ceenk.tumblr.com

"Every time I assume a talented person isn’t painfully aware of the flaws in their work, I am wrong."

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:14:52 +0200

“Every time I assume a talented person isn’t painfully aware of the flaws in their work, I am wrong.”

- Frank Chimero

It has been theorized that you could replace the last panel of any comic strip with “Christ, what an asshole” without sacrificing comedic value

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:00:45 +0200

It has been theorized that you could replace the last panel of any comic strip with “Christ, what an asshole” without sacrificing comedic value

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Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:34:50 +0200

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Thu, 06 Jun 2013 01:18:10 +0200

This is what editing feels like

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:38:00 +0200

This is what editing feels like:

You are alone in a dark room. Across the floor are the scattered pieces of three or four or five floor lamps. You don’t know how many. There are screws and bulbs and fixtures mixed together. You try not to panic as you feel your way across the floor in search of these pieces.

It does not matter how many times you’ve done this exercise before. Each time you do it, it feels like the first. People tell you, you’ve done it before, you can do it again. But they don’t know what it feels like to be in the dark room searching blindly.

Your work is meticulous. You must evaluate not only each piece, trying to discern its nature, but also how it relates to all of the other pieces. Most of the time, you feel as if your work is wrong. It’s a persistent feeling, that the path you’ve chosen, the connections you’ve made, will ultimately lead you astray. That inevitably, you will be forced to begin again.

But the only way forward is through the uncertainty. So you continue, in spite of your doubt.

Only when you have finished the first lamp, do you begin to realize that this darkness might not be forever. So you continue until the room is fully illuminated and your work is finally complete.

Next time, you think, next time, I’ll remember this and it won’t be so difficult. But this is not true. Every time you will begin with nothing. Every time you will begin new.

This is what editing feels like.

#occupygezi

Fri, 31 May 2013 17:36:34 +0200

#occupygezi

Lex Friedman: Birthdays and series finales

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:59:38 +0200

Lex Friedman: Birthdays and series finales:

You’re supposed to get emotional at funerals and weddings. I do, but I also get emotional at two kinds of events that I don’t quite think, logically, I ought to: series finales and my kids birthdays.

Man, I hate series finales. To be clear, I don’t give a hoot when terrible television shows like, say, Joey or Teen Mom conclude. But when I like television shows, I watch them religiously; when those shows end, I inevitably feel teary-eyed. Not because I won’t get to watch the show anymore—indeed, in the case of shows like ER or Lost, finales come as more of a relief than anything else. Rather, it’s because, for whatever reason, finales are forever linked in my mind to the passage of time and growing older.

Lost “only” ran for six years, from 2004 to 2010. When it debuted, I lived in a two-bedroom condo in Culver City, California with my wife. By the time it concluded, I lived in New Jersey with my wife and two kids. I started watching House three jobs ago, and it’s still running.

Series end. Life continues. It moves fast.

How to automatically post to Scriptogr.am when you post to Tumblr using IFTTT, Hazel and Dropbox.

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:26:00 +0200

I don’t know why anyone else would need this, but I’m doing it so I have a backup of my blog just in case anything happens to Tumblr.

1. Set up the IFTTT receipe.

If This Then That is a powerful service that let’s you automate some of the stuff we do on online services.

If you don’t have an account yet, sign up.

Then, grap this receipe: https://ifttt.com/recipes/94892

What it does is check your Tumblr for any new post you made and creates a text file in the Scriptogr.am folder in your Dropbox.

2. Go post something! Unfortunately, this only work for new posts. As far as I know, there’s no way to back up your old Tumblr posts yet.

3. IFTTT checks your blog for new posts every 15 minutes. You can log in and tell it to check immediately - it will take about 5 minutes for IFTTT to grab your new posts.

We now have a bunch of text files in the /posts folder, but nothing’s showing up on our blog. What we need to do is rename all the text files so their extension is .md — This is because as of right now, Scriptogr.am doesn’t support .txt files.

Luckily, this can be automated with Hazel

After you’ve downloaded and installed Hazel, set up a rule that looks like this:

If you’d prefer not to use Hazel, you could do it manually or using Automator.

4. Log in to Scriptogr.am and hit Synchronize. Your posts from Tumblr should show up.

Issues

Getting the date of the posts to show up doesn’ work. That’s because IFTTT uses a different date format than Scriptogr.am. The “Date:” tag is still written, so if Scriptogr.am adds support for other date formats your old posts will be ready. There may be a way to automatically convert the date strings, please email me if you know how.
Image and video posts don’t work perfectly yet - this is because Scriptogr.am won’t allow empty titles.
I found something that I think is a bug - if a post ends with , Scriptogr.am will break the last opening tag. Not sure why this happens. To temporarily fix this I added an empty tag with a hard coded space (so IFTTT doesn’t delete it) after the final , like this:

This post on my Scriptogr.am

Mike Monteiro: The Main Line

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:32:29 +0200

Mike Monteiro: The Main Line:

This is the story about the first time I hit my father.

It starts in a car. We had moved past the Grand Fury and into our Plymouth Volaré era. Station wagon. Wood paneling on the sides, except that by the ’70s the wood had been replaced by wood-patterned vinyl stickers.

I am 15. Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. A fat bundle of acne-covered self-consciousness. In ill-fitting jeans. My mother always bought the size she wished I could fit into. (I should make sure her casket is a size too small.) And schoolboy glasses from the Optical Department of Sears on Roosevelt Boulevard.

Wealth, Risk, and Stuff

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:30:29 +0200

Wealth, Risk, and Stuff:

If you see someone on the street dressed like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know whether they’re lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best indicators is how much they’re carrying.

Lately I’ve been mostly on the lower end of middle class (although I’m kind of unusual along a couple axes). I think about this when I have to deal with my backpack, which is considered déclassé in places like art museums. My backpack has my three-year-old laptop. Because it’s three years old, the battery doesn’t last long and I also carry my power supply. It has my paper and pens, in case I want to write or draw, which is rarely. It has a cable to charge my old phone. It has gum and sometimes a snack. Sunscreen and a water bottle in summer. A raincoat and gloves in winter. Maybe a book in case I get bored.

If I were rich, I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that’s in my backpack now. Go out on the street and look, and I bet you’ll see that the richer people are carrying less.

Jeffrey Zablotny on Apple’s ‘Photos Every Day’ TV Spot

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:58:36 +0200

Jeffrey Zablotny on Apple’s ‘Photos Every Day’ TV Spot:

zablotny:

This is a spot by TBWA/Chiat/Day for Apple, called ‘Photos Every Day’. The craft is fantastic, and there’s some subtle, unusual attention to detail in it.

"‘I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you read. Don’t think I haven’t. I..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 23:02:59 +0200

“‘I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’ My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk.”

- David Foster Wallace

A Short Quiz About Language Design

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:32:00 +0200

A Short Quiz About Language Design:

Suppose you’re designing a programming language. What syntax would you use for a string constant? This isn’t a trick; it’s as simple as that. If you want to print Hello World then how do you specify a basic string like that in your language?

I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

Why should the Arabs make peace?

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:22:18 +0200

“If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

— David Ben-Gurion (1886 – 1973)

Clouds build up over the Victoria Harbor before a storm in Hong...

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:08:03 +0200

Clouds build up over the Victoria Harbor before a storm in Hong Kong.

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Sat, 04 May 2013 18:14:33 +0200

shit bushido says

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:00:03 +0200

shit bushido says:

Witzige (aber eigentlich traurige) Sachen aus Bushido Liedern.

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Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:58:03 +0200

Sweden’s Closet Racists

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:55:31 +0200

Sweden’s Closet Racists:

We remember the shame and the slights.

Being 6 years old and walking toward passport control with Dad, who has sweaty hands, who clears his throat, who fixes his hair and shines up his shoes on the backs of his knees. All the pink-colored people are let by. But our dad is stopped. And we think, maybe it was by chance, until we see the same scene repeated year after year.

Being 7 and starting school and being told about society by a dad who was terrified even then that his outsiderness would be inherited by his children. He says, “When you look like we do, you must always be a thousand times better than everyone else if you don’t want to be refused.”

Being 9 and watching action films where dark men rape and kidnap, manipulate and lie, steal and abuse.

Being 10 and being chased by skinheads for the first, but not the last, time.

Being 12 and coming into a record store and noticing how the security guards circle like sharks. They talk into walkie-talkies, they follow only a few yards behind us. Move in a maximally noncriminal fashion. Walk normally. Breathe calmly. Walk up to that shelf of CDs and reach for that Tupac album in a way that indicates you are not planning to steal it.

Being 15 and sitting outside an electronics store when a police van pulls up, two officers get out, ask for ID, ask what’s up tonight. Then they hop back into the van.

And all the time, a fight inside. One voice says: They have no goddamn right to prejudge us. They can’t cordon off the city with their uniforms. They can’t make us feel insecure in our own neighbourhoods.

But the other voice says: What if it was our fault? We were probably talking too loudly. We were wearing hoodies and sneakers. We could have chosen to have less melanin in our skin. We happened to have last names that reminded this country that it is part of a larger world. We were young.

José Martí Memorial – La Habana, Cuba

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:43:04 +0200

José Martí Memorial – La Habana, Cuba

ceenk.tumblr.com

"Every time I assume a talented person isn’t painfully aware of the flaws in their work, I am wrong."

It has been theorized that you could replace the last panel of any comic strip with “Christ, what an asshole” without sacrificing comedic value

Photo

Photo

This is what editing feels like

#occupygezi

Lex Friedman: Birthdays and series finales

How to automatically post to Scriptogr.am when you post to Tumblr using IFTTT, Hazel and Dropbox.

Mike Monteiro: The Main Line

Wealth, Risk, and Stuff

Jeffrey Zablotny on Apple’s ‘Photos Every Day’ TV Spot

"‘I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you read. Don’t think I haven’t. I..."

A Short Quiz About Language Design

Why should the Arabs make peace?

Clouds build up over the Victoria Harbor before a storm in Hong...

Photo

shit bushido says

Photo

Sweden’s Closet Racists

José Martí Memorial – La Habana, Cuba

Sweden’s Closet Racists