot the double-tap to the head. 

There's no "too soon" for a Hummer owner. It must take some big brass ones to dust off the harbinger of the end of Western Civilization to take it for a spin. But no one ever confused conscientiousness, nuance and empathy with traits that would be found behind the wheel of GM's answer to the M1 Abrams Battle Tank. So move your ass out of the way, recession, America's riding shotgun and we've got ass-kicking to do  ... or ...  groceries to get. And we might need to pick the kids up at the rec center while we're out.  

Walking Dead: What happens after the zombie apocalypse stops being interesting?

This has been a weird season for The Walking Dead. Come to think of it, so was season 2. The show has always been full of annoying characters. Especially the women. Terrible. And they keep finding more of them. But the awe of an epic zombie apocalypse helped to offset all of that. 

Image via fanpop.com

During season two, I joked about it being a zombie show without any zombies. Then during a panel about writing for video games at SXSW, one of the panelists was describing the zombies in the Walking Dead video game as being like the weather. More of something that happened than any kind of focal point or target or objective. Which was an interesting way to look at it. 

Though on the show I’m not sure they are even that important anymore. In season three, no one is scared of them unless tied to a chair. They’ve gotten used to it. Desensitized. Corpses are just wandering around here and there, mostly in the background with the rest of the vegetation. And if one gets in the yard coud you please just punch a hole in its head? And make sure to pull that weed in the road while you’re out there.  

Really, the walkers on the Walking Dead have just become a nuisance. Like having rodents in the yard or coyotes in the holler. And what I’ve realized from this experiment in making a TV series about the zombie apacalypse is that on a long enough timeline, a show about zombies will eventually just be a show about people. And if your characters are annoying, it’s going to get difficult for everyone. Scary even.  

A little something for every deck you do this year...

RIP Google Reader—A Big "Hey Thanks" for Breaking my Internet

I was only going to post this dumb picture in regards to Google shutting down Reader, mostly because I'm supposed to be working. But this news is really bad news for me. It's been such a part of my workflow for as long as I can remember, and with iPad clients like Mr. Reeder, RSS really hit its stride for me. And that's what's going to make it hard to find a replacement. G-reader plugs into the entire internet. Between the IFTTT recipes I have set up and the 15 or so apps that I hook up to it, this is going to make it much harder to spam my friends with articles about quantum physics.  I doubt there's anything anyone can do about it, but now I have even more reason to hope that Glass is a flop. Jerks.

On creation...

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.” – Mark Twain

Ad-free Natives

This might matter in a few years...

The psychology of procrastination. Maybe I'll write about it later...

Thanks to Wesley Crusher for helping me understand why I'm so bad at keeping this blog updated...

It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.

Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.

— David Cain, ‘Procrastination Is Not Laziness’

Via WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR

How Not to Fail

This thing is great.

How to (not) Fail from Martin Weigel

Like most great advertising decks/books/talks/blog posts, it takes what we already suspect and does a good job of articulating it, backing it up and bringing it to life. In this case: brands don't matter in people's lives, they aren't paying attention, they won't ever be devoted to one brand, so you need to make interesting things to get their attention.

There's a lot to love here. But my favorite slide is the one where he quotes Paul Adams from Facebook:

Heavy "immersive" experiences are not how people engage and interact with brands ... Heavyweight experiences will fail because they don't map to real life.

I'm going to suggest having this tattooed on the back of everyone's eyelids at new hire orientation.

(via Phil)

Awkward Teenage Years Airlines

Flying to Dallas last week, I had one of those flights where you pay for all of those lucky breaks enjoyed throughout the travel year, like vacant middle seats, random upgrades, and arriving early. The flight was delayed 45-minutes after we boarded because they had to take all of the cargo off and then out it back on. Also: I was (un)lucky enough to be completely surrounded by 50 or 60 girls from a middle school travel soccer team. It's the sort of thing that would happen in a headache medicine commercial. Except it was five and a half hours long.

It would be difficult to pretend that it didn't transport me back into the horrors of being 13. The cool girls all had a row to themselves. Then there was the one who was just on the edge of being in the cool group sitting one the row behind. She kept trying to talk to the cool girl in seat C one row up, who answered only with monosyllabic dismissal. I'm sure that uncool girl was trying to work out in her head why they always seemed nice to her when hanging out alone, but were completely awful when the whole clan got together. I'm sure she'll be the one driving the others to parties in a few years.

I was struck by the sheer amount of painfully bad decisions and long years that lay ahead of them.

But I was also struck by the fact that I was in a middle seat with a 70-pound little girl sitting in the window seat and another in the aisle seat. They didn't even take up the whole seat pad. It was like flying with really loud Smurfs. At least half of the group could've shared one seat. Meanwhile, my adult sized frequent-flyer self was stretched from armrest to armrest. Hardly seemed fair.

So at the risk of being called a fascist, I'd like to propose a new seating regulation: we need to start seating the smallest people in middle seats. Everyone would be more comfortable. Small people don't touch the sides of their seats anyways. It's just good, common, fascist, sense. It's only a matter if time before they start stacking us like chords of wood, anyways, so we might as well enjoy the time we have left.