The Bygone Bureau: Embracing Uncertainty with BitTorrent -
by (our own) Avery Edison
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The beautiful joke-icing to the ridiculous cake that was 1) Ashton Kutcher 2) making a racist advert 3) for Popchips.
A Continuous Lean: Boston Rubbernecks
Car-wreck photos from the ’30s. (Original full set here.)
“Describe everything you’ve done for the last ten years (or since you were 18). Do not omit anything. Failure to do so will result in a delay in the processing of your application.”
Followed by five short blank lines.
Five.
That’s two years a line.
At an average life-span of 75 years, this form seems to suggest that the average person’s entire existence could be described adequately in 38 lines.
Sometimes, of all the future-gifts our descendants will enjoy - jetpacks and robotic lovers and surgically-implanted laser-eyes - it’s their inevitable ignorance of what paperwork will have been that I envy most.
The concept of a ‘brogrammer’ makes me angry.
Fez is a beautiful, infinitely puzzley game. (I have a notepad with me and I make notes about them. I am learning an alphabet in it!) The soundtrack occasionally reminds me of an 8-bit version of ‘Music for airports.’
The Cabin In The Woods is a funny, self-aware, semi-horror movie. A genre mish-mash produced / written in part by Joss Whedon. Go see it. It is smart (or, at least, different).
The Descendants is wonderful and sad and a small tale. The soundtrack, especially the slack-guitar music by Sonny Chillingworth (Spotify link), is melodic and Hawaiian and wistful.
This article in GQ about a director creating a movie with thousands of extras in a Ukranian city is interesting. It seems almost like an homage to ‘Synechdoche, NY’.
I have been using Endomondo’s app to track my runs and to get a sense of their rhythm. I like it. It’s worth trying out if you do workout things. They support a lot of devices.
I quite like Jack White’s new album, especially the tracks ‘Sixteen saltines’ (Sp.) and ‘Freedom at 21’ (Sp.). I also like Keaton Henson’s sad and heartfelt album ‘Dear’ (Sp.) but I get the sense that it’s going feel a little overwraught pretty quickly.
The dream where I wake up, early, on a clean Sunday morning, just after it’s rained. That’s what’s woken me up, I think, in the dream - that the sound of the rain has stopped.
I wake up slowly, one eye opening at a time. I stretch lazily, push aside the fresh sheets and thick duvet, and wander downstairs. I realise that I have the house, the whole house, to myself and that it’s wonderfully silent. I brew myself some fresh coffee, the filter bubbling and gurgling happily, and sit down to the newly-delivered newspaper. I open it with the slight satisfying thwack noise it makes and find that it’s filled with interesting articles by columnists I know and love, and it has almost no advertisements. I sip the coffee tentatively, wait for it to cool a little, and read. Then, while reading, I find I’m crunching on warm toast I don’t remember making and that it’s covered in thick, good butter spread and a light layer of marmalade.
After a while, the toast finished, I stand, stretch again, and walk out onto my porch. I sip my coffee and look out over the damp, wakening world. I am happy.
Weird, right? I guess it’s Freudian.
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The art of advertising (speaking as someone who’s largely been advertised at, rather than who advertises) seems to lie in getting the user’s attention. That’s what an advertiser pays for - the chance to get a possible customer’s attention. Usually, that gaining of a user’s attention seems to be through subtlety, distraction, or misdirection.
I imagine (and hey, I could be wrong) that you’ll swap adverts into Radar content. One in every five, say. That’s makes sense and I guess would fall under the ‘misdirection’ label. It’ll not change Tumblr’s style, it’ll fold into something people already know, and it’ll give advertisers a known position (both in the site-sense and context-sense) and platform to pitch from.
The thing is, you need to make sure the other 4 things that aren’t adverts in the Radar are worth looking at. If people are actively seeking out that space to check it out, half of your work is done. You’ll get higher click-through rates and higher turn-over, simply because you’ve made sure that the standard of content in there, advertisement or not, is high. Otherwise, people (like myself) are going to simply to block out the Radar box, either mentally or using advert/content-blockers. What constitutes ‘good content’ there will vary in opinion, of course (me, I prefer some actual readable content), but actually making sure the original creators of it are credited is a definite must.
In short: stop fucking around and actually do some professional level curation of the editorial content on your blogging/curation platform. It’ll get you money and do us some good.
Oh hey, look, it’s an piece of art, unattributed, on Tumblr Radar. One that takes all of 5 clicks to source.
I know I’ve complained about this before. I’ll probably do it again. Tumblr is now big enough and old enough that this sort of shit should no longer fly.
Remember when there was a GIF there yesterday? All flashy and insistent? Wasn’t that fun?
I hear they’re going to start putting adverts there soon too.
Good times.
(Hey, remember when Tumblr used to run articles or chunks of text on the Radar? Isn’t there still a LongReads tag somewhere?)
Anyhow, I’m gonna walk off sadly into the sunset now. Feel free to take a faux-vintage photo of that and slap some text over it. Who knows, maybe it’ll make it to the Radar.