quackleton

Inside Pixar's Leadership

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 01:37:06 -0400

If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. if you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle.

Drew Houston's MIT Commencement Address

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:27:09 -0400

Drew Houston's MIT Commencement Address:

youmightfindyourself:

I’ve thought a lot about what’s different about the life you’re beginning today. I’ve thought about what I would do if I had to start all over again. What got you here was basically being smart and working hard. But nobody tells you that after today, the recipe for success changes. So what I want to do is give you a little cheat sheet, the one I would have loved to have had on my graduation day.

If you were to look at my cheat sheet, there wouldn’t be a lot on it. There would be a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. I know this doesn’t make any sense right now, but bear with me.

I started my first company in a Chili’s when I was 21. My cofounder, Andrew Crick, and I had never done this before. We were wondering if you needed to wear a suit to City Hall, or if you needed to make a company seal for stamping important documents. It turns out you can just go online and fill out a form and be done in about two minutes. It was a little anti-climactic, but we were in business. Over onion strings we decided that our company was going to make a new kind of online course for the SAT. Most kids back then were still using these old-school 800-page books, and the other online prep courses weren’t very good. We called it Accolade, an SAT vocab word meaning an award of distinction. Well, actually, we called it “The Accolade Group, LLC” which we thought sounded a lot more impressive.

I stopped at Staples on the way home to pick up some card stock. Clearly, the most important order of business was to Photoshop a logo and print out some business cards that said “Founder” on them. The next order of business was to hand them out at conferences, and tell girls “why yes, I do have a company.” It was awesome.

But the best part was learning all kinds of new things. I lived in my fraternity house every summer, and up on the fifth floor there’s a ladder that goes up to the roof. I had this green nylon folding chair that I’d drag up there along with armfuls of business books I bought off Amazon and I’d spend every weekend reading about marketing, sales, management and all these other things I knew nothing about. I wasn’t planning to get my MBA on the roof of Phi Delta Theta, but that’s what happened.

A couple years later, things started going downhill. I felt like I had to paddle harder and harder to make progress, and at some point I just snapped and couldn’t deal with any more math questions about parallel lines or the train leaving Memphis at 3:45. I figured something was wrong with me. I felt guilty for being so unproductive. Starting a company had been my dream, and, well, maybe I didn’t have what it takes after all.

So I took a little break. Of course, if you’re in course 6, sometimes “taking a break” means writing a poker bot. For those of you who don’t know what a poker bot is, what happens when you play poker online is first, you sit for hours and click buttons, and then you lose all your money. A poker bot means you can have your computer lose all your money for you.

But it was a fascinating challenge. I was possessed. I would think about it in the shower. I would think about it in the middle of the night. It was like a switch went on — suddenly I was a machine.

In the middle of all this, my mom and dad wanted all of us to come up to New Hampshire to spend a family weekend together. But I really wanted to keep working on my poker bot. So I pull up in my Accord and open the trunk, and next I’m dragging all my computer stuff and all these wires into our little cottage. The dining room table wasn’t big enough so I started moving all the pots and pans off the stove to make room for all my monitors. This time it was my mom who thought something was wrong with me. She was convinced I was going to jail.

I was going to say work on what you love, but that’s not really it. It’s so easy to convince yourself that you love what you’re doing — who wants to admit that they don’t? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don’t just love what they do, they’re obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk.

The problem is a lot of people don’t find their tennis ball right away. Don’t get me wrong — I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn’t going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.

It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don’t work hard because they’re disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it’s not about pushing yourself; it’s about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice.

Let’s go back to the summer after my graduation, the summer you’re about to have. One of my fraternity brothers, Adam Smith, and his friend Matt Brezina were starting a company and we decided it would be fun for all of us to work together out of one apartment.

It was the perfect summer — well, almost perfect. The air conditioner was broken so we were all coding in our boxers. Adam and Matt were working around the clock, but as time went on they kept getting pulled away by potential investors who would share their secrets and take them on helicopter rides. I was a little jealous — I had been working on my company for a couple years and Adam had only been at it for a couple months. Where were my helicopter rides?

Things only got worse. August rolled around and Adam gave me the bad news: they were moving out. Not only was my supply of Hot Pockets cut off, but they were off to Silicon Valley, where the real action was happening, and I wasn’t.

Every now and then I’d give Adam a call and hear how things were going. Things were always pretty good. “We met with Vinod this afternoon,” he would tell me. Vinod Khosla is the billionaire investor and cofounder of Sun Microsystems. Then Adam dropped the bomb. “He’s going to give us five million dollars.”

I was thrilled for him, but it was a shock for me. Here was my faithful beer pong partner and my little brother in the fraternity, two years younger than me. I was out of excuses. He was off to the Super Bowl and I wasn’t even getting drafted. He had no idea at the time, but Adam had given me just the kick I needed. It was time for a change.

They say that you’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Think about that for a minute: who would be in your circle of 5? I have some good news: MIT is one of the best places in the world to start building that circle. If I hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t have met Adam, I wouldn’t have met my amazing cofounder, Arash, and there would be no Dropbox.

One thing I’ve learned is surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard. Can you imagine if Michael Jordan hadn’t been in the NBA, if his circle of 5 had been a bunch of guys in Italy? Your circle pushes you to be better, just as Adam pushed me.

And now your circle will grow to include your coworkers and everyone around you. Where you live matters: there’s only one MIT. And there’s only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn’t a coincidence: for whatever you’re doing, there’s usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too — follow them. If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.

The last trap you might fall into after school is “getting ready.” Don’t get me wrong: learning is your top priority, but now the fastest way to learn is by doing. If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying and planning and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been “ready.” I remember the day our first investors said yes and asked us where to send the money. For a 24 year old, this is Christmas — and opening your present is hitting refresh over and over on bankofamerica.com and watching your company’s checking account go from 60 dollars to 1.2 million dollars. At first I was ecstatic — that number has two commas in it! I took a screenshot — but then I was sick to my stomach. Someday these guys are going to want this back. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

You already know this feeling: at MIT we call it “drinking from the firehose.” It’s about as fun as it sounds, and all of us have the internal bleeding to prove it. But we’ve also learned it’s good for you. Today, one valve shuts off. Now you need to go out and find another firehose.

Dropbox has been mine. As you might expect, building this company has been the most exciting, interesting and fulfilling experience of my life. What I haven’t really shared is that it’s also been the most humiliating, frustrating and painful experience too, and I can’t even count the number of things that have gone wrong.

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you’re in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you’re not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you’re not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable.

Bill Gates’s first company made software for traffic lights. Steve Jobs’s first company made plastic whistles that let you make free phone calls. Both failed, but it’s hard to imagine they were too upset about it. That’s my favorite thing that changes today. You no longer carry around a number indicating the sum of all your mistakes. From now on, failure doesn’t matter: you only have to be right once.

I used to worry about all kinds of things, but I can remember the moment when I calmed down. I had just moved to San Francisco, and one night I couldn’t sleep so I was on my laptop. I read something online that said “There are 30,000 days in your life.” At first I didn’t think much of it, but on a whim I tabbed over to the calculator. I type in 24 times 365 and — oh my God, I’m almost 9,000 days down. What the hell have I been doing?

(By the way: you guys are 8,000 days down.)

So that’s how 30,000 ended up on the cheat sheet. That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we’re writing a few more words of a story. And when you die, it’s not like “here lies Drew, he came in 174th place.” So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting. I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that’s made all the difference.

My grandmother is here today, and next week we’ll be celebrating her 95th birthday. We talk more on the phone now that I’ve moved out to California. But one thing that’s stuck with me is she always ends our phone calls with one word: “Excelsior,” which means “ever upward.”

And today on your commencement, your first day of life in the real world, that’s what I wish for you. Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward. Thank you.

Just uploaded 90.1 CJSF May 24th to Mixcloud. Listen now!

Tue, 28 May 2013 17:31:49 -0400

Just uploaded 90.1 CJSF May 24th to Mixcloud. Listen now!

From Here You Can See Everything

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:41:33 -0400

From Here You Can See Everything:

youmightfindyourself:

By: James A Pearson

Our current era of on-demand television series does more than facilitate binge-watching—it encourages it. David Foster Wallace already told us what happens next.

Against my better judgment, I’m watching another episode of The West Wing as I write this. It’s streaming on Netflix in a window next to this one. It’s my third episode of the night, my 80th or so this month.

When I left Uganda this winter I had finally broken the 300-page barrier in David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest. I’ve started it three or four times in the past and aborted each time for attentional reasons. But 300 pages felt like enough momentum, finally, to finish. Then I hit my first American airport, with its 4G and free wi-fi. All at once, my gadgets came alive: pinging and alerting and vibrating excitedly. And even better, all seven seasons of The West Wing had providentially appeared on Netflix Instant. I’ve only finished 100 more pages in the two months since.

I always binge on media when I’m in America. But this time it feels different. Media feels encroaching, circling, kind of predatory. It feels like it’s bingeing back.

The basic currency of consumer media companies—Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, NBC, Fox News, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.—is hours of attention, our attention. They want our eyeballs focused on their content as often as possible and for as many hours as possible, mostly to sell bits of those hours to advertisers or to pitch our enjoyment to investors. And they’re getting better at it, this catch-the-eyeball game.

Consider Netflix. These days, when one episode of The West Wing ends, with its irresistible moralistic tingle, I don’t even have to click a button to watch the next one. The freshly rolling credits migrate to the top-left corner of the browser tab, and below to the right a box with a new episode appears, queued up and just itching to be watched. Fifteen seconds later the new episode starts playing, before the credits on the current episode even finish. They rolled out this handy feature—they call it Post-Play—last August. Now all I have to do is nothing and moralistic tingle keeps coming.

It’s a simple opt-in/opt-out trick. The classic case study here, strangely enough, is organ donation. Countries that require their citizens to opt in before they’ll be considered organ donors often have donor rates in the teens or lower, while countries that presume their citizens are organ donors—unless they explicitly opt out—often have 90-percent-plus rates. Netflix, instead of asking me to opt in to the next episode, just presumes I want to watch another one in 15 seconds, unless I opt out. As I’m sure the Netflix brass happily projected, my episode-watching rates are up.

All sorts of media companies are deploying new tricks. Facebook notifications are no longer confined to Facebook; they’re on browser tabs, on phones and tablets, in as many emails as you forget to turn off, and recently started to feature an annoying little sound on my laptop (one that can thankfully be turned off, unlike Netflix’s Post-Play). It seems like every new phone app I download wants to send me push notifications, so its developers can grab my attention whenever they like. Even a competitive-cooking show my mom watches on basic cable doesn’t cut to commercial between back-to-back episodes anymore, and is designed so every mid-episode commercial break is also mid-cliffhanger.

A recent study on human willpower, involving college students and baked goods, should be cautionary here. Its results suggest that our willpower gets tired, like a muscle, so when we use it a lot in the course of a day we end up hardly being able to use it at all by day’s end. It seems to follow that, faced with media’s stronger, more regular seductions, we’re bound to give in earlier and more often. Perhaps this helps explain why the ends of long American workdays often feature alcohol, dessert, and hours of consumer media.

Then there’s the actual content. It’s probably clear to anyone over the age of 18 or so that content has undergone a sort of Incredible Hulk de-evolution that makes it both dumber and somehow also much more powerful. A good example of this (brought to my attention by a random post on Facebook) is TLC, founded as The Learning Channel by the former Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, together with NASA, to enrich American minds, but which now grips American eyeballs with Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Ratings, no doubt, are up.

The media of my childhood, mostly weekly television shows and overused VHS tapes, was like a good pet. Sure, it was a little costly to keep around, but it was lovable, and I could always shut it out in the yard for a while. Now, though, media is always with me, always trying to snag my attention and siphon away as much as possible to sell to advertisers. It feels like it’s evolved from a cute little pet into a frighteningly efficient parasite.

Media has all the basic necessaries of an evolutionary form. Take television. It reproduces episode by episode and season by season, with variation, under the weight of the selective pressure of ratings. And unlike genes, which can only reproduce vertically from generation to generation, the elements of television can propagate laterally, as networks copy each other, spreading beneficial traits more rapidly across the medium. Shows that succeed in the ratings game survive and reproduce for another season and are copied, while shows that fail are killed. It seems newish series like Honey Boo Boo and Hoarders and Storage Wars have evolved some sort of primordial cocktail of novelty and faux voyeurism that, when delivered with quick edits and dramatic Muzak, is nearly irresistible to a large subset of American eyeballs.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a film (also called Infinite Jest) so entertaining that anyone who starts watching it will die watching it, smiling vacantly at the screen in a pool of their own soiling. It’s the ultimate gripper of eyeballs. Media, in this absurdist rendering, evolves past parasite to parasitoid, the kind of overly aggressive parasite that kills its host.

Wallace himself had a strained relationship with television. He said in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram” that television “can become malignantly addictive,” which, he explained, means, “(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems is causes.” Though I don’t think he would have labeled himself a television addict, Wallace was known to indulge in multi-day television binges. One can imagine those binges raised to the power of Netflix Post-Play and all seven seasons of The West Wing.

That sort of binge-television viewing has become a normal, accepted part of American culture. Saturdays with a DVD box set, a couple bottles of wine, and a big carton of goldfish crackers are a pretty common new feature of American weekends. Netflix bet big on this trend with their release of House of Cards. They released all 13 episodes of the first season at once: roughly one full Saturday’s worth. It’s a show designed for the binge. The New York Times quoted the show’s producer as saying, with a laugh, “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day.” They don’t say what kind of laugh it was.

The scariest part of this new binge culture is that hours spent bingeing don’t seem to displace other media consumption hours; we’re just adding them to our weekly totals. Lump in hours on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and maybe even the occasional non-torrented big-screen feature film and you’re looking at a huge number of hours per person.

In 2009, according to the media research company eMarketer, the average U.S. adult consumed about 10 hours and 32 minutes of media per day. (That’s including multitasking, so if you spend an hour browsing on your iPad while watching TV, that counts as two hours.) By 2012 that total was up over an hour to 11:39 per day. That’s almost eight hours more per week, per person. Now multiply that by America.

Before reading Wallace, I thought the only real use for absurdity, besides pure, often strange entertainment, was the reductio ad absurdum form of argument, the kind that uses a statement’s absurd or just plain false implications to show the statement itself must be false. (Like, for instance, “If the world is flat then we can have a peek over its edge.”) But Wallace uses absurdity differently, as a sort of funhouse mirror of truth. Lured in by outrageous images, we find they are reflections of ourselves. This is truth through absurdity, veritas per absurdum.

In Wallace’s book, a Canadian terrorist informant of foggy allegiance asks an American undercover agent a form of the question: “If Americans would choose to press play on the film Infinite Jest, knowing it will kill them, doesn’t that mean they are already dead inside, that they have chosen entertainment over life?” Of course vanishingly few Americans would press play on a film that was sure to end their lives. But there’s a truth in this absurdity. Almost every American I know does trade large portions of his life for entertainment, hour by weeknight hour, binge by Saturday binge, Facebook check by Facebook check. I’m one of them. In the course of writing this I’ve watched all 13 episodes of House of Cards and who knows how many more West Wing episodes, and I’ve spent any number of blurred hours falling down internet rabbit holes. All instead of reading, or writing, or working, or spending real time with people I love.

An optimally adapted parasite takes as much from its host as possible without damaging the viability of the host. In order for us to stay viable hosts for the media parasite, we need only enough waking hours away from media to make money and to spend that money on advertisers’ offerings and/or media’s costs (and of course to feed ourselves and, like, stay alive). Media will gladly take all our other hours. Think about normal adult American life: After working, spending, and consuming media, how many hours do we really have left? Of course it will never get all of our spare time. But it captures more of our hours every year. Media is on an evolutionary trajectory, a curve bringing it closer and closer and closer to Infinite Jest.

some food for thought

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:36:00 -0400

We are the lucky ones If I Lose Myself By Alesso vs One...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:53:00 -0400

We are the lucky ones

If I Lose Myself By Alesso vs One Republic

Blessed By EDX

One More Time (Solarity Vocal Remix) By Noel Sanger

I Could Be The One (Nicktim) (Vocal Mix) By AVICII & Nicky Romero

Let The Love By Starkillers, Dmitry KO & Amba Sheperd

Platinum Chains By Michael Woods

Apollo (Dashberlin 4AM mix) By Hardwell Feat. Amba Sheperd

Human (David Tort Remix) By Markus Binapfl ft. Brighi

Two Million By Avicii

Hit It By GTA, Henrix & Digital Lab

Chasing Summers (Quintino & R3hab Remix) By Tiesto

This Is What It Feels Like (W&W Remix) By Armin Van Buuren feat. Trevor Guthrie

Discrimination Is Obvious

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:12:26 -0400

Discrimination Is Obvious:

youmightfindyourself:

By: S.B. Woo
NY Times, Dec. 19, 2012

Top colleges are clearly limiting the number of Asians they admit, and what’s at stake for America is of more importance than just the number of Asians going to Harvard.

The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade wrote in his 2009 book, “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life,” that “to receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600).” As Ron Unz demonstrates, the percentage of Asians among the student bodies of Ivy League schools has been a steady 17 percent, give or take a couple of points, for about 20 years.

This clearly shows that these colleges set a quota for Asian students.

The percentage of Asian students at the California Institute of Technology, which uses a “race-neutral” admission policy, has roughly followed the proportion of college-age Asians in the general population.

And it’s not just a matter of Asian-Americans doing well on tests. In 2006, they were 27 percent of Presidential Scholars, who were chosen based on scholarship, service, leadership and creativity.

This all demonstrates that top colleges have a “merits-be-damned” approach to limit the number of Asian students. They did that once before — against Jewish students about a century ago.

America’s core value of equal opportunity is being trampled. The 14th Amendment on equal protection is trampled upon. America and Asian American students suffer.

The creditability of elite colleges suffers. The administrators of these colleges may be steadfast in their righteous posturing. But as the truth emerges, fewer people are with them; more are shaking their heads and chuckling at their facade. The meritocracy of the American culture is compromised. America’s future is too important to allow race-conscious admission to continue hurting all of us. It’s time for the game to stop.

lol asians

VL.: April 16

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 05:17:11 -0400

VL.: April 16 :

dear-est:

I used to think, if I just graduate university and get a degree, life will just come easy. I’ll get the job, the house, and all the nice things. If I just graduate, all these doors are just going to fling open for me.

But I’m starting to realize, its not that easy. (When have things ever been…

Congrats on the car, though :)

March 14

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 17:50:08 -0400

dear-est:

All I know is that you’re so nice
You’re the nicest thing I’ve seen
I wish that we could give it a go
See if we could be something

You mean April

"When my absence doesn’t alter your life, then my presence has no meaning in it."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:56:42 -0400

“When my absence doesn’t alter your life, then my presence has no meaning in it.”

- Unknown
Truth
(via youbroketheinternet)

he doesn't want to be known as just a government worker

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 02:35:00 -0400

I swear, I’m going to make sure you’ll be everything you’ve wanted to become.

I’m dead serious.

REMEMBER THE FEELING.

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:39:05 -0400

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man:

youmightfindyourself:

++ Date:2007-02-15, 9:08AM PST — Advice to Young Men from an Old Man ++

1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.

2. Don’t hate women. It’s a waste of time

3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.

4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.

5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don’t join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people’s economic or political interests.

6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponent’s intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.

7. Don’t be a Republican. They are self-dealing crooks with no sense of honor or patriotism to their fellow citizens. If you must be a Republican, don’t be a “conservative”. They are whining, bitching, complaining, simple-minded self-righteous idiots who think they’re perpetual victims. Listen to talk radio for a while, you’ll see what I mean.

8. Don’t take proffered advice without a critical analysis. 90% of all advice is intended to benefit the proponent, not the recipient. Actually, the number is probably closer to 97%, but I don’t want to come off as cynical.

9. You’ll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them. You don’t owe the vast majority of people shit.

10. Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most power force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you.

11. As a young man, you’re on your own. Society divides and conquers. Unlike women who have advocates looking out for them (NOW, Women’s Study Departments, government, non-profit organizations, political advocacy groups) almost no one is looking out for you.

12. Young men provide the genius and muscle by which our society thrives. Look at the Silicone Valley. By in large, it was not old men or women that created the revolution we live. Realize that society steals your contributions, secures it with our intellectual property laws, and then takes credit and the rewards where none is due.

13. Know that few people have your best interests at heart. Your mother does. Your father probably does (if he stuck around). Your siblings are on your side. Everybody else worries about themselves.

14. Don’t be afraid to tell people to “fuck off” when need be. It is an important skill to acquire. As they say, speak your piece, even if your voice shakes.

15. Acquire empathy, good interpersonal skills, and confidence. Learn to read body language and non-verbal communication. Don’t just concentrate on your vocational or technical skills, or you’ll find your wife fucking somebody else.

16. Keep fit.

17. Don’t speak ill of your wife/girlfriend. Back her up against the world, even if she is wrong. She should know that you have her back. When she needs your help, give it. She should know that you’ll take her part.

18. Don’t cheat on your wife/girlfriend. If you must cheat, don’t humiliate her. Don’t risk having your transgressions come back to her or her friends. Don’t do it where you live. Don’t do it with people in your social circle. Don’t shit in your own back yard.

19. If your girlfriend doesn’t make you feel good about yourself and bring joy to your life, fire her. That’s what girlfriends are for.

20. Don’t bother with “emotional affairs”. They are just a vehicle for women to flirt and have someone make them feel good about themselves. That’s the part of a relationship they want. For you it is a lot of work and investment in time. If they are having an emotional affair with you, they’re probably fucking someone else.

21. Becoming a woman’s friend and confidant is not going to get you into an intimate relationship. If you haven’t gotten the girl within a reasonably short period of time, chances are you won’t ever get her. She’ll end up confiding to you about the sexual adventures she’s having with someone else.

22. Have and nurture friendships with women.

23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You’re going to see some girl and feel like you’ll die if you don’t get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It’s her loss.

24. Don’t be an internet troll. Got out and live life. There is not a cadre of beautiful women advertising on Craigslist to have NSA sex with you. Beautiful women don’t need to advertise. The websites that advertise with attractive women’s photos and claims of loneliness are baloney. All they want is your money and your personal information so that they can market to you. The posts on Craigslist by young “women” seeking NSA sex, and asking for a picture are just a bunch of gay troll pic collectors. This is especially true if the post uses common gay lexicon like “hole” as in “fuck my hole” or seeks “masculine” men, or uses the word cock (except in the context of “Don’t send a cock shot.”) There are women on Craigslist. They are easily recognizable by their 2-5 paragraph postings. Most are in their 30′s or older.

25. When you become a man in full, know that people will get in your way. People who are attracted to you will somehow manage to step in your path. Gay guys will give you “the look”. Old people will somehow stumble in front of you at the worst time. Don’t get frustrated. Just step aside and go about your business. Know that these are passive aggressive methods to get you to acknowledge their existence.

26. Don’t gay bash. Don’t mentally or physically abuse people because of who they are, or how they present themselves. It’s none of your business to try to intimidate people into conformity.

27. If your gay, admit it to yourself, your parents, your friends and society at large. Be prepared to get harassed. See rule 14. If someone threatens you or assaults you, call the cops. Have them arrested. You have no obligation to self sacrifice because of who you are. As a gay person, you’ll have more social freedom than straight men. Use it to protect yourself. Be prepared to get out of Dodge if your orientation makes your life unbearable. Move to San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, or New Orleans. You’ll find a welcoming community there.

28. Don’t be a poser. Avoid being one of those dudes who puts a surfboard on top of their car, but never surfs, or a dude with a powder coated fixed gear bike and a messenger bag, but was never a messenger. Live the life. Earn your bonafides.

29. Don’t believe the crap about the patriarchy. More women are accepted and attend college. More degrees are awarded to women than men. Women outlive men. More men commit suicide. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violence, including murder. If you consider sexual assaults in prisons, twice as many men are raped as women (society thinks prison rape is funny). The streets are littered with homeless men, sprinkled with a few homeless women. Statically,women are happier than men. The myth that girls are being cheated by our educational system is belied by the fact that schools are bastions of femininity, mostly run by and taught by women. Girls outperform boys in school. It is the boys in school getting fucked over, and prescribed Ritalin for being boys. Real wages for men are falling, while real wages for women are rising. Just because someone says something enough times, doesn’t make it true. You have nothing to feel guilty about.

30. Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

Something to think about.

opticBLAST!

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:21:00 -0400

Here’s some rapid changes that have happened since i’ve last updated:

I’ve gotten a new room mate, he’s a fucking dope guy. https://soundcloud.com/ron-soul-oh
Got a new laptop to DJ with
Performed my first live performance at Zeta Cafe under opticBLAST!:
Went to Netsky and checked out new celebs. SO DOPE.

krts-gk: Two weeks of planning, 48 hours of post...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:58:16 -0400

krts-gk:

Two weeks of planning, 48 hours of post production.

Like the video on Youtube, help me make money to support my work.

HEY HEY HEY.

Some serious talent here.

April 6

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:55:58 -0400

dear-est:

Currently sporting a swollen wrist from volleyball. Today wasn’t that fun though, I like playing with less serious and more positive people. I didn’t play that well. I wish I could improve. On another note, I went to check out Carl dj and this new bubble tea place. Holy shit LG/LB galore.

I luv yew.

Track suits everywhere.

youmightfindyourself: “We enter a little coffeehouse with a...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 23:36:42 -0400

youmightfindyourself:

“We enter a little coffeehouse with a friend of mine and give our order. While we’re approaching our table two people come in and they go to the counter:
‘Five coffees, please. Two of them for us and three suspended’ They pay for their order, take the two and leave.

I ask my friend: “What are those ‘suspended’ coffees?”
My friend: “Wait for it and you will see.”

Some more people enter. Two girls ask for one coffee each, pay and go. The next order was for seven coffees and it was made by three lawyers - three for them and four ‘suspended’. While I still wonder what’s the deal with those ‘suspended’ coffees I enjoy the sunny weather and the beautiful view towards the square in front of the café. Suddenly a man dressed in shabby clothes who looks like a beggar comes in through the door and kindly asks
‘Do you have a suspended coffee ?’

It’s simple - people pay in advance for a coffee meant for someone who can not afford a warm beverage. The tradition with the suspended coffees started in Naples, but it has spread all over the world and in some places you can order not only a suspended coffee, but also a sandwich or a whole meal.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have such cafés or even grocery stores in every town where the less fortunate will find hope and support? If you own a business why don’t you offer it to your clients… I am sure many of them will like it. (via Mind Boggling Stories)

great idea

Wow.

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 05:36:31 -0400

Wow.

krts-gk: DUCK SAUCE | 2013 my cousin kurtis’ snaps of...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 05:03:37 -0400

krts-gk:

DUCK SAUCE | 2013

my cousin kurtis’ snaps of me. that was a really enjoyable experience.

nice to see the evolution of my fits too.

hey pebble.

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 03:34:38 -0400

hey pebble.

my first steak, so good.

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 03:32:44 -0400

my first steak, so good.