Jon Mitchell managed to make the most impressively comprehensive guide to arranging your iPhone’s home screen that I’ve ever seen. I doubt anyone will ever try to take his crown. I certainly won’t. He makes some great points about figuring out what you want your phone to do, but I don’t necessarily agree that a list is very helpful. If you use your phone enough you’ll be cognizant of what tasks you want to do most often, and you’ll definitely remember any frustrations you meet along the way. I guess this isn’t really that different from making a mental list, but I rarely think of my apps in terms of their categories. For example, Instagram isn’t really a photography app to me, it’s a portal to pictures that I open when I’m bored. I wouldn’t put that I want to view my friends’ photos on a priority list and then debate between putting my Flickr app on the front page. I just know I like to check Instagram a lot. In addition to the few things I use all the time I have considered the things that fall into Jon’s “when you need it, you need it” category. These are the things that I noticed I got frustrated about not having at my fingertips; like a solid note taking app when I had to write down a name, or [1Password](https://agilebits.com/onepassword) when I forgot a password.

I couldn’t agree more about whittling your apps down until you find the things that work best for you. In all honesty, I probably keep a few too many around my phone in order to check in on what other people are using, but I’m happy enough with my first two screens that I rarely ever even go into the app ghetto that is screens three and four.

The OCD part is the most fun, but I must say I didn’t put much thought into the aesthetics of it. I spent most of my time picking where things would go based on relation and key screen real estate. The center four apps (Instapaper, Reeder, Tweetbot, and Rdio) are chosen because they are the ones I use most often and I wanted to be able to tap them easily with either my left or right hand, no matter how lazy, tired, or drunk I might be. Instapaper and Reeder are next to each other because they are thematically linked in my mind, as are Camera+ and Instagram. The App Store and Tumblr are off to the left because I don’t use them as much and I find hitting that side when I’m holding the phone in my left hand to be difficult. Honestly, Tumblr probably shouldn’t even be on this screen. I’ve found the mobile app to be really unreliable. Wunderlist and Speed Notes are both for taking different types of notes. Speed Notes is awesome for any type of text reminder or blurb that I want synced in Dropbox, while Wunderlist is for tasks. I chose to break them up so I didn’t access the wrong one by accident, especially since both icons feature red. Agenda is out of the way at the top because it’s an aspirational app. I’m always thinking that I should be checking my calendar and being more organized schedule-wise so I put it on the front page in the hope that I’d use it more. I do kind of miss being able to see the date at a glance on Apple’s stock calendar app though. Everything else just kind of fell into place because they needed be on the front page somewhere. As for Google, I’m experimenting with using their app instead of Safari right now.

My dock is made up of things that I want to access from wherever I am. If I’m playing music and want to change artists, I want to do it right away. Ditto for when I decide I want to send a message or make a call.

I was really excited to start using my Sean-Me-Down coffee grinder last night so I started looking for some “perfect one cup system” guides. I managed to sign up for a free trial of Tonx’s bean subscription service before I somehow ended up on this Yelle video, which led me to a number of awesome discoveries.

For one thing, I finally put a name to T.J. Miller’s face. I think he tends to go a little too big, but he nailed it as the cult member Gabriel in The League this season. After deciding I was jealous of Europeans because everyone there seems unafraid to dance, I continued down the rabbit hole of Nathan Barnatt videos until I got to “Pop Culture”.

And this is why I click everything. Jenny Fine’s site turned out to be full of fantastic comics. The type of comedy is varied, and she seems equally skilled at using punch lines and visual gags. I’m also impressed by how often she mixes up the format instead of sticking with the linear three panel webcomic I’m used to seeing.

Tell me this isn’t great.

I changed my preferences in Twitter for Mac last week and it has changed my life. CHANGED MY LIFE. The call of the new is a siren song that I feel must have dashed us all against the rocks at some point or another. And nowhere is this more true for me than Twitter. The real time-ness of Twitter is mesmerizing. In the old days, I used to watch the global feed update as new tweets poured in and get excited by how how new everything was. “This is a representation of the world, right now!” I would  imagine telling the people in the library. And as I used Twitter longer and longer, I started checking it more and more often. I followed ten people, then twenty, then one hundred. Once you add Sean Bonner though it doesn’t really matter. There are always new tweets to be read. Always. And your Twitter apps want you to know. My old settings for Twitter for Mac had the icon turn blue when new tweets came in, which meant that the notification was limited only by the client’s refresh rate. The problem here was two-fold. For one, there is a dark impulse situated deep within me that makes me want to clear counters and notification. (Except for in gmail for some reason. I have 3,946 unread emails right now and I’m totally fine with that.) The second problem is that the notification was the same for when I got an @reply or DM, so I constantly wanted to check that blue notification to see if it was something for me.

But now that I only get notifications for messages to me, I can focus for entire minutes at a time. I haven’t checked Twitter once since I sat down to write this three minutes ago. I only checked Twitter during lulls in my work today. I am free. Free as a bird.

Things I Like

• Ramona Emerson writing for HuffPo – What I said about liking good work is doubly true for writers. Even moreso for writers who are not yet famous. It means that while I may not have their natural talent, dedication to craft, or many of the other prerequisite traits necessary to thrive in that competitive marketplace, I do have taste. It’s the equivalent of what Aziz Ansari’s character in Parks & Rec does when he says, “Game recognizes game.” I should really start saying that more often. And you should read some of Ramona’s work.
• Speed Notes – My friend Daniel made a Notational Velocity inspired ios app that works great with Dropbox. It was even on the frontpage of Hacker News the other day.
• Braids – Beautiful. Short listed for the Polaris Music Prize.
• Ian Rogers’ A Step-By-Step Guide to Building an Online Marketing Plan That Works – A great presenation on building relationships with fans and giving them a reason to buy from you. The specific tips are really good, but the general philosophy behind it is even more important to internalize. I’m rarely excited by marketing related presentations, but Topspin is consistently showing me the future of online marketing I’d like to see. I don’t mind living within their system at all.

(Jordan Brock)

I saw this tweet the other day and saved it for later, after retweeting it. It’s an idea I really like on the surface due to the fact that, as a twenty five year old, – I’m working that into every blog post I write this year – I like feeling like a responsible patron of the arts without having to work too hard. Yeah, I pay five whole bucks a month to Rdio, and I get to feel like that money is going to the bands I listen to. That makes me feel like a stand up guy. But I also know that the amount of money each band is getting from me isn’t a whole lot. They rely on a bunch of listens. So instead of making me feel good about listening to a band, displaying the exact numbers is probably going to frustrate or discourage me as I see how little impact my individual plays have in moving the bar forward. (For some reason I see a progress bar that can never be filled all the way when I picture this. Sometimes it shows royalties paid out from me next to the average listener.) I still love Rdio and think it’s probably a great deal for artists at any stage in their career. I just think this feature would end up being counter-productive because of how people perceive numbers and what it takes to feel like you’re making a difference.

Interestingly, I didn’t run into any sort of mental block when I was using Flattr. I didn’t have a steady stream of income when I signed up for it, so my handful of Euros a month felt relatively generous. I also was opting in to a system that was totally voluntary and where there is no social pressure to buy the work. Direct payments for blog posts you can read for free isn’t really a thing. The authors post them knowing that they will be consumed for free. And readers expect ads to take care of the bloggers. Just like music subscriptions though, that requires huge numbers to be effective. If I only Flattred one or two different authors in a month they could receive a couple of Euros each, which isn’t a ton, but it’s more than a few clicks on some ads generate. Flattr also had the positive effect of being an encouragement to small talent. I meant each click of that button to be a heartfelt pat on the back and a congratulation of work well done. And I could decide at any given month to Flattr a bunch of items and have many more, smaller, amounts go towards giving someone 15 cents worth of, “Thumbs up!” I ultimately left Flattr not because I didn’t want to pay for posts, but because it wasn’t adopted widely enough for me to pay most of the people I really wanted to pay.

Like many young employees, I have an interesting relationship with expereience. On the one hand, I want to believe that I have a fresh perspective on things. The notion that youth is valuable because it has not been become used to standard practices is understandably alluring. On the other hand, I am constantly confronted with the benefits of experience as my coworkers avoid distractions or deftly solve problems that take me much longer to understand. But there has been an idea bouncing around in my head for the last few days that just won’t go away – Experience in years is not an indicator of correctness.

People seem to have a basic understanding that data is important. And data often takes the form of numbers. Therefore, they think using numbers will make them look better prepared, more respectable, and more right. But, while saying, “I’ve been doing this for x years!” doesn’t say nothing, it doesn’t really say anything either. The speaker is really trying to depend on a pretty heavy implication; that is, “I’ve been doing this right for x years.” If you aren’t familiar with the person or their work, this is a huge leap of faith for you to make, as you are operating without any data. What you can be pretty sure of is that they have managed to at least stumble through a career path without getting fired a ton of times to the point where they are deemed too big a risk to hire.

What would help everyone much more is if the employee/applicant said, “I did X, Y way, with Z results!” Now you have a real platform for discussion, and perhaps more importantly, for trust. You may still be uncertain if “Y way” is the correct way for the current task at hand depending on whether or not you think the projects are analogous, but you know some important things. You know how that employee attacked a different task in the past and you have a certain understanding of the level of success achieved.

So, one problem with invoking experience in years is that it doesn’t tell you anything about the task at hand. The other problem with that exclamation is that it tells you that they don’t want to learn. Because even if they aren’t wrong, and their idea is totally valid, this individual is discounting the idea that they could be more right. They believe themselves to be operating at 100% right levels. Maximum right. And I’m sorry, but that is never the case. The individuals who are going to be closest to that 100% right level are the ones who keep acknowledging that there may be a better way, and actually go looking for it.

Intrigued.

A tweet’s relationship to time is an interesting thing.  As I mentioned in my last post.  @fireland‘s tweet “— end of side one — ” gains something in meaning for every second it is not followed by a new update.  There is also a quality dependent on the notion that you are reading content as it is produced.  Obviously, this is not a necessary part of the experience.  A solid one liner is still a solid one liner.  (As a matter of fact, I just starred a number of tweets produced months ago. Wuddup @JasonPermenter)  Daniel’s stream, however, is completely dependent on time.  At least relative to his other tweets.  This is unlike any account I’ve come across before.  There aren’t any jokes.  There is no perspective being pushed though his observations.  The updates simply are.  I’ll give you an example.  On June 1st his tweets read: “transportation”, “affinity”, “inspectors?”, “fail”, and “failsafe”.  He ended last night with, “SUCCESS” and began this morning with, “gloating”.  (British punctuation FTW.)

I couldn’t even get a monolexic comment about the origins of this shift or an estimate about how long it will run but I hope that when it reaches its conclusion there will be absolutely no attention given to it.

In other Twitter news, @Mike_FTW will be ruling Brooklyn Museum’s @1stfans account with an iron fist for the entirety of June.  The number of readers who care will be exactly zero though, as the account requires you to be a BM 1stfans member.  At $20 a year, it’s actually a pretty good deal for people who would take advantage of the “IRL” social networking that goes on but charging for access to Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts just seems ludicrous.  Maybe you think that challenging the notions of monetary value for things is still an interesting question to raise in the art world.  I don’t.   I only mention it because I’ve always wondered what their guest artists do with the feed and Mike was kind enough to post a screen cap of his early updates.

Frankly, I would love to see the rise of throw away or one off accounts that were dedicated to a single narrative.  I think the people behind the retelling of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over the course of a single afternoon via Twitter and Foursquare provided a good proof of concept there.  It certainly helps that the story was already well known and loved but I don’t think it would take much to make an original story go viral.

Some smug sons of bitches that subscribe:

When I first met Nick he was a fresh faced blogger who wore hooded sweatshirts. Now he’s a bearded blogger who plays (what looks to be) speed-bananagrams while wearing suits.

Early Friday morning, I reblogged Nick Douglas and contributed my thoughts on making mistakes as a writer in the wake of the throw down between Mike Monteiro, Mat Honan, and Caroline McCarthy.  It got me thinking about my own mistakes.  I’ve made a few.  The most publicly embarrassing was probably being called out by the happiest man alive, Andrew W.K., for making an absurd amount of typos in an interview I did with him.  In terms of personal shame, my interview with Nick during the promotion for his book, Twitter Wit, holds the top spot.  I had just moved to Berkeley and was starting to land gigs.  I was simply brimming with confidence and held the always dangerous belief that I knew exactly what I was doing.  This piece was analogous to the time I crashed my car after saying that there really wasn’t all that much to learn about driving.  I have no problem admitting that I fumbled the submission process terribly.  More embarrassing is the fact that I put my own interests before the interests of someone who took a fairly large chunk of time out of their day for a complete unknown.  As time drifted by and people grew more Twitter savvy I found myself at a loss for how to proceed.  The piece was cannibalized and redone several times and simply got away from me.  I doubt that the lack of progress even registered on Nick’s radar.  Shortly after we spoke he appeared on Martha Stewart’s show so I’m pretty sure some people heard about his book.  You can also find his writing all over the web and he is currently an editor and blogger at Urlesque. I’ve had different jobs and new deadlines in the interim but I can’t help but be distressed by the fact that he gave me a great interview and I botched it.  At least once every two weeks I pull out my notes or the transcript and sigh.  The web’s climate has changed a great deal since we spoke.  Favrd is down, Twitter has multiple monetization strategies, Facebook proved that they are more than willing to compromise user experience for money.  But Nick was saying all this in August ‘09.  He noted the value of archiving tweets and now they’re in the Library of Congress. I’m not saying Nick went to James Billington, Librarian of Congress, slapped him in the face with Twitter Wit, and screamed, “Do you see!” until he included every bit of content the site produces.  What he did do was give me a bunch of insightful comments about Twitter that he expected me to promulgate as widely as I could.  I failed to do that.

This is not a straight “from the vault” type post but I have kept the first introduction I worked on in the hopes that it might provide a sense of how much things have changed in the last year alone in respect to Twitter being a completely accepted service.  It took me two Thanksgivings to make my family and our friends understand what the damn thing was and now they love explaining it to me.

—–

While some focus on the transformative potential of Twitter from the news to education, its detractors have deemed it an expression of our nation’s self absorption and attention seeking behavior taken to their extremes.  As parents complain that the youth is losing their ability to spell and compose a proper sentence, Nick Douglas sees a renaissance in the art of the one liner.

Twitter is unarguably a growing force in almost every aspect of our lives.  A Twitter ticker on news stations is now almost as common as the stock ticker or additional story updates and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to read a paper or watch a sitcom without at least some mention of the service.  Even the next iteration of Xbox Live will integrate Twitter functionality.  Although there has been a great growth in interest and usership, many people still don’t understand exactly what they can be getting out of Twitter.  Nick Douglas has put a lot of thought into that very subject.  As a founding editor of the tech industry site Valleywag (of Gawker Media) it was practically part of his job to try every online service out there and examine their encouraged user behavior and effectiveness.  Nick has been on Twitter since the beginning when “it was just something the geeks played on,” and while he can talk at length about things like Twitter’s lasting power and competitive edge against Facebook, his most recent project focuses on the unique way that Twitter lends itself to humor by collecting some of the funniest one liners across genre and subject.  While Twitter Wit itself may be seen as a “joke book” it is clear that to Nick Douglas the existence of this book is a reflection of a significant transition taking place in how we communicate and our humor itself.

Although his career brought him into contact with countless services that originally promised great change and tiny, focused, revolutions in user behavior only to fizzle out, Douglas saw something evolving on Twitter.  “I noticed more and more people specifically trying to entertain instead of just fulfilling the basic purpose of saying what they were doing.  These were people who were thinking about the audience they were writing to instead of, ‘I’m writing something for myself,’ almost as a personal diary.  Twitter Wit works in a way that Blogger Wit wouldn’t really or Facebook Wit doesn’t even work, even though they’ve got some very similar features.  You just don’t get huge numbers of people on Facebook trying to be really funny.”

The beautiful thing about Twitter is its simplicity and the almost absolute lack of direction its creators give users.  While feature happy third party apps abound for the service, the actual web UI looks like it might have been designed by an ascetic hermit.  (If ascetics had internet.)  Conventions like the hashtag and even the RT are all derived from user invention and implementation.  The genesis of this book depended on the integrated “star” or “fav” feature and the user communities that arose as a result.  “Favrd definitely changed the game for me,” says Douglas.  The now defunct service tallied the number of stars users had been awarded for their individual tweets and displayed them in rank.  “It changed how people were tweeting because suddenly there was a goal in mind: get the most stars, land on the top of this page, and be commemorated for that day as the funniest person of the day.  Turning it into a little contest, like so many things online, really upped the ante of how people were going to behave.”  In addition to encouraging content creation, it presented a more manageable way to find that content.  Previously, Nick had simply been starring tweets he liked by reflex but he was still limited by the fact that he had to depend on his own follow list or hope that his friends retweeted material they’d enjoyed.  Sites like Favrd and Favotter allowed users to increase their visibility.

This democratizing aspect of Twitter that allows everyone from housewives to college students access to their own audiences has been touted much in the same way people pointed to Youtube celebrities a few years ago.  “I do see Twitter as an equalizing platform.  Granted, the same network effects are still in play.  A famous person is always going to get more followers by default, versus someone who can be funnier than that famous person that just doesn’t have an audience.  People aren’t just reading to be entertained purely by what the tweets are, they also want that feeling of connection with whoever’s behind them.  There’s nothing magical about Twitter that would override that.  And yet, at the same time, like with Shit My Dad Says, you can see that a good idea does get a lot of attention in a way it deserves.  [More than followers] What really is important to me, as far as a sign of attention on Twitter, is whether people are saving your tweets.”

Perhaps even more importantly, the favoriting system has turned Twitter into something greater than a broadcasting tool.  “I’d like to see starring become more of a standard thing on Twitter that people know to do.  You start being able to track what’s good and what your audience likes and actually hone your craft.”  The conventional comments system on a blog will typically skew towards the negative but Douglas notes that it doesn’t necessarily present an honest picture of audience response.  “More people are going to want to explain in words why they don’t like what you wrote than why they did.  It’s always harder to say a coherent positive response when you really just want to go, ‘Yay! I agree.’  Having the “likes” and the stars which are integrated on Tumblr, Flickr, Youtube, Amazon etc. gives people a chance to show their appreciation without having to rack their brains for specific nice things to say.  It’s also important to get followers who are interested in talking to you.  I think that’s one of the really valuable things here; you’re not just doing standup in front of a crowd, you’re doing something that’s participatory.”  Instead of chucking dead ends or throw-away jokes out into the Twittersphere, comedians should be viewing Twitter as a testing ground or joke incubator.  It is increasingly common to see conversations start on Twitter only to be followed up by full length blog posts or articles.  Similarly, there is potential to select excerpts from longer works as a sort of “proof of concept” for the premise of a joke or story.

And here we enter the realm of craft.  The development of characters and a commitment to voice are probably the best argument anyone could offer for Twitter developing into something recognized for having literary characteristics or properties.  It is an interesting time, as writers on Twitter are still shaking out various approaches for creating accounts that invite investment from followers.  Writers must decide to create an account for a singular type of joke, to create an account using their own persona or a fictional one, to stick to perhaps a limited number of subjects or let fly as ideas come to them.  Authors like Arjun Basu, who tells self contained short stories in 140 characters or less, are something of an anomaly but that is not to say that there isn’t an abundance of story driven tweets.  Particularly interesting is the way that behavior is evolving.  While Douglas said he observed that writers developed characteristic voices early on, as personal style is almost impossible to keep out of creative work on Twitter or any other service, it took quite a bit longer for the now popular character accounts to develop.  “I’d say those cropped up almost a year after Twitter started.  I’m sure there were some but they were primordial.  The really good ones took a while.  Darth Vader was an early one but that’s a much simpler account.  It’s very much the standard jokes for someone impersonating Darth Vader because that’s been a trope for decades.  It’s a very easy persona for someone to get into.  Fake Michael Bay is the first [sophisticated] one I can remember, or Fake Sarah Palin might have come first.  The really interesting part about those characters is that they’re always better when the person goes beyond the first, immediate, joke.  It’s the sort of thing they did at MAD magazine a lot.  They would push beyond the obvious thing you could say about a celebrity.  What the Fake Sarah Palin account got was not just that she was ill equipped for her political career, or not just that she was a dumb bible thumper, but that she was so self-assured about how right she was.  It wasn’t just that she didn’t realize how dumb she was, it’s that she thinks everyone else is dumb when they disagree with her, and that’s what was magical.”

When confronted with the conventional wisdom often taught in creative writing classes that an author should find their favorite line or scene and kill it,[1] Douglas doesn’t hesitate for a second, dismissing the advice as “simplistic.”  Much of the comedy taking place online experiments with the short form, he says.  Shorter formats like video sketches or tweets reward artists who can come up with one or two of those killer lines.  Twitter is arguably the shortest of forms.  Whether working in puns, like Jay Hathaway; mimicking conservative politicians, like Avery Edison; or simply being diabolical, like Joshua Allen, each tweet produced is inextricably linked to the negative space around it.  The form’s brevity requires cues from the authors that hint at a world outside the tweet.  Douglas describes Allen’s skill in being able to “imagine an entire short story and taking the one killer line from it.”  The whole story is still there, he’s just let it fall away.  The seemingly instantaneous aspect of Twitter also makes readers wonder about the physical context of the tweet.  While a writer my go through numerous drafts of a tweet before publishing, the fact remains that it is a one off, created at a specific moment to be enjoyed by an audience as soon as the author deems it ready.  Since a tweet can be sent from anywhere, and generally carries a tone of observation, it is not unlikely that a reader might wonder exactly what went on behind it.  Was Jay Hathaway really making a hot pocket at the exact moment you read his hot pocket joke?  The fact that a tweet can be multifaceted and create so many different types of associations in the mind of readers makes the case for tweets as compelling art.

Consider @firleand’s tweet from May 10^th “— end of side one — ” There is a visual component to the composition of the tweet that sets it apart from anything else in the reader’s feed and replicates the sense of separation from content that these messages used to carry.  While the tweet receives a significant boost in meaning to those who follow Allen’s Tumblr as being something relating to his own life, the tweet still works as a message from a fictional character or the last line in an imagined novel.  These four words are rife with dramatic tension and gain in poignancy for every moment that they are not followed by another tweet.  If we were to view the entirety of this feed as an artistic endeavor, this tweet, and the space surrounding it, would be the best exercise in pacing I’ve ever seen on the service.

How important then is the 140 limit, the restriction that creates the form?  140 has become something of an arbitrary hot number these days.  You may have seen the 140 Second Film Festival that limited films to 140 seconds of footage.  While it is true that the limit was adopted to leave room for the user names of those who submitted by SMS, or text message, which brings a limit of 160 characters, this was not always the case.  Initially, there was no character limit at all.  Any overflow would be separated into a second message and submitted subsequently, just as a normal text message sent to another cell user would be.  Similarly, there is nothing to stop someone from writing a story or joke in 10 consecutive 140 character long segments.  I asked Douglas what he thought about users simply ignoring the limit.

“It could be less elegant, maybe,” He said.  “In any format, people that can work within the structure of the format are often going to produce more immediately elegant things.  But, if you can tell a story over several tweets by paying attention to when you’re breaking up the narrative then you can do something really interesting. You can put the punch lines in the second tweet.  You’re forcing comedic timing in a medium that usually seems bereft of any timing.  What’s more artless to me is when people abbreviate.  I’d much rather someone go into a second tweet than type in rebus language.  It distracts.  That definitely kills the feeling of humor, and I had to edit a few of the tweets in the book because they were brilliant except they left out a couple of punctuation marks, or shortened a word too much, just to fit in the character limit.  It’s always better if you can, instead, change your actual words.  If you want to be Hemingway you can’t just make the words look shorter, you have to actually use fewer words and still manage to get the idea across.”

Even if they were to get past the invention of the internet, the old guard would doubtlessly still be shocked at the concept of such brief stories.  Even Henry Youngman, king of the one liners, would have a hard time understanding how Twitter could usher in a new type of one liner joke.  Twitter’s hash tag system allows users to track all the tweets associated with specific tags.  For example, you could search #presidentialdebate and follow the entire community’s reaction to a debate.  Douglas points out the value of such a feature not just for academic purposes but for humorists as well.  The jokes based on memes and trending topics are “a unique form of humor that wasn’t technologically possible without this one tool.  Someone just starts a joke with a simple and easy to replicate formula like, ‘mashed up movie titles,’ or, ‘things I’d never say,’ and you can follow the tags and read hundreds of variations of a certain type of joke.”  Twitter seems to be making everything new again.  It’s not too long ago that a book of crowd sourced one liners would have seemed an unlikely pitch at best.  Now Douglas predicts that before long, we may very well see entire books based on a single day’s jokes from Twitter.   I sure hope so, there’s an empty spot on my bookshelf next to F U Penguin.

[1] Attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the form of “Murder your darlings.” from On the Art of Writing

As the Bike Snob gained notoriety (which is like gaining notariety in that it involves a lot of signatures but differs in that they’re yours) some people began to ask who he was.  It’s a silly sort of question for silly people but eventually even people I know who don’t ride bikes were in on it.  A friend of mine told me she’d heard he was actually some guy in the financial field.  If you actually read the blog you know plenty about him.  He favors practicality and a lack of pomp while still appreciating that some things are simply fun to do.  Although he spends much of his time telling people what to do with their bikes he freely admits that no one should follow his “dictats” if they are enjoying themselves as they are.  (Within reason. See bike salmon.)  He pokes fun at everything, including himself.  He rides his bike often and emphasizes the activity over the maintenance of both body and machine.  What else is there to know?  As a skateboarder I used to run into the same people regularly at “spots” but only interact with them peripherally.  Of these recognizable strangers, there were some I liked and some I disliked based on their comportment.  Knowing someone’s name wouldn’t make me think they were any less of a dick for snaking runs and it wouldn’t make me like anyone who was courteous any more.  What I enjoyed about this book is that it lets us know RTMS better in the ways that count.  Those ways being his relationship to cycling and the joy it brings him.

However, I should note that if you think a band sells out when they use a recording studio instead of etching their disc format of choice with a rock by themselves, you probably won’t like this book. This book is certainly not the affront or slap in the face that many hardcore fans claim when their favorite artists create projects for consumption by wider audiences.  However, it is not a “paper back blog” and may be different than what you expect if you haven’t been following the Snob’s interview circuit.  While I personally feel that the blog holds up over time, at least looking back two years, I understand his point perfectly that a book should be more timeless.  They are composed (and consumed) over a much longer period of time and should have a greater cohesiveness than a collection of posts that are meant to stand alone and have been composed over what was probably sometimes a lunch break.  A blog is topical in the way we mean topical humor, this book is topical in that it is about the topic of cycling.  Period. Complaining about the lack of the Lobster God here would be like complaining that his Giro d’Italia blog doesn’t make fun of anyone on a fixed gear.

A legitimate complaint would be that there isn’t a whole lot of stuff you didn’t know before. While I found all the content based on the history of cycling, why the bicycle was a great invention, and pretty much all of Snob’s personal stories to be engaging, there was quite a bit of rehash. Which is to be fully expected. The man has covered quite a bit of ground in the last couple of years. In general, he does it in a clever and concise way and it’s still fun to see him collect the various themes and categories he has developed over the course of the blog and consolidate and refine them. I particularly liked the part about the myth of bike culture where he skewers the notion of any “thing” culture and distinguishes that idea from the subcultures within cycling.

Back to stuff you already know. There are huge portions of the book dedicated to introductory maintenance and advice for navigating the mean world of bicycle commuting and ownership. Snob maintains a welcoming tone throughout these portions that reminds me of college orientation. There is certainly humorous content that the experienced cyclist will enjoy but in this book the novice or interloper is king.  It’s like Snob is on a long ride with an unsure friend he’s brought along and keeps looking back to make sure he’s still there, smiling encouragingly to tell them to think about it for a second and realize how much fun they’re having.

If you’re like me, you might question the logic of a man who loves riding bikes and has built an audience of people who also love riding bikes writing a book for people who don’t love riding bikes.  The truth is that this book is for people who don’t know they love riding bikes yet. And in that way it is very much for people who love riding bikes.  He has given sold you something that you can give or lend to those around you that are, metaphorically speaking, constantly hovering above a saddle or standing next to a bike.  I agree with him that the best form of bike advocacy is riding your bike.  If you want better bike lanes you have to show that people use them. Once more, if you want to be treated better by drivers you have to get out there so they can get used to the idea of treating you any way at all.  Snob makes the point that every time you let someone see you on a bike you’re helping to show them that cycling is accessible and easy.  Without being snarky, I’d like to suggest that the best form of reading this book is letting it be read by other people.  Think of this book as the guest bike you keep for enticing non-cyclist buddies and the blog as your daily commuter.

Notes:

I borrowed the term “paper back blog” from Sean Bonner. You can download the e-book here.

Yeah, the book is pretty on the inside. Christopher Koelle has done a great job illustrating and you can buy some of work here. It’s actually almost surprising because of how much the Snob avoids flashiness on the site.  He hasn’t even opted to register his own vanity domain like I have, opting instead to stay a dot blogspot.  Readers often take pleasure in his low quality photography and photo editing “skillz.”  No blog to book could be completely bereft of pictures though and Chronicle and Bike Snob oblige with a 16 page insert full of images from the blog.  The handlebar condom makes it in there, as does the lone wolf and the lime green rim heard around the world.

Things have come a long way since then and Amazon now tells you within about a day when you’ll be receiving your next novelty item. Didn’t you know? Dead tree books are like sculptures of blogs. It’s a kind of origami that uses stitching. As you may know, I am a huge fan of a certain blog that is written by the previously mysterious Bike Snob NYC. Ever since I began reading it I have said that I would like to compensate him for his work somehow beyond sending him links to things for his quizzes. So it was that I went to sleep last night comforted by the knowledge that I would most likely rush home from work today and find the most recent Snob x Paper collabo waiting for me. I slept the sleep of a child who has already peeked at his Christmas gifts but has parents that are clumsy enough to misplace them during the transition from their closet to the tree. Well, they made it. Here is what I saw when I got home.

The first thing I noticed after I ripped this book from it’s protective covering was that it is small.  Perhaps that is because it was built for performance.  I immediately decided to take some measurements.

Like succulent homarus americanus meat ripped right out of a claw

In keeping with convention I opted to use sunglasses and improvised as necessary.

As you can see, the book is about one pair of sun glasses wide.

And one and a half eyes wide.  I couldn’t take a picture of the most important dimension, width, because I had to measure it in cell phones and I was capturing the images with mine.  It was two HTC Ozones thick FYI.  I tried to weigh it but since my scale is set to babies, it wouldn’t register.

This bodes well for a quick, snappy read.  I expect it to accelerate great in the bathroom.