posset -
(n) A spiced drink of hot sweetened milk curdled with wine or ale
salvo - n. An exception; a reservation; an excuse; a saving fact or clause.
(Source: wordnik.com)
[video]
“engineers generally want to work on infrastructure, scalability and “hard problems” — that’s where all the prestige is. can be hard to get engineers excited about working on front-end projects and user interfaces. this is the opposite of what you find in some consumer businesses where everyone wants to work on stuff that customers touch so you can point to a particular user experience and say “I built that.” At facebook, the back-end stuff like news feed algorithms, ad-targeting algorithms, memcache optimizations, etc. are the juicy projects that engineers want.” — How Facebook Ships Code « FrameThink
“There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster.” — danah boyd | apophenia » “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power
“There are countless examples of how circumstance influences the way we perceive smells; for instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers.” — A whiff of history - The Boston Globe
[video]
“If there were a late-night comedy show completely run by comedy writers, without any interference from a host, producer, or network, that show would probably be called The Darkest and Most Impossibly Horrible Things You Can Imagine, Presented as Comedy. Every sketch would end with a gunshot or an infant’s stroller engulfed in flames, and the show would be canceled halfway through its opening titles. That’s because most comedy writers are so inured by humor that only the most shockingly toxic ideas can achieve the proper velocity to penetrate their indifference.” —
Conan writer Todd Levin on how jokes die, for GOOD Magazine “Just Like That but Funny” (via lonelysandwich)
(via atencio)
This quote rings so incredibly true to me. Whenever I’m writing, my mind immediately goes to the darkest move possible. I’ve learned to push past this initial instinct to see if there’s something more clever or unexpected, but the urge is always there. And when I watch comedy that ends darkly, I always love it. I think for me at least, there’s just something so funny about getting someone to laugh at something that objectively is definitely not funny at all.
(via sarahschneider)
(via sarahschneider)
“In the old country, for example, we have two kinds of ‘friendship’ (distinguished by whether you address one another with the informal pronoun) and going from one status to the other is a pretty big deal; you have to drink a toast with your arms all in a pretzel and it’s considered a huge faux pas to suggest it before both people feel ready. But at least it’s not ambiguous! And of course sex complicates things even more. Will it get me in hot water to have a crush on someone but have a different person as my muse? Does spouse imply sweetheart, or do I have to explicilty declare that (perhaps on our 20th anniversary)?” — The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)