Month: October 2014

More icons won’t work

Insightful. Screens of icons isn’t scaling, most apps will never make any money, and at this point it’s mostly a sucker’s game.

The idea of having a screen full of icons, representing independent apps, that need to be opened to experience them, is making less and less sense. The idea that these apps sit in the background, pushing content into a central experience, is making more and more sense. That central experience may be something that looks like a notification center today, or something similar to Google Now, or something entirely new.

Pot Stocks

battle of the finance bros.

“But who cares about any of that?. Look, Theo. There’s money to be made. One guy I read about: 4 trades, he paid off the loans on 2 cars. Can you imagine?” The first words out of Theo’s mouth were, “OK, I’m in for $5000. What’s the next step? Let’s go make a trade!” “Whoa, Nelly. The stock market isn’t open on weekends.” “It isn’t?”

Fleecing ballers

a review after my own heart:

There are wine cabinets bulging with Montrachet and Pomerol, priced in 4 figures for men with teeny-weeny penises Mind you, they’re crap chips, huge fat things that could exclude drafts. Who actually likes their chips this way? They’re advertised as coming with truffle and foie-gras salt, which is like getting a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted case for your smartphone because you’ve run out of things to spend money on

The Basic

a “basic” is inescapably predictable. She (and it is always a she) cherishes uninspired brands — a mix of Target products, Ugg boots over leggings, and Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes (the ultimate signifier of basicness) — and lives a banal existence, obsessed with Instagramming photos of things that themselves betray their basicness (other basic friends, pumpkin patches, falling leaves), tagging them #blessed and #thankful, and then reposting them to the basic breeding grounds of Facebook and Pinterest.

110 Reasons to Leave NYC

BuzzFeed posted a list of “110 Reasons Why You Should Never Leave New York City,” and reading through it was one of the more confusing things we’ve done in a really long time. The list manages to be both highly redundant (how many different ways can you say that New York is not a car-reliant city?) and frequently nonsensical, all the while trafficking in such heavily used clichés as to be laughable.

in case you’re curious.

La Machine

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of French-Chinese diplomatic relations, the French production company La Machine traveled to Beijing, China, with 2 of its massive mechanical puppets, including a 6m spider named La Princesse and the newly added Long Ma, a 46-ton fire-breathing dragon-horse made of wood and steel. La Machine put on 3 days of performances titled “Long Ma, Spirit of the Dragon Horse”.