The most recent issue of your magazine, the Début Fiction issue, arrived in our mailbox yesterday. Forgoing for now an exploration of your reasons for accenting the “e” in the English word “debut”, I would like to direct your attention to pages 98 and 99 of that issue. Page 98 is to the left of the crease of the magazine and contains part of an article entitled Our Perfect Summer by David Sedaris, an article I was keenly interested in reading when I saw it in the table of contents. Page 99 is to the right of the crease and contains two vertical half-page flaps that open to reveal an advertisement for UBS. Let’s call the flap that opens toward the crease page 99A, the flap that opens away page 99B, and the revealed advertisement page 99C.
Here’s my problem. Page 99A keeps opening up and flopping down in front of the Sedaris article I’m trying to read on page 98 because the thumb on my right hand is not nearly long enough to clamp it down with the rest of the pages on the right hand side of the magazine. I had to resort to an unorthodox, complicated, and uncomfortable magazine-holding position in order to keep page 99A from interfering with my reading, a position that, had it lasted any longer than the two minutes it took me to read the text it was covering, would have driven me completely bats.
I realize that with all the excitement around the Débuting Fiction in the magazine, you probably forgot, just this once, to run the magazine through The Condé Nast Magazine Usability Lab. And also that UBS probably loves the fact that their exhaustively-honed advertising copy is flopping down in front of the hilarious literary stylings of David Sedaris like a pop up ad on the web and precipitating a post (with a link, no less) on a personal web site of modest acclaim. But this flap, it’s seriously annoying. Please make it go away from all future issues of your magazine.
Yours very sincerely,
Jason Kottke
ps. Please do not print this letter in your magazine. I do not wish for my, how you say, inelegant grammar, odd punctuational choices, and inadequate vocabulary to be snickered at by your discerning readership.
pps. I love this bit from the Sedaris article:
“But it’s perfect,” my father said. “A real beauty, just like your mother here.” He came from behind and pinched her on the bottom. She laughed and swatted him with a towel and we witnessed what we would later come to recognize as the rejuvenating power of real estate. It’s what fortunate couples turn to when their sex life has faded and they’re too pious for affairs. A second car might bring people together for a week or two, but a second home can revitalize a marriage for up to nine months after the closing.
I missed Julian Dibbell’s The Unreal Estate Boom in Wired last November (I was in Frizzance), but I recently rectified that oversight. Too many interesting bits in the article about virtual spaces and economies to exhaustively list here, so here’s a short one:
“The minute you hardwire constraints into a virtual world, an economy emerges,” explains Castronova, the Adam Smith of EverQuest. “One-trillionth of a second later, that economy starts interacting with ours.”
Some thoughts:
1. I’m not sure if that’s always true. Slashdot has an economy (with karma as currency) but as far as I know, no one is selling their karma to less karma-rich folks. But, it’s close enough.
2. Back when ICQ was still popular, people sold low ICQ numbers on eBay. #163896 went for $41.
3. When MetaFilter was inundated with new users, Matt throttled new user signups to 15 people a day. But he also let in anyone who donated $5 toward server upkeep and bandwidth. Many people joined this way.
4. And just in case you didn’t think they were smart, the folks at Ludicorp recognize that virtual economies & real world economies are tightly coupled in the way that Mr. Castronova describes above. Expect The Game Neverending to let people play extensively with the intersection of the virtual and real world economies.
ps. Julian Dibbell is keeping a weblog called Play Money in which he’s documenting his attempt to make real money in the virtual world of Ultima Online.
Andy Baio will be posting to the remaindered links weblog (RSS) for the next couple of weeks. Welcome Andy. And thanks to Lance for posting there for the past couple of weeks. Rumor has it that his special brand of linky goodness will be popping up elsewhere on the web in the near future.
Does your signature really matter?. The Credit Card Prank tests the theory of the illegible signature, including signing with stick figures, a grid, “Mariah Carey”…
Network Effects: Use of the Internet in the Chinese Rave Scene describes how Chinese music promoters and DJs are using the Internet to download & share music, read foreign music-related media, plan events, and generally share knowledge about their interests & craft, despite the Great Firewall of China:
I began to see a number of distinct effects of the rapid increase in Net usage on the nascent Chinese club scene: local DJs and producers were using the Internet to obtain new tools for producing and distributing their own music; websites were springing up to inform users about new developments in the Chinese scene and provide new opportunities for participants to communicate with one another; and music makers and clubbers alike were using the Net to learn about and obtain new music from both domestic and international artists.
and
Some Chinese DJs even use music downloaded from the Net in their live sets, making their own compilations of MP3 files of music from China and abroad and recording them on CDRs; I have observed DJs at some of the largest clubs in Shanghai and Guangzhou using these CDRs in the DJ booth. Among some in the Chinese underground hiphop scene, only tracks which have been downloaded are considered truly “underground” and thus valuable, while any music which is available for purchase in physical form is seen as being tainted by commerciality to some degree.
When I was in Beijing in 1996, I observed several people handing out club flyers around hotels and in the more hip/affluent parts of the city. They were particularly keen about giving flyers to anyone who looked like a tourist.
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