Posts tagged kthread
I have a new jam.
March 15 was my last day at HuffPost. It was a position I never really announced, and one I felt ambivalent about when I gave notice after eight months. Sometimes we join organizations to change them from within, and I met some truly talented people that I will work with again. It’s really a small world. I am proud of a few things from my watch that would otherwise not have happened, which is maybe all we can ask of the jobs we do at large companies. I spin out what my team there did and what I still want to build in this Medium post. The work is unfinished.
Upon leaving, I decided to take a nice long break before my next gig - six weeks is whole years in Internet time. I went platinum blonde. I celebrated my birthday with friends in a private karaoke room in Koreatown. I bought a one-way ticket to Portland, Oregon to see my sister Kat and she made me the best birthday card ever.
We went to secret hot springs and food pod clusters, ordered superlative chicken-fried steak (Portland food is just wow), and talked about the documentary projects she is creating.
From Portland, I bought a one-way ticket to Santa Cruz like the nomad I am, for nomads often travel the same circuit, moving between places they know and have deep connections to, however tenuous and far between visits. My close friend Margaret lives in the not-so-sleepy beach town and is building community narratives around one of the two tech startups I actually find exciting at the moment. We talked about what we want from our work in the next few years over warm garlic-artichoke bread on a quiet street in Pescadero after sitting in the sun outside a strawberry farm. I drove out and hugged my favorite Sequoias.
Though I usually drive, this time I flew from there to L.A. to be with some of my best friends - one of the reasons I may move to that warm coast in a few years. Laura and I walked the Venice beach in early morning as we always do, went to a surprise crab boil birthday party with pink mustaches, and made an incredibly strong spring garlic pesto that we spread on leftover matzoh, talking over next career steps and life choices we had and hadn’t made. At one point, I dressed as Wonder Woman.
When I arrived back in NY, I had a few days and then a round-trip ticket to Paris with a few weeks in Europe to sort out. I said yes to what I have refused in the past and with those fourteen days, I went from Paris > Oslo > Bilbao > Malaga > Paris.
I played (okay, observed) hangman in Norwegian with a friend’s eight-year-old daughter, ate staggeringly good pastries (in Bilbao!),
danced through the Guggenheim’s Richard Serra exhibit and under the Maman sculpture,
sat in the gardens of the Alhambra with a friend I will create work with later, and sat by the canal to realize that Paris will become very important to me in coming years.
And I conquered my fear of pants. Some of the evidence is on my Instagram, the current visual diary of our projected selves. I did not travel with my computer and only used my phone. I recommend it.
All of this to say, today I do want to announce my first day rejoining the Fault Lines program at Al Jazeera. My team will pull together the online experience for the show, working with content from the new weekly episodes and the archived seasons for the AJ English and the new AJ America channels. I like working with badass producers, and Fault Lines is the finest group of documentary journalists I know.
My work as founder and editor of Saucy. mag continues and the new “Movement” issue (No. 6) will be out this summer. Other projects of mine are fermenting and will launch later this year and in 2014. I’ll teach “13 Products In Search of An Audience” this fall at ITP (the animated gif syllabus).
Most important of all, thank you for sheltering me as I figured out which jigsaw pieces to snap in next. Here’s to the next adventures.
Building a zombie army
I have been trying to hatch a zombie army for the past eight months. Today was my last day as Senior Editor of Open Reporting at HuffPost, where much of my work has been the application of resilience and network theory to one of the largest online audiences. It’s been interesting. Earlier this week Bruce Sterling put up a post with Director of the MIT Media Lab Joi Ito’s nine guiding principles for navigating the current economy of creative destruction, so as I head out for new adventures, a few quick thoughts on how some of those principles shake out with content, community, and delicious brains.
Link.
I wrote a thing over on Medium (their word processing interface is pretty sweet, btw) - today was my last day at HP, and I’ll tell you more about my next adventures soon.
UPDATE: Go read Taylor’s post on Vine and editing and the future of photography. His is right over mine on the front of Medium.
Last night I made a buttermilk cake and poured a citrus simple syrup over the top as the Kickstarter ended, lighting candles for all the extraordinary backers of Saucy Magazine.
This weekend is final edits on issue 4 that goes to the printer for proofing next week - made a big leap in number of pages this time and trying out some new ideas for page ordering.
It’s all sparkly and food techniques for buoyancy over here at Saucy HQ; thank you again for supporting this issue and the effort. Amazing way to finish 2012.
Supremely happy to be able to make and give something I love to people who asked to receive it. This month will fly -
The Saucy mag Kickstarter is 196% funded
This has been one of the more amazing afternoons of my life.
I was taking photos of shishito peppers and thinking about whether we ‘blister’ other foods when a friend texted me “TOP OF KICKSTARTER NEWSLETTER” and then backer notifications started blowing up my email and then, well, I started dancing around the kitchen.
The project is now 196% funded, which is astounding, and there are all these new people that I am now connected to, many of whom make really interesting things and think about food in fascinating ways.
This is the gif I made because I tried to make a video and kept tearing up. Wow, what a day.
And we are live on Kickstarter to fund Issue 4: The Unbearable Lightness of Eating.
Thanks in advance for your support of Saucy magazine and independent food magazines.
Issue 3: Dangerous Food of Saucy magazine has arrived.
If you have already placed an order, the issue will be shipped to you this weekend.
Copies are available over here, and more recipes, stories, and photos to follow on this Tumblr.
Thank you for supporting this issue through some long delays. Finally, ready to show you.
And the red foil cover is shiny.
Daft Punk Halloween 2012 with my fellow robot Greg.
PEOPLE. In 2008, I flew from Miami to Nashville (to see the Facebook husband) on Halloween dressed like JEM. It was totally outrageous. I made a lot of friends in the three airports (!) I had to fly through, and had many photos taken - I also refused to take the wig off going through security and dared them to frisk me.
Anyway, now JEM is back in collectible doll form.
Today is a more important day than I realized.
“”We think they should be called trackers because we’re no longer using them as phones. There was a study done by a British cell phone carrier quite recently, which asked smart phone users, ‘What are you actually using these devices for?’ And making phone calls was actually the fifth most popular thing that smart phones are being used for. More popular was checking your email, checking your social media, listening to music, playing games, things of that sort. So phoning people on your smart phone is really not what most of us are using these devices for, so it’s not accurate, in a way, to refer to them as phones, when what we’re using them for are things other than making phone calls.
But, more important than that, in some ways, is our understanding of what these things are when we call them phones, we think of them as phones. This is the whole idea of framing. In politics, if you call something a death panel, that influences what people think about it. If you call something ‘Obamacare,’ that influences what people think about it, positively or negatively. So with these smart phones, given that they do so much tracking, in the sense of, ‘We’re keeping track of our lives, we’re keeping track of the news, we’re keeping track of our friends, and corporate and government entities are keeping track of us,’ if we call them trackers, then we’re doing a much better job of informing ourselves what these devices are actually doing, and what we’re really using them for.
ProPublica investigative reporter Peter Maass on why we should call our phones “trackers” (via nprfreshair)
This is a big idea, actually, about framing and what to call the mobile device as a branding decision and a cultural referent.
If I have fire in my hands (playing with it, of course) then it better be lowercase, part of my juggling pin act, or a Prometheus Halloween costume because I plan never to dress up as Bezos.
Sometimes I wonder how long it will be before we publicly name our personal mobile device and anthropomorphize it more fully.
