blivet

Not much good at anything, but incredible at self-promotion so people think he is

A friend of mine once made what I thought was an absolutely brilliant observation: “Self-promotion is the only skill that is consistently rewarded.”

One reason might be that they couldn’t even be bothered to say what the moment they enjoyed was.

Yes, the name of the company, the logo, and the idea of “tweets” are all a charming evocation of a world filled with brief messages. Twitter has problems, but branding isn’t one of them.

I think we are in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of mental illness, and even the wealthiest and most powerful are not immune.

Yeah, I think it was Scorsese who said that he did “one for them, and one for me”.

I think it’s strange that it’s categorized as a comedy, though. It has some really funny moments, but on the whole I would call it a very intense drama.

I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.

I remember Damien Chazelle saying that they had considered an intermission for Babylon but that there was no natural break point in the story. Having seen it, I can state with perfect confidence that it does contain an appropriate point for an intermission at just the right time. I suspect that Chazelle just couldn’t bear the thought of the audience not watching his opus straight through.

I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.

I wish the micropayments model people were proposing twenty years ago had taken off. I don’t have any interest in subscribing to The New York Times, for example, because I just don’t read it very much, but I wouldn’t object to paying a few cents every time I happened to read one of their articles.