When I saw these guys live I was somehow inspired to snap my glasses in half. I think it was because I hated the glasses, I’d hated them for months, but hadn’t built up the courage to ditch them for something unknown and new, and this song pushed me over the edge. Head Dress by Amazing Baby.
Two years ago today I was fired from Vimeo.
On November 7th, 2007, in a one-on-one meeting, I asked my super-boss Barry Diller if I could report directly to him instead of to Michael Jackson, the former BBC guy who was attempting to manage me. Apparently I didn’t “ask” so much as give him an ultimatum, as he announced in what felt like some sort of checkmate.
Not sure what happened behind the scenes, but on Nov 30th my partners Josh & Ricky walked me to a cafe to deliver the news: I was fired. I remember thinking this was kind of unfortunate, but kind of cool, too, because now I was free to work on new projects.
I went to a friend’s house, on an adrenaline rush, and figured, Well, the best thing to do is let everyone know that I’m fine, I’m strong, I don’t really care at all, and so I took a bong hit and posted the photo to this blog.
In reality, I was affected drastically; I just didn’t know it, or know how to understand what happened. I dreamed up Vimeo in 2004 before “video sharing site” was a concept and it’d been an absolute labor of love every day since. I was working on it relentlessly and totally unprepared to have the rug pulled out from under me. My whole existence, my method of functioning, was custom-sculpted around Vimeo work. Getting fired was like running into a brick wall, blindfolded. I didn’t know what to do with myself and the trauma was heightened by my until-then trauma free life, my inability to cope.
The theme of these two years has been: healing and growing up. I look back at who I was, at what I blogged back then, and it’s like, “Who are you?” … I recognize him like a stranger in a fog; no, he looks like an angry insomniac jogging in the middle of the street at 3:30am. It’s the mentality that doesn’t check out. Something was clearly wrong with me but my worldview didn’t permit me to see it. I wasn’t cracked-out, I was “working my ass off”. I wasn’t arrogant, I was “awesome”. I was peaking on a high I couldn’t imagine coming down from.
I’ve had a lot of false starts in the intervening 730 days. Each one’s taught me something, usually some variation on “You don’t know shit”. Today I worked for 8 hours on my latest project, a pair of “personal productivity programs” that I’m making for my own benefit and enjoyment. Now that the demon is gone, I’m happily enjoying the work and not obsessed with the outcome, and I don’t care if it never becomes a phenomenon. I’m doing a good job and that’s its own reward.
People always ask if my glasses are prescription. OF COURSE THEY’RE PRESCRIPTION!!
(Photo by and glasses from Eric)
Here is a beautiful cover of Kanye West’s Can’t Tell Me Nothing, performed by Francis and the Lights.
You can download all of Francis’s music in one big zip file for the next 14 days.
Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020 (Computerworld.com) →
Glad we’re making progress here — I fantasize about this scenario daily!
Now they’re predicting ten years until I can think, “set alarm 5min” and 5 minutes later a bell goes off, or “message Nick gym 7:30?” and Nick gets an IM asking what time we go to the gym tomorrow.
Or, “11in = ? cm” to get back “27.94”.
A lot of people are probably like, “No way, I’m not turning myself into a cyborg!”. But the joke’s on you: Cyborgs will dominate every job class from CEO to telemarketer. Your caveman brain will be unemployable. The choice isn’t, “Upgrade or stay normal?” but “Upgrade or starve?”.
Maybe.
Via 2020.
A lot of people liked the old version of “Kids” by The Management (now MGMT) I posted a few months ago. Here is my favorite song of theirs from the same leaked 2005 demo-album “Climbing to New Lows”. It’s called We Care. I love how these guys really try… they didn’t wait until they were pros to start kicking ass.
I’m working on web programming and I’ve been listening to them all day long on my headphones.
The designboom blog write about photographer Christopher Payne’s new book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals,
a collection of large-format photographs of seventy institutions in thirty US states, shot between 2002 and 2008. massive state-funded mental hospitals, built to warehouse the mentally ill, were a feature of the american landscape for centuries. emptied out in the 1970s and 80s, they now sit abandoned.
I liked this comment, from “zenondudasculpture.com”:
While it may be true that many of these institutions now lay empty what is also true is that the restraints of straps and walls is now replaced by drugs.
via wintercheck, who said, “I could live in this room.”
Petition: Flavors.me must launch on Friday →
Flavors.me is supposed to launch on Friday. You can sign this petition to encourage them to stick with their agreement.
(watch this video if you don’t understand)
I love the feeling on Monday morning of a crisp new Standards chart for my week, revised and improved since last week. We’re so accustomed to systems that don’t budge, that we must conform to. But what if the system was the slave?
I created a separate blog called Jake Has Standards; the majority of my Standards posts will go there from now on.
Love this site E.gg Timer.
Just go to e.ggtimer.com/5min, replacing 5min with the amount of time you’d like it to count down from.
