The balance of power is going to shift from companies running people, to people running companies.

via designtaxi.com

It’s a hack of old technologies, aimed at creating a calmer vision of social networking. It’s a limited device that’s meant to fit into our day rather than demand attention.

via fastcodesign.com

My brother Mark has submitted a presentation topic for SXSW 2013 on Ambient Futurism:

The future is NOW?! That expression is as annoying as it is untrue. The future is not now… but let’s get prepped for later. An organization’s ability to anticipate the trends and abilities of the future will be crucial for remaining nimble in a world that is forcing us to adapt quickly. Fortune 500 companies are now contracting professional “Futurists” to navigate these waters for them, but what about the rest of us? “Ambient Futurism” is a new approach to the Futurist discipline, designed to extend the far-sighted vision of a company for near-term, tangible benefit. This presentation will define this concept and explain its benefits, specifically for marketers. The content draws on a range of unexpected sources while providing practical tools and frameworks to bring an Ambient Futurism program to your own office or company. The goal will be to demonstrate how actual profit and competitive edge can be gained through a more imaginative application of Futurist thought.

If you dig it, go vote for it at the SXSW PanelPicker site.

Scroll down a bit and a reader will see that Michael linked up one of my Missile Test articles here at Daily Exhaust. I love getting shout outs like that. Yesterday he sent me an IM asking me to check out the stats on my site, as he was curious what sort of juice a DE link up is worth these days. So last night after work I logged on to Dreamhost’s basic stats page, and saw this:

Last week, well before Michael posted his link, hell, before I even wrote the article, Missile Test saw an over 30,000% jump in traffic. Trust me, this had nothing to do with me. I scrolled down further into my stats looking for anything else out of order, and there it was, page requests for a folder I know I did not put on my site. I looked on my server, and there was a whole other website squatting on my domain, selling vpn access to god knows who out of who knows where. I’d been hacked.
Know that feeling you get when you see a roach scuttle across your kitchen counter when you thought things had been clean? That’s what it feels like when you get hacked. Unclean. I was even worried about how the search engines would feel about me now that the vast majority of my traffic was criminal. Was I now an unsafe site? Hopefully I caught the disease in time. As you can see from the bottom of the screenshot above, things went back to normal quickly after I deleted the offending files from my server. But still…my skin is crawling a little bit.

TLDR Summary:
After 13 years of designing websites and mobile applications, I’ve decided to return to my roots and create (and sell) things by hand at my new site, Stay Vigilant. It’s going to feature posters, t-shirts and other design artifacts. I’m starting slow, but in the coming year I’ll be adding new creations, day-by-day, month-by-month.
One of the first projects I’m featuring on my storefront is the poster series I was able to successfully fund through Kickstarter earlier this year, Bicycles For Our Minds.
If you don’t see something you like, sign up for the SV newsletter (it’s in the righthand column) and I’ll let you know when I post new pieces.
Extended Chunk:
Long ago, in an analogue galaxy far, far away I was a fine art major with a concentration in graphic design. Figure Drawing. Photography. Painting. Print Making. Book Binding. The trunk of my car and the floor of my bedroom included: sketchbooks, x-acto knives, linoleum blocks, gouache, cardboard, stretcher bars, conté crayons, Canvas, card stock, tracing paper, charcoal, oil paint, acrylic paint. Almost every piece of clothing I owned had an ink or paint stain on it.
Back in these days, I stretched (and gessoed) my own canvases to paint on. I developed my own film from the Pentax K-1000 I shot photos with. I cut my own mat board and mounted my design work onto it with spray mount. I wasn’t always happy with my work, but there was a great satisfaction in creating things by hand.
When I brought my wife (then girlfriend) to my parents house for the first time 12 years ago, she saw painting and drawing hung on the walls. She asked me who made them. I told her I did. She was surprised, because even back then, she knew me as a guy who designed websites. Who did things on an RGB screen.
I don’t think she’s surprised by my new venture. She’s caught me sniffing the bindings of hardcover books at bookstores on numerous occasions. The first time, she didn’t know what to think. She probably thought I was doing some weird drug. I had to explain to her I loved the smell of paper and ink. Maybe it transports me back to happy time in college. A time when I decided what I wanted to make and for whom.
Well, there’s no reason I can’t start doing it again.

The Velvet Underground: psychedelic poster for an October 14, 1971 show at the London College of Printing (via thisisnthappiness):

My first thought when seeing this was that it looked like the result of giving Milton Glaser way too many tabs of acid and having him redesign his iconic 1967 Bob Dylan poster:

Fellow Exhauster Bryan reviewed The Dark Knight Rises over at his site, Missile Test, and he didn’t pull punches:

Bane, in short, is a joke. A third-tier Batman villain artificially elevated to prominence like a newcomer in the WWE whom Vince McMahon decided to give some juice because Smackdown was lagging in ratings. Bane is a failed experiment, a tawdry diversion from what can make the comics great. Featuring Bane as the villain in The Dark Knight Rises is a disappointment. It was a choice that was intriguing only in its ability to challenge Nolan as a storyteller. Elevating a character lacking in depth and sincerity to such a degree while requiring he carry the final act of the greatest superhero trilogy of all time is ambitious, indeed.

Was Nolan up to the task? Could he take such dreck and make it compelling through sheer will and talent?

It’s an interesting and very educational review. Bryan not only delves into Batman comic book history, but also pivots it into a review of the campy Batman movie from 1966:

Recently, Grant Morrison, the great comics writer, watched all the Batman films, and a good deal of the television series. In a short blurb about the 1966 film, he pointed out that it was the type of movie that children love, adolescents loathe, and adults find hilarious. I agree.

Per Bryan’s recommendation, I loaded up Batman: Year One onto my iPad and it’s pretty great.

From the BBC:

Late Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch has used his will to stop people from using his music or image in advertising.

Surprised by this move? If you’re a real Beasties fan you shouldn’t be. I’d like to point you to some lyrics from ‘Putting Shame In Your Game’ off of 1998’s album, Hello Nasty:
Don’t grease my palm with your filthy cash
Multinationals spreading like a rash
I might stick around or I might be a fad
But I won’t sell my songs for no TV ad
One of reasons the Beasties have been one of my favorite bands since I was a kid. Well played, Adam. Rest in peace.

John Gruber summarizing the App.net thing:

In a nut, App.net is a startup aiming to build a rival platform to Twitter, “where users and developers come first, not advertisers.” How? By generating revenue from users instead of from advertisers. They’re not using Kickstarter but they’ve built their own Kickstarter-like system.

Like Gruber, I respect what the people at App.net are doing but it’s not going to work, even if they do reach their funding goal.
The reason? App.net’s service is not a verb. I’m not saying every online service has to be a verb, but ‘googling’ and ‘tweeting’ have a tremendous amount of momentum with regular, non-nerdy, non-developer people. You might say, “Facebook isn’ a verb and look how big they are.” Sure, but they own ‘Like’ and before that they owned ‘Poke’.
There’s nothing I can see with App.net the general public can get behind. Even with all the negative moves Twitter is making with how it’s handling third-party developers, Twitter isn’t broken (yet).

From Marcelo Somers (via Jim Dalrymple)

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

This is exactly what goes through my head when I post to Daily Exhaust.
There’s many times the link I want to link to and quote is already linked to and quoted by John Gruber, Jim Dalrymple, Shawn Blanc, Jason Kottke, Ben Brooks or someone I found on Techmeme. If I don’t have a unique perspective to the link in question, I usually won’t link to it. I don’t want to be the noise in the conversation.
I try to do the same with the images I post. While it’s tempting to get caught up in the whatever’s popular on Tumblr at the moment, I try to post my own designs, photography and scans.
Writing original content and posting original imagery makes me a source, not just just another reblogger of other peoples’ stuff. Sure it’s more work, but it’s worth it.

The Atlantic: By the Next Olympics, Athletes May Be Getting Routine Gene Doping Tests
I say we do what they proposed in an old SNL skit from the 90’s and just let athletes take anything they want.