A celebrity story is usually far more interesting when the person telling the story doesn’t give a shit about offending the celebs in question (or talking to them ever again). This story told by Ninja, one half of the Die Antwoord musical group, is clearly in that category. In it, he recounts hanging out at Kanye’s house, eating Kim Kardashian’s delicious banana pudding (not even a euphemism), and then wandering over to Drake’s house (with whom Ninja has a history) to play some basketball. One of the things I liked about this story is that it could have stopped in three or four different places and been a complete & entertaining story, but it just kept going.
Just in time for the holidays, Kim Kardashian, queen of the selfie, is releasing her own line of emoji. They are called Kimoji. The emoji include a butt, a doughnut, Kim’s censored boobs, Kim ugly crying, a word cloud featuring Kim calling someone “basic,” a solo cup, Kim taking a selfie, and a hairdryer.
Via email, Jacobs told Knauss that PAPER believed “they’ve got something that they think will generate at least 100 million page views, and will their current infrastructure support that?”
“This sort of cold thrill goes down my spine,” Knauss said, “and the only thought that makes it out of my brain is, ‘Eep.’”
He continued: “I reflexively begin designing the architecture in my head. It’s a nerd impulse. Dogs chase after thrown balls, system administrators design to arbitrary traffic.”
I love this article for a whole bunch of reasons (including that it’s written by a friend about two other friends, one of whom is responsible for keeping kottke.org’s servers going), but I was just talking about the burstable web scaling issue with a friend the other day. She was trying to make a reservation for a ferry. The reservations open for the entire season on a particular day at a particular hour and in a matter of hours, most (if not all) of the reservations are taken. And of course, their tiny web site and backend systems melts into a huge puddle that day, people can’t get in, and everyone wastes 4 hours of their day trying to make a simple reservation. Basically, the ferry company needs to be Ticketmaster, but only for 3 or 4 hours every year. That’s a weird problem and it’s been an issue on the web since forever, and no one has solved it in an entirely off-the-shelf way. Someone get on this, riches await.
Ethan Zuckerman proposes measuring attention with a unit of measure called a Kardashian. One Kardashian is equal to the amount of worldwide media attention that Kim Kardashian gets in a day.
I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term — like the Ohm or the Roentgen — and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous.
Example usage: The crisis in Greece received 12 microKardashians of attention today.
Usually when the hype machine is up and running on a film, I tend to be a little sceptical about it, even when I’ve seen it and enjoyed it. A lot of “yeah, I liked it, but….” I love to ride the backlash.
Saving Private Ryan is the hyped movie of the moment. I liked it. That’s it. I liked it. It was a good movie. I don’t care if it’s not the best war picture ever made. Or the bloodiest. Or the most shell shocking. Or if Tom Hanks’ character was too Mr. Goody Two Shoes. It was just good. I went twice and it was good both times. And I’d recommend it to friends.
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