I switched the comments so the oldest is at the top, and the newest at the bottom. :-)

• According to the Pew study on Social Ties, things aren't nearly as bad as Robert Putnam, author of the influential Bowling Alone, would have it.
• I was going to link to a bunch of articles on BLDG BLOG, but why don't you just go and see them all yourself. (via Matt)
• America in Color: 1934-1943. There's something really striking about the people in this photo, in particular, the girl with the curly hair. Everyone else in the family is wearing exactly the same expression, and looking directly at the camera, but not only does her hair not match anyone else's, she's looking off as if she's posing for another photographer off to the side.

Matt Webb's blog is full of great entries, but today's really struck me because it's about Animal Crossing, and because I spent much of the summer and fall of 2004 playing Animal Crossing on our Game Cube. I think I was processing the end of Game Neverending.

We don't have a TV any longer, so we don't play, and I'm quite glad about that, but it was a truly beautiful game, so cute, and Japanese. I can't describe it better than Matt, so go read his post.

That last sentence is like a little confectioner's sugar dusted on top of the mammoth Bundt cake of the previous one.

Heather made me do it, but since everyone else is doing it, at least I can blend into the crowd.

Four Things

Four jobs I've had:

1. Nurse's Aide, nursing home. My mother wanted to teach me compassion, so she got me this job.
2. Flunky in dive shop in Arkansas. Yes, Arkansas is landlocked.
3. Painter's assistant. Want to live in Manhattan on $5/hr? Ask me how! (When your dad goes to the bathroom, ask the waiter for more bread, stuff bread into backpack, swipe butter only if foil-wrapped.)
4. Investment banker. Starving got a little old, so I got a job through a temp agency, where I ended up at a bank. The managing director took me aside and said, "Hey, you're pretty sharp! You could be an investment banker too!" I said No way!. He said I'll pay you a six figure salary. Wo. Color me powersuited.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. 8 1/2
2. Persona
3. Chinatown
4. Hair
5. ...but why stop there?
6. Putney Swope
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
8. Donny Darko
9. The Year Without a Santa Claus
10. Gummo
11. In the Mood for Love

Four places I've lived:

1. Pittsburgh
2. New York
3. San Francisco
4. Vancouver

Four TV shows I love:

1. Kill your TV
2. Kill your TV: The Sequel
3. Kill your TV: The Prequel
4. Kill your TV: Cathode Ray Armageddon

Four places I've vacationed:

1. Pampanga
2. Aleppo
3. Montevideo
4. Negril

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Margarita Pizza from Delfina Pizzeria
2. Raw meat
3. The kinds of sushi no one else will go near
4. Coffee ice cream

Four sites I visit daily:

1. Flickr
2. Travian
3. http://search.yahoo.com
4. http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Paris (Madame Bovary: "She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.")
2. Tokyo
3. West Indies
4. Istanbul

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. Sylloge
2. Kottke
3. Open Brackets
4. Ian C Rogers

A shout out to Pinoy Expats, who published an interview with me in their latest issue, Caterina Fake: Bringing Communities Closer and Online.

And also:

I read somewhere that in the days of Abraham Lincoln, your average citizen encountered, during his or her lifetime, the same amount of information as is found in the average Sunday edition of your city newspaper. And I'll be damned if most of the stuff we're getting today isn't just noise, and at the end of our lives, we could condense all the useful knowledge we've gleaned... into one edition of a Sunday newspaper. The whole ballyahoo -- and I mean BallyYahoo! -- over the past few days reminds me of this. I occasionally wander into these senseless blogosphere babblewars, but they always end up seeming like a bunch of bald men fighting over a comb.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Are you obsessed with 43 folders, Getting Things Done, and other productivity programs, and after reading them, do you feel significantly more productive than you did before you read them? I am, and I do. You can read 43 folders and then forget to go to work, you feel so accomplished.

This is the same principle at work in gym memberships and self-help books. It's easy to go and pay for them, and you get a feeling of accomplishment when you do, even without having done a single other thing to achieve your goals.

I've been watching all the blathering about Yahoo! giving up search dominance to Google, which, I might add, is bullshit*. Quotes taken out of context by company executives do not an overarching business strategy make. This is exactly the kind of thing that most annoys me about blogs (and, I guess, media in general): the piling on, as also noticed by Jeff Clavier and Thomas Hawk, among others. Based on this sensationalistic headline, Steve Rubel says he has stopped using Yahoo! Search.

People!! Try to keep your knees from jerking! Of course, doing the legwork is a lot harder than jumping to conclusions, in the Olympiad of life. Loren Baker, in the comments in Micropersuasion quotes what CEO Terry Semel said in his Q4 Earnings report, which explains what the Yahoo! business priorities are, and is thus worth looking at in the context of the blathering:

Etc., etc.

Moreover, I really think people should be paying more attention to what's said by people working in Yahoo! Search. Amr Awadallah, who sits near me at Yahoo!, is typical of the many people who should always be paid attention to at Yahoo! -- he's one of the smartest guys around (I love Amr, he's bold, brusque and brilliant). He predicts Google will miss 2005-Q4 quarter revenue estimates.. He outlines the way Google padded their Q3 earnings a couple months ago, and this quarter too, with what are called in the industry accelerator changes: they added more ads to the top of their pages, and made them wrap when you ensmallen your browser window; they also jumped up the text size for AdWord listings, and Danny Sullivan also notes that Google has apparently embiggened their ads. We'll see what happens in about a week, when the earnings come out.

------------------------

* You'll notice I reserve swearing on this blog for occasions of particular exasperation. :-)

I am reading Teenage Wasteland by Donna Gaines, on the recommendation of Danah. It's about a group of teenagers from Bergenfield, NJ, where in 1987 four teenagers made a suicide pact and died together in a car by carbon monoxide poisoning. These were the "burnouts", the druggies, the ones who listened to Iron Maiden and hung out on street corners. I was struck again by this weird principle of teenagerness in the quote above, which also applies to *any* transgressive group, no matter how outré and how the trangressive is appropriated by commerce over and over again. The Osbournes, anyone?

Etsy launched a great new feature tonight called Alchemy where you can put in requests for things to be made for you -- and I submitted a request for something I've always wanted: A needlepoint of an anatomical heart. Man, this is just the thing for me! The heart's just the first one. I have many more ideas for projects that I will ever be able to make.

I also want to get a needlepoint done of some video games, and in looking around for some good screen shots, I found this site, which has screenshots of games from Pong to the present. I'm thinking Pole Position might make a good needlepoint. And I also want to get a needlepoint done in black and white of the cover of T. Rex album The Slider. I also have a bunch of ideas for silkscreens, a collage tarot deck, a chandelier, a lightbox...

That gruesome gargly sound you were hearing today was my stomach's contention with worms and dragons. That hammering sound you heard yesterday was a thousand monkeys clubbing the inside of my braincase. The night between, that high-pitched sound was the screech of cables lifting my eyelids so my red eyes would not miss a single tick of the second hand measuring out the endless hours.

And today, to the amazement of only one, I managed to commute, attend six hours of meetings, read 200 emails and be cordial to people I secretly can't stand.

I commend me!

Rebecca Blood interviews David Weinberger for her Bloggers on Blogging series, and David, who has such a lovely way of saying things, says another of those things:

I am constantly quoting David's essay, The Hyperlinked Metaphysics of the Web:

Mash Pit is in full force, and we're just about wrapping up our various projects. I am going to be going out to dinner with our pal Rael, but the rest of the Mash Pitters will be having dinner at Zagora on Guerrero, and then after that a group of us are going to have drinks at Lone Palm on 22nd Street, right across from the place we had the event. Come by!

UPDATE: So, MashPit, as you can read on the description on Upcoming, was a single day of hacking by a small group of 12-15 people. In the morning we discussed what human problems we would attempt to solve and then broke up into three groups. My group, which included Niall Kennedy, Chris Ratcliff, and Josh Kinberg built a thing called WhuffieTracker, an ego surfing tool which aggregates (or will aggregate, when it's working!) all blog posts, comments, links, tags, photos, conversations and bits of attention focused on you you you. What could possibly be more interesting? Cal Henderson, Alex Russell and Matt Mullenweg built a collaborative localization tool (I'll find out if it's up anywhere, it's cool) and Chris Messina, Nima Dilmaghani and Brad Neuberg built a thing called "Event in a Box", which pulls together a bunch of tools to make planning an event easier.

In all, it was a great day. Tomorrow I'm going to pull together a bunch of half-finished posts about the creative process, and add in some of what we learned today doing Mash Pit. Thanks, Chris and Brad, for putting it together!

I've separated out my Flickr photo feed and my Caterina.net photo feed, since it's likely that only my mother wants both. If you already subscribe to my Caterina.net feed, it's the same, except without the photos, no need to resubscribe. Here are the links:

Caterina.net Feed
Caterina's Flickr photos

Ta!

• No Sampling, Please. Floor managers meet their foe, in this photoset found on Kottke
• Kottke also does a great Digg vs. Slashdot analysis, based on traffic sent to his blog from those two sites. Conclusion: Slashdot ain't dead yet.
• Eventful is new, isn't it? I mean, I haven't looked at EVDB for a long time, and today I discovered this (by way of Stowe Boyd's new blog).
• This nifty new Technorati Charting stuff is cool; you can even post it to your blog, just like this:
  Posts that contain "flickr" per day for the last 30 days.
  
  Get your own chart!

One of my vices is trashy biographies, and the latest one I read was Martha, Inc. about Martha Stewart in which the author -- one of her former neighbors from Westport no less-- was really going out of his way to make her look bad. And it confirmed my suspicion that Martha gets a lot of flak because she is a powerful woman, as she's said elsewhere: her same aggressive business style would be praised in a man. The book doesn't give her any credit at all for her achievements or business acumen, or interview any people that were her allies. And she really did build an amazing media empire, with books, TV shows, products, and of course her magazine -- and created an entire industry: the Lifestyle industry, which has spawned impresarios such as P. Diddy, aka Puff Daddy, aka Sean Combs. The only person who is a Martha fan who was interviewed for the book appears to be Richard Sheingold, the man who took on her television proposal after her own publisher, Time Warner, had turned her down.

Of course later on Time Warner comes to deeply regret their error, which gave me cause for glee, as I've been 'chicked' innumerable times myself, and boy does it make me mad.

With a ton of thanks to Jay Allen, my Movable Type is running smooth as clockwork again, after we ridded ourselves of the nasty Berkeley DB which was the cause of all the misery, and rolled the database into MySQL. I'm happy again!

Movable Type rocks, and I have to say, what a great team, and what great customer service. Jay helped me out even with my antiquated installation and over 70,000 spam trackbacks and got it up and running again. Hooray!

I read on If Only an interesting post thinking about why Tom Cruise has been behaving like such a weirdo lately.

There I also read that Thomas Szasz had published a page asserting that he is not a Scientologist, which arose because Scientologists, like Szasz, are anti-psychiatry, anti-medication, anti-antidepressants. Some of his followers are now publishing The Szasz Blog, and about Georges Canguilhem, whose book The Normal and the Pathological looks like something that I ought to read, but I've been considering, since New Year's Eve, a possible Resolution that I will not, in 2006, buy a single book, but instead read only books that I've already bought. Of course, while contemplating whether or not to actually act upon this Resolution, I've bought about 10 books. And as a friend recently noted, when I buy a book, I am also, with great optimism, buying the time in which to read it. Now if *that* were true, by God, I'd be a Methuselah.

Insomniacs make for accomplished web surfers. I was up til 2 helping a friend with a Flickr problem, and then up til 6 unable to sleep, so I got cracking!!

• Through Hack a day I went back to Gavin Miller's snake robots site (that Paul told me about a couple years ago.) They're quite beautiful, I wish we had videos. Dr. Miller does other stuff too.

• On Cool Hunting I found Transmaterial, which catalogues great new sticky, thin, ultralight, magnetic, reflective, electronic material of all varieties. Also found on Cool Hunting, this awesome Personal Annual Report. I'll have to check out those bands he mentions. And I wonder what the excised web site surfed are. I have a guess.

• And on Wonderland some lovely Post-it note Marios and Space Invaders a lunch room prankster puts up after everyone leaves to go back to work .

• Now wot's this here on Essays & Effluvia? The top-grossing shows of 2005?

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Most of the people on this list are senior citizens. I haven't a clue who Kenny Chesney is, but of the ones I recognize the only people on here under 40 (50?) are Green Day. And where are the women? Didn't Madonna tour? She's in her 50s, and so would qualify for this list. Gwen and Britney were having babies last year. Christina? I wish (I wish I wish) we'd gotten a photo of that headline that was in the Globe and Mail: EAGLES FIGHT TO STAY RELEVANT. Oh it made us laugh.

What do you think? Why are Baby Boomers the only ones having big shows? Don't kids these days go to concerts? Is the audience for stadium spectaculars dwindling? Is everyone making their own MP3 and uploading them to MySpace, having concerts in their basement?

OK so someone told me this story. They're out at Bungalow 8 or somewhere and they're having drinks and suddenly this old lady walks in and everybody in the place goes wild! The old lady goes up to the VIP lounge and everyone goes swarming back there and everyone's craning their necks trying to see, and so my friend wonders Who is this old lady?, so she gets up to peek...and it's Mick Jagger.

Niall tells the story of Pricegrabber another "side project" (cf. Blogger, Flickr) that became the whole enchilada, after changing hands in the process. Whether your enterprise succeeds or fails is often a matter of when you quit. In this case, the original company was formed to build a product called "Grabware" which didn't get any traction, though a price comparison spider was developed as a side project. The Pricegrabber business was handed off to a new group of entrepreneurs who ran it the rest of the way down the field (to a $500 million finish line, in this case). I'm looking forward to the rest of the story.

(This is the kind of post I used to put on Bizwerk, but I've decided to confront my online Multiple Personality Disorder, and put everything in one place.)

(Via Gordon Gould)

1. Woman with four children Five people, four of them under the age of 5. Two seats. She had two on her lap, and two in the seat next to her, when one wasn't in MY lap. This one was particularly bad because I'd broken up with my boyfriend the night before, was terrifically hung over, and was sitting in front of the exit row which meant that our seats did not recline. They screamed the whole way and I had a hysterectomy upon my arrival home. (Miami to Newark)
2. Enormous man He didn't fit in the aisle, much less the seat. Economy. I was roughly the size of his arm, so you know I didn't get the middle arm rest. Didn't smell very good, either. So picture a map of South America. You know how Brazil is this huge country busting into the countries adjacent, and Chile is this little skinny country clinging to the coast? He was Brazil, I was Chile, the flight was miserable. (Kingston to JFK)
3. Wallace Black Elk descended from the original Black Elk, and who was returning from a Peace Mission in Kosovo. He was really tall, and had long grey braids and a lovely broad smile full of teeth. He gave me what he called an "Indian Name". He closed his eyes and contacted the Great Spirit, who told him that my name was Little Chicken. Not the most distinguished bird, but it's served me well as totem animal so far. I've never gotten sick after visiting KFC. (JFK to SFO)
4. The man who fell asleep and drooled on my shoulder I was shy in those days. You might not believe it, but it's true. I was young and shy and this nice old man fell asleep on my shoulder. I didn't want to move and wake him up. But then he started to drool and when I noticed this I think I went "EW!" and bounced his head off my shoulder, flinging it forcefully into the window next to him. He didn't sleep after that, he was engaged primarily in whimpering. (JFK to SFO)
5. The theology professor from UC Berkeley I was on my way back to college and had the misfortune of sitting next to one of those talkative types, a bearded man in his late 60s who looked like a thin and creepy Santa Claus. He started a conversation based on what I was reading, told me he was a theologian, and asked me where I went to school. I told him Vassar and, looking over my shoulder read my name from my computer screen and noted my email address and if that weren't ooky enough, months later started calling me through the college's main number hoping to 'get together' and other untoward insinuations. Still creeps me out remembering. (SFO to JFK)
6. The sheik, the Italian countess, the Chinese magnate By George, I don't know how this happened to me, but I was coming back from backpacking around Europe and the plane from Rome to NY was full, and there were no seats, even though I'd called and confirmed the day before. They upgraded me not to Business Class, not to First Class, but to this heretofore unknown class called Royal Class, which was in the upstairs of the plane. There I was, with a Sheik, and Italian Countess and a Chinese Businessman. We were served smoked salmon, oysters, foie gras and Cristal; we were given cashmere blankets to take home; our seats were covered in mink. OK, that last part isn't true. I felt as if I'd somehow fallen into an Agatha Christie novel, and waited for a body to fall out of the overhead compartment. (Rome-JFK)

LINK | 1:50 PM | COMMENTS (19) | TB
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Steven Spielberg, at some point in the recent past, pooh-poohed the emotional power of games, as noted on Pat Kane's site The Play Ethic. And in the comments, this from Alexander Kjerulf:

This was great. I'll never forget how, when we shut down the prototype for GNE, people logged in all over the world for what we called The End of the World -- from remote locations and time zones such as Berlin, Australia and the Philippines -- and many people cried. We were really amazed by this, and moved.

The Planetfall comment it led me to Alexander's site Positive Sharing. Alexander, three years ago, had an epiphany that his next task was to make people "Happy at Work" -- a noble undertaking no doubt! which he chronicles in The story so far.

Happy Day! Foe is blogging again. It's a good one too. She shows us Sherry Turkle's daughter talking about a turtle brought all the way from the Galapagos to sit in a glass box in the middle of a museum exhibit, and how it could have been replaced by a robot since the turtle's "aliveness" was not essential to the exhibit. Replace "aliveness" with "aura" and this is is a great example of what Walter Benjamin was talking about in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If you scroll up and down the page and read the questions posed above and below Sherry Turkle, you'll see one by Daniel Gilbert (Psychologist, Harvard University) who says that the idea that there is such a thing as a dangerous idea is the *only* dangerous idea. Not only is it too pat an answer to the question ("What is your most dangerous idea"), I completely disagree. He says:

The reason those people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, etc. is because of someone else's idea, which has clearly become dangerous, even lethal. It just happens to be the idea that's accrued the power at that time, or is held by a stronger person, and not a weaker person. A few innocent people, few, powerless, and weak, get hung on crosses for having promulgated certain dangerous ideas, dangerous to the People In Power (PIP) who are many, powerful and strong. The next thing you know, those selfsame dangerous ideas are sitting pretty as 'generally accepted' ideas held by the PIPs themselves, which are then responsible for Crusades, Inquisitions and George W. Bush.

Scroll up a little farther on the page at Edge.org and you'll see a man I agree with, another Daniel, a Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel! this time, Daniel Dennett, who begins his blurb, "Ideas can be dangerous." And he's quite right too, when he says there aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes.

With that in mind, I'll be stopping this blog post right....now.

X

The fantastic show The All Girls School by Mara Bodis Wollner at the Jen Bekman Gallery, has been extended, so you might be able to catch it. From Mara's statement:

In 1999, Howart Rheingold wrote an article for Wired about Technology and the Amish, which I chanced upon yesterday and it beautifully summed up some problems I've been mulling lately. The Amish are not complete technophobes, and insist they're not against technology, but want to make sure it is deliberated, and 'slowed down'. They are against disruptive change because it does just that: disrupts. And they want to make sure that the community is prioritized over convenience or progress. So they ask themselves, whenever a new technology emerges, "Does it bring us together or draw us apart?".

As I was stopped at a stoplight under Route 80 on Duboce tonight I noticed the sound of the cars rumbling up above. It sounded like a large metal place was loose right over my head, and I wondered how I'd never noticed it before -- I've driven under there many many times, at night. I realized it was because I was driving a Prius, and the engine stops when you stop, and the car falls silent. And I also realized I hadn't looked at the consumption meter at all for several weeks -- maybe even several months -- and that seemed sad to me: the novelty of the new car had worn off. I don't like growing used to things.

Also: "growing used to" and "I used to..." seem weirdly contrary.

I constantly remark how I never get tired of looking at/playing with/talking to Dos Pesos. There's something so strange about having a little animal living in my house that the surprise of it never goes away.

I am considering moving Caterina.net off of Movable Type and onto Blogger or Word Press; Movable Type is completely hosed with the 7500+ comments I've had on this blog -- the comments page on the admin interface won't load, even after an upgrade to the latest version. I don't think MT was really designed to handle a site with 1,000s of pages and comments, as this site has after 6-7 years, -- though I think it's likely the Berkeley database it's running on. Nonetheless, I have both Blogger and Word Press blogs, and their comment spam handling is so much better than Movable Type's, which basically forces people to use TypeKey -- and I don't want commenters to have to sign up for another service just to prove they're legit so they can comment on my blog. It's a big hassle switching over, but I might have to give it a go. First I'm going to try going from Berkeley to MySQL for the database and see if that fixes all the hell.

In other news, I have relaunched Wench, which has been asleep for almost six years now! Woo!