via Bag and Baggage

Watch out, X-Men Origins:Wolverine.

Me and my bud Brian C. may drive up to St. Louis to catch these guys on June 10th, and hopefully stay with a fellow I know only as Icepick.

I mean sure, they’ve been a constant in my rotation since 1998’s “Midwestern Songs of the Americas,” but the music is overrated. It’s the banter I want to get my shimmy on to.

Check out the 2:30 point for some of the best work I’ve ever heard.

Sometime I think the only reason I stay at the forward margins of the adoption curve is to spite neurotic curmudgeons like Dowd. Biz Stone did nothing worse than to create a trivial little message service, and Dowd comes at him like a mean-spirited 9 year-old girl on the playground.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?

BIZ: We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great.

It’s worth reading if only to be impressed that Dowd managed to get a Pulitzer in the 90s for her Lewinsky coverage.

Microsoft confirms grossly shortsighted plans to release crippled Windows 7 SKU for netbooks and developing markets.

I don’t mean to hate on MSFT again. In fact, I’m mostly just tired of spending energy, positive or negative, on that behemoth. I’m not alone. I’ve seen even among dedicated Mac-folks an optimism, a rooting-for-ness surrounding Windows 7.  My sense is that those of us in the <10% marketshare crowd take pleasure in the apples-to-oranges aesthetic high-ground, the we-like-macs-because-we-get-it smugness. Vista made that smugness more difficult in a way: If the Microsoft “other” is just objectively crappy (Vista) rather then subjectively inelegant (XP), from where can we claim our cultural grace?.
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Slate has run a piece for you:

Do I Really Have To Join Twitter?
What to do if you’re just not that into microblogging but don’t want to be left behind.
Check it out here

Money quote, and spot on:

Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web… Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.

“Twitter is dead, long live Twitter”

I’m going to stop cross-posting my Twitter to these pages. I’m also going to try one last time to get you mugs to give the damned thing a shot. If you haven’t yet, you’re probably not going to. And given it’s current hyper-zealous embrace by an institutional media desperate for appearances of relevance, I’m not sure I can blame you.

But you still should join. Not because it’s hyped-up, but because it’s interesting.

Way back in late ‘07 – allow this geek some cred here – I gave my first argument for joining up. In it, I emphasized the community element of it, the idea of a sort of asynchronous, persistent IM: “Hey (circle of friends on Twitter), heading to Damgoode, be there ’til 8 or so, glad for company.” I tweet that at around 7, it goes into all of ya’ll’s feeds, tadaa, you all have an open invitation.” This was the early model, which is still kind of neat.

But the new revealed utility is its brevity. The true interestingness of Twitter is not just the connectedness, but the brevity. Right now, conjure to to mind something you’ve been thinking about recently. Now try and express it in 144 characters – which is the limit Twitter sets. Having a worthwhile idea on your mind is easy. Being able to convey any worthwhile idea in a couple of sentence is what good writing it made of.

Do it to train your mind to make concise jokes and arguments.

Example tweets from the past week:

Think of it as a challenge. It’s a brain exercise! really!

Unless you mugs are too scared to try the new.

Opening image via: Flick user Monstro.

Full set viewable here.

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