Now, Losse offers a book about her experience there. Covering the period between 2005 and 2012, she sunk into the soft comfort of corporate life just as early Facebook's miasmic jelly hardened into serious business. Losse, because she's not a wonk, is the kind of person that you want writing about this kind of rise: she writes like she's working out a Lorrie Moore story set at Xerox/PARC and, as a result, she leaves out the nerdiness and attempts to replace it with humanity.

Sadly, editing or elision breaks the story far too often to give The Boy Kings a resounding Like. Take, for example, the central relationship with Thrax, an unnamed programmer with whom she spends an inordinate amount of time. Like a phimosis-suffering Louis XVI, Thrax prefers programming and running around with the geeks to creating a meaningful relationship with Losse. They dance around a kiss for years, and eventually you just don't care.

The rest of the story—the tales of untrammeled growth, the largesse, the haughty boy king Zuckerberg—is painted with the broadest brush. It was as if an editor said "We don't want any of that computer stuff in here" and cast it all out, leaving a husk. For a book about social networks, we don't meet many of the main characters. Names pop up randomly, as if we were reading Losse's News Feed. No one is described in any detail; but maybe we don't need to really "see" a group of man-children "ripsticking" around an empty office at 2am. Losse does the best she can with what amounts to a skein of electronic relationships.

But it also feels like Losse held a lot back. Some corners of the Internet expressed disbelief at the sexism at Facebook, although most of what she describes is nearly neuter: these boy kings can't be sexist, because they're not actually sexed. They're nerds given a little power, and when they have to handle soft skills like talking to girls and being friendly, they fail. The brogrammer, at least in Losse's world, is less bro and more boring.

I can recommend this book as a short slice of life, but if you're looking for a look inside Facebook, or even an understanding of its growth and expansion, you're going to have to wait. Losse isn't that writer, and that's fine. However, if you want to see what it's like to be a liberal arts major among the technologists, Losse has that down completely, almost to a fault. Like her chaste, weird relationship with Thrax, she held herself at a far remove from the goings-on in Facebook and the book highlights that remove starkly and with grace.

The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network [Amazon]]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/22/in-the-boy-kings-zuc.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/30/ebook-review-sober-is-my-new.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/30/ebook-review-sober-is-my-new.html#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:38:24 +0000 John Biggs http://boingboing.net/?p=156908 Sometimes enough is enough, and memoirist Paul Carr exemplifies this maxim. His previous books - Bringing Nothing To The Party and The Upgrade - were tales told from the bottom of a champagne glass. The first book, a rollicking story about how Carr started and destroyed an Internet business, was punctuated by drunken antics that seemed to define the Carr character: part imp, part jerk, and part Lost Boy. The second book, a treatise on how to live in hotels rather than renting an apartment, is really more about drinking too much at all the wrong places.

In short, over time, Carr became his own character and his only job as a writer was to try to remember what went down the morning after the bottles of beer, whiskey, and champagne finally dwindled down to a raft of empties floating in the slush of ice at the bottom of a VIP bucket. Well, goodbye to all that.

His third book - really more of a longer essay - is a Byliner project called Sober Is My New Drunk. It costs $1.99 and can be read in an hour. It is, in short, a step-by-step look at how to stop drinking the Paul Carr way and, although it may not be useful for a majority, in the Venn diagram of people like Paul Carr (plugged-in web users for whom Wi-Fi is a secondary addiction) and alcoholics, the overlap is probably not small. There is a bit more on the topic here, although the essay is worth a full read.

In his first two books, Carr came off as a well-to-do Poe Ballantine, writing from the road to ruin. In this book, he's more of a buddy who has seen and done a little too much and is letting you know how to avoid that road.

His advice is fairly straight-forward and will make some folks uneasy. In his effort to give up drinking he eschewed the 12-step method and basically did a blog post. He posits that, like any worthy project, a statement of intent is needed to follow through. He wrote:

You don’t need anywhere near that kind of audience for public quitting to be effective. Posting on Facebook or Twitter for just your friends to see will have almost the same effect as posting on a blog. If you’re worried about your professional reputation if you “come out” as an addict, you might want to consider sending a group e-mail to a dozen or so people you trust. Believe me, word will get around. The key is for people you encounter on a day-to-day basis to be aware that you have a problem and are trying to fix it. Those people—not a group of well-meaning strangers in AA—are the ones who will be your greatest allies in quitting.

Alcoholism is a difficult subject. Like forms of religious experience and certain health manias, those experienced in the space are often vocal about their methods and dedicated to evangelizing their success. Therefore, it took some guts for Carr to make the recommendations he does. Although some would call his actions irresponsible, I'm more likely to call them brave.

Carr quotes Mignon McLaughlin on his quitting letter: "the chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol." His essay, perhaps, is a step onto the path of better behavior. But, as a dedicated fan of his various hijinks, I'm looking forward to seeing what he can write with the clarity of a bon vivant doing a little less of the bon and a little more of the vivant.

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That is why so many "star" memoirs are so fraught. The star has a swift rise, a period of wandering, massive drug addiction, and reflection/renewal. Then the rest of their output sucks or they stop producing altogether.

Mike Doughty is, arguably, a rare exception. His recent memoir, The Book Of Drugs, tells the story of a young man - he was 22 when he founded Soul Coughing with a bassist, drummer, and keyboard player at New York's The Knitting Factory - who entered the music industry at its near-nadir. His band was arguably successful, especially in a decade of one-hit-wonders (remember "Sex and Candy?") and addled grunge rock, and he had a close relationship with the arguably more well-known Jeff Buckley. Doughty tells his story in the context of a decade that gave and took away the aforementioned Buckley, Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain, and Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon. The music industry was always cruel to the ones it blighted with success. In the 1990s, with the rapid destruction of the industry as a whole and the rise of file sharing, it was particularly rancid.

Doughty grew up in West Point. His father was a distant Vietnam vet and his mother was a bundle of neuroses, calling out "Rots of ruck" when she heard him pounding around upstairs trying on rock star moves while lip syncing to Thin Lizzy. He was a self-described outsider who used big words with his friends and embraced communism in seventh grade after reading a comic about Mao Zedong. He was kind of a rocker, kind of an introvert, and kind of a nerd, and fell in love with weed and beer in college.

Soul Coughing (Doughty hates the name, in retrospect, and doesn't like to talk about that decade's produce at all) was formed out of the heyday of the Knitting Factory, the Tribeca club that catered to the established alternative scene in New York. There he met an upright bassist, a keyboard and sampler player, and an Israeli drummer who was able to recreate the skitter and scratch of techno on a physical drum kit. Doughty's original vision was something that wasn't very popular during the 1990s, namely an unknown singer-songwriter backed by a band. Instead the other, older members pulled rank and made Doughty feel inferior while offering up their own permutations of typical rock star dickwaddery. The resulting tension wound the young singer up to the breaking point, resulting in a crack-up that destroyed the band and allowed Doughty to come out of the 1990s a changed man.

The music industry packaged Soul Coughing like the mad offspring of Devo and They Might Be Giants. Impossible to pigeonhole, the band produced what some called trip hop while others called acid jazz. All Doughty wanted was to be a respected songwriter. The rest of the band wanted to make a lot of cash.

The Soul Coughing years were not kind to Doughty. He was addicted to heroin and a habitual pot smoker and he spent years just trying to get his fix. The first three-quarters of the book describes his junk-sick quest and subsequent addiction and illnesses.

The last quarter details his quest for sobriety. After kicking heroin and breaking up the band, he found himself addicted to booze. He slowly blew up on a steady diet of whiskey and beer. In an effort to maintain his career, he travelled US playing songs that he had never officially recorded and discovered that his fans had found them on Napster and were able to sing along to them at concerts. His audience, an audience he gained thanks to the machinery of the music industry, had not abandoned him. From then on, M. Doughty of Soul Coughing became Mike Doughty the songwriter and his rise into clarity is cataloged most poignantly in his subsequent work.

Sunken-eyed girl on the Ludlow Street
Junkieland once but they swept it up, so
Sing in my mind, singing you’re so sweet
I need a bundle of dope just to numb it out and I’m

Feeling so good that it hurts my skin
Feeling so good I could do myself in

You are the drinks I drink and keep drinking and
Wake up tremble
All of the blinks I blink and keep blinking and
Fall down stumble

While many would argue that a memoir by a minor rock star in the 1990s is little but a trifle - after all, Doughty was no Cobain or Buckley - it's easy to accept that Doughty's tale need to be told. For fans of Doughty in his various incarnations it's a fascinating look at a heretofore inscrutable character and for folks who know him in his new incarnation it's nice to see from whence all his brillance came. Non-fans may enjoy the story of redemption and the insider's look at a dying music industry (and, presumably, a seedier view of gentrified Ludlow Street).

I went to a Soul Coughing show as a young shoe-gazer in Pittsburgh and nodded along to "Sugar Free Jazz" and "Super Bon Bon" as if I had discovered some skinny but passable bridge out of the bloated sixties rock passed down to me from my father and into a new world of skittering electronics and poetic hip hop. Doughty was important to me then and he's a more fully-faceted person to me now.

To sum up the book, here's what you'll learn: Doughty's bandmates royally screwed him, then he screwed himself. Then he came back. The title itself seems to be a play on the Magnetic Fields song "Book of Love." We're reminded that, as well as being "long and boring," the book of love:

... has music in it
In fact, that's where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

Some of Doughty's prose is transcendental - it's down to earth, raw, and real - and thankfully it's never really dumb. It helps us understand him and that understanding is the least we can offer to the men and women we raise up so high only to watch them fall.

Thumbnail photo: El Jiggity / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Bonus - A special Mike Doughty Musical Interlude featuring his Cymbalta Musical Shaker:

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/22/mike-doughty-indie-rocker-re.html/feed 24 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/20/the-big-v.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/20/the-big-v.html#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:03:08 +0000 John Biggs http://boingboing.net/?p=144601
The beach at Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Photo: BBM Explorer

I had my vasectomy on January 19, 2012, the date memorialized with the iCal notation "Vascect [sic] no lunch 34th st." At this writing the objects in question are still apparently live, pumping out spermatozoa like a dying pulsar that will soon dwindle into white noise. It takes a certain number of ejaculations to completely clear the pipes, as it were, and by try number twelve I'll be as barren as the surface of binary moons rising over an alien landscape.

Stepping back from the hyperbolic, let's explore my reasons for this course of action and why, at 36, I decided it was time to stop all this baby nonsense, at least from my side. My wife and I have two kids, six and three, and for a number of years we thought we were through. A surprising (but definitely not unwanted, if he's reading this later) third appeared this summer and we decided that 98% effectiveness was less enticing than 100% effectiveness. Rather than risk an invasive surgery for her, we (or I? I like to think we) decided it would be nice for me to have a bit of outpatient work done, go home, wash down a Tylenol with some bourbon(s), and let the old boys rest.

I went into this whole thing without thinking about it. I had friends who had already had it done and few told any truly terrible tales. One friend said his doctor recommended putting a cold six pack between his legs the first day and finishing it off before they (the beers) warmed. Another mentioned getting Valium, so I was pretty much sold at that point.

I headed over to "no lunch 34th st" at about 1pm and came upon one of those strange, close doctor's offices at the heart of Manhattan, an office that you least expect to be on the first floor of a high-rise and that is big enough to seat maybe fifty souls. This is a urology practice and there are a lot of old men here - myself, I fear, included. This is the heath and we are all Lears, raging (silently) against the coming ruin. Gents, your loins are the first to go, this room seems to say, so let's get this thing over with. Pee into this cup.

Before you can get the big V there's a waiting period, like waiting for a gun before the days of the Computerized Background Check. You need to think on it for a month before they snip, and you have to sign a page of legalese when you first ask for the procedure and then the same page a month later, admitting that you've gone into this course of action with full recognizance and that you haven't just decided to have someone cut into your testicles on a whim. The nurses at this practice were mostly surly-looking but once they realize you're here for the snip they're much more personable, smiling, kindly leading you to one room and then another. Perhaps I was the first patient that day they didn't have to request urine from, a respite I definitely would appreciate and I'm sure they appreciated more. Or maybe they knew my fate and inwardly smiled at what awaited me, full of schadenfreude. I won't ascribe to them this malice but, as I understand it, there are very few things going on down there for a guy and many more painful medical invasions for women. This is the Halley's Comet of medical experiences for dudes - a bold and once-in-a-lifetime incursion from the outside with a blazing tail of pain and discomfort.

Zoom. They were ready for me.

Strip from the waist down, put this around you. Here's some iodine. Here comes the anesthesiologist. "We don't need to snow you under," she says. "It's just a little valium." We start to talk about Find My iPhone vs. Friend Finder as she finds a vein. She's confused. "What's the difference? My friend uses Find My iPhone to find her son. Is that the same?" she asks. She plugs in. The valium comes in like a fog bank, warm and floaty. "My friend wants to see where her daughter is."

"Try Find My iPhone," I mutter, still awake, not snowed under.

The doctor comes in and checks things out. Two pinpricks down there to administer the topical anesthetic and I'm numb both top and bottom. "Here we go," says the doctor, like we're about to rev up the motor of his cigarette boat and go scudding over the waves. We're not.

There is no pain, just a few moments of jiggling down there and a few moments of "Whoa." A little bit of sewing and I'm given some time to sit off the Valium. Then it's home on the subway.

And then my troubles began. What they they don't tell you about this whole thing is that the invasion is initially uncomfortable and then excruciating. First there's bruising. Then there's swelling. Then there's drinking. Then there's lack of sleep because of the swelling. I had scheduled a trip with the family to the Dominican Republic for the week after my operation and I found that walking through an airport with bags and kids aggravated the boys quite handily and I tried to sit still a lot, the pain throbbing gently like a disco beat in my loins.

Over the next few days I lay by the pool, voided the efficacy my antibiotics by drinking Mai Tais, and waited for this all to end. It's akin to starting things anew down there, something like discovering puberty. For years you're humming along, doing good work, and suddenly something happens. It's unnerving and it kept me from using the equipment out of fear of breakage.

I remember an afternoon on the hotel balcony, a train of humans dressed in vacation wear walking by below, the Mai Tai dying in my hand, that I realized what I had done. I used to laugh at people who had kids, saying in a robot voice "Your biological imperative is complete. You can die now." I was a jerk, sure, but what I didn't realize was that this was the end game. To not be able to transmit is the organism's nadir. In nature you can't transmit because your feathers are too ugly or you caught your eye on a tree-limb and you no female baboon would take you. But I did this to myself. It was a voluntary going into that good night. To be fair, I still have plenty of time to enjoy myself during that good night, before I shuffle off this mortal coil and truly stop transmitting altogether and, to be doubly fair, I already have three kids who will carry me to the stars and beyond, but damn if it isn't a discomfiting feeling to know this is the end of the line.

So that's it. That's the big reveal: vasectomy makes blogger think about life. The process also polarizes things. It closes off a number of avenues of dreamy-eyed reproduction while opening new vistas of exciting potential health complications. It makes you realize that you are at the end of your life cycle, your old role is rapidly aging, and that you're basically here as a bag of meat until you're not.

But it's not all depression and gloom.

But it also tells you that you've made it, you've done what you needed to do, and as I watched my kids run on that Puerto Plata beach, their eyes and hands and voices in so many ways wedded to my own, I figured I'd made my peace with whatever it was that made them and that I was ready for them to run in front of me, their faces buffeted by the spray, their hair reflecting the mid-day sun the way it did when I was a kid, a long time ago, before all of this.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/20/the-big-v.html/feed 128 http://boingboing.net/2011/09/25/the-1000-words-rule-of-blogging-book-excerpt.html http://boingboing.net/2011/09/25/the-1000-words-rule-of-blogging-book-excerpt.html#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:08:14 +0000 John Biggs http://boingboing.net/?p=119963 Want to be a successful blogger? Every new endeavor requires a period of ascetic dedication. You must write a minimum of 1,000 words a day.

Some bloggers make this their ceiling, but many make it their floor. Either way, you must produce on a daily basis. How do you do this? You can crank out, perhaps, three posts of a few hundred words each in the morning and three in the evening. Or you can write one big post. Either way, do the word count. Why is this important? Because if you have a goal, you can meet it. After his heart attack, blogging great Om Malik set this number for himself to ensure he produced quality content in a timely manner and did not kill himself in the process. Sadly, Om’s heart attack was brought on by the blogging lifestyle, as well as too much booze, cigars, family history and bad luck. It took a massive change in his everyday life to reorient him toward a saner blogging schedule, and he found this 1,000-word limit invaluable.

This word count is not impossible. It’s about two pages of standard paper a day. At first, do not surpass this word count. This is an endurance race, not a sprint. The recommended dosage of 1,000 words a day is doable by the average writer, is a concrete number for you to strive toward, and is about as much as your audience can read in a day. Do not do less, either. This is a regimen. You need to get used to producing this much content quickly and without complaint. Consider using a speech recognition tool: you’ll be pounding out words without pounding on the keyboard. In fact, you’ll find that by speaking your posts you often write more than you originally intended.

This also brings up an important point: writing for blogs is conversational. Some of the best bloggers write like they’re telling a story. For example, Eben Oliver Weiss, author of BikeSnobNYC, does two pertinent things when he creates a blog post: He first offers a bit of information about an important aspect of biking lore or current bike news, then blends that news into a tightly spun yarn connecting the news to his unstated mission: to poke holes in the smug superiority of biking experts. It’s a noble goal and he’s been rewarded with a book deal and great popularity.

The hardest part of this 1,000-word regimen is accepting that your audience may not appear magically out of thin air as you write. Luring readers to your writer’s online lair is addressed in my book, but rest assured that the 1,000-word regimen will give vibrancy and life to your blog. A blog that has not been updated for days is a sick blog. A blog that has not been updated for a month is a dead blog. If you do not produce 1,000 words a day, no matter what, you’re risking running out of momentum far too early.

Some bloggers do considerably less than 1,000 words a day and some do more. For example, John Gruber at Daring Fireball posts small “nugget” posts and then creates long, well-written essays on technology every week or so. Like the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, Gruber’s long posts are a reward to his readers and a joy to read. Why not do the same? Post lots of nuggets—100 words each—and one or two huge posts every few days. Or you can publish one large post every day. Either way, you’re going to gain an audience if you give them something they want.

Just remember this motto: ABP. Always Be Posting. You will burn out. When this happens, take a break. Always take weekends off and limit your off-the-clock consumption of social media. Your conversations should happen in comments and in your writing. Bloggers should use services like Twitter as news sources and broadcast media instead of a source of endless distraction. Do this every weekday and leave the blog alone on weekends. Or, if there is no one in your niche writing on the weekends, that might be an opportunity for you. Either way, give yourself a regular weekly break.

Keep writing. Write 1,000 words a day.

John Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets and the former editor of Gizmodo. This excerpt is from his new book, Blogger's Boot Camp: Learning how to build, write, and run a successful blog.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/09/25/the-1000-words-rule-of-blogging-book-excerpt.html/feed 36