—Ludwig Wittgenstein

I never owned a bike in the 12 years I lived in Manhattan. The 24/7 subway, my feet and the occasional taxi always had me covered.
Now I live in San Francisco. Mass transit is still an option, although it’s not nearly as pervasive as NYC’s. Walking is mostly doable, but again, not as much as NYC. As for taxis, Eddie Izzard is right, there’s about 5 in the whole city. Über is magical and awesome, but I’m not made of money.
So I’m going to get a bicycle very soon. Something reliable and strong with gears for getting up SF hills, but also scratched up and cheap—something I don’t have to worry about getting stolen.
I moved out of NYC before they implemented the Citibike program, which has proven to be a success.
Co.Exist finds they’re safe too:

Nearly seven months after New Yorkers first took their heavy blue frames for a spin, Tom Swanson, a solutions engineer for the mapping firm Esri and an avid cyclist, has crunched the numbers. By his count, Citibike has actually not significantly increased the number of bike collisions at all.
Over at Chicago Magazine, Whet Moser finds there’s a lot of bicycle haters out there too, like this rant from Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass on Chicago’s bike share program:
“This is the problem with the Divvy bikes, with all the bikes,” Kass says in the video. “This is a city made for people who want to go from point A to point B. This is not some Seattle coffee, grunge, pothead experiment. This is Chicago… Shut the whole Divvy bike thing down. Get off Dearborn. I’m tired of you people.”
I’m someone who drives a decent amount in SF but also wants a bicycle, and from my perspective as a driver my problem with (some) cyclists isn’t their form of transportation, it’s how they conduct themselves on the roads. They behave like a pedestrian when it’s convenient and a car when it’s convenient.
When you operate under two sets of rules accidents happen.

—Heraclitus

5Pointz, a Graffiti Mecca in Queens, Is Wiped Clean Overnight:

By Tuesday morning, the work of some 1,500 artists had been wiped clean, the Brobdingnagian bubble letters and the colorful cartoons spray painted on the building’s brick walls all covered in a fresh coat of white paint.

“We are supposed to be the vandals, but this is the biggest rag and disrespect in the history of graffiti,” said Marie Cecile Flageul, an unofficial curator for 5Pointz.
Boo-hoo.
Some might think this is unfortunate for graffiti artists, but the truth is, the artists who tagged up the surfaces of 5Pointz were allowed to by the owners of the building.
Anyone who really knows NYC knows the only thing constant in the city is change.
Or to remix Heraclitus, you cannot tag the same wall twice.

NYTimes: ‘Selfie’ Trumps ‘Twerk’ as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year
Seriously, what’s going on?

What’s the non-iPhone smartphone world baking up these days?
Curved displays and 41-megapixel cameras:

I guess you can argue that some consumers need the 41-megapixel camera that Nokia introduced a few months ago. But the number of people who care about that is a sliver of the overall market. Things get even murkier with the Samsung Galaxy Round and its curved display. Technically, this feature does have marginal utility. When you rock the phone as it lies on its convex side, you can glimpse messages on the display if you happen to be looking at it sideways. This is pretty much the definition of “grasping at straws” when it comes to feature innovation.
It’s seems like companies are just spinning their wheels while they wait for whatever Apple might announce in 2014.

The 23-year-olds at Snapchat rejected a 4 billion dollar buyout offer.
In other news, Kanye West gives a lecture on design (?!?!?!) at Harvard Business School.
Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on in the world?

I recently downloaded the LucasArts iOS game, Tiny Death Star. I blame it on the double-pronged nostalgia attack of 8-bit graphics (a la the NES) and Star Wars, two integral elements of my childhood.
Tiny Death Star is a freemium game. Shit, I hate that word. Freemium means technically, superficially, it’s free, but in order to play at a reasonable pace and acquire upgrades and rewards, you have to make in-app purchases.
I can’t make a blanket statement and say I object to every app with a freemium business model. I specifically object to in-app purchases for games. My reason is simple: in a game, I expect progression based on my skill in playing, not on the size of my wallet.
In Tiny Death Star, acquiring certain properties is only possible if you buy in-app ‘bux’ and ‘credits’. The alternative is intially waiting hours and eventually waiting up to days to accumulate credits. As for bux, the only way to acquire them is to follow instructions from the (tiny) Emperor. Based on the price of certain items and the slow rate at which you’re awarded bux, it could take months and months of gameplay to make minimal progress.
Below is a screen grab of the Imperial Bux Store:

The fact that there is even the option to buy $99 worth of bux is bullshit.
This is not fun.
This is being squeezed, nickel-and-dimed, dare I say extorted, on a tiny scale (and by tiny I mean big).
I tried this game for a week but have since deleted it from my iPhone as it was clear I was getting nowhere fast. The only reason this game seems to exist is to jam more money into LucasArts’ pockets.
Count me out.

BatKid saves San Francisco.
I love this city.

My studio mate Brock Daves at Big Umbrella Studios here in San Francisco recently had a photo series published on The Bold Italic.
Subject matter? Dramatic Portraits of Dogs Pooping.
The series has proved so popular, TBI readers are submitting photos of their own dogs dropping deuces.
You never know what form a new meme will take.

—from Mr. & Mrs. Smith

The Scanadu Scout promises to allow you to keep tabs on your (or someone else’s) health. A small, hockey-puck-shaped device, it works through bodily contact. Hold it to your forehead and it displays, via a smartphone, your temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and plenty more.
The Scanadu Scout

Earlier this year Matt Gemmell defended the flat, buttonless UI aesthetic of iOS 7:

The thing is, we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content.
Nigel Warren calls bullshit:
I appreciate some of their other insights, but I call bullshit on this specific point. Who, exactly, has grown up? In the past 30 years of traditional desktop GUIs, no one questioned the need for basic visual cues to demonstrate interactivity. When it comes to smartphones specifically, billions of people around the world have never used one. To take an example of a particularly smartphone-happy country, almost half the population in the U.S. has yet to buy one.
I’m with Nigel.
The lack of visual affordance in iOS 7 is just one of a handful of problems I have with iOS 7 (Fitt’s Law, anyone?).

Context looks like a great design tool:

Use the design tools you already know to create stunning photorealistic onscreen mockups with a click. Context links with Illustrator to allow you to see your concepts realized side-by-side, while you work.
Subscription licensing starts at $9 a month.