Month: August 2012

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“I Ended Up Having A Minor Nervous Breakdown From The Schedule”

I didn’t have any help for a long time, so I was doing 20-30 posts a day trying to keep up. I was so stressed my body was pretty much perpetually contorted in pain, making it nearly impossible to sleep. I put on about 30 pounds from shoveling in Chinese delivery at my desk. I ended up having a minor nervous breakdown from the schedule and what seemed like a lack of a future.

The series of interviews with Gizmodo writers and editors from the past decade to celebrate the site’s 10th anniversary is interesting – and, with people talking about nervous breakdowns or having “a complicated relationship” with the site –  although I’m not sure if it’s supposed to come from some kind of place of “Look what we used to be like, but we’re not like that anymore!” or not. I wonder if io9 will do one for their tenth anniversary (I’ve just realized io9 is five in January. Holy crap)?

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Food For My Thought

An analytics product such as Chartbeat produces reams of data: pageviews, unique users, and more. News organizations reliant on advertising or user subscriptions must pay attention to these numbers because they’re tied to revenue — but it’s less clear how they might be relevant editorially.

Consider pageviews. That single number is a combination of many causes and effects: promotional success, headline clickability, viral spread, audience demand for the information, and finally, the number of people who might be slightly better informed after viewing a story. Each of these components might be used to make better editorial choices — such as increasing promotion of an important story, choosing what to report on next, or evaluating whether a story really changed anything. But it can be hard to disentangle the factors. The number of times a story is viewed is a complex, mixed signal.

It’s also possible to try to get at impact through “engagement” metrics, perhaps derived from social media data such as the number of times a story is shared. Josh Stearns has a good summary of recent reports on measuring engagement. But though it’s certainly related, engagement isn’t the same as impact. Again, the question comes down to: Why would we want to see this number increase? What would it say about the ultimate effects of your journalism on the world?

From here.

Measuring metrics always feels like the enemy to me, personally. By which I mean, I hate that it’s not enough for something to be “good,” but that it has to be “sticky” as well; I really hate that, for so many sites, generating pageviews would be preferable to being of high quality if it came to some kind of DeathBowl-esque showdown. The Game is The Game, etc.

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It’s A Bronze! A Bronze, I Tells Ya!

And then there was the point, this weekend, when my Bourne Legacy article for Time’s Entertainment blog went broad, becoming the third-most viewed article on all of Time.com. I am sure this is because it was suddenly linked somewhere – I mean, it was four days old when this happened, and it didn’t seem to have massive purchase immediately? – but, no matter what, this was surprising and another sign that I have no idea how the Internet works.

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“Life is Such A Mrrumph!”

Found on the Internet, so I have no idea what comic this is from. It’s by Alex Toth, though, and just look at the design on this page. It’s gorgeous. The dialogue, too, is kind of awesome; I should try and track down the rest of this story one day.

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366 Songs 232: The Shock Of The Lightning

This song is, in so many ways, Oasis-By-Numbers; the lyrics that reference well-known pop cultural artifacts in the middle of meaningless platitudes (“Love is a time machine/Up on the silver screen/Love is a litany/A magical mystery”) before going on to exhort something of the listener (“Come in/Come out/Come in/Come out tonight”), sneered against a wall of noise made up of every instrument seemingly being turned up to 11 and just played without any artifice or self-awareness. And yet, it works because of that, not despite of it. There’s no there there in this song, no hidden meaning or secret that you only discover after repeated listens – You either get this or you don’t. It’s thug music pretending to be hippie music, and that always been what Oasis is, deep down. It’s not even a “you’re either on the bus or you’re off it” thing; if you’re not on Oasis’ bus, they’ll probably accidentally run you over because they genuinely don’t give a fuck, and not even in the poserish “We don’t give a fuck” sense; it’s because they’re too dumb to think to do it. The work of idiot savants, “The Shock of The Lightning” even has a drum solo that, against all logic, may just be the best part of the song (Jump to 3:02 if you don’t believe me).

A song this bad becomes good, or at least appealing, true. But still: It really doesn’t deserve this amazingly good Julian House-directed video, which gets psychedelia far more than the band ever did.

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366 Songs 231: Shangri-La

That I apparently haven’t written about this song yet seems a massive oversight to me, considering this may be one of my favorite pop songs ever written/performed, mixing a wonderful arrangement – The brass section! The jangly guitars! – some lyrics that speak to the disaffection of a nation bred into apathy (“But he’s too scared to complain/Cause he’s conditioned that way”), and a structure that just builds into the spectacularly amped up, angry section that begins at 2:50 that kicks the whole thing into a higher level. “And all the houses on the street have got a name/Cause all the houses on the street all look the same,” while the music repeats, a commentary on the similarity of suburbia, and the horns drag everything down… And then everything turns into a lazy, sloppy singalong, punctuated by cymbal crashes and we return to where we started, emboldened, tired and underscoring some wonderfully sad idea that you can never really escape where you come from.

That this isn’t a song that everyone knows and adores continually makes me a little sad; this is what pop music can do, if it really tries.

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Well, I Didn’t See That Coming

Sometimes, you think “Hey, I’m caught up on deadlines!” and look forward to your day. And those are the days when an editor will ask you to write a quick crash course in a ridiculously complicated lawsuit, and you spend hours researching and writing a thousand words on it. Seriously, this is like the length of one of my Time pieces.

On the plus side, I feel like it’s a reasonably good piece. On the minus side, now I still have work to do. Thanks, Friday.

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366 Songs 230: I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have

(Note: I know the above video cuts off the end, but it’s the only YouTube I could find of the original song!)

There’s something wonderfully drunken about this song; more than likely, it wasn’t alcohol that messed Bobby Gillespie up before he recorded the vocals to this song, but nonetheless, this song always sounds like the complaints and pleas of a man gloriously drunk, dumped and trying to talk his way out’ve the trouble he’s surrounded himself with, and I love it for that.

I also love it for the arrangement, with the horns, the grumpy wah-wah guitar and, really low in the mix but definitely there, the piano. It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned, sad song, and even if it ended up getting remixed to hell to become “Loaded” and start a minor musical revolution in the UK, this is still the version I love best.

Well, okay. Maybe I prefer this version, but that’s only because I’m a sucker for women doing acoustic songs, for some reason.

Ah, Idha. The world needs more of you…

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“A Missing Image or Text, That Implies Something”

I love this list of the “20 irrefutable theories of book cover design” from the Guardian:

11. Unheimlich theory
This theory takes a familiar image or symbol and makes it strange or unsettling. One cover of Lolita uses the image of a girl’s bedroom wall to represent a girl’s legs and underwear.

12. Absent presence theory
A gap is left on the cover, a missing image or text, that implies something. By having this space, the reader is forced to fill the gap with their imagination in order to understand the meaning.

13. Ju Jitsu theory
The opponent, the cover, forces a view or conception upon the defender, the reader, such as the bloody, violent implications on the cover of Anthony McGowan’s love story Stag Hunt.

It speaks to the former graphic designer in me, as well as the lover of seeing trends and movements that may not really be there yet, drawing on threads to bring them together. Plus, you know, “Unheimlich theory” is just a great name for anything.

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366 Songs 229: Candy Everybody Wants

Oh, 1990s alternative music. What did you do to me?

I really liked this song, when it was released (which was… 1992, apparently); I can remember listening to it over and over again, alternating it with the R.E.M. that I was getting into at the time, and wondering whether I had a crush on Natalie Merchant* or not, and feeling guilty about the possibility that I did. Listening to it again now, for the first time in many, many years, I am struck by the way the production reminds me of Paul Simon’s Graceland album from six years prior, with the weirdly suffocating jangly guitars and soulless horn section (Especially surprising, considering it’s James Brown’s backing horns providing them, with Maceo Parker involved as well). There’s an unappealing sanctimoniousness about the lyrics, too: “If lust and hate are the candy/If blood and love tastes so sweet/Then we give ’em what they want” is, in some strange way, entirely offputting an opening to the song, some kind of superior judgment that makes Merchant and friends seem alien and uncaring.

Amusingly, listening to this again today, I realized that the version that lived in my head was the live version with Michael Stipe doing co-vocals:

There’s something loose and joyful in his performance that the song just feels entirely different. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.

(* Watching the video today, for the first time ever, Merchant reminds me of Parker Posey; if they ever do a Natalie Merchant biopic, clearly they need to cast Posey in the lead.)