So..... Facebook's stock is dropping a bit. Ignoring the major explanations: a bank that didn't underprice the stock to take piles of money off of a tech company, a big honking tech bubble, etc., there's something else going on. We all have this basic feeling that Facebook is actually hugely important and hugely valuable. We …
First mint of the year is in the bottle
I learned this trick last year, and it's awesome. You take a bottle of bourbon (cheap is best, given what we're going to do to it), you pour out a shot or so, and stuff in as much mint as you can possibly fit in the bottle. Then you wait two days, then you pour …
Connection Wealth for Artists
So, social connection and money both solve similar coordination problems. And for a couple centuries doing economics meant you could basically ignore the social connection category of wealth, because it was a pain in the ass to analyze and it wasn't that powerful, really. But now there are a ton more social connections and those …
You know what’s going to rock? Ian’s show next week.
The first time I worked with Ian for real was on the reading of Summer's Twilight a little over two years ago. He played Oberon, and he just tore it up. Since then we've hatched a few schemes, and sometimes I bring over sketches of sections I've written for Oberon to test with him. And …
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Artists Should Invest in Love
Apple has a ton of money. As their business grew, they kept a lot of it as a long term investment. They didn't invest it in hedge funds or anything like that. They held onto it partly because Steve Jobs was kinda weird, but partly because all that money gave them safety and flexibility. They …
Learn Kickstarter from AFP’s new campaign
Because really, there's only so long you can go on a blog about the future of the arts and the internet without blogging about Amanda Palmer. That's her new Kickstarter video down there. Back it. Buy it. Love it. But more to the point: THAT'S HOW YOU DO THAT. I spend a lot of time …
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Kir Bourgeois
I didn't realize until I started writing this post that I might have to worry about the gender of the adjective in the name. I probably screwed it up. Anyway. We know about the kir royale: creme de cassis (made from blackcurrants) and champagne. But we've started buying this blackcurrant concentrate/syrup/squash from our favorite local …
Money and the Internet
I've written before about how things that used to involve money and companies, and therefore appear in "the economy", no loger have to do so, thanks to the internet. If I needed a place to crash in a strange city, I used to have to pay a hotel. Now I can use all these lovely …
Grapefruit Old Fashioned
I haven't been blogging a lot of cocktails recently. I apologize. I've been distracted by two things. 1) Writing a 20-some minute piece for Rhymes With Opera in two months, and 2) really getting to know the Old-Fashioned. I'm a solid whiskey-drinker, and I like my cocktails, so I suppose it was only a matter …
Rhymes With Opera rocked
That went beautifully. Not that I knew it would. Rhymes With Opera put on a fantastic show last night, and it was just the way I like it. It was a great big party. There was food, there was wine, there was a staggeringly relaxed atmosphere, and there were these amazing musicians onstage playing extremely …
Double Fine Adventure and Kony 2012: The Internet’s Doing New Stuff!
These two things have basically nothing to do with each other, but they're both pretty stonking powerful examples of things changing for culture on the web. Kony First, Kony 2012. Everyone knows by now that the film is an oversimplification and the charity behind it isn't super efficient. There are problems. But when All Your …
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How do we support culture when it’s too busy upvoting itself?
It used to be that the cultural economy didn't exist, which was terrible. Then in the post-war period it was great at promoting things with mass appeal. That was pretty wonderful - it gave us the astonishing cultural power of pop music and movies, but it meant that there wasn't any money leftover for stuff …
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