Posts by matt

In case any of you haven’t seen this link yet, enjoy. It’s the top 65 music videos of 2005, and all the selections I’ve seen really are brilliant. A few are available for watching without downloading the torrent; def. avail yourself of that opportunity. And watch “Mushaboom.” (Waxtastic, and side note: If Feist comes to your city, make every effort to see her perform; she’s wonderful in concert. Her voice really is as deliciously birdlike as it sounds on tape. And she’s great at banter. And she plays some mean drums. And she’s Canadian.)

PS: Gondry + Kanye = Yay. (fimoculicious)

I am all for the Blink Don’t Wink™ campaign. As The Assimilated Negro says:

There is no situation where a wink is appropriate. There

A bunch of folks, Google tells us, have studied thousands of Web pages to see what (X)HTML authoring techniques are most prevalent. Well, Google just completed another study like this, with a sample size of just over a billion pages, giving us a pretty definitive guide to what’s going on in the world of Web markup. Their writeup of the study’s conclusions is highly snarky and readable, and rather fascinating if you, too, are geeky beyond redemption (or if you have a hand in deciding what Web standards should be).

The heaviest snark comes into play in the writeup of how people use the meta element, which usually contains the stuff they’re trying to highlight for the search engines. Saddest fact: a totally useless HTML expression (<meta name="revisit-after">), invented for a defunct search engine nobody ever used, is more popular than the standards-beloved <em> tag. Fun fact: The New York Times uses its very own HTML element, <NYT_COPYRIGHT>.

Um, </geek>. (Waxtastic.)

The astonishing thing about these maps of video game worlds is how much smaller and less complicated they look when you see them this way. (Kottkettish.)

In case you haven’t seen it, make sure to catch this Salon article that’s making the rounds about Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries, 61 (pictured at right, photo by Tom Tavee / Salon). It’s the best article I’ve read about A&F since reading this one in college.

I have always hated A&F. During high school, on trips to the mall with my best friend, he always wanted to go in, and I’d usually oblige him. I remember the layout of the store, the lighting. I’d wait for my friend to be helped by one of the employees so he could make his purchase and we could leave. I’d watch the employee stand lamely by a pile of t-shirts, unfolding and refolding them to look busy, until someone else walked into the store. And if that someone was a decent facsimile of the models grinning in the store windows, the employee would spring into action, asking if he could be of any assistance, pointing out the items on sale.

I got the message, even if my friend ignored it or didn’t care, always buying something anyway. The employees were there to help A&F Boys, and we were clearly not a pair of those. A&F Boys were athletic. They were outdoorsy. They were young. They were maybe a little gay. But they were definitely, definitely white. My blackness (and the half-Asianness of my best friend) was rarely as palpable as it was in Abercrombie & Fitch.

I think what A&F offered — belonging, assimilation — was a dear enticement to my friend. The girls were all swooning over Abercrombie’s “Woods” cologne. And the clothes definitely drew compliments for him. Why I ever followed him in, I can’t tell you.

But after high school, I don’t believe I ever set foot in one again, even though the A&F Boy aesthetic gradually became less racially coded. (Partly due to lawsuits, although the store in uber-liberal Cambridge, MA, employed at least a few people of color.)

The tragic insight at the core of the Salon article is how the man who created and enforced this ideal — Mike Jeffries — cannot attain it himself, no matter how much he wants to. The article suggests that Mike Jeffries feels every bit as excluded as I did when standing in an Abercrombie store. He created a heaven so perfect even he could not gain entrance. And who knows if this is true? But it’s a sad, powerful story.

Best ever. Adrian H has recorded a gypsy jazz version of the Super Mario Bros. 2 main theme, and it’s crazy delicious, much like the game itself.

SMB2 was the unsung Super Mario Bros. game, and I could never figure out why. The feminist in me always appreciated that the Princess in SMB2 was finally given some agency beyond being the helpless, fainting damsel in distress that drives the plot in most Mario games. And she had the power of levitation, which was much cooler than Mario’s janky raccoon tail in SMB3. (Although his cape in Super Mario World was excellent.) The game also had a very cool, cute, recognizably Japanese aesthetic about it. And something about plucking and chucking vegetables was oddly comforting. Two thumbs up, to the game, and its gypsy jazz revival.

But this one’s free! Someone try out Enemy Nations and tell us if it’s any good. According to TRFJ, it’s “billed as

The WaPo shut off comments on its meta-blog today, making it the latest victim of Internet trollery in a long trail that stretches from LA to North Carolina and beyond.

An angel dies every time this happens. The folks in news organizations who are already against the idea of strengthening the relationship between the editors in the newsroom and the ones outside it just feel vindicated by setbacks like this. In the news world, the Wikipedia Wars are actually only battles in a wider conflict. Many journalists still believe our only role can be telling folks what we think they need to hear. I, of course, come down on the side of those who believe all these hassles are worth it if it means a true dialogue with the “people formerly known as the audience.”

As we get smarter about creating platforms for interactivity, incidents like those that burned the WaPo and the LA Times will happen less frequently. An intelligent approach to the Web doesn’t involve either totally free, unmitigated chaos or rigid hierarchical control.

I remember being all bummed out when Lifehacker introduced comments by invitation only. The other day, my itch to comment on an LH thread was so strong that I actually — gasp — used the e-mail feedback link and sent in my comment the old “letter to the editor” way. Moments later, I received an e-mail from LH associate editor Adam Pash inviting me to sign up as a Lifehacker commenter. So the threshold is seriously low to be a commenter on Lifehacker, but I imagine it’s the simplest possible thing for the editors to close the account of someone who’s become a problem contributor. Call this approach Domesticated Chaos.

Of course, news sites probably can’t vet every person who wants to contribute, and I don’t think they’d need to. If only one registered users of WashingtonPost.com could comment, and if their comment histories were linked from their profiles — as is the case on a blog like MetaFilter — that would make contributors much more accountable for their words. And it would make it much easier for site administrators to ban the small minority of troublemakers who tend to ruin forums like these for the majority.

If WaPo editors want even more filters than that, they could institute a Kuro5hin-esque system of comment ratings. (Scoop is free, after all.) Since WaPo.com’s editors are so concerned about the level of discourse in their forums, why are they using TypePad, of all things? Why not implement a system that’s 1) free and 2) much better suited for sorting wheat from chaff?

The folks behind these sites are smart cookies, though. I imagine they’ll hit on a solution soon, and open up comments again. I hope so.

Oh, and WaPo.com? Your slip is showing. (In case it’s fixed, here’s a screenshot.)

Plus: More on trollery, by David Pogue.

McSweeneys makes two funnies today:

1) Troubling Tyra-mails censored from aired episodes of America’s Next Top Model.

2) Places where I can find a woman like Jesse’s girl, years later. (I eagerly await the corollary list, “Places where I can find Jesse, years later.”)

And Defective Yeti gives us the funniest thing I have read on the Internet in three months (via MeFi): Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure. (Warning: will not be funny if the phrase “you are likely to be eaten by a grue” means nothing to you.)

Hey, check this out! I’ve got a blog!! Who knew??

Really I’m just momentarily retreating from hibernation to bring you two interesting links from MetaFilter. The first is a question: How much has your own attractiveness or sense thereof determined with whom you are or have been romantically involved? I always wonder about something very slightly different — how much has my sense of my own attractiveness determined what I find attractive in others?

The second is a comparison of Germany and the US, of general social attitudes on everything from transportation to privacy.

Read more…