*Безымянная овца

Вы палите наугад из безумной смеси пистолета и экскаватора урановыми медведями. В конце концов вам удается попасть в изогнутую по синусоиде «ногу».

В 1974 году Мухаммеда Али спросили, чем он собирается побеждать Джорджа Формана. Вопрос был не праздный: Форман — молодой и непобедимый чемпион, с сокрушительным ударом. До боя с Али он брутально за два раунда вбил в ринг Джо Фрейзера и Кена Нортона — боксеров, которым до этого Али проиграл. «Слабость Джорджа в том, что он никогда не слышал звон гонга на седьмой, восьмой или девятый раунд», — сказал Али. В том бою «величайший» висел на канатах, а Форман избивал его семь раундов из восьми. В восьмом Форман устал и надломился. Не столько физически, сколько психологически. Через 22 года в другом чемпионском бою Эвандер Холифилд точно так же сломает превосходящего в скорости, технике и силе удара Майка Тайсона, ни один из предыдущих соперников которого с момента возвращения его на ринг не смог продержаться и трех раундов.

Если ты брутальный мачо, привыкший ломать противника нахрапом, а именно такой подход к жизни исповедует наша власть, самое страшное для тебя, когда соперник сразу не ломается.

This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)

This redesign is deliberately over the top, but new ideas often exaggerate to make a point. It’s over the top but not unusable nor, in my opinion, unbeautiful. How can passages set in Georgia and headlines in Franklin be anything but beautiful? I love seeing my words this big. It encourages me to write better and more often.

Get uncomfortable. I’m coming up on two years with Adam. He is stable, supportive and fun to be with (he is also tall, passionate, and deeply sensitive in the goofiest way imaginable). But our relationship is so far from what I had imagined love to be. We have lots of sweet times, but we also have the moments where I feel bloated after eating too much dessert or he is withdrawn and worried about money, or we sit across from each other at dinner with nothing obvious to say. These feel hard to deal with and always make me afraid that something is terribly wrong. But they pass.

A few years ago, two wise, married yogis gave me a piece of advice. They told me that while it’s essential to have honest intimacy in a relationship, it’s just as essential that your partner earns the right to see your struggle. Before Adam, I thought it was good luck or good breeding or even good karma that led to being in a satisfying relationship. It didn’t occur to me that loving another person is essentially an exercise in being ok with being uncomfortable with someone you care about, and not holding a grudge about it.

But in a world where magazine are a lot more than their printed artifacts, what’s a brand? I’ll go through my evidence in a minute, but here’s my current hypothesis.

Brands are probabilistic now. The primary power of a brand is to increase the probability that someone clicks on, upvotes, or links to a story associated with your brand. It is not calculated primarily on a per issue basis as in the past. Instead, it’s a kind of implicit regression based on all the stories a publication has produced.

This isn’t a completely foreign idea. In the past, a brand’s strength would have been measured by how likely people were to buy or subscribe to a magazine. Today’s probabilistic brand, though, is less coherent and much broader than before.

He looked at the kids in front of him and wondered if they’d ever heard of Infiltrators, or if this had become obscure knowledge of his profession. Infiltrators were a probably-mythical subculture that invented subcultures to sell to coolhunters, and then flipped the money into making those subcultures a reality. Then, later, they sold the proof that the subcultures were fakes to the highest bidder. When Doug was coming up in the ’20s, a lot of his colleagues had been burned, worried that every new lead led to a camouflaged tar pit. Just as the industry had gotten used to a level of stability as cultural commentators, a collection of malcontents had put the fear of God into them: their tag, an “i” with a circle around it, appeared everywhere, and made their numbers seem infinite. Doug, with no reputation yet to lose, dismissed it as a covert branding campaign and was brazen and fearless where his colleagues were cautious. Harris had liked his moxy and had promoted him quickly.

Developers would love to sell more copies of their game at a higher price, but the choices offered to gamers across XBLA, PSN, Steam, and other services have never been more extensive.

“Everyone has a queue in their head and a queue on their hard drive, and for most games, sales aren’t even a way to make sure your game gets played; they’re a way to move your game from a gamer’s mental queue to their hard drive queue,” — Ambrogi said.

“It could still, without hyperbole, be years before that person actually downloads, installs or plays your game.”

Post-divorce, the Internet has become a personal minefield. There was the time shortly after the split when LinkedIn suggested I connect with my ex’s new boyfriend. There was a time when Facebook kept surfacing “remember this moment?” photos of me and my ex from my mom’s profile. I hid and changed my relationship status in the dead of night so as few people as possible would notice the change and ask me about it.

Worst of all is Gmail, which has one of the most maddening “features” to confront anyone going through a breakup. Nearly every time I wrote an e-mail to friends this past year, Gmail oh-so-helpfully suggested I include my ex-wife in the e-mail. And you can’t turn this off. It still happens, despite my pleas to Google to make it optional. (Google obviously doesn’t employ enough divorcees.)

iPhone 4’s operating system doesn’t work this way. It decouples the density of the pixels on the screen from the visual interface that it draws. Because OS X is built from the ground up to be resolution independent, all the default iOS interface elements are already vectorized graphics (PDFs, to be specific). This means that when iOS scales the elements in physical size to fit the 3.5-inch iPhone 4 screen, they take up the same amount of space as the elements drawn on the iPhone 3GS but they use four times the number of pixels.