Not that my legal schoolin’ at The Bowen School is not already casting shadows of a future legislative efficacy. It’s just that a certain kind of graduate program would have been so… immersive.. so .. so aligned with where I am right now.

Law school has felt a little like training for an Iron Man race: Rewarding, but painful and without present, demonstrable fruit. Every once and a while I wish I had a marked-up, 16th-draft of a thesis or dissertation at which to sigh each morning. Sigh, but then to sit with and hone hone hone, stroke by stroke building my case for solving everything.

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“When I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”
– Pres. Obama. March 9th, 2012

Yes! To the dogs with election-year equivocation on civil rights. This is the transformative bravery we swelled behind 4 hours ago. Hope he sticks around this time.

May even be a surprise coup on the issue if it corners Romney into taking a firm stance in the other direction, alienating the center-right and/or the “sensibility” voters like my parents.

via Freedomtomarry.org

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“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights.”
- Joe Biden, May 6th 2012.

And, honestly, shame on Obama for not saying it himself.

via The Telegraph

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Somebody edited together 44:59 of Fugazi stage banter. Guy just dropped the term “erotic nostalgia” in-between songs like it was nothing.

In addition to the thirty-volume official live series available at their record label Dischord’s web site, I pulled material from about two dozen bootlegs I found on the web and on peer-to-peer networks. While there was no specific era that yielded the best material, a lot of stuff came from a three night stand at NYC’s Irving Plaza in 1995, and a March 2002 show at the Sloss Furnace in Birmingham, AL.

Listen here: Fun On Stage With Fugazi

via James Burns

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“You’re going between news about Syria, Obama’s new ridiculous thing, and then someone will be like ‘I just ate some plastic.’ The poetic rhythm of Twitter is really lovely. It’s like the best newspaper you couldn’t possibly design.”

- Sasha Frere-Jones, staff writer at the New Yorker

I am coming around to the confidence that sucessful design, for software, legislation and maybe even for everything, is 100% dependent on sound, simple first principles. More than anything else because a few articulated axis let us say “no.” They make us say “no”.  And with that first “No’: now you’ve got a direction.

Direction. It pains me to not obsess about the details of the mid and end-game before even ramping up. It might help to remember that, as in a Rube Goldberg machine, you can always augment the path ahead of the balls motion, but you can never go back in time and make sure that you soon enough. Yes, it’s trite to trite and necessary to congratulate Twitter in 2012, but it just now struck me – while reading this article – how well its product team managed to a.) just get it out there, and b.) keep it’s direction so aligned with it’s fundamental launch principles 6 years later.

Minus some sponsored chrome, the egalitarian 144-character little network still provides the same @bare textbox, thriving in leaving the use-case argument to the users. It’s at once a great newspaper, great book-o-jokes, great gossip mag, and none of those at all if you don’t want it to be. Twitter is terrible, Twitter is great, Twitter is multitudes, and I don’t think they had a damn idea what it would become. Get started. Say “no.” Keep it simple. Complexity will emanate.

via an interview in the Atlantic via The Verge’s Tumblr

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“Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”

The moment for IP and culture right now is so pivotal, that honestly, I’ll take disappointing.

My generation may never even live to see a a clear outcome of its efforts, but the outcome will be there all the same.

Just hope I can make it to one of the smaller chessboards before my bell rings.

Quote via George Orwell, in a lovely lil 1940 ode to Charles Dickens.

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A surprisingly eminent product with much to offer, and perhaps much to require. At the most extreme, one can imagine a world in which one turns the entire external life over to the Google database’s view.

Don’t get me wrong: it is a fascinating concept video. A fascinating concept video conspicuously absent HUD AdWords or other mild, ever-present suggestions.

via Project Glass

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Listening to McCain – notably on Citizen’s United’s impact in recent cycles– bears a big ole lefty Fist Pump of Gratitude for the stunted issue-provincialism of this year’s GOP field.

via This American Life

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“The United States has been eclipsed by China as the largest market for free applications in the world for the first time in the history of the Apple App Store for iPad. During February 2012, the number of daily downloads in the top 300 most popular free applications in China exceeded 1.1M, while the volume among the top 300 most popular free applications on each day in the United States was just below 1M.”

“But there are way more people in China?”, I was ask-asserted during a discussion of this research. Exactly! Stated as such– as if we don’t expect other factors like lack of personal wealth and market availability to be prohibitive – exactly underscores why this is so interesting a vector.

via a Distimo Study

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“No matter how long the slinky is, the bottom of the slinky will stay still (hover) until the top reaches it. Even if the slinky is over 1000 feet long.”

via unattributed tumblr post

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