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From a great piece on cyberpunk, what it was and what it might become, over at Killscreen:
Cyberpunk was, and remains, noir brought into the digital age; the black and white reinvented in neon and then LED. Given it was Edgar Allen Poe who introduced the first detective story, it seems natural that the procedural and the gothic interconnected.
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I wanted to write “failing”, but I see too many of those blasted things whenever I’m on Facebook that it just wouldn’t be true. Anyway, from a Digiday story on the matter:
Many publishers are deeply unhappy with the monetization on these pages, with major partners like The New York Times throwing in the towel and many others cutting back the amount of content pushed to the IA platform.
It goes on like that. Now if someone would please kill off Google’s AMP so that we could have a shot at an open web, wouldn’t that be nice?
Max Booth III decided to read all of Stephen King’s collected short works in a month.
But oh my god, you guys, Stevie King has written a lot of short stories. More than I certainly remembered, at least. Right off the bat I realized there was no way in hell I’d be able to include his collections consisting entirely of novellas, which would eliminate from my to-read list the following: Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight, and Full Dark, No Stars. Apparently many people view Hearts in Atlantis as a story collection, which is insane to me since it’s obviously a novel, so I also crossed that one off the list. This left me with the following to read in the month of February: Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, Just After Sunset, and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
It’s a pretty good column, although parts of it reads like a puff piece for the author’s Stephen King podcast. All that aside, if you’re interested in King’s short stories, which any sane person who loves to read should be, this one’s for you.
I’d never heard of the book Go Ask Alice, but the mystery surrounding the author made this piece an interesting read:
Despite the popularity of Go Ask Alice, the mystery of the diarist’s identity has never been truly solved, and none of her relatives have ever come forward to claim a share of the royalties. Yet the book was largely treated as authentic by reviewers in the 1970s, and touted as such for the television adaptation. Only Publisher’s Weekly threw shade, remarking that it “seems awfully well written,” to be real.
Looking for something to read the next couple of days? Longreads has made a list of all the Pulitzer Prize winners this year. Enjoy.
Jason Fried, founder and CEO of Basecamp, said this in the HBR Ideacast podcast, which I didn't listen to but luckily there's a transcript:
You know, people don’t have hours anymore. Like, you don’t have hours at work. You know, people say they work 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day. They don’t. They work 15 minutes and 20 minutes and 25 minutes and 6 minutes and maybe 45 minutes if they’re lucky. And that just seems broken to me. So I’m trying to push hard against that.
The Guardian reporting on the possibility of US requiring social media account access and more from visitors:
(Security secretary John) Kelly told a House homeland security committee hearing in February: “We want to say for instance, ‘What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords,’ so that we can see what they do on the internet. If they don’t want to give us that information then they don’t come.”
Yeah, I’m not visiting the US anytime soon. This is just horrible.
Jean-Louis Gassée believes that the iPad turnaround, where the naysayers are predicting doom and gloom due to the huge dip in sales. This, after writing about the relaunched iPad product line, sans pro, in the Monday Note piece:
This leads us to an easy guess for future iPad Pros. We’re likely to see linear hardware and software improvements (keyboard, screen, stylus, more independent windows…), plus others we can’t think of immersed, as we often are, in derivative thought. All will make the Pros more pro: Powerful enough of take business away from the Mac (and Windows PCs). I like my MacBook, but can see an iPad Pro on my lap and desk in a not-too-distant future.
I believe this is possible, I know the vast majority of people would enjoy their computing tasks more if they used an iPad Pro instead, with the suitable accessories of course. However that’s a big step, and for some a change in mindset. It’s a tough battle to win.
I write columns for Di Digital, a Swedish business tech site, and whenever I mention a computing solution that’s far from the laptop, I get emails about “not being able to work without the Thinkpad nub” and the like. People, professionals especially, are creatures of habit.
That said, putting iPad Pros in the workflow of the younger generation, which are clearly the target of the new iPad Pro ads (one embedded below), might be the longterm route to success. Some industries you disrupt over night, others take more time. Professional computing work isn’t as easily defined as a smart mobile phone segment.
Oh, and before you click play, make sure you read the whole Jean-Louis Gassée piece and the tiny little note about perspectives at the end. The iPad is a big deal, the only reason Apple pundits and analysts are chirping about its doom is because of the declining sales. That’s only really a truly worrying factor if people never upgrades their iPads. Looking at my immediate surroundings, that’s something people are interested in doing.
https://youtu.be/Z-9tvx0aO1U
