How to Get Rid of Clutter and Live Abundantly »
# Aug 6, 2015Have you ever owned anything? This is why you cannot forgive any of your former lovers. Things like “having chairs” is preventing you from living your best life, and also you should throw away any item of clothing you’re not currently wearing. If it’s not on your skin, you don’t really love it, do you?
Hello!
If you’ve reached this page, it’s probably because you’re wondering who’s writing this blog. My name is John Kelly and I’m really terrible about writing my own biographies like this, mainly because I never know where to start. In the last five years, I’ve been a systems administrator, a student, a web developer, a designer, an actor, and a journalist. Where do you start with that? Right now, I’m a swashbuckling devops engineer at a scrappy startup in Dublin, Ireland.
I blog very infrequently, but you can also find me on Twitter at @johnke, where I tweet even more infrequently. I like to keep track of the films I’ve been watching over on letterboxd.
As you may have already noticed, I don’t have comments enabled on my blog. If you’re interested, you can read why here. If you would like to comment or tell me I’m wrong about anything, you can do it the old-fashioned way, by sending me a goddamned email.
# Aug 3, 2015The Good Dinosaur
Pixar are pretty great at pulling at my heartstrings, but this is the first time they’ve made me cry during the trailer.
This looks amazing.
Authenticity
Casey Neistat just launched his new social network, Beme. It’s probably easiest if I just link to Casey’s video so he can describe it himself.
I really love the idea of Beme. I mean, is there anyone genuinely advocating for these awful, fake, rigidly curated lives on Facebook and Instagram? When these perfectly-composed, perfectly-filtered shot appears in my timeline, I get the worst fomo. The consolation, the thing that prevents me spiraling into a full-on, god-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life depression is realising that for someone to take the time to line up the shot, crop it, choose the right filter, and upload it - this all means that they weren’t actually engaged in the moment they’re depicting 1. So I understand the problem Beme is trying to solve.
So here’s another one of his videos, where he climbs a theater in Belgium.
This is the moment when I realised that even Casey Neistat is guilty of not being engaged in the moment. At 4'00 in that video, you can see him scrambling up a near-vertical wall. God, I haven’t ever climbed up a Belgian theater - the fomo is starting to set in! But hang on a second. To get that shot, he had to climb up the wall, set up the shot, climb down again and then climb up again. And then later on, he had to edit out the first two parts of that2.
Casey Neistat made a name for himself through his youtube videos. And his youtube videos are so watchable partly because of his enormous, planet-sized personality. But they’re also watchable because they’re really well made. They’re tightly edited, and they’re shot with a filmmaker’s eye. None of which are available with Beme - you get a potentially wonky shot (apparently worse if you have boobs), with no way to correct it. And since you don’t know what you uploaded, there’s no way for you to improve your skills. Chances are you’ll always be shooting wonky junk.
I really would like Beme to succeed, but I worry that heavy users of social media (i.e. not me) aren’t going to like the limitations, so we’ll just be left with videos like this one. Authentic as fuck, but that’s pretty much all you can say about it.
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One of my biggest personal achievements of the last year is when I climbed Croagh Patrick. But would you know I’d done it by looking at my Instagram or my Facebook timeline? Would you fuck. ↩︎
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He addresses this in his vlog, where he often posts videos of him running in New York and he says his runs end up taking three times as long because he has to set up the shot, go back, run past the camera, then go back for the camera. ↩︎
Thank You, Mr Iwata
Remember when video games were fun? Remember when they were about colour and happiness? Watching E3 2015 a few months ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these were things that video games had grown out of. It was dour, brown, post-apocalyptic shooters as far as the eye could see. Bombast and spectacle were the order of the day. The thing that drew one of the biggest cheers from the Microsoft crowd was when they lowered a fucking Ferrari from the roof. A fucking Ferrari.
Here’s what Nintendo did for their E3.
They teamed up with the Jim Henson Company to make puppets of their corporate team and made the most adorable, dorky video imaginable. And it was lovely.
It was a uniquely Nintendo way of approaching the industry. It was showing that video games could still be about colour and happiness and fun. And it’s largely because of this man, Satoru Iwata.
When someone asks me to picture the president of one of the three largest video game companies in the world, this is exactly what I want to imagine. Not someone in a blazer and jeans with a focus-tested number of shirt buttons opened. I want a person who understands why we play games. I want a person who knows that games are about bringing people together, not just about shooting people in the face. I want someone who gets it.
Iwata got it. And the world feels a little less joyful now that he’s left it.
Thank you, Mr Iwata.
# Jul 17, 2015Guardian profiles Amy Poehler »
# Jul 11, 2015“I see life as like being attacked by a bear,” she says. “You can run, you can pretend to be dead or you can make yourself bigger. So, if you’re my stature, you stand on a chair and bang a pan and scream and shout as if you’re going to attack the bear. This is my go-to strategy. I really liked being pregnant, for example, because I got to take up more space.”
Is Kickstarter covering up a scam? »
I smelled a rat with the Holus early on - in the original pitch, they showed a video conference using a side angle, which would require a super-fancy camera on the other end. Joanie Mercier really dug into the project and showed what a goddamn mess this is. Strangest discovery: the “staff pick” badge means absolutely nothing on Kickstarter.
# Jul 9, 2015
Slate's review of Armada »
I hated Ernest Cline’s previous book, Ready Player One. I genuinely hated it with a burning passion. It was one of the worst books I read last year. And the fact that everyone else (even the New York Times!) loved it made me wonder if it was just something broken in me. Which is why Laura Hudson’s review of his new book, Armada (and by extension, her critique of RPO), has cheered me up no end.
Armada often feels like it’s being narrated by that one guy in your group of friends who never stops quoting the Simpsons, a tic that feels increasingly tiresome and off-putting in the face of the novel’s supposedly apocalyptic stakes. On more than one occasion, soldiers salute each other en route to world-ending battles by solemnly swearing that “the Force” will be with them, and one character flies to his supposedly tragic and moving death while screaming quotes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is a book that ends with someone unironically quoting Yoda.
See also I don’t even own a television’s review of Ready Player One.
# Jul 7, 2015Paul Ford's What is Code? »
I’ve said before that Paul Ford is one of my internet heroes. If you didn’t understand or remained unconvinced as to why I said this, you need to read his latest piece for Bloomberg Businessweek - a spectacular 38.000-word article about programming and computers. Which in the hands of most technology writers would be dry and boring, but this is why I love Paul Ford so much. He’s incredibly smart and intelligent, but he approaches everything from an extremely human point of view, so it’s a wonderful read.
# May 11, 2015