The murmur of the snarkmatrix…

Jennifer § Two songs from The Muppet Movie / 2021-02-12 15:53:34
A few notes on daily blogging § Stock and flow / 2017-11-20 19:52:47
El Stock y Flujo de nuestro negocio. – redmasiva § Stock and flow / 2017-03-27 17:35:13
Meet the Attendees – edcampoc § The generative web event / 2017-02-27 10:18:17
Does Your Digital Business Support a Lifestyle You Love? § Stock and flow / 2017-02-09 18:15:22
Daniel § Stock and flow / 2017-02-06 23:47:51
Kanye West, media cyborg – MacDara Conroy § Kanye West, media cyborg / 2017-01-18 10:53:08
Inventing a game – MacDara Conroy § Inventing a game / 2017-01-18 10:52:33
Losing my religion | Mathew Lowry § Stock and flow / 2016-07-11 08:26:59
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless – Sitegreek !nfotech § Towards A Theory of Secondary Literacy / 2016-06-20 16:42:52
Snarkmarket commenter-in-chief since 2003, editor since 2008. Technology journalist and media theorist; reporter, writer, and recovering academic. Born in Detroit, living in Brooklyn, Tim loves hip-hop and poetry, and books have been and remain his drug of choice. Everything changes; don't be afraid. Follow him at

Speaking of Airships…
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Christopher Hsiang at io9.com just posted what looks like a terrific primer on steampunk novels new and old. This is perfect for someone like me; steampunk has always seemed right up my alley, but I haven’t read much of anything.

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Paper Modernism
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Now that my dissertation is good and filed, I want to share a few fragments of what I’ve been working on, on-and-off, for the past few years.

Here’s a few selected grafs from the first chapter:

The history of Modernism is part of the history of paper. That is, the transformation of literary and visual culture announced by Modernism and the avant-garde is inseparable from the transformation of the largely paper-based communication and information technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries…

From the daguerrotype to the cinema, the history of photography simultaneously parallels and intersects the development of paper and print. A single image, handmade by an artisan, is succeeded by a continuously-fed reel of industrially-made material. In fact, the chemical treatment of wood pulp cellulose with sulfurous acid to produce paper is only slightly different from the chemical treatment of wood fibers with nitric acid to produce celluloid film. Nitrocellulose (also called guncotton) in ether or acetone yields collodion, the albumen alternative that allowed for glass-plate photography; the evaporation of collodion in turn led to the discovery of celluloid film. Celluloid emerges as a paper alternative with Eastman Kodak, the company credited with the introduction of flexible film and the supplier of continuous film rolls for Edison’s early motion pictures. Kodak had originally used ordinary paper treated with collodion in their famous

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John Hughes, For Grownups
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Filmmaker John Hughes passed away today, too young at 58. In the 1980s, Hughes had an astonishing run of iconic teen comedies that, almost a quarter century later, hold up as honest-to-goodness movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

My generation (I was born in 1979) was too young to see these movies in the theater, and too old for the kiddie comedies Hughes wrote (but didn’t direct) in the 1990s. We ate these movies up on VHS and basic cable, badly cut (to protect US) for broadcast TV, but seeing in them our older brothers, sisters, and cousins, and later, ourselves.

However, since everyone’s talking about these four movies, I want to single out the one great comedy Hughes made for and featuring grownups – Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I saw this movie just last week – and it’s terrific. What’s more, it shows that the world Hughes created in his films, of humiliation and catastrophes offset by unlikely friendships, isn’t just a sympathetic take on kids in fictional midwestern high schools, but a distinct comic take on the world itself. And every buddy comedy from the 1990s just follows this movie’s playbook, with half the brains, a third of the timing, and a quarter of the heart.

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Rupert Murdoch Forgets He Ever Saw That Crazy Flash Movie
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Five years ago, Rupert Murdoch sat down at his computer and spent a few minutes watching a movie made by two journalism students. When he rose, he proclaimed that “he and his fellow newspaper proprietors risked being relegated to the status of also-rans if they did not overhaul their internet strategies.”

Then he bought MySpace and the WSJ. He also bought a locket with Matt and Robin’s picture inside.

But now, instead of following the clear lesson of that movie – that is, merging these two properties to make WallSpace? MyStreetLiveJournal? – he just might out-grey-lady the Grey Lady by contending to become King Cash on Paywall Mountain.

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Gods of the Underworld
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I wrote about Joshua Glenn’s new schema for generations a year ago – basically, Glenn’s MO is to toss out distended categories like “Generation X” for tighter, single-decade groupings with names like “Hardboileds” or “The Net Generation.”

That was at Brainiac, the blog for the Boston Globe. But at Hilobrow, Glenn’s still working back, decade by decade, which is especially awesome for 1) people who are geeks for the nineteenth-century, like me, and 2) all of us, who have a much less intuitive sense of generational changes or continuities the longer we look beyond living memory.

For example, consider the generation born between 1854 and 1863. Glenn calls them “the Plutonians“:

Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation

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Beyond Starbucks: Physical APIs
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Some great ideas are sparking here, helped along by Robin’s notion of a “Starbucks API.” Noah Brier calls it a “physical API” (see also the smart comments) and Kit Eaton at Fast Company extends the concept (tongue-in-cheek) to Microsoft, Apple, and Twitter. But I like Drew Weilage’s proposal at Our Own System the best:

The idea: create a “physical API”… of the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. Copy their entire way of doing business and paste it into hospitals around the country. In a nicely wrapped package deliver their systems for decision-making, integration, coordination, and expertise. Include their human resources practices, innovation efforts, and technology. Import their employment model, their bargaining power, and of course brand recognition. This is a beta release so if anything is left out, it can be included in a later version.

Mix with water. Implement. Poof! Great health care!

Just think about it, Local County Hospital, powered by the Mayo Clinic or Our Lady Health Care System, supported by the Cleveland Clinic; it’s a definite brand extender.

Seriously — this has, potentially, amazing public policy implications. My dad, who’s worked in the government for-practically-ever in Wayne County/Detroit (first at the jail, then in public health, then in lots of places), always used to stun his bosses, co-workers, everybody, because whenever they ran into a persistent problem or one they couldn’t solve, he would get on the phone to people he knew in Oakland County, or Chicago, or Denver, to see how they handled it, who would in turn refer him to other people, etc.

You can get these information bottlenecks even when there’s no competing interests, and nothing proprietary — it’s just hard (without an API) for people to know where or how to look.

Read more…

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A Fine Vintage In the Kitchen
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I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff; Regina Schrambling praises vintage stoves:

So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you’re asking for a crash. Google “I hate my Viking” these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.

I get kind of excited about things like self-updating blenders and coffee makers that I can control from my Blackberry, but there’s also, sometimes, something to be said for saying, “You know, I think we’ve kind of figured this out. Maybe we’ll work the kinks out on what’s next in another few decades, but until then, let me have my dumb appliance.”

This sort of dovetails with Michael Pollan’s essay about Julia Child and food TV — there’s something about the convergence of cooking with electronics that transformed it into entertainment, that elevated it into something harder than most people could or would do at home, that left us with celebrity chefs and high-powered gadgets and a vastly reduced proportion of us actually cooking anything on them.

Which in turn makes it harder for technology to help us – we’d have to actually KNOW what we were doing to actually make a better (as opposed to shinier, or more convenient) device.

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The Aliens Within
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I hadn’t really been following much news behind the Peter Jackson/Neill Blomkamp project District 9, but this is intriguing:

When its extraterrestrial passengers emerge, they are sequestered to a sprawling shantytown and shunned by even the lowest strata of human society. Amid an effort to relocate the creatures to a new camp, a corporate bureaucrat (played by Sharlto Copley) is infected with a virus that begins turning him into an alien, forcing him to confront his prejudices and his loyalties while he runs for his life.

If it all sounds like a science-fiction parable for South Africa

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Drifting Away, Like Doctor Manhattan
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I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about autism lately, so this NYT piece on a slate of forthcoming movies featuring characters with autism or Asperger’s syndrome caught my attention.

But isn’t the great book/movie about autism really Watchmen? One character after another — savants, to be sure — driven by their obsessions, unable to make lasting emotional connections with other people, despite their best efforts to connect and identify with humanity?

From the NYT:

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It Really Is Snark Week
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… but that doesn’t mean Christopher Shea isn’t right:

I’m as big a Julia Child fan as the next person… But how many pieces about Child’s cultural significance can media outlets run before it starts to look as though reporters and editors have a financial stake in the forthcoming Nora Ephron movie about her?

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