Oh ho, what's this? Choire Sicha's book is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's called Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c.2009 A.D.) in a Large City. I don't know what the book is about beyond that, but Choire wrote a bit about writing and publishing in his non-announcement of it, the book.
In response to some blogfight I don't really understand or care too much about, Choire Sicha published a handy guide for determining whether you are on the internet or not.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if you are on the Internet or not. For example you are almost always typing into a box on a series of screens on your computer. Because of this, there are whole sections of the Internet that are pretty sure they are not on the Internet, because, they are just boxes, right? You could be typing into anything, who knows if it's public. This was true about LiveJournal for a long time. When you would link to a posting on LiveJournal, back in the day, you would get outraged emails about invasion of privacy. Because in their minds, they were just typing in their diary.
Former kottke.org guest curator Choire Sicha rails against the dirty filthy c-word. That's right, "curator".
Your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you're a low-grade collector, not a curator. You're buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling -- and you're then reselling it on your blog. You're nothing but a secondary market for someone else's work.
I got fresh Sicha content. Anyone buying Sicha? 2-for-1 Sicha for the next hour only. Free embedded tweets! I'm also selling links to @curateordie for a limited time only, act now!
Nice little piece by David Carr in the NY Times about The Awl, a small batch blogging concern owned and operated by Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho.
"My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for," Mr. Sicha said. "All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn't that hard to figure out."
In today's installment of Cooking with the Awl, Choire Sicha shows us how to make his famous Nonchalant Smoker's E-Z Pie Crust. Baking has never been less precise!
3. Put something more than a teaspoon but something less than a tablespoon of salt in the flour. That is like "three pinches." It doesn't really matter how much! Saltiness offsets sweetness! People, who are animals, like salt!
4. Put about the same amount of sugar in the flour! Give or take! IT DOESN'T MATTER.
Choire also notes at one point that the crust "should look sort of gross".
Oof, I so hate to go out here with a whimper rather than a bang, but I'm BEAT. The jig is up! The thing about not having a job is that 1. You will take any and all irregular work that comes your way, and 2. You then have to do it until it's done, no matter what ("what" being "3 a.m." or "dental work" or even "laziness"). Plus I gotta get up in the morning and drive to South Carolina. Hellloooo, Mr. Obama! Thanks so much to Mr. Kottke for letting me muddy up his rec room this week—it was a good reboot for me, and also it didn't drive away all the readers, each of whom seems, judging from the inbox, particularly lovely and intelligent and amusing and polite. So yay you! Your reward is that your regularly-scheduled programming returns shortly.
Update: Thanks, Choire! Enjoy your time with Mr. Obama in SC. -jkottke
Fresh off his exit from Gawker and covering last week's New Hampshire primary for the New York Observer, Choire Sicha will be handling a slightly easier, less glamourous, and potentially more spiritually rewarding job: editing kottke.org for the next week.
Choire has written for Gawker (on two non-consecutive occasions, making him Gawker Media's Grover Cleveland), the NY Times, the Observer, and a host of other publications, but I remember him mostly from from the olden days of the blogosphere. He was one half of the tandem that wrote the now-defunct East/West, an early blog detailing the lives of two friends who live on opposite ends of the US. He's also done a bunch of other stuff but I'll let him share or not share about all that. Welcome, Choire!
For his last Gawker post, Choire Sicha pens a recent history of New York City, 2000-2007.
Over the last month, I have read the Metro section from each issue of the New York Times -- starting in mid-2000 and ending with today's paper. Here's what I learned.
David Remnick may be the current editor of the New Yorker, but it's much-maligned former editor Tina Brown's team that's running the place. Love the comments at the end...the Gawker audience is almost shocked at something that's actually researched, longer than three sentences, and doesn't contain any overt drug references. Choire, you keep this up, I might have to start reading the site again.
Choire Sicha is returning to edit Gawker. What's the line from Godfather 3? "...but they keep pulling me back in." Here's a post about it on the big G itself.
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