Tom Hawking at Flavorwire on the lastest in a series of NYTimes hipsters pieces:

The ongoing New York Times obsession with “hipsters” continued this week with yet another lifestyle article about Williamsburg, a place that the NYT apparently thinks is still home to the Brooklyn cool set. The piece served as more confirmation that the Times is officially the only publication that still thinks the word “hipster” actually means something and/or is a cultural phenomenon worth analyzing in 2013.
He’s absolutely right and something I’ve felt ever since I started hearing the word ‘hipster’ used in New York and San Francisco. It’s such a blanket word it means nothing anymore.
Hawking points to a great list of hipster attributes Matthew J.X. Malady compiled over at The Awl.
We’re at the point where if you see a group of 22- to 42-year olds standing on a corner waiting to be seated at a cafe, and they aren’t wearing the latest from J.Crew or The Gap, then they’re all hipsters. “Those people look slightly different and one of em is wearing dark-rimmed glasses. Hipsters!”
It’s a meaningless term.

Turns out Mr. Braff launched his Garden State Part 2 Kickstarter exactly one week after I launched mine.
Not bad timing.

So I’ve done it again. I’ve launched another Kickstarter project.
It’s called, Grown In the Garden (State). It features 54 actors, musicians and TV personalities from my home state of New Jersey.
I’m producing a poster, a deck of cards and a couple t-shirts.
(the poster is still in-progress)

Hey developers, you’re probably already reading Hacker News on YCombinator.
Hey designers, do you know about Designer News on Layer Vault?
Maybe you’re like me and you read both.

On Google’s big earnings day, Google+ is a no-show
Has anyone told Google+ that MySpace and Friendster are having a party down the street and they should really go check it out?
No? Well, someone should.
Update: Sergey Brin is in the subway and already on his way. He’s dressed as a jewel thief from an 80’s movie and ready to rock.

The Icarus Deception from Squarespace on Vimeo.

My wife and I are staying at a friend’s apartment on 8th Street and Avenue B in Manhattan for the next few days while she’s in Ireland.

While signing onto her Wifi network, I couldn’t help but read the names of the other networks in the neighborhood, particularly the fifth one down:

I love you New York. You and your messed-up head.

I received an early invite to test-drive the new MySpace. Time will tell if they can make a comeback, but they’re definitely doing some interesting things from a UI/Design standpoint.

Hit me up on Twitter if you’d like an invite. I have 7 left.

Fortune profiled the Hell’s Angels in 1992 (via Noah Brier).

It’s a dry piece, but this bit about how they used to call themselves One-Percenters is great (not to be confused with the Muslim Five-Percenters):

What makes the Angels and the lesser outlaws so distinctive among criminal enterprises—and adds to the frustration of law enforcement officials—is that many Americans celebrate them and identify with them. Back in the 1950s, the American Motorcyclist Association, the voice of legitimate riders, pronounced that ”only 1%” of all riders were troublemakers. The outlaws gleefully accepted the label, and many still call themselves one-percenters. (The actual percentage is much smaller—counting the hangers-on police call associates, only about 0.2% of the estimated nine million motorcyclists in the U.S.) And plenty of people—including many who have never even sat on a motorcycle—like their style and applaud them for defying convention and authority.

I used to live a few blocks away from the Hell’s Angels NYC headquarters in the East Village. Definitely not the kind of guys you want to mess with.

It’s great to see the Daily Exhaust fumes traveling around the tubes*.

*Notice how I don’t watermark my images? You know why? These don’t belong to me, even (other peoples’) quotes I create in Photoshop and the scans I scan myself. These images belong to everyone.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time is a new book by Jeff Speck:

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. Each of these qualities is essential an none alone is sufficient. Useful means that most aspects of daily life are located close at hand and organized in a way that walking serves them well. Safe means that the street has been designed to give pedestrians a fighting chance against being hit by automobiles; they must not only be safe but feel safe, which is even tougher to satisfy. Comfortable means that buildings and landscape shape urban streets into ‘outdoor living rooms,’ in contrast to wide-open spaces, which usually fail to attract pedestrians. Interesting means that sidewalks are lined by unique buildings with friendly faces and that signs of humanity abound.

One of my biggest issues with Los Angeles since moving here in April is the lack of walkability (combined with a lack of decent public transit-ability). There’s a ton of great culture to be discovered, but it’s hard to get to if you don’t have a car.

Having lived in NYC for 12 years I’ve become spoiled with walkability.

via Brain Pickings

Apparently people a handful of states want to withdrawal from the United States of America, including Texas, and have signed a petition:

To which the awesome city of Austin responded:

It’s incredible how many petitions are on the White House’s website. There’s even a petition for my home state of New Jersey to secede.

via Ars Technica

David Rohde at The Atlantic, on the inequality in New York exposed by Hurricane Sandy:

A hotel bellman said he was worried about his mother uptown. A maid said she had been calling her family in Queens. A garage attendant said he hadn’t been able to contact his only relative – a sister in New Jersey – since the storm hit. Asked where he weathered the hurricane, his answer was simple.

“I slept in my car,” he said.

Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city.

As they point out in the article, everyone is getting hit hard in the aftermath of the hurricane, just some are getting hit harder than others.

From Jason Kottke:

Publishing on kottke.org is suspended until further notice. The situation in New York and New Jersey is still dire** so posting stupid crap seems frivolous and posting about the Sandy aftermath seems exploitive. Information is not what people need right now; people need flashlights, candles, drinking water, safety, food, access to emergency medical care, a warm place to sleep, etc.

Interesting he identifies his site content as “stupid crap.”

In the face of dire living conditions, it’s amazing how much of what we do seems so pointless.