produce your explanation

In October 2004, I was a freshman in college, and there were exactly two other people on facebook with whom I shared a name.  I was friends with both of them.  They were fucking sweet.  The one dude laxed at Yale, and the other guy slew trashy (though myriad) box at SMU.

Some months after that, our troika became a quadrumvirate.  The fourth of us was British.  But not the classy kind: if he’d gone to your high school, you would’ve voted him most likely to be the lovechild of Dee Snider and Jerry Gergich.  Really I wouldn’t even have to say anything, that’s just the inevitable conclusion you’d reach.

Obviously, I thought this was awesome.  The SMU frat star even sent me a facebook message when he first discovered our fourth brother-from-another-mother, just to say that my status as his favorite name-sharer was in jeopardy.  (This was a time when you could interact with Internet strangers without jeopardizing your bro status, clearly.  Since those heady days, we’ve all defriended each other because that shit is weird.)

In any event, it was just the four of us for months and months.  My name isn’t exactly “John Smith,” so I wasn’t the least bit surprised by the state of things.

But now, going on seven years later, I just facebooked myself again.  And I’ve literally been clicking “See More Results” for many many seconds, and I can’t get to the end of Me.  There must be hundreds.  It’s really astounding. 

So there’s today’s proof that the world is going to shit.

(Why it sucks besides the fact that nobody’s on it and it doesn’t do anything, I mean.)

It’s tied exclusively to iTunes Store purchases.  If you start listening to an album that you didn’t exactly “purchase from Apple,” Ping pretends it doesn’t exist.

So no, I don’t know what my friends are listening to these days.  I just know what they had a hard time finding on Google.

My sheets is sweaty, my luggage is Louis, and all the bitches in the projects wan’ do me, ‘cause I got money.  -I Got Money, 2006.
 
The trap got a nigga drunk, I’m still tryin’a sober up; wish I had me some money, I’d buy me some better luck.  But it’s a recession: e’erybody broke.  -The Recession, 2008.

orderoftheblondecoif-deactivate asked: I like it. But who are you?

Probably: exactly who you suspect me to be.

futurejournalismproject:

Journalists are a busy lot, out reporting each day as fire breathing editors demand they fill news holes post haste.

No wonder the allure of a press release. Flip a word here and there, massage some copy and here you go, an article ready for publication.

Not so fast.

England’s Media Standards Trust has released a “churn engine” that lets readers compare articles to press releases to see whether what they’re reading is actually independently reported. Some results can be seen here and examples run the gamut from science to royal family reporting.

On the external costs of medical malpractice liability:

Incentives should be in place to encourage proper care; to the extent that those incentives produce costs, they reflect the appropriate functioning of a rule that internalizes the costs of medical accidents. It is remarkable that any gravity is accorded surveys of physician complaints and attitudes toward the liability system.