poorboyoftroy

I love social media, but I also hate social media. It's revolutionizing how organizations and individuals communicate with each other and disseminate information, but it's also destroying language and ruining attention spans. It's giving voice to the oppressed and disenfranchised, but it's also creating jobs for the least talented and most privileged among us. And while it's empowering small businesses and entrepreneurs, it's also making us all beholden to the whims of the handful of massive tech firms that run the platforms and are actively seeking out more and more innovative ways to mine our personal data for profit. I'm a grown up, so I understand that nothing is or is meant to be perfect, that slick marketing presents idealized depictions of products and services that are inherently imperfect if not intrinsically evil, but I can't help but have my expectations ruined all the same, again and again. This all brings me to some observations on a genre o...

Uptown Espresso, a Second Wave Coffee staple and “Home of the Velvet Foam” A quick preface: I’ve had a lot of great coffee at Third Wave shops over the past few years, often served by really lovely and knowledgeable baristas who clearly enjoy what they do (and whose enjoyment enhances the customer experience). I also feel strongly that the Third Wave is a deservedly important strand of the broader historical development of coffee from which coffee lovers have benefited greatly. Here, I’m really taking issue with the Third Wave orthodoxy, its ridiculous tropes of artisanality, “honesty” in roasting, and rigidity in preparation methods, as well as its clear solipsism and sense of superiority with regard to pre-existing coffee methodologies.  The ideology and practices writ large, in other words, not the people. The Third Wave Experience It used to be so simple to get a good cup of coffee. Or so we thought. The doyens of the Third Wave Coffee movement, today’s dominant coffee purvey...

Daft Punk's Random Access Memories  cover art Prologue 2013 was a *great* year for music. There were exceptional releases each month from established acts,  left-for-dead acts , and several very exciting rookies. Anybody who keeps up in earnest with popular music should  have found themselves juggling a profundity of riches, even outright overwhelmed by them. Usually, by early December, I have a reasonable idea of what my rankings will look like, and while this year my top choices have been static for several months, I really had to scramble to fill out the rest of my list. As late as the second week of December, I was still discovering 2013 releases that warranted inclusion. This is in part due to my decision to expand my reading habits, which led me to publications such as The Quietus , perhaps the closest approximation of an English analogue to Pitchfork. It reviews albums and bands that are not even on Pitchfork and progeny's radar, such as Grumbling Fur's ...

I love iOS7. I love its flat UI and attendant absence of gradients, especially noticeable in the much-improved appearance of the core app icons ( haters gonna hate ) and those of third-party apps that were updated by developers keen on keeping with the new aesthetic. I love the fastidious little gesture now required to close an app, the indulgent thumb flick that makes me feel like an Ottoman sultan dismissing some minor nobel to deal with his own affairs. I love the little navigation back button , the bold title bars now featured in most apps, and the endlessly useful Command Center . Above all, I love that iOS7 persuasively evinces the commitment of Apple to creating and curating a mobile operating system experience that is as elegant as it is functional. But there is one thing I hate: I *hate* what is has done to album art in the Music App. What has it done, you ask, that it is deserving of my ire? Here, here is what it has done: This ain't no art rock That man is the one, the o...

Riot Police Near Galatasaray High School on October 19 There is a manic exuberance to the always congested Istiklal Caddesi that is as enjoyable as it can be overwhelming. Conceive of Istiklal as a frenetic pedestrian rush hour that never ends. Tourists and Istanbulus alike traverse it at all hours of the day and night. Hipsters idle in its traditional and more European-style cafes. The country's over-abundance of teenagers move in tiny scrums down it and guard the entryways to the many intriguing side streets that feed it, smoking cigarettes and playing on their smartphones. Young families displaying various levels of Islamic religious observance walk down it in small yet formidable phalanxes. The iconic Tünel-Taksim tramway stutter-stops down the middle more slowly than a pedestrian, serving more of an ornamental purpose (a welcome one at that) as Istanbulus jump on and off it, exploiting it as an apparent break from walking. Somehow, cars, including taxis that really should kno...

"I'm really going to do  it this time. I'm going to write a blog!" he said with a feigned assertiveness, like some deluded, perennial failure over-compensating for his crippling insecurity and paucity of accomplishments. Think Willy Loman or, better yet, "The Simpsons'" Willy Loman analogue, Gil Gunderson. "This time it'll work out for old Nullprof! You'll see!"  I've started at least five blogs in my lifetime. Three never earned more than two posts. One was a text-intensive Tumblr that quickly devolved into a standard, image-intensive Tumblr (that's easier than writing, it turns out). One was a Posterous that was active for almost a year until I unceremoniously abandoned it. Earlier this year, Posterous' new owner, Twitter, killed it dead along with all other blogs on that service. So, yeah, I've had a bad history with blogs/blogging.  Regardless, I'm going to try to start again. I have things to say, and judging b...

...who should know I love "Singles" more than most things in life. @ nullprof @ cafepedlar Exactly the quality I was looking for."Action!" — Cameron Crowe (@CameronCrowe) February 7, 2013 For context, here's a photo of the cast of "Singles":