Most of us would like far more leisure – we dream of it. But we believe it comes with a price. And so we resent the unemployed for (supposedly) “sitting around all day”, while we identify with our jobs and righteously grumble, or boast, about our hard work, like demented subjects in a behaviourist’s divide-and-rule experiment.

Leisure, like happiness, tends to be seen as something that’s earned through work. The underlying idea is that you’re endlessly undeserving – that reward, ie happiness, will always be contingent on the endurance of some unpleasant activity (eg “hard work”). Again, we could trace this notion to early moral ideas – eg original sin and redemption through suffering – but the important point is that we seem to have a nasty, and very persistent, cultural neurosis in the form of an archaic cognitive frame for work and leisure.

So what the fuck is “antiwork”?

Antiwork is what we do out of love, fun, interest, talent, enthusiasm, inspiration, etc. Only a lucky few get paid enough from it to live on, yet it probably enriches our lives and benefits society more than most jobs do.

—Antiwork – a radical shift in how we view “jobs”

And Columbia producer Mitch Miller, back in 1958, told Dwight MacDonald for a New Yorker piece, “The kids don’t want recognized stars doing their music. They don’t want real professionals. They want faceless young people doing it in order to retain the feeling that it’s their own.”

—When Did Rock’n’Roll Become “Authentic”?

Kitchen Ghosts

via thisisnthappiness

The Verge on J.J. Abrams interview with Collider:

Abrams also spoke to Collider briefly about his use of computer-generated effects in Episode VII. We’ve known all along that Abrams is leaning heavily on real sets and effects, but it’s also a Star Wars movie, so there’s no escaping CG. It turns out, Abrams use of CG is actually more reductive than additive — which is basically the total opposite approach that George Lucas would take.

“I feel like the beauty of this age of filmmaking is that there are more tools at your disposal, but it doesn’t mean that any of these new tools are automatically the right tools,” Abrams says. “And there are a lot of situations where we went very much old school and in fact used CG more to remove things than to add things.”

In a similar way as Apple has prospered despite the death of Steve Jobs, it’s great to see there’s the potential (we haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie) for the Star Wars franchise to prosper in the absence of George Lucas.

At Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo reviews Samsung’s first Tizen smartphone:

The million dollar question for any new OS is always “Why would anyone pick this over Android?” Google’s free OS seems purpose-built to smother upstart operating systems like Tizen. It has tons of developer support (even Samsung supports Android more than Tizen), killer integration with Google services, and is available on any kind of hardware you can imagine.

Samsung hasn’t provided a good answer to this question, which makes its outlook especially bleak in the hyper-competitive smartphone OS market. New OSes always have problems, usually with app selection and hardware availability, but they’re supposed to make up for their ecosystem problems by bringing something new to the table. Windows Phone had a new interface style. Blackberry 10 devices have a small but vocal built-in fanbase, well-made hardware with physical keyboards, and lots of enterprise experience. But Tizen doesn’t have any stand-out aspect. It’s all the negatives of a new OS without any of the positives.

Samsung seems better at ripping off Apple’s hardware designs than it is at ripping off Android’s software designs. They really epitomize the textbook definition of shameless. Also: the typography on Tizen is horrendous.

via Gizmodo

Time Tells You

Predator Helmet

IDC: Tablet shipments decline for the first time in Q4 2014, leaders Apple and Samsung both lose market share

When I see this headline in light of Apple’s blockbuster first quarter—where they sold 74.5 million iPhones—I realize this is all just semantics.

Apple doesn’t breakout their 74.5 million sales by model, but we know the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus have been huge sellers (particularly in China) and as far as I’m concerned, the iPhone 6 Plus is a mini tablet.

So another way and looking at the numbers is: Apple sold more small tablets than they sold big tablets in Q4 2014.

The work of Nick Smith.

via thisisnthappiness

Your logo is not hardcore.

via Instagram

Sounds like (see what I did there?) Neil Young’s Pono Player is bullshit:

My test compared Pono files against Apple’s iTunes files, which come in 16-bit/256Kbps AAC format (more on formats below). That’s much better than the radically compressed MP3 files of 1998.

There’s another factor at play here, too: Pono is going to extraordinary lengths to acquire remastered versions of the songs in its catalog. “If we are looking for a popular master and find it has not been sampled at the highest rate, we try to access it and, with the cooperation of labels and artists, maximize the recapture at the highest resolution,” Neil Young wrote to me. “We reach out to the creators, if they are still with us, to include their knowledge in the mastering. Sometimes they will even supervise it. This is a long process, but we are providing the absolute best available and pushing for improvement in resolution for maximizing the labels/creators’ art whenever possible.”

Clearly, if Pono’s testing involved a remastered, high-resolution audio file going head-to-head with an original, crummy MP3 of the same song, you’d hear a difference.

The thing is, that’s not a fair test. The music we buy today from iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and similar online stores has much higher quality than low-res MP3 files. Why would you spend $400 on a new player and re-buy all of your music files if the result sounds no better than what’s on your phone already?

Fuck you, Neil.

via Daring Fireball

Bryan fires a missile on the vaccine bullshit sweeping our dumb country:

Not too long ago, measles was declared eradicated in the United States. It was a public health victory of huge import. And now, that victory is threatened.

It all began less than twenty years ago with the publication of a now discredited study linking vaccinations with autism. The facts are clear. There is no link between vaccinations and autism. But, as has been said countless times before, yet continues to be forgotten, facts do not matter when they conflict with belief.

A small number of people believe, deep down, in places inaccessible to evidence, that some vaccines cause autism. Therefore, these people have chosen not to immunize their children against one of the most virulent diseases mankind has ever seen, weakening herd immunity and leading to the outbreak now taking place in the southwestern United States.

We’re all just monkeys with smartphones.

That’s it.