The internet is trying to kill us, people. Set the Cute Threat Level to RED!

Also, is that a kitteh or an Ewok? Srsly.

Posted via web from Barb’s posterous

resume as a D&D character sheet. brilliant.

[via Neatorama]

Posted via web from Barb’s posterous

Love. These. Folks.

Posted via web from Barb’s posterous

Along with that big move news, and actually completely unrelated, is another change: I’ve accepted an offer to take on the role of Senior Editor at Mashable.com. I’m excited to be returning to a focus on social media and social tech and working with a top-notch team at a destination that’s been in my daily feed reading since 2005.

It’s been a great year working with the fine folks at Crowd Fusion and I wish the team there all the best. I can’t really talk yet about some of the cool things coming up there and how it might mean some continued involvement with the platform, but rest assured we are parting on good terms and I have high hopes for the continued success of the company.

In between NY and CA I managed to squeeze in a bit of on the road Kerouac-style vacation, driving coast to coast in my trusty ‘98 Toyota Corolla whose awesome gas mileage had me going 8 hours at a stretch before a refill with those pesky non-renewable fossil fuels. I was 13 days on the trip and only had 1 night of hotel (richly enjoyed in Deadwood, SD), staying with friends and family along the way and having many memorable adventures. The last time I made a cross-country trek was back in the Triassic Period of 1997, and this trip shared with it 2 very important pit-stops: Chicago, and Wall Drug, SD. If you’ve ever been to Wall Drug, or if you’ve even just driven on 90W through South Dakota, you know what I’m talking about.

In the “I get by with a little help from my friends” Acknowledgements section I must extend heaping amounts of gratitude to all the folks who helped make this move possible: Julia, Jackie & Joe, Mrs. Perrone (who performed the very vital role of cleaning supervisor), Chris Willett and Bobby the plumber, the affable Sears repair dude, the last-minute roofer who also regaled me with stories about his recent cross-country trips, Dounan (ice cream and heavy lifting), Meryl (fire-starter), Shane and Scott at Certified Properties, Jason and Danielle my awesome tenants, Leah and Amelia (refreshments and PA system adoption), Laura Darlington (LA intelligence ground team, Bowflex consultation), Eliot (interim home office), Dan, Diane, Erin and Ryan O’Halloran (adopted family in (too) sunny Burbank), Judith (encouragement and shared brain matter), CK (covering for my vacationing ass, etc.), Daddy Bowen (spiritual road-trip presence), Mom and Jo-Jo, Ruby (Cleveland party planner), Sam Axon (provider of Chicago food, pad, improv and Kerouac library), Tam and Lauren (Presidents of the Minneapolis Secret Spoon Society), Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, Sarge (Denver hail and smoke), Dad and Joy (Albuquerque welcoming committee), Dawn (Vegas MC and encouragement), ABF U-Pack, WestSideRentals, Peter’s Movers, Rory the super super at Carseka Apts., Clotho and the Norns, and everyone else whose inclusion would turn this section into a paperback novel.

If you’re in the LA social tech scene, I look forward to meeting you! One such opportunity happens to be coming up this Friday at the Mashable Hyatt4Good Tweetup Tour — I’ll be there with bells on, etc. If you’re not in LA but have occasion to visit, give me a shout and let’s meet up! I’ll be here whenever I’m not travelling to events, trying vainly to Do Everything Cool — a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. If you know of anything in town I Absolutely Must See, let me know that too!

Below is a track by Kenny Mosher set to video produced by Showdown Productions. After the break is “Love, Love, Love” by Reyna Perez.

Music Video Shot on iPhone from Kenny Mosher on Vimeo.

“His death may have stunned the world of music, but those who knew Michael Jackson say the warning signs of his fading health were clear. They claim his long-term addiction to painkillers is the obvious underlying health issue which – combined with the considerable pressure of attempting a showbusiness comeback – may just have claimed his life. Only last month, the Daily Mail reported that Jackson was struggling to make even a handful of the rehearsals for the comeback tour which was due to start in July at the O2 in London. He had been to just two out of more than 45 rehearsals.”

(via Did painkiller addiction and pressure of re-building sullied reputation kill Michael Jackson? | Mail Online)

He’s steeped in my memory from childhood but I lost total interest during the creepy years (which, sadly, were the majority of the past 2 decades). Why is it then that his death finds me suddenly fascinated by such a strange personality and bizarre larger-than-life life — a sad, twisted product of childhood abuse and resulting psychological disorders, the intense pressures of superstardom, almost continuous medical treatment morphing into 25 years of prescription drug addiction, a disturbing obsession with plastic surgery and the peculiar two-sided coin of unrelenting media scrutiny combined with a reclusive, self-delusional private fantasy world enabled by wealth and a sycophantic entourage of opportunistic handlers.

Michael Jackson was a completely and utterly fascinating icon of the ravages and consequences of the American supermedia machine and resultant hyper-celebritism. He was also a phenomenally talented musician, singer, songwriter, dancer and entertainer who was loved around the world and broke so many records we’ve lost count. Whether he really was a child abuser or simply a psychological and emotional child himself unable to grow mentally into adulthood due to physical and emotional abuse from his father from a young age and complete sheltering from adult reality (or both), it was a sad and terrible long decline for a star once so bright. Whatever he became, it’s clear he so long and so desperately wanted to become someone else. It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Reading this gives me crazy ideas about completely transforming the music retail experience into more of a social experience — get rid of 80% of the CD racks, keep some premium inventory around like box sets and limited editions, put in a coffee shop (seems to work wonders for brick and mortar book retailers) and create a space for music lovers to hang out and share tunes with each other. Put in digital “jukebox” computers, let people stream whatever they want (volume might be an issue… maybe the tables have headphone stands, or hire a brilliant sound engineer to baffle everything properly so tables/stations don’t bleed too much audio), and some percentage will buy MP3 files on site (and continue to buy some physical media). Others won’t buy anything but the occasional coffee but will be 100% free and avid promoters to others. Have concerts and special events in stores constantly. Hold workshops for would-be and independent music makers.

Even better: provide a celestial jukebox service to any customer who buys anything from you, ever. Store whatever tracks and albums they buy, ever, and let them stream it from any device they own. Let them re-download anything at any time when they have a hard drive crash, clean system install, get a new computer/NAS/PMP/phone/game console/etc.

These are so frakking brilliant.

MySpace slashes head count by 30 percent | The Social – CNET News.

The tagline reads “MySpace is a place for friends.” No, it’s not. It’s a place for scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, spam-spewing trolls to post mindless blinking affiliate marketing links all over creation. If “this hurts me more than it hurts you” Van Natta wants to turn that ship around they have to start treating the social network like a community that it sadly once was, heinous crimes against HTML and all, instead of like a wishful money-printing machine that occasionally requires light watering for maintenance.

Seriously, that place is a cesspool.

I wonder if the current spate of anger relates to two things: 1) a conflation of the general hatred being levied towards AT&T right now over their completely craptastic reception and service, and 2) a new market of iPhone 3G owners who have never previously purchased a smartphone, and thus don’t have much direct experience with how cell phone subsidies work in the U.S. and on carriers around the world. The actual cost of a smartphone device as sophisicated as an iPhone or G1 or Nokia N97 et al is many hundreds of dollars — I tend to think of it like “car trouble” price: whenever something goes wrong, I steel myself to be out $500-600 no matter what the heck it is. Some phones climb as high as a cool $1k for an unlocked GSM handset. The only reason smartphones can be had cheaper is because the carrier subsidizes them: you agree to be locked in to this 2-year contract and the carrier is guaranteed to extract $XXXX from you over that period, in exchange for which they discount the price of your phone because they’re guaranteed to make that money back from you (unless you cancel early, which people seem loathe to do even though a $150 early termination fee (or less, depending on how much of the contract has elapsed) is far less than you’d pay to stay stuck in the contract… maybe it’s the principle of the thing).

Thus, if you want to pick up a new phone before you’ve completed that 2-year contract you signed, you’re just plain SOL. There is no special deal for you, and if there were the whole phone subsidy house of cards would fall apart. What would stop me from popping in every month to pick up the latest hot smartphone on deep discount, and what incentive would carriers have to support that?

What these folks are really angry about is the underlying racket of the phone subsidy. It’s spurious to blame Apple or AT&T for “allowing” this pricing scheme — this pricing scheme is typical for the mobile market. Still, neither Apple nor AT&T have done much in the way of educating a First Time Smartphone Buyer market about how this works, and they could have softened some of the blow if they had. Nevertheless, it’s a rude but entirely fair wakeup call to phone buyers about how the subsidy system works.