August 19th, 2009 § by A
Gabe – I’m right there with you. A new book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft” has raised some interesting points along these lines. A favorite blog (Front Porch Republic) just did a week-long symposium on it.  This summary of the book touches on a surprising amount of your questions – the value of the craftsman, how we got here, and where do we go from here. I’d be very curious to know what you think of it.
But in the meantime, perhaps this will cheer you up. It’s my new favorite (click to expand):
August 17th, 2009 § by A
Hopefully any church would do this, but to say it out loud, bluntly, from the pulpit is shocking. This article is a must-read.
July 10th, 2009 § by A
Penny Arcade’s Tycho talks about his frustrations with the latest Battlefield 1942:
When am I going to learn not to buy their products on day one? When am I going to learn that EA products include free misery?
A couple years ago, when we were trying (unsuccessfully) to set up a round of Tiger Woods with Gabe’s father, I can recall that the Elder Krahulik was almost flabbergasted by the notion that you could buy a product that simply didn’t work, or worked partially, or worked according to the voodoo whims of some witch calendar, or that buying had been divorced from ownership, or any one of a hundred other treacherous ambiguities brought on by the alloyed Eden of the digital age.
March 2nd, 2009 § by A
How did I go so long without reading First Things? It’s my favorite thing to read, period. Here’s a neat observation in the middle of an article on image and sacrament:
What is it that puts me off about photographers? Anyone who’s ever been in charge of taking pictures at a Thanksgiving dinner or a children’s birthday party knows how abstracting it is. If you have to take the pictures, you can’t be there in the usual sense: you have to be always looking for shots, turning people toward the camera, eyeing the turkey or birthday cake for posterity. But the more you believe in what you’re doing, the more you also believe your presence justifies everything.The photographers I’m talking about, the true believers, don’t seem absent from where they are, the way people do when their eyes pass over you as they talk on their cell phones. But as Nikon says on its website: “Choose a camera and you’ve taken the first step toward turning fleeting moments into precious memories.” What it says is accurate: the objective of most amateur photography is the conquest of time and distance. The photographs will eventually be the memories as the context drops away. Just go through your old photographs and see.
The great faculty of memory that St. Augustine celebrates in the Confessions has enhanced itself with literal accuracy and indentured itself to technology at the same time. Plato (and not just Plato) worried that even writing things down would supplant the living presence of the truth, but the photograph uncannily holds the present, only the present, this moment forever, while the world goes on.
A veiled Muslim woman once chased my wife through Istanbul trying to get back her stolen image. I understand the impulse. I find myself uncomfortably in the camp of Susan Sontag: “the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”
January 8th, 2009 § by A
Facebook set a new record for its busiest day ever – Christmas Day. It’s a wonderful tool and etc., but if you updated your Facebook status to wish everyone Merry Christmas on the day of (or Happy New Year at 12:05 on New Year’s Day, for that matter), it may be time to get introspective, take a long look at your iLife and all that.
Try starting with this… you can get a free Whopper if you remove 10 friends from Facebook. It’s… Whopper Sacrifice! Crispin Porter + Bogusky brings the magic!
December 20th, 2008 § by A
Dan Lyons (the blogger formerly known as Fake Steve Jobs) had this to say about Google’s Android:
[Android is] the desktop Linux of mobile phones — a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. Or, to put it another way, Android was indeed created to help solve a problem, but it’s not a problem that customers have, it’s a problem that Google has. Same for Chrome, when you think about it. Google is all about solving the world’s most difficult problems — specifically, those problems that prevent Google from owning every last piece of the world.
Ouch!