Decamping Artists

Dezeen:

The flow of creative people from New York to Los Angeles is “a cautionary tale for London” according to Rohan Silva, former senior policy advisor to UK prime minister David Cameron.

Silva told Dezeen that the recent trend for designers, artists and other creatives to leave New York due to sky-high prices and lack of suitable studio space could happen in London too.

“I think it’s a cautionary tale for London,” he said. “In New York, people are decamping to LA and I think we’ve really got to be careful in London that people don’t pick another city and choose to go there. Because the moment a city starts to lose its artists, things can fall apart and the city might lose its edge.”

This seems to be happening everywhere. I live in San Francisco and rents are insane. I lived in NYC until 2012 and watched rents continue to balloon (they continue to balloon with more luxury apartments being built). I’ve even heard that Austin is getting expensive and the music scene isn’t what it used to be since its rise in popularity and Google setting up a huge office there.

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Finance

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Participating In Your Own Vision

Horace Dediu: iOS v. Windows and Immunity to Disruption:

Which reminds me. This week Microsoft just wrote off the acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business. The growth of mobile as an alternative to desktop/laptop computing was foreseen by Microsoft a decade before the the data in the graphs above. It began in 1994 with Windows CE development, proceeded with a PDA operating system by 1998 and the Pocket PC brand in 2001 and Windows Mobile in 2004 and Windows Phone in 2009.

After anticipating, predicting and dedicating decades of work why didn’t Microsoft participate in its own vision?

The curious thing about disruption is that predictability does not result in immunity. If the new trajectory threatens the current profit formula, the trajectory is not joined with enthusiasm. There is an uncanny unwillingness to self-disrupt.

Just because you were first to market doesn’t mean you had the right vision.

Categories:

Technology

Innate Talent

At Aeon, Sam Haselby asks, is artistic talent innate?:

In reality, artistic creativity is extremely widespread, maybe even a human universal. Most young children would be capable of achieving advanced proficiency in several different disciplines (athletic, visual, performative/musical, mathematical, verbal), and culture is replete with examples of folk art, ordinary inventiveness (Etsy, patent applications) and creativity in many different dimensions (cake-decorating, graffiti). What is less common, perhaps, is the drive and persistence (“grit,” in recent terminology) to develop those skills to a level that will lead others to identify the individual who possesses them as having exceptional talent. Those we think of as most creative – take a list of recent MacArthur Foundation fellowship winners, or of living artists whose work is held in the permanent collections of major museums like the Guggenheim or MOMA – are often no more creative than their less distinguished peers; they are more driven, or more gifted at envisioning and executing the shape of a career, or sometimes just more fortunate in a right-time-right-place sense.

Grit, man. You gotta have grit.

Categories:

Pyschology

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Comments Suck

The Verge is turning off their commenting system for the summer:

From the very start, community has been at the heart of The Verge — we are unique among almost every major media brand of our size in having a vocal, engaged audience that cares deeply about what we cover, why we cover it, and how we do it. The Verge audience knows our staff and genuinely cares about us. They write us long posts about ways to improve the site and what they like, and when they leave we get heartfelt breakup letters. It’s terrific, and intense.

And sometimes it gets too intense. What we’ve found lately is that the tone of our comments (and some of our commenters) is getting a little too aggressive and negative — a change that feels like it started with GamerGate and has steadily gotten worse ever since. It’s hard for us to do our best work in that environment, and it’s even harder for our staff to hang out with our audience and build the relationships that led to us having a great community in the first place.

That’s a bad feedback loop, and we want to stop it. So we’re going to call timeout for a while and turn comments off by default on all posts for the next few weeks. It’s going to be a super chill summer.

Why stop at the end of the summer? Turn comments off permanently. There are very few sites where I’ve seen mostly positive comments (Asymco and The Loop come to mind), but comment threads are usually filled with shit-talking fanbois, trolls and negativity. Commenting systems encourage reactionary replies with little critical thinking behind them.

I decided a long time ago to kill comments on this site, in part from John Gruber’s comment-less approach on Daring Fireball. I believe his reason for not having comments was something along the lines of, “I want to own every pixel on my site.” That resonated with me.

If you read something someone wrote and have thoughts of your own that support/refute it, launch your own website and spend some time formulating a cohesive response. Then sit on it and reread it. Then post it.

Fuck comments.

Categories:

Words

Hard Work First

Seth Godin:

The Wright Brothers decided to solve the hardest problem of flight first.

It’s so tempting to work on the fun, the urgent or even the controversial parts of a problem.

There are really good reasons to do the hard part first, though. In addition to not wasting time in meetings about logos, you’ll end up getting the rest of your design right if you do the easy parts last.

This is great advice for planning Kickstarter projects and avoiding the potential pitfalls associated with them.

Categories:

Process

Apple Music, First Impressions

I’ve been using Apple Music since it launched yesterday. It’s interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll be signing up after the 3-month trial is over, but so far I like the recommendations it gives me.

The playlists under “For You” are good, but I’ve been playing around with the ability to create a “station” based on a track I’m listening too. I want recommendations based on my music library. So far, the stations Apple has been creating are good. I noticed it will play me a combination of songs already in my library and songs from iTunes.

The user interface on my iPhone is on the complex side. I can figure it out without too much trouble, but I’m not sure non-nerds will be able to. Part of this is due to the density of functionality Apple has packed into the Music app. There’s a lot going on.

I used to be able to double-tap on the album artwork to display the album track list, but that doesn’t work anymore. I have to hit the 3 dots in the bottom right of my iPhone and then tap on the track/album/artist at the top of the modal menu. Weird. Confusing.

When I go to My Music and switch to ‘Songs’ I no longer have a ‘Shuffle’ button at the top of the list. I miss that button. I’ll probably get over it.

I also no longer have the ability to reorganize the bottom menu. Right now ‘My Music’ is the last button. Apple is assuming I’m always going to want their streaming service to be my first priority. I’d like ‘My Music’ to be the first menu item. Please.

iTunes is a whole other story. It continues the long tradition of being a labyrinthine, confusing desktop application. As with the iOS Music app, I can figure it out, I just wonder how many regular people can. Since iOS is where all the money and consumer eyes are these days, it’s not the end of the world.

Now back to my music.

Categories:

Human Experience

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