Love After the World's End

Some incredibly vivid dystopic vision for you. Film director Romain Demongeot and electronic music artists De Andria & Ghisal give us "Love 2062", a picture of what love may look like when civilisation as we know it comes to a shattering end. But it's also a picture of what addiction could become when embedded technology plays a starring role in sparing us from a desolate reality. Even for a few hours. Think heroin, opium, The Matrix and Inception crammed into a neat little shot.

Production work by Heroes.

bref., the Mobile App.

Darewin, an agency I work with, just released this case study for French short-form series bref. Get this: that's my voice!

The case study (in English) covers how the agency was tasked to maintain the show's cult status after it stopped airing. What'd it do? It created a mobile app that put the hero's phone right in your hands. With it, you could relive bref. through his eyes ... and even call his friends. (Not recordings of his friends. The actual friends.)

More drippy fangirliness: I've discussed bref. before (see all the special effects used in the show), and word's out that they're making an English version called So. Soon, you too will be able to experience its awesomeness. So, consider this a sneak peek.

Creators: Kill Your Darlings.

I mean, if you really look at it, we have four iPods. We have two main iPhones. We have two iPads, and we have a few Macs. That’s it. And we argue and debate like crazy about what we’re going to do, because we know that we can only do a few things great. That means not doing a bunch of things that would be really good and really fun.

- "Tim Cook's Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks", BusinessWeek.

The House Always Wins

Reblogged from kiplinger:

As our CEO Knight Kiplinger likes to say, “the biggest barrier to becoming rich is living like you’re rich before you are.”

This is solid advice. But one thing I learned in France is that many of the elements that abet or discourage this kind of discipline are cultural. The US is an unapologetic debt-driven society: financial education isn't something we teach youth, solutions to social problems tend to be consumption-driven, and basic things like higher education, renting a car, and achieving crucial societal milestones are nearly impossible to attain without credit.

And let's not forget our revolving credit system, which encourages people to accrue debt that you don't (and eventually can't) pay off right away in order to improve your FICO score -- the number critical to cultivating your financial reputation. A FICO score could stand between you and an apartment, or even a cell phone. Curiously, your FICO isn't improved by demonstrating an ability to manage money well. It only rises if you manage debt well. We have effectively made debt a cultural necessity.

It's important to learn how to spend less money than you make. It is crucial to building wealth. But when a society values accruing debt more than it values spending within your means, the game's rigged.