Patton Oswald on geek culture

Wake up, geek culture. Time to die, a Wired article by Patton Oswald.

When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

There are a number of quotable paragraphs in the article, but I went with one that seems vaguely hypocritical for posting. You should read the whole thing. Nerd culture may be harmed by the overabundance of information related to minutiae. The internet creates an instant otaku.






Decanting wine

When should wine be decanted?

The most obvious reason to decant is that the wine has thrown a deposit, and that’s really only likely with vintage or crusted ports and aged unfiltered reds. For the process to work effectively the bottle needs to have been upright for several hours, then be carefully poured into the decanter in front of a light (traditionally a candle) so you can see as the sediment inches towards the neck. You need to do this in a single movement so that it doesn’t fall back and get mixed up with the wine again.


Eco on Wikileaks

From Umberto Eco’s article about Wikileaks.

I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage.

An interesting analogy. Political communications probably won’t slide back to horses, but sneakernets are looking good.


The first Christmas card

The first Christmas card

The world’s first commercial Christmas card was commissioned by Henry Cole in 1843. Three of the remaining cards were recently sold at auction, with one of them fetching over £8000. The cards originally came with an illustrated envelope.

These Christmas cards are interesting pieces of ephemera, but I have to admit that David Mitchell’s take on them is more in keeping with my opinions.

It’s natural to think of Sir Henry as an admirable fellow for having established this most respectable of Christmas customs. It’s natural but it’s a mistake. Bear in mind that, before printed Christmas cards existed, seasonal messages were written individually and in longhand. Before Sir Henry’s brain started to gestate, that was the tradition. His idea was to industrialise it.

He mechanised the exchange of greetings so that more greetings could be exchanged more quickly between more people. He considered the previous rate of greeting-exchange to be tediously slow and resolved to speed it up. This way, he presumably reasoned, people can show how much they care with much less effort. It’s carefree caring: now your heartfelt solicitude can reach dozens of people at once. The man must have thought he was actually manufacturing love.


Bartenders as social status

From an NYT article on having bartenders at your party, even in tiny little flats.

In my opinion, if you don’t have a bartender at your party, you’re a loser, said Dustin Terry, who lives a floor below Ms. Argiro and said his job was to get models and Saudi royalty into hot clubs. The bartender brings class and sophistication.

If you can’t afford to hire a bartender,he added, you shouldn’t be having a party.

Ugh. What a bunch of pretentious twats. That said, credit to the bartenders for putting up with them and taking their money.