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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Why the mainstream media is dying
"Why the mainstream media is dying
Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.
The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains. On Oct. 31 TechCrunch broke a big story called “Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell” about how Zynga was making money by selling scam ads — the kind that trick kids and other frigtards into signing up for useless subscriptions to stuff they don’t want.
Arrington packaged his story with a video of himself taking on Anu Shukla, CEO of one of the scam-ad distributors, at a conference. He also ran an “insider’s confession” piece by a former scammer explaining how these guys operate. He followed with a story about how Zynga CEO Mark Pincus had acknowledged the problem and said Zynga would stop running those ads, and another story about how Anu Shukla had been pushed out of her company, and another story about Shukla’s replacement admitting that the company had, indeed, been running scammy ads. On Friday Arrington capped it off with a coup: he dug up a video clip from earlier this year in which Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told a laughing audience of scumbag developers about all the scumbaggy things he had done to generate revenue with his games.
After all this, we woke up Saturday to find a story in the New York Times, also about Zynga (and other Facebook game companies) with the headline, “Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays.” The Times put two reporters on the knob-polisher, and somehow they managed to interview Pincus, and to quote him — and yet they included not a single word about the scammy ads. Not. A. Fucking. Word. The piece could not have been nicer if it had been written by Zynga’s PR people themselves. Gist: Virtua
Tiger Woods Accident Updates Legacy - Charles P. Pierce on Tiger Woods Accident News - Esquire
"Tiger Woods and I go back a long ways. A little bit over twelve years, truth be told. Back then, I wrote a profile of him just prior to his winning the 1997 Masters, the first major accomplishment of his professional career. Over the course of a day's worth of interviews, which were themselves the result of negotiations with his People at the International Management Group that were so protracted they should have been moved to Panmunjom, Tiger made some distasteful remarks and told some puerile and sexist jokes. Seeing as how they occurred during my limited interview time, I included them in my story, along with some not-overly-subtle intimations that Tiger had a reputation even among golfers as something of a chaser. The quotes were a Media Thing for a brief time, and the ensuing dust storm looks positively charming compared to what's certainly coming after the events of this past weekend, which already appears to be something between Al Cowlings on the highway and an episode of The Real Housewives of Gated Communities. Back then, all that happened was that Tiger's People at the International Management Group accused me of wiretapping a limo driver. (Me and Gordon Liddy!) And that Tiger's father, Earl, whom I still miss, told Charlie Rose he hoped my story wouldn't do permanent damage to his son's career, and that Charlie Rose waved a copy of the magazine and told Earl he intended never to read the story. This is why Earl was an entertaining con man and Charlie Rose is a salon-sniffing Beltway yahoo.
Anyway, the story gradually faded away. (It returned, briefly, when the PGA whacked Fuzzy Zoeller for saying some marginally racist things about Tiger, who, back then, skated on things he'd said to me.) Tiger went on to become the best golfer who ever lived, and a towering corporate brand — good friend, valued confidant, and treasured commodity to every unsavory plutocrat on the planet, from the leaders of Chevron to the oil-sodden sultans of the Persian Gulf.
Until, of course, this weekend, when Tiger ran his Es
One Simple Mental Exercise to improve your Mind Power — Chess Blog
"When you start, that mind video will be in a fast forward mode. You will find that you are unable to remember what else you did when you were brushing your teeth (looking in the mirror, thinking on things to do, …) and then the scene shifts to possibly mid-afternoon in your workplace and then jumps back to your starting the car or taking the metro, and shift again to some other point. That is why I stressed that you must try to remember in correct sequence!
During initial few days, you will be surprised to find how little you remember even when you thought it was a busy day! Only some big “lumps”, particularly those which had some impact, will come to your mind without many details. But if you continue to do it, you will progressively start remembering more of your day. Your aim should be to go to the extent where you can visualize in a scene the people who were present, the conversations you had, the pictures that were hanging on the walls, the signboards you saw when you were walking on the road, even the thoughts you had … you get the point?
What is your mind achieving in this exercise? A greater power of observation, the ability to see details, and increase in memory power through your effort in remebering, which is but a memory exercise."
MAGIC MOLLY - Twitching at intervals
"Twitching at intervals
When it’s not lonely or yearning, the act of waiting for someone can be exquisite. I guess this would be called ‘anticipation’, but that doesn’t quite nail it.
It’s a feeling of suspended animation but with the addition of consciousness. Like freezing the entire world but leaving your eyeballs free to toggle like a Kit-Cat clock. That is exactly how it feels."
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