is this what they mean by gift economy?

Patton Oswalt on "Gifting Suites"
While I was waiting for the SUV to take me back to my car, I got waylaid by one of the producers of MTV's Pimp My Ride. You know what a pimp is, right? He's a dude who tricks, frightens, or flat-out bullies a woman to fuck other men for money, which she then gives to him. Just wanted to clear that up. 'Cuz there's a show called Pimp My Ride. Maybe they can do another show called Rape My Crib.
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43 Responses:

  1. dmlaenker says:

    That's the most awesome paragraph I've read since the last awesome paragraph.

    • jwz says:

      So you think!

      Last checked: 2007-06-04 20:14:56 (Parse error)
      Error Message: 500 read timeout
      Next check: 2007-06-04 23:16:56

      Anyway, the rss feed is only the first few dozen words, not the whole entry, and is thus useless.

      • dojothemouse says:

        Myspace: Where Web Standards Come First.

      • skreidle says:

        As far as LJ friends pages are concerned, that's the best kind--a brief taste and a link to the whole article.

          • skreidle says:

            Yes.

            As a subscriber to a dozen or so different RSS feeds, what I want on my Friends page is a paragraph or so of the article, and a link to the actual article. If every feed dumped the entire content of a multi-page, perhaps 20-image article (as some of them are), my Friends page would be decidedly more unwieldly.

            • jwz says:

              Whatever.

              A) it's faster to scroll than to wait for myspace to load; B) the first dozen words of an article rarely tells me whether that article is worth reading. Skimming ahead does.

              • skreidle says:

                I deftly avoid this by not reading MySpace pages. :)

                It depends what feeds one follows, I suppose. davebarry3 is actually too short--it sometimes misses even the entire first sentence. However, is it's just amusing links, it's skippable if I don't feel like it. thrillingwonder is one of the very, very long ones with dozens of pictures. It used to not feed at all, now it feeds the whole thing, which is annoying--but they won't edit the feed to send a summary instead. malcontents and givawayoftheday are both designed to be feeds, so the whole (short) picture and blurb and link carry through. achenblog gives me the first paragraph or so, which may or may not be enough to draw me in. Just a WashPost columnist, though, and generally humor, so also skippable.

                I'd say the best are those designed to be feeds--a succinct summary sent over RSS, with a link to the whole article, rather than just clipping the first few words/lines/paragraphs.

                • jwz says:

                  For any value of 'myspace', obviously.

                  You think they're good feeds because your definition of "feed" is "summary".

                  I won't read any feeds that only send summaries, because I'm interested in having a single URL - my friends page - that gives me the complete, sequential content of every web site I'm interested in reading.

                  This works well enough these days that I no longer read any sites that don't have full feeds (let alone that don't have feeds at all). And I read 145 feeds, plus 205 LJs/communities.

                  • wikkit42 says:

                    What about the feeds that don't work any more because the entries are too long? I used to do what you're doing, and had all my feeds going into my flist. But then I noticed that there had been no BLDGBLOG entries in a long time; it turns out that if the entry is too long, LJ just ignores it entirely.

                    Not a good failure mode. It should at least put in a "entry too long, here's a link" post.

                    So now I use Safari's feed watching capabilities and the bookmarks bar.

                  • jwz says:

                    Well, that's like, a bug...

                    I hadn't noticed that bldblog stopped. Bummer.

                  • jwz says:

                    Looks to me like bldblog is working fine now.

                    A more common problem is that LJ chokes on bad HTML in the source feed, and dumps out unreadable source from the HTML cleaner. That's a pain in the ass too (the LJ HTML cleaner is a piece of shit). But not enough of a pain in the ass to outweigh the benefits of having it all in one place.

                  • wikkit42 says:

                    It's working at the moment, because he's been posting short entries. Things like this were missed, and I'm sure Geoff will be back to long, invisible-to-you entries shortly.

                    Table of Malcontents regularly had HTML issues. Typical of a Wired operation.

                  • skreidle says:

                    Indeed.. I read some 300 LJs/communities and 25 feeds; most of the feeds send summaries, and the ones that send whole posts are often lists of links that I then follow--as ones like Boing Boing, Neatorama, Malcontents, and Ectomo are dedicated to disseminated interesting links.

  2. omni_ferret says:

    I figure you either know already or don't care, but he's at the Punch Line tonight & tomorrow night. He's got a new album coming out in a month, so there should be some new material.

  3. robotman says:

    Didn't Warren Ellis already do this? Or is Patton Oswalt something i should be using?

  4. rsalerno says:

    I was at that thing! I'd never been to anything like it and my first reaction was severe discomfort as well....

    The Pink Taco people were handing out VIP cards that you could present at any of their locations to be seated next, regardless of how many people were in line before you.

    The whole thing was so awkward. You didn't just get stuff handed to you off a shelf. Every booth had stuff they were giving away (different levels of swag based on the color of your wrist band which coincided with how much of a celebrity you were), but it was all about them talking to you and pressing business cards on you and trying to make some creepy lasting impression. And whenever they gave someone "important" something for "free" they had them pose for pictures with whatever the thing was, and sign stuff so they could show off the "endorsement" later.

    Lots of good it did them, too. The shoes were Reeboks and he kept calling them Adidas....

    • flipzagging says:

      So... how much of a celebrity are you? According to whoever-it-is that put this on.

      • rsalerno says:

        Essentially zero. I work for the DJ that played the party the night before.... Through a combination of avoiding direct eye contact and having a green wrist band I was pretty much ignored by everyone.

  5. no_brakes23 says:

    Patton Oswald reminds me of the nerdly mouthbreathing little kid who got beat up for being a putz and complaining that the other kids were stupid for describing something as cool. "That's a method of describing temperature, guyz, not a way of saying it is popular."

    Way to keep up with pop culture, dumbshit. Pimp has become a verb form to represent making something nice or extravagant, such as a materialistic person with a lot of disposable income would posess. The intermediate step of this evolution is that pimp is an adjective that describes something a sucessful pimp might have. A pimp would have a "pimp" set of clothes on, and and would drive a pimped out car.

    I know scads of folks who don't have the first clue about ebonic slang, and yet know this. I suspect Oswald knows it somewhere to, in the back of his unfunny head.