June 2010
“creep” was recorded in the studio with mick but it ended up not feeling like it...”
– amanda fucking palmer: LOOK: THE “IDIOTEQUE” SINGLE FROM MY RADIOHEAD COVERS RECORD IS OUT!
Um 1. I love this cover and 2. Do you see how wonderful it is to hear the STORY behind the things people make? Amanda Palmer is so good at this stuff. Maybe I am biased as we seem to share a...
The Kickstarter Blog: The Kickstarter Film... →
We’re thrilled to announce that on Friday, July 9th Kickstarter and Rooftop Films will host the first annual Kickstarter Film Festival on the roof of the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
OMG this looks so awesome, I can’t wait!
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“My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly...”
– Jeff Bezos Princeton Commencement (via soxiam, fred-wilson)
Things I Don't Understand And Definitely Am Not...
thingsidontunderstandand:
They suggested that we celebrate the 18th anniversary of my bat mitzvah.
That sounds like a terrible (or terribly fascinating) way to call something “not a 30th birthday party.”
I was only 12. It wasn’t my temple. Someone set the rug in the synagogue classroom on fire while making a memory candle.
“Stop being such a sign-in board below balloon arches,” she said.
...
“It’s always hard for me to distinguish between denial and what used to be...”
– Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
I have lived in this new place by myself for a month and Lindsay moved today so I got her loveseat, or her “seat,” in my case as I JOKED SELF-DEPRECATINGLY on Twitter today. I keep looking over my shoulder back at it and getting scared. It is an actual Furniture Thing. I haven’t had an actual furniture couch thing ever. I had a futon in college, and a really fucking sweet one I...
Me: Lauren, look! A priest is slow dancing with a girl. That's kinda...
Lauren: what?
Me: a PRIEST is slow dancing with a YOUNG GIRL. that's sort of fucked up.
Lauren: That's his sister.
Me: Oh.
Lauren: EVEN MORE FUCKED UP!
“This had been Agnes’s mishmash decade, after college. She had lived...”
– Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (via ephemeralness)
“My greatest faults are obsessing over guys and speaking my mind outwardly.”
– from my 8th grade autobiography. Cough.
Friends: This is my Baby. It is a human being my husband made with me that we get to keep for 18 years and we will never be alone! I think this might mean we fulfilled our evolutionary destiny? Or started to anyway?
Me: Have you ever heard of Stumbleupon?
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I am going home to Tallahassee tomorrow for my cousin’s wedding. My three best friends from high school all had kids this year! BABIES. The kind that sit up on their own. Sometimes my tote bag sits upright if the weight is distributed the right way. I’ll be sure to show them that.
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“Probably in their marriage she had been too dreamy and inconsistent. For love to...”
– Lorrie Moore, Like Life, 1990. (via worksofgenius)
The other day at the Tumblr Meetup actually, a woman walked into a pizza place with her son and I found out she was “Thomas Pynchon’s wife,” and I slammed my hands down on the table like a 3rd grader because OMG that is Lorrie...
We got a PO Box for the book so none of you people...
Melissa: And they're only $10 dollars more a month than the post office--
UPS Guy: The post office is NOT a service. We will take your packages, we will send you an email notification...
me: You send them?
UPS Guy: Yes, we provide the service.
me: Hm. Well there better be smiley faces!
UPS Guy: Okay ma'am.
me: Well I see that you *do* have free nail files! For the ladies!
Melissa: And pens! Wait, this is just a random pen someone stuck in here.
UPS Guy: Next time, we have pens.
me: You better!
UPS Guy: There are lots of small businesses here. 50 to 70 people have PO Boxes here for their small businesses.
me: We should have a mixer!
Melissa: Meatspace!
UPS Guy: Okay ma'am.
“I am an angry man, which is one of the reasons I have resumed therapy and take...”
– Buzz Bissinger in The New Republic (via ebert’s twitter).
This bastard is my hero.
late afternoon dismantling of popular plot devices...
If someone put a baby on your doorstep, what would you do? Just pick it up and keep it and raise it as your own?
No. No you would not.
Peter says he would bring it to the fire department.
Watchtoday:
Man who severed arm: ‘Convinced’ I was going to die
Jonathan Metz, who attempted a self-amputation of his trapped arm, says he was “so convinced” he was going to die, that he began to scribble a farewell note to loved ones in his blood.
O DEAR JESUS. I just spent the past 10 minutes yelling UGHHHHHHHHHHHH at my computer, and then crying.
John, I’m sorry—if I am late for...
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“Dolly is in fact quite a curvy typeface, with lots of rounded ends and flowing...”
– Coming & Crying has a typeface and it is NOT flaccid!
The Entire North Side Was Covered with Fire →
This one, by Rivka Galchen, was my favorite.
There is a wonderful portrayal of people talking at each other, like gchat in person.
These are my two favorite parts of the Jonathan Safron-Foer story in the New Yorker fiction issue:
You were terrible in emergencies. You were wonderful in “The Cherry Orchard.”
—-
We were all doing well. I was still in love with the Olympics.
They are basically the same.
I love these sentences, but I don’t like this story really at all. Most of it, to my ear/brain, is...
When he was younger, [Kevin] Rose worked as a... →
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When you find yourself waiting for the bus with no waiting-for-the-bus comrades, do you ever think that every single person who walks by is laughing maniacally in their heads, yelling, “THERE’S NO BUS TODAY, STUPID! MWAHAHAHAHA. THEY CANCELLED THE BUS! IDIOT!”
***——»>UPDATE«——-***
:::::there was a bus:::::::
Last weekend I was waiting for the bus and it was Sunday and it was raining and no one else was standing there waiting, too, so I started to look around and wonder if this was all some practical joke (this=buses, public transportation, Sundays, rain). I stood there wondering what to do, smiling uncomfortably at everyone who, not needing the bus, kept walking. I looked to my left and saw something...
Peter: What're you doing before the reading?
me: I dunno, wanna get dinner?
Peter: Yea, I would rather not go home in between, so I would get dinner with you, as a little treat.
me: Wow, how generous.
Peter: Yeah, how nice...for you.
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“Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle Illusion, in which...”
– Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
I’m not kidding at all when I say that I think that’s why blogs like Selleck Waterfall Sandwich and Unhappy Hipsters and etc., etc., etc., are so catchy: there is not, at least initially, an identifiable human being present to implicate its fallibility...
“A seventy-four-year-old woman was arrested this week after pouring a jar of...”
– The Book Bench: No Donations in the Book Drop, Please : The New Yorker (via housingworksbookstore)
Wow.
“I didn’t know this was a Standing concert!”
– Jen, at The National
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David Foster Wallace's Kenyon commencement speech... →
thisislobster:
Yes, this is true. It’s now available for purchase.
I’ve been listening to this every day since I downloaded it.
It’s very cool to hear all of the asides and little jokes that were cut from the transcript.
COVER STORY: An illustrated book of fiction &...
lizcolville:
Good morning! I’ve just begun a project on Kickstarter to produce a 100-page book I’ve put together called Cover Story. It features short stories, essays, truthy vignettes and some satire, along with about 25 color photographs by my partner in crime, Colin Clark. In deciding how to classify this book, I soon realized that self-publishing does not require you to make such choices....
Ben Walker: Band newsletters are SERIOUSLY DULL →
Ben is one of my favorite Internet people and used C&C as an example today when talking about using storytelling to connect an audience to your creative project. He talked about Band newsletters but it might as well be anything.
This stuff comes especially naturally to us as writers and ‘Internet people,’but it is working all over Kickstarter and all over the web (and, er,...
“Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m...”
– (continues)
Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.
(via texburgher)
This counts as press, right?
This is from my cab ride home tonight. I want to...
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“Whatever typeface we decide on for the main copy, it needs to be one in which...”
– Jez Burrows on C&C.
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“THANK YOU, INTERNET. I LOVE YOU. I love you all of the dot com people! You can...”
– #CRYING.
C&C by the numbers.
nightmarebrunette:
…if anyone would like to guess which of the following activities my story includes (there are four) and you guess all of them correctly, I will take you out for a drink in some mutually convenient east coast city. I mean it!
Here’s a hint: I’m in one of the dramatically underrepresented categories. And I’m surprised there are not more hash marks alongside mine. Another...
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Annnnd
Just ran into that guy on the street.
(We just laughed and kept moving.)
