The age old question, Are people inherently evil?
…I don’t know, but I like this word and I’m making it today’s Word of the Day:
schadenfreude – [n. SHAW-den-froy-duh] Taking malicious satisfaction in another person’s troubles is schadenfreude. (definition via Cool Words)
this word was found at at DaringFireball

New York Times Magazine: Handmade 2.0 (requires login, free)

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blockquote>All of which is a familiar-enough Internet-start-up story line. I was more interested in what made Etsy seem different from so many current efforts to “build community” online: the luck or genius of the site is that Kalin and the other founders encountered in the D.I.Y./craft scene something that was already social, community-minded, supportive and aggressively using the Web. It seemed to me that the company’s future would depend not only on the success of its sellers but also on its reputation among them. Nor could its reputation simply be for business acumen. If all Etsy did was channel D.I.Y.-ism into a profit machine, it could easily be seen as monetizing — exploiting — the creativity and hustle of 70,000 indiepreneurs. There was a cultural dimension, too.

Without Heat in the Bronx (with video) – A lot of people in the city are unaware that situations exist like this. They assume that since they have heat and hot water in the their building, everyone must.
And they don’t.

Their building, a five-story walk-up at 1277 Morris Avenue, has been without steady heat and hot water for months, he and other tenants said.
Residents dress for the outdoors even while indoors, wearing scarves and hats. They use the stove as if it were a fireplace, huddling around it with the burners aflame and the oven turned on. They wash up in the mornings with water heated in pots. At night, the temperature drops to the low 30s in the stairways and hovers in the 40s and 50s in the rooms.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve grown more and more interested in the history of New York, and I found The Ghosts of Clinton Street (with a slideshow) fascinating in today’s Sunday Times.

Yet 312, as the family calls it, remains the rarest of places, a Brooklyn home whose residents eat at the same oak table, within the same brick walls, and among many of the same well-worn possessions as no fewer than five generations of ancestors.

I really like this new Beck song. It’s not anything groundbreaking, just really friggin catchy. Apparently the video below is unauthorized. Someone just decided to make a video for Beck. The video takes the idea of a timebomb and counts down the length of the song. It also cycles through all of Beck’s styles throughout the years.
This is how progress and opportunities are made in this world. Don’t ask for permission. Forget rules. Just create. Let everyone else worry about the details, the legal… blah, blah.
Act on your urges. The timebomb is tickin’.

PUBLICIS Macedonia (via Fcukstar)

Apparently, at some point these last few days, someone took some acid, dropped all the HTML and Actionscript from Adobe.com into a blender and took the mixture and slapped it back onto the electronic internet.

I have so many questions in my head I don’t know where to begin.
It’s almost 2008 – why the 760 pixel width for the main content?
I have a big monitor, so that little search box goes alllllll the way over the right. Have we heard of Fitts’ Law before? Hello?

Remember that story? I know the analogy isn’t perfect, but I think there are (or will be) some key parallels between the two.

Firstborn just launched a new site and I like it. It’s really solid, easy to navigate and functions well.
That being said, it’s never going to match up to their 2005 version, which is one of my favorite sites of all time.

Rita Flórez on Why Zines Won’t Die
‘SNL’ Staff Fired En Masse – Um, wow. I didn’t see that coming. I haven’t been in a union since I was a service clerk at Shop Rite when I was 16, but isn’t the point of being a union member so you can avoid things like that happening to you?
The Future of Reading (via DF) – It will be interesting to see how this project pans out. Music, photos, documents, they’re all digital, it’s inevitable that books will be too, but I can’t help but get sad to think about how the art of bookmaking will die.
False Endorsement

LastExitToNowhere.com specializes in designs relating to “some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in 20th-century fiction.” Other popular T-shirts on the site, which went up in June, include one for Tyrell (“More Human Than Human” is its motto), maker of genetic replicants in “Blade Runner,” and Polymer Records, a music label in “This Is Spinal Tap.”

I’m selling some things on eBay right now, perhaps something catches your fancy.

Adobe: Flash On – seems like the bar is being raised for online video. I’m glad to see Adobe is taking this seriously.
*note – be sure to click that HD button on trailers that feature it.

NYTimes.com: Forever Weird
From the Times review of GONZO -The Life of Hunter S. Thompson:

In compiling this oral history, Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour could easily have succumbed to the same temptation that Hunter did: to celebrate the myth, to recount a numbing parade of hilarious, drug-addled Hunter stories, and to miss the man. Happily, they have produced a rigorous and honest piece of work. “Gonzo” is a wonderfully entertaining chronicle of Hunter’s wild ride, but it is also a detailed, painful account of his self-destructive immersions…