John Stokvis

@johnstokvis.com

208 Followers 191 Following

does Product at Outschool. formerly at Indiegogo, Twitter, Groupon a captain at sea

Dr Manhattan sitting on the moon
Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white, they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world. Her stupidity panicked her, as well as the way her voice now sounded when she talked to people who hadn't stopped being stupid yet. No One Is Talking About This Patricia Lockwood
“Circumcision Tylenol-ol” but in the teenage mutant ninja turtles logo
Keith Hernandez comments on the Mets/Rockies game: “just seeing a lot of stinky baseball out here tonight.”
A whack batter stepping up to the dish
Actors in noises off at the globe
A rolling ball machine with lots of people standing around it
A Wizard of Earthsea War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might. Or does might make right? If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don't play war games. Ursula K. Le Guin
xerox'd flowers ° When my work does well, it's usually because the idea was driving. But then I get cocky, or arrogant, and think, "I was there. I was involved. That was successful. should drive this time." And it doesn't work, because there's no idea in the car. visakanv
The lotus of my optimism grows out of the mud of my despair. And really, someone with a blissfully charmed life probably wouldn't think to make a big fuss about being optimistic and prosocial and so on. They'd just be that way naturally. It would be something that they'd take for granted. I don't take mine for granted, because I had to fight for it. Visa
Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - “Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote “Don’t be a ninny” alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s. Another notes the presence of “Irony” fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, hands cupped around their mouths. “Absolutely,” they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. “Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!” Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written “Man vs. Nature” in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge.
3 posts The definition of Groundhog Day as a situation in which the same or usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly is the bread. A post explaining that the groundhog doesn’t actually see his shadow but a person receives the message verbally is the meat.
Zohran sign with the lyrics to War War huh yeah what is it good for absolutely nothing
Zohran sign saying “two wheat for one sheep”
Geordi leforge meme Tired - Ken burns: the civil war Wired - Real housewives: the civil war
The poster for Michael Keaton classic, multiplicity
Here’s the trick, though — These people are, unsurprisingly, rubes. Because they misunderstand the fundamental problem with generative AI, particularly when it comes to using it for informational services — AI doesn’t know anything. I’ll say that again, a bunch more times, because you need to get that: AI doesn’t know anything. AI doesn’t know anything. AI doesn’t know anything. AI doesn’t know anything.
Visa saying having kids turns you into a morning person the way being chased by a bear turns you into a running person
the scene from the shining where jack nicholson pokes his head through the door, but instead it's clippy the paperclip
the "put a bird on it" image from portlandia but b, r, and d are blacked out so it says "put AI on it." same vibes
Ballmer meme but saying “agency”
a signup button in green and a log in button in grey
people tend to think "It's unrealistic if not impossible to make a living doing what you love" because their model assumes you're not going to talk to 100,000 people but once you have a decent-enough product that even 1% of people like, then it's just a matter of distribution
Walter goggins mouth agape
Interior of the Skokie library with glass light and books
Wooden blocks stacked that say antimony arsenic aluminum selenium
This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States - to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status. The purveyors of supremacist ideologies have worked in concrete ways to bound the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another. Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed ... Jamelle Bouie
A girl at an Elvis concert wishing she was having the feelings of the girl sitting next to her
a drawing of the smiling curve from stratechery.com with writers and focused publications on the left hand side and google and facebook on the right.
a picture of stan shih
a drawing of the smiling curve from stratechery.com with writers and focused publications on the left hand side and google and facebook on the right. publishers are in the middle at the bottom of the curve
archimedes picking up the world with a lever
Facebook’s old poke button
an image of a woman yelling at a man covered in filth: "Messy!"
a comment saying "this isn't the last time listening to this."
The first tweet, made by Jack Dorsey, was made on March 21, 2006. It has the Snowflake ID of 20. The Iconfactory was developing a Twitter application in 2006 called "Twitterrific" and developer Craig Hockenberry began a search for a shorter way to refer to "Post a Twitter Update." In 2007 they began using "twit" before Twitter developer Blaine Cook suggested that "tweet" be used instead.
Pic of Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator Umberto Eco looking real sharp in a hat and coat
A quote from Patricia Lockwood: In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?