A Tumblr by oak

In the same way bad designers sometimes never get better because they don’t know what they’re aiming for, some companies have a culture that just promotes bad taste and doesn’t encourage improvement. The ideology permeates the entire organization, lowering the required level of awesomeness expected from each employee. Companies like this just float along, in the background of capitalism, exchanging goods and services for money. And that is it. They suck.

There’s a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it’s none of those. It’s taste.

There is a reason I’ve heard the word ‘Citizen Journalism’ tossed out hundreds of times in debates, conferences, and panels related to media but I have never once heard a single person identify themselves as a ‘Citizen Journalist’. It’s therapy. In a few years we will look back at ‘Citizen Journalism’ as one of those funny things an established profession created to cope with what was obviously putting it out of business. It’s the equivalent, as USC professor Henry Jenkins points out, to someone calling a Ford a ‘Horseless Carriage’ around the turn of the 19th century.

ANXIETY IS NOT fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger. It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.

Bobby Bowden refuses to give up his license; he’ll drive this thing as long as he likes, even if he’s got Jimbo Fisher strapped to the hood, and even if all of those people on the sidewalk won’t get out of the way.