n-judah love song

Ahead of the Curves | Joan and me

we have a lot of things in common.

via www.advocate.com

Did you have gay friends growing up?

People would always say to me, “Your friends are gay!” And I would say, “No, they aren’t!” I didn’t really know what they meant; I just knew someone was saying something aggressively and it made me feel protective. It took me years of saying, “You don’t know what you’re talking about” before I realized that I didn’t know what I was talking about. In fact, those people were correct: My friends were gay.

Has your gaydar sharpened?
No. I have the worst gaydar. Just count up my ex-boyfriends for proof.

can you critique the memoir and not the human

While watching Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on nurturing creativity, I'm interested to see how her followup memoir to the phenomenally successful Eat, Pray, Love goes over with her fans and with reviewers. It often seems to me that people reading her work start to criticize her choices, rather than her writing, which seems to me a bit unfair. On the other hand, maybe I'm not the best judge: I still thought A Million Little Pieces was a great read, even when James Frey was outed for lying to Oprah.

Either way, whether you like her work or not, the TED talk is a good one for anyone who's struggling with the creative process.

favrd: my 5 minutes in daily LOL'ing

I'm a lot like Amy Winehouse. But a boy. And with less makeup. And tonedeaf. Hair's smaller. Okay, listen, I just fell off my bar stool.

phyllisstein

Daniel Shannon

via twitter.com

Favrd is my little daily dose of hilarity. When the going gets tough, the tough remember that  the best part of Twitter is who can come up with the most awesome one-liner.

(posting with our new and improved insta-bloggity "Blog It" - I love it more than any other feature, like, ever.)

we're gonna make it

Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro

the first comment on this reads true: "i'm thinking you need to wheatpaste this one all over market st america, please."

done is good.

This is an interesting blog post from Rands in Repose, about choosing how and when to say [this is done.] 

"Done has a lot of definitions, depending on where you're standing in the building. Marketing thinks you're done the first time they see a working demo. Program managers think you're done when the deadline arrives. QA thinks they decide when it's done because they've got metrics to define doneness: "No high priority bugs found in the software for a week." Ok, fine metric, but for engineering, done happens long before all of these definitions.

 The issue is that an engineer's definition of done is the perfect set of code, and left to his own devices, an engineer will endlessly improve the code on the mythic journey to done. It's never done. For any large project with many personalities in play, at best it's always good enough. Sorry.

This is not an argument for mediocrity."

He goes on to explain how each person needs a list of what has to work in order to know that you are, indeed, done, and it's time to ship things. While the situation he's describing is about engineering, it can really apply to just about anything - writing a book, playing a video game, learning yoga.

What's your list?

updating

Well, I managed to hose my own old design, but considering it was a hacked-together template from four years ago, it was about time to clean things up around here. I quite like a simpler look and feel, actually, and I'd been wanting to play around with the Widget Gallery and the drag-and-drop features offered in basic templates, and the oh-so-many custom themes are quite lovely. I've changed this one three times already. 

Let me know if you see something acting squirrely. Other than me, that is.

Almost-related? I love the Firefox add-on "Auto-Dial", which adds frequently visited pages into a new tab. Bookmarking is sooo 2007.

get into the groove

One of my favorite things about my job is finding new blogs to read. Here are some of my favorites from the amazing women of the web.

A dinner menu from a TypePad blog, My Marrakesh, which is a constant source of beautiful colors and inspiring loveliness.

Another great blog that I love to love is Fly, which is a mishmash of awesome, a collage of fashion and feeling.

Kindnessgirl is another great inspiration - how I WISH I could write with her honesty and evocativeness. In that same line is Mackin Ink, the personal blog of one of the Kirtsy editors living abroad with her family in Jordan, each post illustrated with fantastic images from around the web.

Do you have a favorite little corner of the web, a place you want to sit down with a cup of tea and talk in?

A quick update

I have not (as yet) been eaten by bears, eloped, or fallen off the side of a cliff. Since time is short, I'll just give you some listy goodness.

- our national parks are amazing. Go. Go to them now. I don't care which one. Just go.
- wasting water is for dummies.
- T-Mobile has service approximately nowhere outside of a city.
- real hiking requires real hiking clothes. Like skiing requires boots and kayaking requires a paddle, old New Balance won't cut it.
- Both of us can be out and about at 6 am. Really. I'm not "awake", per se, but that's a technicality.
- subnote: while hiking, Clif Bar "shot bloks" are great. Everything else Clif still tastes like rice and sand.
- Alex will have all the good photos of nature. A cameraphone just won't do for most of this, but you can see a few odds and ends from the road (when I DO have service) here.
- Oh, and turn off the computer and go outside and play this weekend. I promise, it's totally worth it.

OMG Ponies!

  P1060625a 
  Originally uploaded by Steve1949.

This photoset, that Alaina's dad took of wild ponies in Shackleford, made me homesick in 1000 ways. These ponies were one of my favorite things ever growing up, both in story and to see. The ones on Assateague were a little too used to humans, and were mean little suckers. They would crowd you for an apple and bite your damn hand off to get it. And then you could see how many miles it was on 50 to Sacramento, which always made me think "well, it's not THAT far to California, I could move there"...

But the photoset is beyond lovely, especially of the spring colts.

ease of use.

There's a few things that I really like to do that I don't often make time for, and other, easier technologies have started to replace them.

One of these is reading the New York Times on a Sunday. Not the online version, the real thing. Preferably with good company and good coffee.

It's a leftover, I'm sure, from my record store days, but  Adam and I went to Amoeba the other night and were both in a sort of giddy fever pitch flipping through the sale vinyl. I once made the mistake of getting rid of all the jewel cases to my cd's. I know it's made moving a lot lighter, but there's something about holding the actual album in your hand that iTunes just can't replicate. Not for better or worse, because I'd rather carry an iPod than lug cd's around, but - still.

Another is going to the movies. Actually GOING. And it's annoying to get there, it's too expensive, the popcorn usually sucks (unless you're at the Red Vic) and usually, nothing good is actually playing. I've probably seen three movies in the past six months, and only because I knew these deserved to be seen on a big screen - King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, and V For Vendetta. All of them awesome. V For Vendetta I saw this weekend, and not only did it totally rock, but it was interesting to hear who in the packed theater got which jokes.

Netflix, iTunes, online papers, craigslist, it's all just so easy now that sometimes I'm amazed that it's really only gelled recently. How did I know anything at all before Google?

Also, while we're making things easy, can I have back Kozmo?