Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 81
November 8, 2012
Big Quote
“The best” isn’t necessarily a product or thing. It’s the reward for winning the battle fought between patience, obsession, and desire. It takes an unreasonably long amount of time to find the best of something. It requires that you know everything about a product’s market, manufacture, and design, and that you can navigate deceptive pricing and marketing. It requires that you find the best thing for yourself, which means you need to know what actually matters to you.
—Dustin Curtis
November 4, 2012
More Things, November 4, 2012
Land of the Free by Chris LaBrooy
Now the collection is boundless. The space near infinite. Every single item collected is plugged into the network. And so that self—that idealization—suddenly flows fast and far. It touches other selfs, other idealizations. It can be reconstituted by data mappers. What a strange thing to think: It can be reconstituted by data mappers. But it’s true.
According to our December 2011 national survey, Americans under age 30 are more likely than older adults to do reading of any sort (including books, magazines, journals, newspapers, and online content) for work or school, or to satisfy their own curiosity on a topic. About eight in ten say they read for these professional or educational reasons, more than older age groups. And about three-quarters of younger Americans say they read for pleasure or to keep up with current events.
It’s easy to share, to broadcast, to put our selves and our tastes and our identity performances out into the world for others to consume; what feedback and friendship we get in return comes in response to comparatively little effort and investment from us. It takes a lot more work, however, to do the consumption, to sift through everything all (or even just some) of our friends produce, to do the work of connecting to our friends’ generalized broadcasts so that we can convert their depersonalized shares into meaningful friendship-labor.
The idea that humans need stories is as intuitive as it is obvious—we don’t need a good neurologist to tell us the human animal craves narrative and structure to organize the chaos of real life. We need story—but do we need Story, with a capital S?
October 29, 2012
October 26, 2012
October 19, 2012
The Ring
I proposed to my girlfriend of six years a few weeks ago. She said yes. I posted a picture of her holding the ring, and we've done our best to show everyone that we could. This week, the ring is in the shop getting sized, so a few people couldn't see it. In case you're wondering, here's what it looks like close-up:
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Squarespace and Tumblr
Squarespace has a built-in Send-to-Tumblr feature. It's located in "social" on the top-right menu of the post area. I don't quite like how it works, however. It will send the photos from a blog posts, but not the words. This is bad.
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this is the thing I'm not terribly happy with.
Lately, I've been using IFTTT to push content, using the "link" area. There's no Squarespace integration with IFTTT as of yet, so I send a feed to Tumblr, and alter the recipe like so:
[image error]It looks fine on my actual Tumblr page, but most people who read me on tumblr use the dash, which unfortunately looks like this:
[image error]This makes sense, because if you click "edit" you'll see this:
[image error]I'm going to keep playing with IFTTT to see if there's a better way. If anyone else knows a better way of sending Squarespace content to Tumblr, please let me know.
