July « 2011 « Black Marks on Wood Pulp / by Corey Vilhauer

The ongoing legacy of 9rules

July 20th, 2011

It always strikes me how the most active people from the old 9rules community – and I’m thinking about the community from 2005-2007, when I was a new member and the Triad was still around and everything felt awesome – have all ended up skewing toward what I like to think of as the New Creative Industries: web development and strategy, digital design, digital photography, etc. This from a group that wasn’t necessarily a tech- or web-related bunch: people in 9rules did not blog exclusively about technology, development or digital design at all.

For those who don’t remember, 9rules was a blog community. A pretty great one, for a while. Backed by Scrivs and Tyme and Mike, 9rules collected the best of unrepresented blogs, aggregating content and helping others discover good writing and design. It was an honor to be selected.

I was a late bloomer – I came in on round 5 of acceptances in 2006, a few years before the Triad sold off and the site became a shell – but I remember the thrill in finding like-minded blog nuts, all blogging about random things.

Many of these people I still keep track of. I still follow Kyle Neath and Alex Morse and Scrivs, and I’d consider myself Internet Friends with even more – Nils Geylan and Abi Jones come to mind. Even Deane is a former 9rules alumnus.

There are more. More talented former 9rules bloggers. More still awesome people. I can’t list them all.

And, outside of the 9rules connection, they all have one thing in common: They all work on the web. Or, they are keenly interested in the web. Or they use the web to their advantage.

By collecting high quality blogs, was 9rules also – in some way – collecting a new generation of curators and web creatives and future people of note? Was I lucky enough to be included in something larger than I even realize – larger than the site itself was even able to realize?

Was the underlying theme of 9rules this sense of discovery? That people who were willing to stay current and keep posting content and be vigilant about quality were already pre-determined to forge forward into the increasingly stable and viable web world?

Did we all become web professionals because we were in 9rules? Or did 9rules work because we were all deeply interested in creating great things for the web?

Or is just a blatantly obvious connection that I’ve been too dull to notice until recently?

Comments: 5

Issues Considered: Blogging, Web

Yao retires

July 8th, 2011

Just 90 minutes ago, I conducted a user interview with a director-level staff member at the Toyota Center in Houston. We chatted about the project and about average internet usage and all the things I was supposed to talk about. But I couldn’t help but slide one extra question in at the end.

ME: “So, do you think Yao Ming will ever play again?”

HIM: “On the record? Yeah, absolutely. Off the record … ”

All records aside, we have our answer. Just 30 minutes later, Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Yao Ming, who hasn’t played a full season since his sophomore season, is officially retiring. And, as always, Kelly Dwyer of Ball Don’t Lie sums it up the most elegantly.

From his post:

A 77-game run in 2008-09 led to broken hearts amongst every basketball fan, as they watched him pull up lame on basic cable television on a Friday night, working as best he could to defeat the Lakers in the second round of the playoffs. This is a game that was created for winter, to distract young men from cabin fever, and Yao’s run was as cold and cruel as those dreary New England months around the turn of the last century that created what we, in the heat of July of 2011, obsess over. Fairness had no say in the deal.

I hated how he’d be voted in as an All-Star starter every year on the strength of millions of Chinese votes, but I always respected his game.

The first NBA mashup card

July 7th, 2011

When Upper Deck released the Michael Jordan baseball card in its 1991 set, it was a stroke of genius. In one card Upper Deck illustrated the juxtaposition of patience and brute force; the struggle of minor-league hope against established superstardom. And, in doing so, created one of the oddest natural moments in sports card history.

Jordan, playing baseball (Key note: NATURAL. This wasn’t Kurt Rambis freaking out over his glowing basketball. This was a real picture – a photo opportunity, sure, but a real picture of a real player playing a real sport for a real team.)

If you were a basketball fan, you wanted this card. It was the only way to get a Michael Jordan card that year. If you were a baseball fan, you wanted this card, much as you’d have wanted Eddie Gaedel’s card: as an oddity, a rare blip on the trading card landscape, a mashup before mashups were even a thing.

It was valuable. It was rare.

Twenty years later, we can see it for what it really was: arrogant.

Because, with the benefit of hindsight, this card freezes a privileged superstar at the peak of his ability, unable to understand failure, confident that he can do anything better than anyone, and completely willing to be paraded around as a novelty for the chance to prove everyone wrong.

Michael Jordan played baseball for a year. He was given a minor league spot by Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of both the White Sox and the Bulls. He was paid by the Chicago Bulls the entire time.

He batted .202 for the Birmingham Barons. He hit three home runs and drove in 51 runs.

He wasn’t perfect. And this card proves it, much to his chagrin.

The accepted story is that Jordan did this for his father. It was all done out of tragedy of his dad’s murder. He retired and went into baseball because his father’s dream was for Jordan to be a MLB star.

Maybe. But he also did it because that’s who he always was: unable to admit that he had flaws. The arrogance in that smirk, the ease with which he wandered onto the baseball field, the knowledge that he hadn’t worked a day to earn his spot on the team, and that, once he felt the heat from his critics, he was able to waltz back onto the Bulls with a simple phrase.

“I’m back.”

And we all embraced him. We had missed him on the floor. So we patted him on the head and let the experiment slide.

The card’s worth about five bucks, now. Funny what hindsight does.

Comments: 2

Issues Considered: Baseball, Basketball, Sports

John Howell, an Indianapolis newsboy

July 6th, 2011

Without a doubt, this may be one of the greatest pictures I’ve ever seen. Lots of story – and history – in a somewhat simple shot.

Via: Flickr blog., from the Library of Congress. Say what you will about Flickr and their inability to sustain any kind of momentum – their blog is pretty fantastic.

I’m on a podcast! Talking about emo music! Listen to me!

July 5th, 2011

Once again, I was asked by Scott Hudson to guest co-host his podcast, The Ledge. This time, I brought a theme: mid- and late-90s emo, back in the days when emo wasn’t such a dirty word. The show, which is available on iTunes or via Scott’s post, was pretty fun.

So y’all should go listen to it. We talk about basketball and The Monkees and old Pomp Room shows and we maybe even kind of get into emo music a little bit.

The playlist for The Ledge, Episode 78: Corey Vilhauer’s Defense of Emo:

Sunny Day Real Estate – “47” (Diary, Sub Pop 1994)
Engine Kid – “Windshield” (Angel Wings, Revelation 1994)
Elliott – “Calm Americans” (False Cathedrals, Revelation 2000)
Mineral – “Gloria” (The Power of Failing, Epitaph 1997)
Split Lip – “Street Singer” (Fate’s Got a Driver, Doghouse 1995)
Rainer Maria – “Broken Radio” (Look Now Look Again, Polyvinyl 1999)
Jejune – “Morale is Low” (This Afternoon’s Malady, Big Wheel Recreation 1998)
Braid – “First Day Back” (Frame and Canvas, Polyvinyl 1998)
The Promise Ring – “Is This Thing On?” (Nothing Feels Good, Jade Tree Records 1997)
The Blacktop Cadence – “Cold Night in Virginia” (The Emo Diaries, Chapter 2, Deep Elm 1998)
Samiam – “Ordinary Life” (The Emo Diaries, Chapter 1, Deep Elm 1997)
Piebald – “Grace Kelly with Wings” (If it Weren’t for Venetian Blinds it Would Be Curtains For Us All, Big Wheel Recreation 1999)
The Anniversary – “The D in Detroit” (Designing a Nervous Breakdown, Vagrant 2000)
Reggie and the Full Effect – “Girl, Why’d You Run Away?” (Greatest Hits 1984-1987, Vagrant 1999)
Jets to Brazil – “The Frequency” (Perfecting Loneliness, Jade Tree 2002)
Jimmy Eat World – “Thinking, That’s All” (Static Prevails, Capitol 1996)
The Get Up Kids – “Alec Eiffel” (Where Is My Mind? A Tribute to the Pixies, Glue Factory Records 1999)
Seven Storey Mountain – “So Soon” (Based on a True Story, Jade Tree 2000)
Texas is the Reason – “The Magic Bullet Theory” (Do You Know Who You Are?, Revelation 1995)