Comments Still Off

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MG Siegler, writing on his blog ParisLemon:

Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any. MG's post is very short and therefore I do not want to quote the entire post here, verbatim, but the last paragraph is also important. He basically makes the same point that I've made here before. If you wish to comment on a post you see here, do so via Twitter, or your own blog, or your LiveJournal site…whatever, I don't care. The vast majority of people do not read blog comments anyway. By not allowing comments on my own site, the barrier to entry to do so usually eliminates most of the idiots typically found within the comment sections of most websites who have comments. As MG says: Commenting is a facade. It makes you think you have a voice. You don't. Get your own blog and write how you really feel on your own site. Earn your voice. Perfectly put. Also, I've linked to this several weeks back, but if this topic is new to you then I suggest you read Matt Gemmell's post as well.

The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See

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Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate:

American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore. Here is an example of part of the map, the state of Pennsylvania. Please avoid buying one of these for about 10 more minutes (just long enough for me to order my copy before they sell out).

an update

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I missed this yesterday because I was visiting with friends back home until late last night and then spent most of today on the interstate driving back from southern Virginia. Mike Krahulik (Gabe), has posted an update to the Ocean Marketing saga over at Penny Arcade:

I just wanted to post an update with some of the stuff that has happened over on my end with regards to all this Ocean Marketing stuff. Around midnight last night Paul sent me a mail saying that I could expect to hear from their attorneys. As of right now that still has not happened and honestly I don’t expect it will. Our attorneys (who are real people with an office and everything) are ready should it get to that point though. Head over to Penny Arcade to see the rest.

Another Statement From Louis C.K. (December 21, 2011)

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Louis C.K, writing on his website:

hi. So it's been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That's a lot of money. Really too much money. I've never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we're all sharing this experience and since it's really your money, I wanted to let you know what I'm doing with it. People are paying attention to what's going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes. So I'm breaking the million into four pieces. The rest of his post outlines exactly what he plans to do with the money. Spoiler alert: he's a generous man. Andy Baio made a good observation on Twitter:

I do hope Louis C.K. moves that pile out of Paypal to a safer location, and soon.

A Statement From Louis C.K. (December 13, 2011)

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Louis C.K., writing on his website:

It's been 4 days. A lot of people are asking me how it's going. I've been hesitant to share the actual figures, because there's power in exclusive ownership of information. What I didn't expect when I started this was that people would not only take part in this experiment, they would be invested in it and it would be important to them. It's been amazing to see people in large numbers advocating this idea. So I think it's only fair that you get to know the results. Also, it's just really cool and fun and I'm dying to tell everybody. I told my Mom, I told three friends, and that wasn't nearly enough. So here it is. Spoiler alert: it worked. Also, Mike Rundle makes a very good observation: