BRIAN LOVES WORDS

ilovecharts:

-Seth

(Source: feelafraid)

“Leave your regular, tedious, awful life behind and transport yourself to a place where steel drummers outnumber guests three to one.”

Market Hotel bathroom 1

Uncle Terry’s all ages party

This article is about why I love Slashdot. I could let other people ferret out interesting news while I kicked back and enjoyed the results. It was like a direct tap to the Constant Stream of Information.

I wanted more. Slashdot didn’t offer new articles fast enough and I began to get frustrated at the limited scope. I began supplementing with Fark, but I needed more still.

Social bookmarking entered my radar at that point, specifically del.icio.us. I also started using feed aggregators like Google Reader to follow blogs I found from the Fark and Slashdot. It’s like I opened the floodgates on the Constant Stream of Information.

That’s when things got out of hand.

On Google Reader, I was subscribed to several hundred sites. I couldn’t keep up with everything. I became overwhelmed. If I spent more than a few minutes reading an article, I got anxious thinking about all the other information I was missing. I stopped reading articles and just read the summaries. I stopped reading summaries and just read the headlines. Then I stopped reading altogether.

That’s about when social news sites hit. I flirted briefly with Digg, but, more or less, I skipped directly to reddit. There’s a good government analogy here. Slashdot and Fark are oligarchies. del.icio.us is close to information anarchy, and Google Reader made me an out of control dictator. Sites like reddit and digg are the communism of information control. The power is in the community (with very little oversight by moderators).

It was perfect for me — somewhere between the deluge I unleashed on myself with Google Reader and the trickle I was getting from the autocracies. Irrelevance and spam got smashed down by the hammer of the community and quality cut through the swath quickly and efficiently.

I don’t want to put all of the blame on reddit; I think part of the disillusionment I started feeling was my own changing attitude to the Constant Stream of Information. I really can’t say whether the overall quality of content on reddit has changed or whether what I look for in content has changed.

I originally came to reddit for the quantity and quality of information. I still visit daily (I even have the iPhone app), but my expectations have changed. I used to come expecting to find at least a few good, long articles that would keep my interest piqued and leave me with something to think about. The comments would be (mostly) insightful. Mixed in would be some pictures of cats with bad grammar.

Irreverence greatly outweighs genuine content now. Or maybe it was always that way, I just never noticed, and now I color my early experience with nostalgia. In whatever case, I started searching the digital landscape for the next place to go for my information fix and came up dry. I had hit the final frontier.

Finally, we’ve reached the part where I talk about why I love Fast Flip. If you don’t know about it, here’s Google’s own description:

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

Fast Flip is a non-social aggregator that collects mostly primary and secondary news sources, like Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. Flipping through these sources, I realized one of the things I’ve been missing in my years of social news addiction: a coherent, mature editorial voice.

There is also the user experience. I love the way articles are presented, with screenshots of the article taken from the source website. The design and branding of the publisher is there and rather than a summary, I can scan the actual article to find out whether I’m interested. This is a full leap better than the Google Reader experience.

I still love reddit for what it is, but for my actual news I’ve turned to Fast Flip. It’s still in Labs right now, but I really hope it becomes a full featured product.

(TL;DR: Fast Flip rekindled my love for the internet.)>

I’ve had a few blog ideas rolling around in my head. I finally got around to acting on one of those ideas, so I present: Recipe Poetry.

I’ll be posting at least one recipe a week, most likely more, in the form of a poem/series of poems. I’m also going to start including pictures with each post, so follow Recipe Poetry and get a weekly dose of food and literature.

This is the first touristy thing I’ve done since moving to New York. They have a really good deal on milkshakes.

10 out of 10 girls love beards.