Daniel O'Brien's Blog, page 13
February 3, 2016
This is a Full-Blown Life Highlight
Here is an interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the actual genius behind In The Heights and my current and probably all-time favorite musical Hamilton. The interview is about the Grammy nomination for Hamilton. At around 1:12, they cut to a bookcase and, assuming that’s Lin-Manuel’s bookcase, Lin-Manuel Miranda owns a copy of my book, How to Fight Presidents.
…which means Lin-Manuel Miranda has at the very least seen my name and at the very most read words that I wrote and (if I’m being greedy) laughed at at least a few of them. And, in summation, holyshitholyshitholyshit. (Special thanks to TheWomanIntheTanJacket for pointing this out.)
svengalia:
she protect them
In that first picture that’s not...
she protect them
In that first picture that’s not how Anakin and Obi-Wan’s hair are supposed to be for the situation being depicted, that’s the hair style they had in Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith but the time when Padme wore that outfit and had the gun was in Episode 2 Attack of the Clones and Obi-Wan’s hair should be longer and Anakin should have the shorter hair with that bullshit side-rat-tail and also he shouldn’t have a scar yet, this art is still very nice and I like its message and I didn’t like the prequels either but I am burdened with this knowledge and I don’t want anyone to change or do anything I think everyone’s the best at all times, including me which is why I’m celebrating myself by sharing the knowledge that I have, and if we’re nitpicking (which we’re never not) Anakin’s also wearing the wrong outfit for the situation.
February 1, 2016
hodgman:
Sorry, FineBros. I patented “Sad Head Shaking and...
Sorry, FineBros. I patented “Sad Head Shaking and Slow, Solemn Eye Closing, Not So Much Out of Apology, But Condescending Disbelief That You Don’t Understand How Awesome I Am” in 2009. SEE YOU IN COURT.
PS: All Bros can make money however they want. But when they called themselves “CREATORS” for pointing cameras at people watching culture that other people ACTUALLY MADE OUT OF NOTHING, I said a swear word. Out loud.
Call yourselves ENTREPRENEURS or even PRODUCERS; but dudes have 1 million hipster beanies full of gall to try that line.
John Hodgman!
January 29, 2016
January 27, 2016
sorenbowie:
cracked:
“Daniel hates his birthday and tries to...
“Daniel hates his birthday and tries to hide it from us so each year we try to punish him for that. This year we hired the a cappella group ScatterTones from UCLA to pose as another website coming in for a meeting on how to make their videos funnier. Dan was furious he had to attend. Additionally little-known fact, Dan used to be in an a cappella group whose name he still refuses to tell us.” — Soren
Every prank I play on Daniel is designed to make him angry and then immediately deny him a single legitimate place to unleash that anger. Some day he will have an ulcer and my job will be done.
I’ve never felt simultaneously angrier and more loved in my entire life.
But, Silly Soren, I got an ulcer when I was 16.
January 25, 2016
rosarioisabeldawson:
That time when I found out I was...
That time when I found out I was transgendered…?!
Super huge and impressive if true!
January 24, 2016
On The Job
Whenever I tell someone that I work at a comedy website with some of my closest friends, every single person has said “Man, that must just be the most fun place to work in the world, just a bunch of funny people, you must be cracking each other up all day.” And there is an element of that, but here is what the job is.
Harvard’s Teresa Amabile conducted a study a few years ago. Two groups were asked to produce a collage. One was told that whomever produced the most creative collage (as determined by a panel of artists and experts) would get some kind of financial reward. The second group was told to have fun.
By a wide margin, the people in the group told to have fun made the more creative and exciting collages. It wasn’t even close. Fun won.
“The expectation of a reward or evaluation, even a positive evaluation, squelched creativity.”
I work in a creative industry, but I work specifically in a managerial position in a creative industry, which has changed basically everything about the way I approach my own work and the work that I am in the best of times helping and allowing my employees to do and, in the worst of times, forcing them to do.
Amabile goes on to say “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and the challenge of the work itself— not by external pleasures.” And of course I feel that and I know that in my gut, but I also know I need my team to put out five videos every week, and if that number ever changes, it would only increase. I need my team to create their favorite things, and the things that they love, but I also need them to deliver consistently and on a deadline, and to ideally do it in a big, sterile office on a weekday morning. And this is a system where the only rewards I can give them when they succeed are financial, even though I know that financial reward is demonstrably not linked with better creative work. In an ideal world, when someone made a hit video I’d be able to say “Great job, take two months to work on whatever you want,” but in the real world we have to say “Great job, make more of that video, keep making that video and I will remember that when I do your performance review.”
The struggle between the manager part of my brain and the creative part of my brain, and the struggle between wanting to be an effective manager in my bosses’ eyes (by which I mean a person who hits his goals and makes the site money) and wanting to be an effective manager in my employees’ eyes (by which I mean a leader who gives them the space, time and support they need to be creatively ambitious) is something I think about every day.
On this subject, Jon Stewart says “Yeah, our morning meeting starts at nine. We have to pitch out our ideas– and in some ways that is the challenge of a show. It’s to create a factory that doesn’t kill inspiration or imagination. You try to create a process that includes all the aspects of a mechanized process that we recognize as soul killing while not actually killing souls.”
I don’t know how he did it (and the fact that he was still using the word “try” when describing this process in an interview in 2015 suggests that he doesn’t totally know either), but that’s what I want to do. In a lot of ways it means trying to reboot my brain every Monday. It’s about building a system that will churn out videos and then breaking that system the second it starts working and starting on a new one that feels fresh. In a sense, creating a system designed to trick our minds into thinking it isn’t a system.
Anyway. That’s just something I think about all the time every day.
January 20, 2016
tehawesome:
the fine folks at the coca-cola company made a...
the fine folks at the coca-cola company made a website where we can create our own gifs with their coca-cola logo on them, and the gifs we create are going to help the coca-cola people sell a lot of their beverage i’m sure
January 18, 2016
cracked:
“And Luke is literally magic!”
The Dark Secret Behind...
“And Luke is literally magic!”
The Dark Secret Behind Star Wars’s Goofiest Characters
I made this! Watch it!
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