Jon Udell, Critical mass and social network fatigue, blog.jonudell.net (2007-02-06). Years ago at BYTE Magazine my friend Ben Smith, who was a Unix greybeard even then (now he's a Unix whitebeard), made a memorable comment that's always stuck with me. We were in the midst of evaluating a batch of LAN email products. "One of these days," Ben said in, I think, 1991, "everyone's going to look up from their little islands of LAN email and see this giant mothership hovering overhead called the Internet.
How Super Mario became a global cultural icon, The Economist (2016-12-24). There is one aspect of his context, though, that matters: fun. Mr Abe turned up in Rio dressed as Mario not just because Mario is instantly recognisable around the world. He embodies the delight of play. Talking to the New York Times in 2008 the reclusive Mr Miyamoto explained that people like Mario and his ilk "not for the characters themselves, but because the games they appear in are fun. And because people enjoy playing those games first, they come to love the characters as well."
Frankie Huang, The Rise and Fall of China’s Cycling Empires, Foreign Policy (2018-12-31). Meanwhile, Shanghai is adding more docking stations, perhaps a return to the boring, but infinitely more manageable, version of the bike-share. There's always going to be a small audience for cycling—but it turned out to be a bad dream to build giant firms on.
Kickstarter: Perry Chen, How I Built This (2018-12-31). [22:28] In some ways we made every mistake in the book. We did one lap that way. Classic stuff like people with experience telling us, "You know, you shouldn't do something this way", and us being like "Well, we appreciate that, but, like, you know, it'll be different for us". And then of course it's like exactly what they said happened. Well, duh.
