- I wrote a thing for Motherboard about Twine, a computer program that makes it really easy for non-technical people to create choose-your-own-adventure-style games, and the scene of cool weirdos that has developed around it.
- You should get banned from the NBA for life if you lay it up during the All-Star game.
A great thing about the internet is that, instead of doing meaningful work or talking to friends, you can think of the most bankrupt phrases imaginable and use the greatest collection of knowledge in human history to see what the world has to say about them.
“For most of us, settling is an inevitability, not because of insufficient exposure to these bland admonishments but because, unlike Jobs, we do not know what great work really is —meaning, we lack confidence in any system of values or ideals, we cannot give ourselves wholly over to anything without doubt— or we cannot decide how much of ourselves or others we are willing to sacrifice. We want love and labor, freedom and meaning, flexibility and commitment.”
– When I read this part of Mills’ excellent essay on Steve Jobs’s monomania, a giant foam finger appeared on my hand and I started chanting his name. Then I started hurling embarrassing insults at Mills’ literary opponents from my eighteen-dollar seat in the internet’s bleachers.
In June 2008, when the Celtics won their most recent championship, I was working nights at a phone-survey call center along with a significant portion of Boston’s DIY music scene and a bunch of friendly, hard-drinking middle-aged ladies. Our office was roughly 100 yards from the TD Bank North Garden, and we had to walk by it in order to get to the 7-11 that served as the only affordable, fast place in the neighborhood to get some food during our short breaks. Almost every night, we were tempted to solicit the scalpers for Van Halen tickets or Bruins tickets or Celtics tickets instead of going back to work and calling Midwestern families to ask them what they thought of their homeowners insurance. It should go without saying that, despite it spawning nearly all of my funniest workplace memories, the job sucked really bad.
- I wrote the one-sheet for Colleen Green’s great new album. Here is that.
- I wrote a review of the new Barbaras collection. Here is that.
- Chris Bosh was mean mugging at the White House today. Here is that.
- Between that and Lebron mobbing that guy who hit the half-court shot and then apparently tweeting about being hung over the morning he had to go meet the president, my opinion of the big three-era Heat is at an all-time high.
Friend of the program Devon Maloney wrote a thing about the band Iceage today, and I was going to write a different thing about Iceage until things got shuffled around and now I’m not anymore, so instead of jogging this afternoon I organized some thoughts on the former and some thoughts that were originally going to find their way into the latter. Mostly: Iceage are getting really popular, and it’s weird, but not that weird.
Editor’s Note: This has been sitting in my drafts for months. It is a true story. I can’t remember what the other thing that happened was.
- Not long after eating lunch, I felt something amiss in one of my teeth. After picking at it, I managed to shake loose a small, hard piece of metal.
“Oh no,” I thought. “I’ve lost a filling.”
“Wait a minute,” I thought. “I don’t have any fillings.”
“Wait a minute,” I thought. “That’s a piece of foil from my burrito.”
“As an aesthetic document, Hotline is unimpeachable, and please do not just take a video game writer’s word for it on the subject of aesthetics. That said, let me try to gain your trust. We share our offices with what must be described as a very cool design firm. They work with big boys and influence minds and look good doing it. One guy has a Japanese girlfriend.”
– Well put, Kill Screen. I will continue to not take your writers’ words on the subject of aesthetics, but I will visit your site as a source of late-breaking updates on your officemates’ partners’ ethnicities.
Just in time for election season, I made an MP3 of Homer Simpson angrily asking “When are people going to learn? Democracy. Doesn’t. Work.”
Feel free to listen to it on repeat instead of watching the news, or do what I did and set it as your ringtone. (Download)
The first wave of prompts, provided graciously by the illustrious “Uptown” David Cole, has been answered and can be found by clicking that thing, or clicking here. I’ve got a decent-sized backlog of prompts (especially at the current rate I’ve been answering them), but if you’re interested in participating, you are encouraged to let me know.I still haven’t figured out exactly what format this is going to take.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked a few of my friends (and one person I know pretty tangentially and entirely over the internet) to send me five writing prompts. I’m still not sure exactly what a ‘writing prompt’ is, but they are my friends, and they’re smart, and they did a good job filtering my selfish request through their personal sensibilities.
Then I was totally busy for a couple of weeks.
But now: I am going to try and answer the prompts to the best of my ability. I will answer them in the order they were asked, and I will try and put each answer over 250 words. Once all of the prompts have been answered, I will probably ask for more prompts from different friends and different people I know pretty tangentially and entirely over the internet.
I decided last night that an explanation of who the person is and my relationship to them will act as a sort of sixth prompt from that person. I will do that one first.
So here goes.
