“The crazy thing is that I’d bet that right now, today, we have the right technology smarts and certainly the right design smarts to solve [the media center] problem. But the missing leg of the stool, a rational, user-focused business model, is still sorely missing.”

“It is money that, in the language of economic sociologists, enables us to become ‘disembedded’ from our social context, with contradictory effects. Because a £10 note is the same regardless of who holds it, money can be viewed as a dreadful force for anonymity and dissolution of community. But because a £10 note is the same regardless of who holds it, money can also be viewed as the best basis for anonymity and cultural equality. It permits an absence of judgement.”

no more 1up Show. How will I find out what to play now? :(

so very worth the 45 minutes

”Not stories, but toy moments.”

Good bit about the Spike VGAs, plus: "In fact, if you liked Alvin and the Chimpmunks to BEGIN with, maybe you need your childhood raped."

another portrait of the blogger unlike the one familiar to me; Curtis labels the best behaviors of bloggers I've seen with the word “journalism”

"'The central premise of the title essay in my new book, The Braindead Megaphone, is this: Our cultural discourse is being dumbed-down by mass-media prose that is written too quickly, and therefore fails to due justice to the complexity of the world.'"