In 2016, I left my job to start a company. I still vividly remember an exchange with an older guy shortly thereafter.

OLD GUY
Oh. So you started your own company?

TROY
Yeah. I’m a little nervous but more excited.

OLD GUY
Sure. Fun stuff. Being your own boss is great. Want to know the best thing about having your own company?

TROY
Sure. What ...

the above screen shot shows a web page i look at nearly every day. it is part of a collection of webpages i use to motivate and remind me of things important to me. i originally made the above page to look at before leaving the office to help me shift from work mode to family mode. when i first made it, the day count in red had thousands of days. now it has hundreds of days, and barely so.
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do you know how if you ever click on something in amazon, then all the amazon-suggestions and even sidebar ads on other websites tend to be related to what you looked at/for on amazon? marty knows. marty knows because she was looking for new underwear and accidentally clicked on a pair of crotchless panties. ever since that inadvertant selection, those curiously designed pantaloons have been chasing her all over the web.

if asked why she would ever click on that, with an exasperated huff she replies, "it was a small thumbnail, i couldn't tell what they were and they looked weird, so i clicked". our eleven year-old anthony can attest to this confusion as he saw them pop up while using marty's computer to renew some books at the library. he pointed at the screen and asked his mother, "mom, what's wrong with these underwear, that lady's butt is falling out of them".

i woke up at my usual 6:30. this was a saturday. i went to the kitchen to get my morning drinks. as i walked into the kitchen, anthony entered at the same time from a second doorway. i knew he had slept downstairs in the living room and assumed he was still balled up on the couch. surprised, i asked him why he was up. he said he couldn't sleep. i tousled his hair, told him it was too early to be u...

as i said yesterday my most pondered question of 2015 was what should we do about our children's impossible-to-police and premature exposure to the open waters of internet porn. the parental measures offered by browsers and operating systems are more laughable than my junior high hair style. instructing a child to "steer clear" rivals abstine...

my most pondered question in 2015 was what to do about all of this internet porn. well, not in regard to you or me but in regard to these children we are bringing up. i come from a generation where most people HAD sex before they SAW other people having sex (via video porn). that era is more wrecked and faded than the playboy you dug out of the apartment dumpsters. for your average teenage boy how many examples of intercourse, both pedestrian and outlandish, do you think they might consume before they, themselves, first engage in the act? your options are (a) none, (b) a dozen, (c) 38,956. if you answered anything other than C then i suggest your pull your head out of the sand (or worse) and join the rest of us in the existence that is actually taking place.

you might say, not my problem, i don't have boys, i thankfully only have daughters. well, who exactly do you think your daughter is going to marry einstein?

and even if you do have daughters, i, like possibly you, thought they are immune and above such hi-jinks. i have since learned you may not be as safe as you thought.

the pre-youPorn generation likes to joke how a few "instructional" vids may have helped their game and social stock when they were figuring it all out but that joke is funny for about seven seconds which pretty much leaves the rest of your and your children's adult life to figure out how to fold their online porn conditioning into their own real-world relationship(s).

i mean consuming porn for adults who are already formed and broken and kinked in our own way is one thing but what in the world does a bottomless firehose of un-policed and un-curated and un-censored pornography do to a developing mind. fortunately for you, i know the answer: we have no idea. none. not even a start, an inkling. a fragment of a lead. all we know is it might be a good idea to nudge your children towards a career in counseling because next to tattoo removal, that is likely to be one of the most booming industries in the decades ahead.

i've got about seven months worth of things to say on this topic. i won't be starting seriously today but am giving you fair warning that this is a place we will be soon traveling so charge your phone and learn how to clear your browser history as we are going to visit in some dark, cringe-inducing and keep-you-up-at-night topics.

ok fellas. we gotta talk.

i was recently at a reception and sat down with a friend i hadn't talked to in awhile. i asked him what was up. what was new. during our catch-up he remembered something, lifted a finger in the air and said, "oh, get this". he proceeded to tell me a story about how he, needing a computer quick, raised the lid of his teen son's laptop and found something on the sc...

in the middle of last year, i retired. not from my proper day job but from doing freelance work. in taking five minutes to do the math, i observed that the amount of enjoyment (e.g. cash money) traded for the amount of effort (e.g. my saturday nights) were disproportionate, and wildly so. so i forfeited the enjoyment by no longer buying things (things i didn't need in the first place) and instead of working through the night each and every weekend, would read books, and watch movies with my daughter, and go on dates with my wife, and work obsessively on my cross stitch skills.

and equally important, instead of making things i was essentially paid to care about, i now make things i personally care about. some would call these pet projects and is, i'd guess, what many old men of this generation do instead of diddling with electronics on their basement workbenches. while many of my projects are for private use, today i'm sharing the first public project to come from my reclaimed saturday nights, In Short Books.


click to jump

mr jason kottke, my digital-hero, recently wrote an article about the death of the blog. the subject obviously caught my eye and i quickly clicked through. as i read i felt more old and more out of touch until i came to the line that read: and i instantly went from feeling totally disconnected to being exactly right where i'm supposed to be. and i can for sure count on one hand the number of times that has happened in my life.

another semi-related story to the everyman deals in the buildup to the contest. in discussing the early motivation to get art, i mentioned going to an art fair and buying some photos for my newly purchased (and bare) home. during the transaction i struck up a conversation with the photog's wife who also served as his manager. she mentioned the newly forming web and their need to get her husband's work online but confessed they were having problems with it. having recently gotten into the game i gave her my sympathy admitting there was a lot of mystery to in using this new medium well, especially in the arts. but i waved my arm towards their wall of photography and said their task was simpler than most as the biggest thing they had to do was stay out of the way of her husband's amazing photography and let the art wash over the user. she conceded to the sense of the approach but gave the oft-used 'easier said than done' in reply. looking over the man's stunning work hanging on the temporary panels of his booth, various treatments for porting the images to the web came to mind. i asked her if she would be interested in an exchange—a web design for some prints (the prints were quite pricey for a fellow who just bought his first home). i added if they didn't like my suggestions they wouldn't owe anything in return. if they did, i would let them determine the quantity and size of prints they felt fair in exchange. she smilingly agreed.

as is the way with true inspiration in a matter of days i had produced a site design i thought would suit them well. i packaged up several screen shots and emailed them to the woman. as is the case whenever you share your artistic creations i sat back and awaited their reaction. none came. not after a day. not after three days. not after two weeks. i obviously took the silence as a solid rejection of my work and will say it injured my confidence in the craft and vigor for the trade more than i'd like to admit. i tried to push the failure out of my mind but the taunting notion routinely skipped through the forefront of my awareness like a teasing classmate.

then on a bored weekend night months later—i said it maimed me to embarrassing degrees—i pulled up the photog's site to try to see what they could like in their present design that my work did not improve upon. after the page loaded i stared at not the faltering design i had looked to replace, but the design i had sent them, albeit a clumsy implementation of it. i stared at the page using my design for several minutes trying to make sense of what i was seeing. i scrolled to the footer and about pages looking for a mention of credit. i found none.

Anger took the Rejection that had been moping around my brain by the collar and threw her out the front door with a flailing kick in the ass. the few times Recognition's bright face dared to knock on the door to celebrate the acceptance of our design Anger turned her away with a rough push in the shoulder.

i talked to marty about what happened. she told me to call them and say that its a sad world when one creative steals the work of another creative and especially after one supported the other by buying their work. i silently listened to marty's prudent advice but instead said things like, "nah, it doesn't really matter" or "if you have to say those words to an adult they won't matter". so i did nothing. well, that's not entirely true. every month or two i'd pull the website up and look at my design and feel the anxiety of emotions that sputtered and flared.

then the email campaign began. every few months i'd receive an email from this photographer announcing his latest prints and inviting me to see them on his newly designed website. to add to it, they even modeled the email campaign using my design. after the third email, i sent a polite request to be removed from their list and the following email exchanges took place. the two things i learned from this ordeal are:

1. every time i get myself worked up over something, it is almost always for naught in the end.
2. when marty is kind enough to offer advice, i should be sensible enough to use it because it is, also, almost always spot-on counsel.

in honor of the everyman release, i'm devoting the week to everyman related matters (that add to details missed in the everyman story told a few months back). today i'm sharing two of the most noteworthy bits of history:

1. the original photograph
i can put hands on every single image ever entered into the photo contest, but miserably, i have lost the image that began it all—the image from chris mcgrath's coffee table taken of his brother in law taking a giant bite from a plum. the only remnant i have from what i sometimes call "the original entry" that sparked it all is from the 1st everyman where i used the image in the masthead.



2. the kottke explosion
then there was the post heard around the web. every time i the tell the story i obviously mention how simple and unadorned the mention that brought the everyman to the world was. jason kottke's wonderful brevity allows me to repeat it, verbatim, in each re-telling. what that pithy three-word link did for the everyman speaks to the power and potential of the world wide web which can still surprise when we see it flex its muscles in ways we weren't expecting.

stick with it throughout. i imagine you'll be glad you did.

while we were away, musical group karmin took a giant step forward. in case you're not familiar with their story karmin is a musical duo that met in college at an arts school. she studied singing and he studied the trombone. after school they started writing original music and posting it to youtube hoping to get noticed. they gained, as you might expect, exactly no traction with the galactic population so they, in a thoughtful and well executed move, chose to sing covers of songs. the thoughtful part of the move was the female of the duo had a penchant for singing rap songs in the shower so the dude suggested they cover one of those songs she typically only crooned in private. the execution was the other brilliant and more pivotal cocktail ingredient and by nailing the production brought their initial acclaim as the 84 million views at the time of this writing will attest. i'm assuming we can all agree, had they botched this execution/production they might at this very moment be cutting hair, waiting tables and dreaming about how close they were to doing what they loved.

this newfound attention allowed them to return to making original music, something they've done with respectable success. over the summer though they took it to a whole new level with a song that like it or hate it, you'd have to admit is right in the wheelhouse of the general population's taste and consumption needs.

and, if you put them up against the business advice from last week, i think they'd score well. granted we don't know if they'd buy a horse from an amish guy or a hotel from a pakistani, but i'd wager they know themselves well enough to know either of those pursuits would be a rookie move.

exhibit 1 - break-out moment from their small apartment.


exhibit 2 - and after several years of stayin' after it.


exhibit 3 - and lastly, a demonstration that acoustic versions of anything are awesome AND that they are still the two people back in that apartment and can still do a good bit of damage with not much more than a keyboard (this time using an acoustic guitar and wooden box).

the other day kottke.org posted the following. as someone who marvels at the infinite power of photography, the image blew me away. i can't imagine a place in the world i was less meant to occupy. i mean seriously.

were i to use twitter i would not only be brief in characters (as mandated by them) i'd also be brief in contributions (as mandated by myself). after some thought, i've concluded my one and only contribution to the twitter morass would be the following.

the above text is taken near verbatim from an email exchange with a former student, who is now graduated and i need to just start calling a friend given our ongoing relationship. he and i have shared two lunches recently. the first to celebrate a new responsibility given to him at the dream job he secured six months ago. the second lunch, just a few weeks later, focused on how he could depart the company. it turns out the owner, who at first seemed to be a warm and patronly mentor is mildly, but not quietly, deranged. when sam explained what had gone on, i expressed surprise that he hadn't left already. one week after the second lunch i received an early morning email from sam announcing his plan to put an end to the crazy job this day. usually i'm not a spry mail responder (like, that happens at nine, ya know) but given the import of the moment, i took a minute to dash off a quick reply, hence the brevity of the message. the only bit removed involves a statement that no matter how the world around you (e.g. shitheel boss) behaves make sure to conduct yourself with grace and aplomb.

i was at a small dinner party of a friend almost ten years ago. while there an older lady struck up a conversation with me. she had a thick accent which she told me was bosnian. she asked what i did for a living and i told her i was in technology, web-technologies specifically. to this she lit up, put a hand on my arm, and asked if i would talk to her son, zavisa, who was in school studying graphic design and had interest in "this web stuff". being part of a burgeoning industry such requests were frequent so i easily said sure, of course i would talk to her boy, knowing that serious inquiries rarely followed, especially ones that began with a mother's nudge.

this was not to be the case here. a few days later i received a message from the lady's boy, zavisa, or zavi to be kind to ethnocentric, american mouths. the message was quite long by today's hurried, email standards. in it he explained his studies and interests. he forwarded me a number of websites he had done for friends and university organizations and asked my opinion about his work. given the effort he put into this message, i replied in kind, reviewing his sites, making notes where i thought things could be improved, and commenting on his work's general strengths and weaknesses. when i hit reply i figured he would deem this mine empty and move on. again, this was not to be the case. he replied with another long email asking for clarification on some points, questioning others and with this our exchanges continued for several rounds. in time he gave me a profuse thank you and that was that.

more than five years later i bumped into zavisa through a co-worker. zavi was doing well in life and work as his earlier, voracious emails would imply such a mind would. he's gone on to become an everyman judge and represents one of my most thorough and eager eyes. at last year's everyman party he and his girlfriend arrived late, coming through the door as marty and i were saying goodbye to what we thought was our last guest. zavi, his girlfriend laura, and i sat by the fire and chatted, catching up. he expressed dissatisfaction in his job. i'm going to blame my severe fatigue at the moment but i fear i came on strong in my response. i all but chastised him for staying at a job he was unhappy in. i listed his many skills, his many gifts and said it was crazy that someone as talented as him do anything he doesn't want to. i even pulled out the dreaded "if i had your skills when i was your age, what i could have done" bit, which in some regards is valid but in so many more is not. again, i was deathly tired. his response was that the market sucked and no one was hiring. to this i said i never knew a passion that waited for a market. passion is passion and if you have it you just do it whether you're paid or given benefits or not. when he left i felt poorly about the conversation. i like and respect zavisa and felt that i was overly heavy-handed with him at what should have been a simple and relaxing social encounter.

a few months later i received an invitation to zavi's thirtieth birthday party. these days i go out a handful of times a year, but he's always been supportive and helpful to me so i decided to turn in one of my few kitchen passes with marty to go to the saturday night event. when i arrived the apartment was filled with people all more than ten years younger than myself that i didn't know. i made my way through the shotgun layout to find zavi and laura churning out custom pizzas for their guests (it was a make your own pizza party). i chitted and chatted with folks practicing my cold conversation skills and then got to catch up with zavi in the back. remembering something he lit up and said he had a cool thing to tell me. it was this. laura was out of town at a conference and he was left alone for the weekend. a friend had asked him for a bread recipe. when he went about getting it together, he had a notion of doing something a little different than just boringly typing out the steps and sending an email and instead spent a few hours of his solo-weekend afternoon making a graphical version of the recipe (shown below). when it was done he posted it to his facebook page. shortly after that it was picked up by reddit. and shortly after that he was contacted by two men asking if he wanted to collaborate on a project with them. when he asked more about the two men he came to learn one of them was an internet pioneer who created a recent-ish technology anyone reading this page uses and benefits from daily.

i'm surely not going to imply that my passion talk in december had anything to do with this success (believe me, i wish i could take credit for zavi's body of work) but this is definitely what my passion-talk was about. kudos zavi for this success and the others that are sure to follow in its wake. beautiful and inspiring stuff.


click to enlarge

a note from bookguy earlier this week: not to push you off to other parts of the interwebs, but he wasn't kidding about there being some good curios in their cabinet.

from kottke: 

the girl brave enough to tackle my hair, even sent an email requesting the honor of doing so post-larry, is thinking about starting a fashion blog. i told her that one of the very few websites i routinely look in on is, of all things, a style-based site. seeing me every few weeks and knowing how limited and shabby my style sense is, she expressed great shock and then interest in a site that could hold my interest so. here is the email i sent her.


a few of my favorite post of his:
mancaves
robert evans
dorthea lange
jayne mansfield (that first picture is one of my favorite all-time, ever photos.)

i need to make a clarification about yesterday's post. while i did receive an email about it, the email i received was sent from facebook because grammar-dave posted the message on something called "my wall". i'm not entirely certain what my wall is. i've been told by more than one person that if i'm going to have a wall, i should at least know what it is. i told them that having or not having a wall was never a choice i was asked to make and it was only emails like this one that even made me aware of my wall-ownership.

and speaking of facebook, i bet you cash-money i can summarize my facebook thoughts and experiences in seven sentences or less:

1. in april of 2006 i created a facebook account after i was hired by a university because i was told that everyone at the university had a one and it was the proper thing to do.
2. in 2008 i used my facebook account for the first time to look up 40 students i was teaching and then told them in class there were five of them i wouldn't hire for a job based solely upon what i found on their facebook pages.
3. i've never seen more blood leave more faces more quickly, like ever.
4. i log onto face book every three to four months and accept every friend request that has been made of me whether i know the person or not.
5. when asked by someone why i friended everyone, i said because it just didn't matter enough not to.
6. a female student at my school had a job with facebook where she received the questionable material reports and had to make decisions about if the material was questionable enough to be stricken from the record.
7. it's very possible the questionable material job is the only job i might enjoy more than the job i presently have.
8. the last time i looked in on my page a woman i know asked a question about my photo contest and when i didn't answer after a few weeks, another friend, who knew me but not the woman, answered the question for me after saying he was pretty sure i never looked at the page.
9. when i saw that that exchange had occurred, i experienced my first ever warm feeling towards facebook.

ok. so i couldn't swing it in less than seven sentences. de-friend me. and if you're wondering what this might have looked like for myspace, i'm reasonably confident i could have wrapped that up in one sentence.

from merlin mann's inbox zero talk delivered to google employees

merlin is also responsible for something that stands as one of my favorite-ever internet reads titled simply Better.

it began with a video. the one below. i saw it referenced on a site i frequent and shared it with some colleagues. several weeks later, one of those colleagues directed me to an article about the viral manner in which the song, illegally used in this video, put the band on the map and caused their itunes portfolio to skyrocket. in the article, pissed-off musicians talk about their feelings regarding their record labels and how they, the record people, seem to be completely void of ideas or creative avenues to get their, the musician people, music heard. given the article is about several irate and youthful musicians, it is not for the verbally squeamish. but people who enjoy the unique combining of words, some bluer than the water in the featured video, should ought to enjoy it just fine.

and in case it needs to be said, a video such as this should be watched full screen and without interruption.

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world
song is Please don't go by Barcelona
from Jon Rawlinson

while searching for something called a bike bra which is a protective cover used to shield a roof-mounted bike from bugs on long road trips, i learned a new thing about the world we live in: amazon has porn.

click to enlarge

something about myself i'm confident has always been true is that the phrase, "Fishnet Open Bust 3 Piece Set Garter Top, Thong, Stockings" would have always gotten my attention. i mean that's a scintillating mouthful. even if the fabric comprising the collective ensemble is not.

say "Fishnet Open Bust 3 Piece Set Garter Top, Thong, Stockings" five times fast and you have a good old school tongue twister on your hands.

"Fishnet Open Bust 3 Piece Set Garter Top, Thong, Stockings" sounds like the title to a feature song in the music man or chitty, chitty, bang, bang, or high school musical 3. and while we're on the topic, the movie chitty, chitty, bang, bang is a title that seems to have some cross-marketing possibilities as well. and with the high school musical franchise, if it hasn't already happened, it's only a matter of time.

"Fishnet Open Bust 3 Piece Set Garter Top, Thong, Stockings" is going to be my new password with all merchants that make me open an account with them. as an added plus, the phrase has both a numeral and piece of punctuation for the password sticklers.

if i owned a diner and had a special sandwich, it would be called a "Fishnet Open Bust 3 Piece Set Garter Top, Thong, Stockings" and would contain bacon somewhere in the mix. without doubt.

in closing i'd like to say, when i was fourteen, amazon was a long blue line drawn in the over-sized atlas in the family bookshelf. today it is a bountiful treasure trove of scantily clad women. if there is a good bit of news in the fishnet covered crannies of this discovery it is that when i was fourteen, women still had nipples.

** UPDATE **
it wasn't until after i made the post that i realized the item has 30 customer reviews!

N RAMJOHN wrote:
I bought this item a few weeks ago, and boy did I have a hard time in trying to figure it out. Its very delicate material, and if you have jewellery on, it could get caught up in the meshing and also make some pulls in it. the stockings are too long, the thong is a bit small, but I dont bother to wear the thong anymore....my better half loves it though....he likes to see me in it...and has me wear it regularly! what a good buy though...of all the other lingerie sets I have purchased in the past, this is the one he likes best!

my favorite part of that comment is the line stating that the "stocking are too long and the thong is a bit small". sounds like someone should read the sizing charts with a bit more precision.

i challenge anyone to find more entertaining comment threads anywhere on the internet than in the amazon lingerie product pages. it just ain't gonna happen.

i received several comments on the awkward family photos site i linked to a few weeks back. one person (thx dionna) even sent me a link to another, similar site.

i find the key factor to success for funny picture sites is not just the picture itself but the commentary the host attaches to a photograph. without the proper wit, the full potential is not met. here's an image/caption example from the site dionna sent my way:


It's a vagina, madam, not a clown car.

i don't know that you're going to do any better than that. if this were the olympics, that would be a solid 10.0. check out his other work.