trenchant.org

— “i wanted to play the best visual hack and the best aural hack of super mario bros. at the same time”

I don’t know exactly why I want a Fisher-Price style NERV base, but I do.

My relationship with RSS is complicated.

In violation of the self imposed site regulations the following material was posted elsewhere on the internet earlier this week by me. It’s ok you didn’t miss much.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Failure

I know Scott Pilgrim bombed at the box office, and honestly, I know it probably deserved to given how inaccessible the movie was to like, every possible demographic and how they gutted the actual romance and character development of the comics and instead just focused on CRAZY ACTION WHOOHA but can we all just agree to love Scott Pilgrim still anyway? Here, have some awesome animated gifs from the video game.

Mathowie, Big Time Blogger

I want this on a shirt.

I Want To See That Movie

dakotasmith: SMITH AND WIGGIN
dakotasmith: it’s a movie about how i think will smith and i are brothers dakotasmith: and in a cop buddy movie
dakotasmith: staring wiley wiggins
dakotasmith: as me

— then me and will smith throw a CRAZY PARTY

Andre Torrez -

A rough recounting of what I wanted:

1. Make money (duh)
2. Like and respect the people I work with
3. Really enjoy my day and feel like I got something done
4. No pointless meetings
5. Making something I’m proud of

I follow a few VCs on Twitter and have talked to even fewer in person. While they have all been extremely kind, thoughtful, and blindingly smart, I came away from any those interactions thinking “I don’t see their money benefiting me for anything I want to do” and so I haven’t pursued that route any further.

I’m on vacation and visiting my family, and I realized that actually everything is sort of a vacation now since I do my own… stuff.

Although I haven’t really been making anything this week, so it’s something of a vacation from that.

I am really happy with the last two things I made - mail me daily and imagesoak - but I am also really happy teaching puppies how to swim.

What’s the difference between the Google/Verizon network proposal and a joint proposal from a fox and a rat on henhouse regulation?

One is from bloodthirsty predators you can’t trust and the other is a figment of your fucking imagination.

After using it for a few days, I’ve concluded that Flipboard is designed for people that want to “read” but are annoyed with words getting in the way.

That sounds insulting but it’s actually a rather brilliant insight.

The blind spot people had when trying to understand the iPad was focusing on features and use cases instead of use contexts.

has this ever happened to you

“No, art like that view to corrupt thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What?! I just wrote about that last week. On my website.”

“…uh yeah. I mean, I guess I missed that one.”

Uhoh, Your Friends Don’t Read Your Website

You spend hours “blogging” or creating projects or whatever and then the next time you see your “IRL” friends they have no idea what the hell any of it is.

Because they aren’t like, total nerds.

Isn’t there a better way?

RSS

“Hey, my site has an RSS feed! You can just subscribe to updates and then you won’t forget to check it.”

“What the hell is RSS?”

“It’s like, an XML format originally for site syndication that allows you to get updates in a feed reader.”

“What does any of that mean?”

“You know, honestly, I don’t even know anymore.”

Email

“Ok, never mind that. Can you read email?”

“Like, Facebook Mail, or regular email?”

“I refuse to dignify that with an answer. Just enter your email address here to subscribe and you’ll get an email when I update.”

Happy Endings

“You shouldn’t eat cheese fries.”

“Huh?”

“You wrote about eating cheese fries. I got an email about it! That’s unhealthy! Think of all the choleserol!”

“…”

Make RSS So Easy It Disappears

So that’s the concept behind mail me daily, which I launched last week in alpha.

I’m trying to make rss and subscription so easy it disappears for publishers and readers.

If you’d like to try adding it to your site to help your readers “subscribe” to your site’s RSS feed by just entering an email address, let me know.

My latest random hack is called “endless i/o”

It’s a folder that sits on my Mac’s desktop. Anything I drag to it shows up a few seconds later on this blog thing.

It’s stupid but it’s currently my Favorite Thing Ever. I may clean it up and release the code sometime but it’s more of a “stupid python and Applescript tricks” than a real application right now.

Oh also “people” are now allowed to try the experimental version of 4uhm.

Testing the widget version of mailmedaily.com’s rss to email subscription

And by testing I mean… you should subscribe. Or don’t! That’s fine too.

subscribe by email to trenchant.org using mailmedaily which is this thing that I made and is in testing.

Subscribe to web sites and get one email every morning with the updates.

That’s it.

It’s RSS for people who don’t ever want to know what RSS is. And people who don’t like RSS and don’t want to deal with another inbox. And also people who love RSS but love email. I’m not sure. We’ll see how it goes. I’m liking it so far.

“Not productive? I read Scott Pilgrim Volume 6 twice and did laundry and made cheese fries. If that isn’t productive then…”

“That isn’t productive.”

“I know.”

“So you can only update the portfolio in increments of 2. Seems inconvenient.”

“It just means each project needs to have a b-side. And that’s good. Everything should have a b-side.”

• Flying Jelly Attack · The Mr. T Experience
• Mood is Right (Migs and Jelly Mix) · Gigi
• How Some Jellyfish Are Born · Yo La Tengo
• King Jelly Bean · The Dakota Smith

Things are actually pretty nice but sometimes I feel like I’m just a few missteps away from becoming hikkomori.

Stuff I’ve made recently but haven’t released (widely)

• An art experiment that encrypts what you type in real time into colored dots
• 4uhm, which is a group blog/image discuss board thing that basically nobody is allowed to use ever but you can Oatestache posts
• A thing sort of like 4uhm that is superinstant and more like disposable chatrooms and defaults to everyone being called ‘anonymouse’
• Dead simple email subscription to any web site prototype
• Endless Inkwell, which I use to manage this website

It’s nice to be able to prototype things quickly and see where they take me. I don’t know if any of them will grow up to be real products yet.

Stop the flow and tell me what’s on.

These are three images send from cellphones from friends of mine to an email account I forgot I had (my full name instead of amathes at whatever) and never check.

I saw them for the first time today and they brought me a lot more joy due to the accidental multi-year delay.

Ben is an Austin Bar Patron.

The end of the Peel recording sessions.

Bryan, Ben and Katie flipping me off, apparently.

Look, some of us are trying to make art we don’t understand, ok?

It’s part of a process.

Young Person’s Guide To History was shown again July 4 and it makes me want to watch The World of Franklin & Jefferson again. On hallucinogens.

I’ve lost a little bit of weight recently.

My expertly crafted three step plan to weight loss:

1. Quit your job where there’s food everywhere at all times
2. Eat oranges
3. There is no step 3!

One day I’m just going to add a heart to every entry that you can click.

♥

It will thank you and that’s all.

It brings me great joy that Paul Robertson and crew are working on this

I recently read the first five volumes of Scott Pilgrim in a day and then was very upset that nobody had told me that volume 6 wasn’t out yet.

If your company is responsible for an ecological disaster on its way to billions in profits by raping public lands, then it is a crime against humanity to pay for and run this ad.

Also, negatively impacting British pensions by devaluing BP is a reasonable non-violent response to the sacking of Washington in 1814.

· · ·

Program note: for the first time in many years, the trenchant.org homepage is a “blog” style rendering of trenchant daily entries. The previous spliced multicolumn edition is available at /recent/ for those that miss it.

The Claw, Stanford Graduation Weekend 2010

“Dude, how long are we going to follow that frog?”

“I just really want to see him put on that crown!”

— Adventure Time, Witch’s Garden

“I’ve worked at Google for several years, and I’m often fascinated by the differences in internal perception of our products and external perception.”

— Patrick Blogs for Curious People - Google services ranked by Google Trends

(I may have been a bad influence on Patrick.)

The recent upgrade to a MacBook Pro with solid state drive has made me acutely aware of noise from other computers.

(When I turn on the Alienware machine to play a game, I have to hope the sound effects will be loud enough to drown out the fan noise.)

· · ·

The thing about great products is that they can make the flaws in everything else so much more apparent.

— The essence of Harvest Moon captured by Paul Havell

Over the past five years I’ve fractured my publishing across a variety of different tools and sites, leaving the simplicity of the “one something a day on my own domain” behind.

This, I now realize, has been a huge mistake.

2001

Back in 2001 there was trenchant.org daily and that was it.

On a daily basis I will put one small bit of something on a web page here.

At some point I added a photos section that nobody cared about.

Then Shit Happened

By 2010 I was posting to:

Flickr, for all photos. This basically removed the occasional “good” digital photograph as entry type on trenchant.org in 2005.

Tumblr, for “blogging.” This subsumed the “extended quote” and “random image” entry types on trenchant.org in 2007.

Delicious, for links, sometimes. (Single small links without commentary were never much of a staple of the site though.)

Twitter, for lots of unedited short stuff.

This left essays and longer text content to trenchant.org/daily

The whole thing was spliced together at trenchant.org

The Olden Days

In the olden days, trenchant daily just used to do all of these things.

That was better, in the sense that I liked it more, and worse, in the sense that centralized services have done a better job of establishing “audience” - mostly due to the fact that they actually figured out how to make subscription and identity sensible and easy while the rag-tag bunch of decentralized RSS nerds didn’t.

But whatever, fuck audience (not you, you’re great, please keep reading!) and I’ve had enough of these giant web services and the idea of “user generated content” or whatever. I could auto-cross-post but that would be a dick move.

The other thing is that these web services provided targeted tools for specific content types, and just generally removed friction from the publishing process. I’ve mostly replicated the parts of that that I think are important in my own publishing system now, so hopefully that shouldn’t be an excuse.

The most important thing any person can do in this world is get back to their blog. In my opinion.

New Regulations

And as of 2010 it’s ok to say I blog, so, I’m getting back to it again.

The new new is going to be:

• trenchant daily, for basically everything textual, bloggish, and pictorial that is Good
• Flickr will house other photographs
• Tumblr will be used for the sort of crap that used to be on Twitter, as a dirty pleasure, sometimes.
• Twitter will be used only when I’m pooping.
• Online discussion will be with pre-approved parties only.

This is a promise from me to you.

(I haven’t decided what to do with the front page yet, but it’ll probably change soon.)

http://www.wearehelsinki.fi/no-talk-just-design/

Bryan Boyer, my friend the design genius.

It’s important to have the tools with the right affordances.

Quieter, slower, more precise tools.

That’s what I’m trying to do.

“Later this year we’re all going to try to figure out which of the bloggers from 8 years ago started blogging again first. Adam might think it is himself, but he doesn’t count because he never really stopped.”

— Dakota Smith

Related: I think blogging is now sufficiently old and replaced with hipper things that it is now “retro” cool so you can now say I blog without me yelling at you like I would 5 years ago.

Also related: trenchant.org/daily now shows more than one entry at once, and you can keep scrolling for more. Indefinitely, until your browser crashes or you reach 2001.

“there’s more or less only renaud and i making the game. and we’re trying to make it good. we’re taking the time it takes. while we do that (and trust me that’s all we do), we dont want to spend time making trailers, or writing blog posts. we’re not interested in development transparency, we’re interested in development, period.

also, fez is a game about exploration and discovery. unlike every other game out there we’re keeping our cards very close to our vest. you’ve only seen maybe 5% of what the game has to offer in terms of art styles, mechanics and environments, we want you to have a LOT of surprises when playing fez, we did not want to, and could not sustain close to 3 years of press and media releases.”

— http://polytroncorporation.com/?p=762

I’m in one of these phases were I hate the internet and love the internet equally and in opposite ways that will either be instantly understandable or impossibly obscure, and aren’t worth explaining.

I haven’t written here because I have a new publishing system that I haven’t flipped the deployment switch on and thus hesitate to put things here.

You’d love the new system, internet audience in my head that is a combination of a 80’s teen movie high school class in a gymanisium, synthetic humanoid robots from the future that love vector graphics video games, and people looking at the web with Netscape 3. You’d just love it.

I haven’t tweeted because that shit needs to stop.

With each experience we leave something of ourselves behind.

I visit my parents more often now.

dakotasmith: you just went idle
dakotasmith: i am the mayor of our friendship
Adam Mathes: you are the mayor mccheese
Adam Mathes: of this friendship
dakotasmith: i have a burger
dakotasmith: for a head
dakotasmith: want to eat a burger?
dakotasmith: is that weird?
dakotasmith: because that is the world i live in.
dakotasmith: no, eat a burger
dakotasmith: that is fine
dakotasmith: don’t think about that my head is a burger
dakotasmith: and what, if any, may the implications be
dakotasmith: upon the existence of burgers

kubelet #42 and early results of another project.

kubelet: a selection of six small squares of significance to someone

Small things to start are OK.

How I work, April 2010 edition.

Would the web be better if every visit started out like that?

That’s the fundamental question behind Facebook’s launch of ‘Instant Personalization.’

More accurately, would the web be more profitable if Facebook just automated your response to that. All the time. Anytime anyone asked.

While investors in Facebook competitors nervously pull out their social networks and new APIs and see whose is bigger, and then put theirs away in shame and say it’s about how much it grows over time, they’re all just missing the point.

Facebook’s semantic web RDF-reborn-as-JSON centralized social web circle-jerk open graphing calculation is mostly a distraction.

The real possiblities - and by that I mean [cash|money|prizes] - is the demographics information, all the seemingly inane profile data, made available to other companies to personalize their site the second you show up.

Knowing who your “friends” are was cool in 2005 to “bootstrap” / spam them about the latest web site they didn’t want to use, but now it’s 2010 and knowing your age, sex, location, and musical tastes helps to sell sugar water more effectively so this time it matters.

My Yahoo Or Yours?

Like most things people talk incessantly about on the web, personalized web services are nothing new. The difference is back in the olden days web sites would have to convince you to give them personal information and that was something sort of scary!

A decade later, we’ve all already turned over that personal data to a social network in exchange for an ever increasing acquaintance counter and a greener fake farm.

Progress.

And now Facebook has a great deal for you. They’re going to do you a favor by giving that data to web sites you visit. Without asking you.

Cookie Monster Also Likes Fruit

HTTP and the web were designed stateless. In non-computer-ese, this means the underlying way the web works has no idea of who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing. This is great when serving physics data at CERN but not for other applications.

I mean, how are you going to have a shopping cart without state? You can’t have an ecommerce revolution without shopping carts!

Some company that cared a lot about shoping carts realized that wasn’t enough and when they released their web browser in 1994 included support for cookies, which was some little technology they invented to add state to the web.

People freaked out, but why worry? Site A can not access cookies sent to your browser by Site B.

But, and here’s the evil genius part, what if Site A could read Site FB?

Start With The Really Evil Companies First, Then The Rest Will Seem Decent

I mean, how are you going to have a personalized site without instant access to personal data? You can’t have a revolution in personalized social commerce experiences without instant access to ever-present demographic targeting data!

And that’s just what Facebook has done, through some evil technical genius to subvert the structure of the web.

As of this writing, Facebook is helpfully providing your information without permission upon a visit to sites from Microsoft - the largest convicted monopolist in the software industry guilty of both antitrust violations and a criminal lack of taste, Yelp - the LiveJournal for depressed people with credit cards that allegedly runs a mafia style “service” business to extort owners with bad reviews, and Pandora - a company I don’t know anything about but I’m fairly certain you can’t trust anyone who works with the big record companies unless they’re Steve Albini.

My ground-breaking theory is: if you’re a giant company and run a web site, you can probably make more money if you know age, sex, location, and other data about your user instantly.

The corollary to this theory is: if you’re a giant company that is not one of the above mentioned three companies, you will therefore be willing to pay money to Facebook to get access.

Not to make a ridiculous sounding logical fallacy-filled slippery slope argument, but we’re literally only minutes away from this:

You: Can you recommend me a movie?

Netflix: What movies do you like? Don’t answer that, we already know, and we’re recommending you stop watching Fight Club so much, it appears to raise your blood pressure according to your doctor.

A company built on a foundation of non-verbal poking as flirting and repurposing innocent photos as masturbation fodder in the privacy of the sheltered elite college bubble is now poised to pawn off your carefully crafted profile to whatever web sites you visit.

But don’t worry - you’ll have so many better targeted recommendations of stuff to put in your virtual shopping cart you won’t even want to take the time to opt-out of the system and block each individual application.