I've been advised by doctors to prepare for death. "I believe that there is strength in facing reality, and then planning your demise on your own terms as best you can. And hey, if a miracle happens and we beat the odds, that is only a bonus. Facing reality doesn't mean denying a possible happy outcome. Look at my case for instance--I have surpassed 60 days, and I am not dead yet. I haven't counted how many days I am past my expiration date, but one could say that each day is a miracle now." [more inside]
posted by jcterminal
on Dec 14, 2011 -
44 comments
Roger Ebert has posted the intro of his memoirs,
Life Itself, to
his blog, which particularly talks about how therapeutic his blog has been, giving him a voice when he can no longer speak. Originally dismissive of online media, he's gone on to embrace it (for example, with his
twitter feed), in a manner matched by few other celebrities.
posted by kaszeta
on Aug 16, 2011 -
22 comments
Allie Brosh (previously
1 2 3), drunk
liveblogs (live drunkblogs?), on internet expectations, being a role model, and burritos as compared to fighter jets.
posted by yellowbinder
on Oct 28, 2010 -
24 comments
Vox, the social networking/blogging platform set up by [former] LiveJournal parent company SixApart, is
closing down.
posted by mippy
on Sep 3, 2010 -
64 comments
Pay Up! "Got a blog that makes no money? The city (Philadelphia) wants $300, thank you very much." [...] "After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made."
posted by Fizz
on Aug 23, 2010 -
95 comments
Andrew Shane Huang is a 35 year old hardware hacker, known to some as
bunnie, and others as that guy who
hacked the Xbox and went on to
write a book about it.
Finding the hidden key to the Xbox was
an enjoyable distraction while he worked on getting his PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT as
part of
Project Aries. Since then, he has
written for (and
been written about) in
Make Magazine, has
giving talks on the strategy of hardware openness and
manufacturing practices in China, as experienced with the development of the opensource
ambient "
internet-based TV" called
Chumby. When he's not busy on such excursions, bunnie writes about
hacking (and more specifically,
Chumby hacking),
technology in China, and even
biology in exquisite detail on
the bunnie studios blog (
previously).
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 17, 2010 -
36 comments
What journalists who blog think “blogging” is. Lizzie Skurnick (pseudonymous author of the literary blog
the Old Hag) almost got called up to the Show – the New York
Times actually asked her to write. But under their terms. And that’s the problem:
[T]he media who, after constantly treating me as an amusing quantity who, despite the zillions of print articles I have written, is still a blogger, while they, who are now blogging, because they crashed their whole goddamn field, are somehow not bloggers except for how maybe they are running blogs, want to tell me what to do.... You link wrong. You’re not funny.... You think posts are something you “pitch.” [...] You think other bloggers should respond to other bloggers, preferably in chin-stroking ways like “I appreciate your thoughts, Gwendolyn, yet I….” You want headlines maximized for SEO.... Worse, you seem to take blogging as some amusing shift you’ve been asked to do that is entirely within your powers. You are a fancy important journalist! You are an actual writer. OK, maybe you are. But you are sure as hell not a blogger any more than that dude with the novel in the drawer is a novelist.
(Via)
posted by joeclark
on Jun 14, 2010 -
101 comments
Restoring Journalism Maureen Tkacik talks about her life as a journalist, the nothing-based economy, and the future of journalism. She suggests abandoning authority and productively channeling narcissism. (via
2p &
dd)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jun 12, 2010 -
18 comments
The rise of the f*** yeah tumblrs has been
noted on MeFi, but with the appearance of
Is it a F*** Yeah!?, it's easier to find curious FYTs. So in addition to the obvious
cats,
sharks and
what have you, one might happen upon
modernism,
Hamlet,
e.e cummings,
chinchillas,
archeology,
Romania,
The Kinks,
weather, and
ballet.
posted by nthdegx
on Jun 3, 2010 -
59 comments
Much has been made of the ethics of bloggers who receive compensation -- usually in the form of demo units and trial versions of products -- in exchange for reviewing those products, often with the implicit understanding that the review is a positive one. These questions prompted an FTC investigation, and last fall the agency revised their
formal guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials to include bloggers or other "word-of-mouth" marketers. The Interactive Agency Bureau maintains that the guidelines are unconstitutional, and is calling for the FTC to
rescind the rules as they apply to bloggers and other online outlets. The latest casualty? An intern at TechCrunch asked for a MacBook Air in exchange for a post. In the wake of this revelation, TechCrunch fired the intern and issued a
formal apology. To his credit, the intern has posted his own
mea culpa.
posted by shiu mai baby
on Feb 5, 2010 -
69 comments
Looking for a new project? Wish you were a better cook? Why not try
cooking every recipe in a cookbook? Originally started by
Julie Powell of
Julie & Julia fame, people now register domain names for anticipated cookbooks
in advance of the release date. As daunting as it seems to tackle the entirety of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, that challenge seems to pale in comparison to the epic quest of cooking all 1000+ recipes in the
Gourmet cookbook. For the chef who wants a different sort of challenge, there are the
particular demands of Heston Blumenthal's $250, 11.6 pound molecular gastronomy bible,
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook. While the bloggers
cooking through
Alinea are working with isomalt and sorghum flour, the daring souls blogging
Nose to Tail are wrestling with noses, tails, and
all the offal parts in between. If this seems like a lonely road, maybe you'd like to join one of the group baking projects such as
Tuesdays with Dorie or
The Bread Baker's Apprentice.
posted by hindmost
on Jan 16, 2010 -
47 comments
On August 16, 2008, a small plane carrying a young married couple and their flight instructor crashed in the Arizona desert. Doug Kinneard, the instructor, was killed in the crash; Stephanie and Christian Nielson survived, both severely burned. Prior to the crash, Stephanie's weblog, the NieNie Dialogues,
"had attracted a small but ardent following, thanks to its upbeat dispatches about marriage, home décor, entertaining and the art of raising four children ages 6 and younger." After the crash, with burns on over 80% of her body, she spent two months in a medically induced coma. One month later, she was
released from the hospital (link to Stephanie's sister's blog); one month after that, she
began blogging again. Stephanie's posts since then have chronicled her
gradual recovery, her re-integration into
her family, her
love and gratitude for her husband, and, finally, on the one-year anniversary of the plane crash,
herself. [more inside]
posted by granted
on Aug 16, 2009 -
61 comments
The Early Days of Blogging - Presented at the 2009 HyperText conference, this paper is an extensively cited and well-researched narrative of the blogosphere's formative period. It delves deep into the involvement of Jorn Barger, Dave Winer, and other A-list luminaries.
posted by SpecialK
on Jul 6, 2009 -
36 comments
John Gruber of
Daring Fireball:
"My friend Merlin Mann and I had a session at SXSW Interactive about two weeks ago. It certainly wasn’t a panel, and it wasn’t really a presentation. It was more like an hour-long duet rant, the main goal of which was to inspire anyone who wants to publish or write on the web to pursue their obsessions in a serious way.
We got the audio recording of the session from SXSW a few days ago, recorded short intro and outro segments, and Merlin spliced it together and has published it on his 43 Folders podcast. I encourage you to go ahead and listen to it."
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Mar 27, 2009 -
26 comments
"The biggest problem with the metal bikini, was that it wasn’t metal. ——Not that metal would’ve been an improvement over what it was actually made of, which was kind of a hard plastic. Whatever it was, it didn’t adhere to one’s skin. MY skin. My young, soon to be popular, unlucky skin. SO, when I was relaxing leisurely against Jabba the Hutt’s gigantic, albiet grotesque stomach, my hard, plastic bikini bottom……….well, it had the tendency to make my now not so private privates quite public. Especially for the actor standing behind Jabba playing Bobba Fett—–I believe his name was Jeremy—–from where Bobba/Jeremy stood, so straight and tall and severe behind his mask——to put it simply and weirdly, Jeremy could see beyond my yawning, plastic bikini bottoms all the way to Florida."
-
Carrie Fisher goes from
writing the occasional book to
daily blogging, from substance abuse to abusing punctuation
posted by crossoverman
on Feb 3, 2009 -
66 comments
