viz.garden

Jakob Nielsen:

Decades can pass with even frequent system users barely learning one or two new things per year.

This means that enhancing the discoverability of existing features sometimes trumps the need for new features, as in the case of Office 2007:

Ensuring that people understood the old features was more important than adding new ones.

Get along with it:

You’re unlikely to be the first user interface in 30 years for which all users become sophisticated experts and learn all the features.

Love, falling in love, and “the culture of our world, right now”.

François Vesin :

Du pain bénit pour les journalistes qui écriront plus tard à son sujet. Seulement voilà, Kristian a une grille de lecture plutôt originale de la géopolitique de la Terre du Milieu. Pour lui, hobbits, elfes et nains incarnent le rouleau compresseur de la chrétienté à l’origine de la destruction des pratiques ancestrales païennes, alors que les armées de Sauron sont en fait les good guys, de valeureux Vikings qui ne cherchent qu’à défendre et étendre leur territoire.

En toute logique, Kristian renomme son premier groupe, Kalashnikov, en Uruk-Hai (une race d’orques guerriers dans le Seigneur des Anneaux), avec des paroles aussi inteligentes que «Uruk-Hai / You will die!». Rebaptisé Varg («loup» en norvégien) pour l’occasion, il rejoint Old Funeral, formé par les futurs membre de Immortal.

Mais voilà, le death metal bas du front et plein de clichés, Varg Vikernes, 18 ans à peine, l’exècre. Les clubs technos de Bergen l’intéressent bien plus que les vestes à patchs. Sobre, il se met à rôder silencieusement dans ces lieux pour s’imprégner des vibrations et de la puissance froide et répétitive de la musique électronique.

Sylvie Tissot :

Il convient de réfléchir aux effets idéologiques de dix ans de captation d’un terme utilisé au départ par des journalistes en quête de sujets légers pour les rubriques « Société ». La dénonciation du bobo est aujourd’hui une manière facile et faussement audacieuse de stigmatiser l’anti-racisme et le combat contre toutes formes de discrimination. Des causes auxquelles le peuple, le « vrai », serait profondément allergique.

I was approached by a reporter, Cal Flyn, from the Sunday Times, to assess this kind of variation in the writings of “Robert Galbraith,“ a first-time novelist and author of The Cuckoo’s Calling. (I learned later from the papers that the paper had received an anonymous tip via Twitter that Galbraith was the pen name of J.K. Rowling. And in retrospect there were a lot of other clues as well. For example, Galbraith apparently was surprisingly good at describing women’s clothing, possibly suggesting a female author.) Would I be willing to look into this? I said yes, of course, but with a couple of conditions. First, I needed clean (machine readable) copies of Cuckoo, and clean samples of something comparable undisputedly by Rowling herself. Secondly, I needed other comparable samples from other writers (distractor authors, to use the common term) to assess the degree of variation.

(via lkm)

David Simon:

“The ancients valued tragedy, not merely for what it told them about the world but for what it told them about themselves,” he said. “Almost the entire diaspora of American television and film manages to eschew that genuine catharsis, which is what tragedy is explicitly intended to channel. We don’t tolerate tragedy. We mock it. We undervalue it. We go for the laughs, the sex, the violence. We exult the individual over his fate, time and time and time again.”

In his Baltimore version of Olympus, the roles of gods were played by the unthinking forces of modern capitalism. And any mortal with the hubris to stand up for reform of any kind was, in classical style, ineluctably, implacably, pushed back down, if not violently rubbed out altogether.

“That was just us stealing from a much more ancient tradition that’s been so ignored, it felt utterly fresh and utterly improbable,” he said. “Nobody had encountered it as a consistent theme in American drama because it’s not the kind of drama that brings the most eyeballs.” It was possible in this time and place because, in the new pay cable model, eyeballs were no longer the most important thing.

And on how the magic happens:

Yet The Wire was also inescapably modern; its characters operated based on real, idiosyncratic psychologies, refusing to be pushed around like figures on a board. Sometimes they surprised even their creators. One passionate argument in the writers’ room was about a major moment in Season 1’s next-to-last episode, “Cleaning Up”: the execution of the young drug slinger Wallace by the tougher, only slightly older thug Bodie Broadus. Just before shooting his friend, Bodie hesitates, gun shaking. Ed Burns, the co-creator of the series, raised an objection: The Bodie we had seen to that point, he argued, was the very incarnation of a street monster, a young person so damaged and inured to violence by the culture of the drug game that he would never hesitate to pull the trigger, even on a friend.

“It didn’t go with the character. Bodie was a borderline psychopath almost. I was like, ‘We’re leading the audience down this path, and now this guy is backing off?’ That’s fucked up. That’s bullshit,” he said, remembering his feelings on the scene.

In future seasons, though, Broadus would emerge as the drug game’s answer to the rogue detective Jimmy McNulty: a soldier who tries to make his own way and ends up ground down by the system. His death would be unexpectedly poignant. All of that, Burns granted, was set up by his unexpected moment of humanity in Season 1.

“What it did was it allowed for a wonderful dynamic that went on for four seasons. It brought out a lot of comedy that psychopaths don’t have,” he said. “It was a learning curve for me. Originally I just didn’t like it because you don’t pull punches like that with the audience. Now, when I think about it, I think, ‘This is cool. This is something that allowed for another dimension.’ It worked. It worked fine.”

Kanye West:

I want to tell people, “I can create more for this world, and I’ve hit the glass ceiling.” If I don’t scream, if I don’t say something, then no one’s going to say anything, you know? So I come to them and say, “Dude, talk to me! Respect me!”

Yeah, respect my trendsetting abilities. Once that happens, everyone wins. The world wins; fresh kids win; creatives win; the company wins.

I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z.

Jean-Noël Lafargue :

« …un monde de solitude peuplé de chiens mélancoliques. »

Will Davies:

Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges. The fact that the resolutely ‘anti-political’ behaviorists of the 1920s, for example, produced techniques of psychological control that could serve the interests of military and corporate power, is one demonstration of this. The NSA revelations arguably herald a similar moment of reckoning for digital data collectors and analysts. Google’s childish political mantra of being anything other than ‘evil’ ignored the historical lesson, that apolitical, purposeless knowledge is often one of the greatest assets to the strategies of the powerful.

François Huguet :

Je dois fantasmer quelque chose de cette ville, comme j’ai fantasmé, fantasme et fantasmerai beaucoup d’autres cités. Il commence à pleuvoir sur North Avenue et quelque chose de flou, d’impalpable et d’indéfini flotte durant cette déambulation automobile. Baltimore joue aux montagnes russes quant à la perception que l’on peut en avoir ; elle fait évoluer nos chimères de spectateurs au fur et à mesure que l’on visite les artères qui l’irriguent.

An article that could have been written, point for point, in 1995, at the time where people like Nielsen were discussing the Anti-Mac interface. Same delusions about 3D, same hopes about non visual interfaces. Still, there’s so much to do with the personal computer that we haven’t tried yet.