♺ Leftovers

John Oliver said:

We are making jokes about the news and sometimes we need to research things deeply to understand them, but it’s always in service of a joke. If you make jokes about animals, that does not make you a zoologist. We certainly hold ourselves to a high standard and fact-check everything, but the correct term for what we do is “comedy.”

James Poniewozik reflects on this matter:

That’s journalism; a news analysis is journalism; an editorial is journalism. The chief difference between these and what Oliver does, if anything, is that he’s entertaining, so that, when he spends fifteen minutes arguing the stakes of net neutrality, people actually pay attention and even act on it. If that makes it “not journalism,” then it’s journalism that has the problem.

I wrote about Interstellar on Medium.

Vijay Umapathy, Product Manager at Google:

When I was considering joining the Inbox team, one of the first things I saw was a set of design principles listed on their internal website (and hung up on the wall at the office):

1. Encourage Human Connection
2. Deliver Peace of Mind
3. Content Trumps Chrome
4. Simplify
5. Make People Smile

If you look at Inbox, you can probably see bits of each of these at play.

I’ll know if Inbox is a sustainable answer to a real problem only after a few months of use, but right now I believe they totally nailed it.

Lukas Mathis:

There’s a concept in visual art called horror vacui, or «fear of empty spaces.» It’s the natural tendency of humans to fill empty spaces with stuff. Your new shelf has some empty panels? Put something in there! Your flat has an empty corner? Buy a chair! Or a plant! Something! Anything!

Humans have the same tendency when it comes to visual design. No empty space! Your screen has a few white pixels? What feature can we put there! Quick! Find something we can put there!

There’s a problem with that, though. Empty space is not useless.

Empty space creates value perception. […] Emptiness equates to prestige.

Empty space also creates better creative environments. The tendecy towards minimalism in software design means that developers and designers are getting this, and users are understading the value of emptiness as well.

A great panoramic view on horror television by Even Melendez:

In the wake of The Walking Dead phenomenon, horror television shows have spread quickly, infecting networks left vulnerable from mediocre ratings and the challenges of generating original content. The all-encompassing genre spans period dramas (Showtime’s Penny Dreadful) and “almost” musicals (American Horror Story: Freak Show, seriously…watch it). Even the quintessential procedural can’t escape horror’s impact. Shows like True Detective, influenced by the iconic stories of author H.P. Lovecraft, refuse the horror label but still dabble in the genre’s psychology.

Kwame Opam:

From start to finish, Lost is a master class in the art of creating relatable (if not wholly believable) characters and putting them in the most extreme situations imaginable. But while the show bent over backwards to raise the bar in terms of absurd things that could happen on the Island and off, it put just as much effort into grounding the characters, making them ultimately feel like human beings.

No one is ever depicted as perfect — many of the characters aren’t especially likeable — but every lead and supporting role is fleshed out, every motivation is exposed, and every decision is rooted in the core of who that character is as a person. That alone keeps you around on the second, third, or fourth viewing even if you hate the things your favorite characters do or go through.

This is something the Lost detractors don’t get, and certainly one of the reasons why I loved the series up until the end.

Zachary Wigon:

No one goes into a movie theater hoping a film will stink. No one goes in totally unwilling to suspend their disbelief. People walk into the theater and accept that they will trade in real-world logic for movie logic for two hours, in the hopes of being entertained. Every second of the way, while watching a film, the viewer has an unconscious decision that they are continually faced with: go with the film’s narrative logic, or choose to disbelieve it. If the viewer can help it, they’ll always side with the former, so long as the film remains entertaining.

True, but not just as long as the film is entertaining, but as long as it remains faithful to its internal logic. The narrative world is an ecosystem with its set of rules, rules made up by the writers. The story follows this logic and style, and as long as it does, the audience is fine.

I’ve finally found the time to read this wonderful piece about Christopher Thomas Knight, who spent 25 years in the woods without any human contact, or diary, or anything like that.

“I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

JJ Abrams to the cast and crew of the new upcoming Star Wars movie:

To the Extraordinary Cast and Crew of Episode VII:

It is a true honor and absolute joy to come to set every day and work alongside each of you. Your professionalism, passion, and patience is more deeply appreciated than we could ever express. From the deserts of Abu Dhabi, to the Forest of Dean, to the stages of Pinewood, you have risen to every challenge and been as wonderfully kind as you are brilliantly talented. Our ambition here is large, of course, and it must be: we are here to make a film that entertains millions of people, of all ages, for generations. To create an experience people will cherish watching as much as we will cherish having made it, together. How lovely it would be if you had, in addition to your name on the screen, some actual, real, tangible proof that you were part of it! Here, then, is that proof. Wear it well, wear it healthily, wear it proudly. But, mostly, thank you.

With love, J.J. Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, Bryan Burke

That’s how you wrap things up.

Stacey D’Erasmo thinks time is changing:

There are more clocks than ever—clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second—but they all seem to matter less. […] The Internet, however, doesn’t need standardized time to function. It can use it in forecasting delivery times of packages, say, or in time-stamping messages, and so on, but it also does much of what it does in a state of atemporality. The day is not a pie but a vapor, a tenuous notion. Standardized time’s regulatory powers are fading. We seem to have entered the Age of Relativity, wherein we finally experience time as Einstein imagined it, contracting and expanding relative to the velocities of observers.

That’s how I often feel after wasting hours on the Internet, that my perception of time faded. It’s not exactly like being the moment, more like losing myself in it.

The iPad app echosystem, apart from some notable exceptions, has become more stagnant and less exciting over the years, and the device finds itself in a weird position.

Ben Thompson wrote a perfect article to explain what’s happening.

At the first iPad presentation, Steve Jobs was at pains to explain that the iPad would only work as a product if it found a spot between the iPhone and Mac where it did some number of things much better than either. […]

Over time, though, that middle has shrunk. Macs have gotten much smaller and, more importantly, achieved much better battery life, removing one of the iPad’s biggest advantages. […]

Now the iPhone is making a major play for the original iPad standbys: reading and video. One can absolutely argue that the iPhone Plus is superior to the iPad or iPad mini for reading […]

This echoes my own personal experience. While I still use Paper on the iPad (primarily for this blog), much of my reading has moved to the iPhone simply because the iPad apps are inferior (TweetBot) or non-existent (Nuzzel). More broadly, there simply aren’t that many apps like Paper that make an iPad essential. I personally will always own an iPad simply because Paper on the iPad does something for me that no other Apple device does; this simply isn’t the case for nearly enough people.

This is Apple’s fault.

The fact that I’m on my bed and I’m publishing this very post from my iPhone 6, even though my iPad is on arms-length, is emblematic.

I like my iPad. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. But I know that I’m doing whatever I can to make it relevant for me, while it’s probably less indispensable, and sometimes even less comfortable, that I’m willing to admit.

From my last post on Medium:

Twitter addicts and tech nerds like me read an impressive amount of thoughts — some of them deep, most of them superficial — about everything. While that often gives us more options and awareness, it’s increasingly hard to look at products and services with clear eyes, without a hovering grey cloud full of comments, rumors, preconceptions, expectations — all things that already drive our consciousness and desires, and certainly don’t need more prominence.

Riccardo Mori:

There are apps that, on paper, come with an impressive set of features. Too bad that you have to buy every — single — little — one of them, even very basic ones, otherwise you won’t do much with the app. I won’t make specific examples, but imagine a photography app that features single editing tools, like Crop or the Saturation slider, as In-app purchases. Dear developer, you may have tricked me into downloading your ‘free’ app, but rest assured that once I discover your questionable In-app purchase tactics, I will delete your app right away.

The single worst example of these shady techniques, unfortunately, comes from an app I use everyday: Infuse.

There are two versions in the App Store and it’s not clear what feature is free and what’s not, and at least at some point the app was pretty useless (like a demo, which is not allowed in the App Store) in its free version. This is clearly a business model that consciously hurt users. I want to know what I pay for.

From The Verge’s review of the iPad Air 2:

Pick up an iPad Air 2 and you’ll immediately understand why Apple pursues that thinness with such single-minded zeal. It’s so, so thin: 18 percent thinner than the older Air, and even slightly lighter. It’s hard to believe that there’s a computer back there, let alone a computer as powerful as the laptop computers of just a few years ago. If there is anything magical about this new iPad it is this, this feeling of impossibility. The Air 2 makes the original iPad look and feel archaic, like a horrible monster from a long-forgotten past.

During the last Apple keynote I wasn’t particularly excited about anything, but I can’t help but see the iPad Air—and this new one in particular—as a device from the future.

It’s a screen with a computer hidden somewhere in it. I own an iPad Air and I can’t believe how they made something thinner than that.