Jessica Hische has created Day-Ruining Invoice Notepads. The covers are letterpressed and the interiors are 2 color offset. They're bound with glue black binding tape. As Swiss Miss notes, a set of them will "certainly make any designer snortlaugh if you give it to them."
You can buy them here.
The philosopher John Perry has written a great, humorous essay about how to get things done by structuring your inevitable procrastination. I've excerpted a few bits here, but it is more than worth reading in full. Please also appreciate the irony of reading this paper as a form of unstructured procrastination.
Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.
Words to live by.
Database marketing firm Drake Direct claims that Facebook represents 1 in 4 pageviews in the US. By comparison, Google gets 1 in 12 pageviews using the same dataset.
The data sounds questionable, but it made me think. These days, I probably visit Facebook at least as much as Google. I wonder how that traffic breaks down in terms of Facebook applications vs. socializing? How much of those numbers are games, for instance?
This fall, Kazys Varnelis
is teaching a graduate architecture studio on the topic of evil.
If one simply does not care about playing by the rules of the game, but only about seizing power to further one’s own ends, it becomes possible to shed layers of complexity and thereby continue society.
The human cost, of course, is quite high, as Mussolini’s quest to get the trains to run on time in Italy demonstrates. Still, with the recent economic success of authoritarian regimes—and the open advocacy of such regimes as clients by notable architects such as OMA—evil is on the table again as an option for architects to pursue.
This studio looks at how one might design for an evil client... How do you build for evil?
If you remember the comics magazine Cracked from back in the day (it was similar to Mad Magazine), you may be surprised to see that Cracked.com is completely different. The internet-age incarnation now lampoons strange and unusual facts.
For instance, this recent article (NSFW) reveals that there's not much to common "high tech" products except good marketing:
HeadOn, as it turns out, is almost completely made from wax, with a small amount of extra crap--small as in parts per trillion--added in. That means it is, effectively, just wax.
This comic blog is a recent find for me. If you're in the marketing and design biz, you'll recognize some all-too-familiar frustrations here.
If these are some of your favorite sayings or ideas, you just might be a marketer.
Forgive the spammy nature of this post, but these are some pretty good juxtapositions (some NSFW). It's funny to see two strong marketing messages, oblivious of context, crash and burn together.
Rollover the image to see the parody version. Caution: Language is NSFW.
Diagram of the AP’s new Protect, Point, Pay Scheme
To add insult to injury, after studying the initial press release, Ed Felten determined that the technology AP plans to use can't actually do any of the things they claim it can!
Lest we forget, Techdirt reminds us why any strategy that depends upon DRM is doomed to fail:
This has been said before (multiple times) but you don't rescue your business model by "protecting" against what people want to do. You don't rescue your business model by wasting resources trying to hold back what people want to do. You rescue your business by providing more value and figuring out a way to monetize that value. Putting bogus DRM on news does none of that. It only hastens failure.
I find them so witty, they're almost profound. Some of my favorites are below, but they're all available at his Flickr Photostream (be careful, though, mom and dad, some of his content may not be safe for the easily offended).
