“Don’t Touch This”
From GoodReader’s settings.
Probably the awesomest setting on my phone.
Someone should start a tumblr of just these sort of “don’t select this option” UI elements. I’d subscribe.
Source: merlin
Designers talk a good game about culture, but it is rare to see them address this critical deficit of the design-thinking model. As the Peter Arnell-Tropicana debacle shows, designers are sometimes still more interested in design culture than American culture. The designer can’t realistically talk about knowing culture unless this is made a systematic study, the object of a complete mapping. And I don’t ever hear the design community taking up this challenge. We can only imagine what design thinking could be if it put these things right.
Source: jeanphony
Mr. Bloomberg met daily with several deputies and commissioners, and as more business owners complained and editorials lampooned him as gutless, his patience wore thin.
This meme, of journalists describing elected officials (or, nonsensically, municipalities) as moving to dismantle these protests because their “patience wore thin” is particularly irksome. Because, and any competent editor/reporter should know this, the right to peaceably assemble isn’t subject to the “patience” of an elected official. To describe it this way is to accept that citizens are allowed in any public space only at the sufferance of their government, and at least for now in the U.S., that simply isn’t true.
(Police Oust Occupy Wall Street Protesters at Zuccotti Park - NYTimes.com)
(via theawl)
Source: The New York Times
Learning is not punishment. It is a reward. If it is made a punishment, you violate the fundamental sense of learning. You don’t learn by having your hands twisted. It should be a celebration. It is a celebration.
Co-signed
Courage is this thing that you dig out of a pit of shame, most of the time, I think.
I think courage is not this thing where you walk around - I mean, that’s the people who are full of crap, is the people who walk around acting all courageous and saying the right thing. I think the real courage is to be somebody incredibly broken who occasionally pulls it out. Like, that’s courage. Courage to me is somebody, like, who hits rock-bottom and manages to go to AA - like, that’s courage. Like, just, just, you know, protecting your brand and trying to look good about everything doesn’t take courage, it just takes a Facebook account.
That’s - you know, I think courage is a very interesting word, because each time that you’re courageous about something, I think, for myself, I’m fighting, like, every impulse I have to not be courageous.
Source: timemagazine
That’s what I call a polite interface.
Apple App Store reviews
Maybe the much-decried culture of entitlement in the reviews is in fact an expression of powerlessness…
The typical user feels pretty powerless around technology. The industry is run by large, faceless corporations that are usually almost impossible to get in touch with. Exhibit A: part of the popularity of Apple’s retail stores and online interactive support tools is that customers feel like they’re getting a direct line to Apple, or at least someone really smart who’s associated with Apple. But in general, computers have been so complicated for so long that it has become commonly practiced behavior to immediately admit fault or being “stupid with computers” the second anything goes wrong or even if someone don’t understand a new technology.
Maybe leaving these nasty reviews in the App Store is the first way a lot of people have felt any kind of power around technology in a really long time. If you felt personally repressed by a faceless entity that’s taken over and disoriented so many aspects of your life, wouldn’t you lash out at your first opportunity?
Sure, the internet anonymity factor is clearly at play, and I am in no way trying to justify the behavior. But perhaps a different perspective on the root of the problem can help us understand and combat it better, whether the solution comes from the community or ultimately Apple with some kind of a broad-sweeping policy or feature change in the store.
Source: chartier
I have this theory about modernism and fantasy, which I’ll do in 30 seconds.
They came into being at the same time, which is very interesting. They were both reactions to the disasters of World War I and the electrification of cities, and urbanization, and the rise of the automobile, the end of that twilight world of the Victorians. They both are reactions to that in different ways. Modernism went very inside and delved into the interior lives of people. Fantasy externalized all that in these fantastical, magical, metaphorical landscapes. I thought, “Well, what if you did both the inside and the outside at once?” I tried to combine those foci of fantasy and modernism into one kind of writing. It sounds like I’m writing a dissertation on my own work, but, you know, you end up thinking about what you’re doing. That’s the kind of thing I thought.So for me, massively influential are obviously James Joyce, another reinterpreter of Homer, and Virginia Woolf. My prose comes more from the Americans, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, rather obviously. The other influence is Evelyn Waugh. I don’t even know if Waugh is a modernist. He was writing at the time, but in a different mode. Brideshead Revisited is always super, super present in my work. I rely on most of my readers to never have read Brideshead Revisited, so they cannot see how much I am stealing from it. But I do urge people to go out and read it. It’s a hugely important source text for the 20th century, and is also an incredibly fun novel to read.
Are you standing in someone’s place? Do you perhaps owe them something for that space? Just a thought! When you walk down Horatio Street or St. Mark’s Place or Central Park West or Prospect Avenue, if you’re thinking about them, it can feel like someone has just run ahead and pulled down alongside you these fake scenic backdrops of the City. Like you’re actually walking down a little tight hallway in the middle of everything, and all these people are hiding behind them in the dark. You can almost hear the rustle; noise leaking through from the other side like it’s a weird, terrible surprise party, a bad dream. But no one wakes up with a gasp and neither can anyone ever jump out and yell.
