Jack Baty’s posterous

you know one thing I hate? It's when an object or device only has a very limited design brief—only a couple of things its design needs to fulfill—and it fails at one or more of them. For instance, when a broom handle  falls off the broom. Really, the entire design brief of a broom can be summed up in about four points, and one of them would  have to be, "the broom part and the handle part must not fall into two pieces.

I cannot throw out these books. Some are protected because I have personally turned all their pages and read every word; they're like little shrines to my past hours.

Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers. It dumbs-down the content, which turns off your real audience, which ultimately makes you less valuable to advertisers.

this is another aspect of the obsessive quality of photography—the desire to see and possess results in compulsive behavior. And yet, depicting recognizable things in unusual ways does not on its own, perhaps, equal a conceptual vision.

In this environment, accepting that yer casual music fan is now out of the equation, the only way to make any money is to appeal to the fetishistic sensibilities of the obsessives, who still view music as art and releases as artefacts.

When I pick up an M9, it just shoots. When I pick up my 5D Mark II or Nikon D3, I have to spend minutes jacking it off in menus just trying to get it set up for whatever I hope to shoot before it goes away.