The reddit alien didn't have to be an alien. It's a well-known fact that I appreciate the subtle eminence of the penguin, as it occasionally appears in the logo as a foil our futuristic mascot. But there is no shortage of other worthy animals -- why not consider replacement?
Yep, that's how I spent my workweek.
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I finally got around to finding a shorter domain for this blog. The header is now emphasizing the "reddit all" part, as well as featuring a brilliant starburst to remind you that you've arrived at dot-com. And that I am indeed a sellout.
Some of you have also expressed concerns regarding this week's logos. If you're worried about what's been happening to our mascot, just be thankful we haven't recruited the London 2012 Olympics logo designers...
I'm afraid this one might be a bit too esoteric, since only a select few of our luckiest users have seen our 500 error. (And those who have will be quick to point out that the one pictured below isn't quite the one we've got running right now. +8 points for you, now stop hurting reddit.)
As much as I want to believe you're just a simple Russian girl from Cheboksary, deep down I know there's something more to you. Don't doubt for a second that you're not long brave to have written me -- even if an exact duplicate was sent 24 hours later. Like any man, I have serious attitudes in the future for creations of family. It's my duty as an American.
I'm happy to hear about your best girlfriend, she sounds like a lucky gal. It troubles me to hear that her happiness has pushed you to find itself of the satellite. Space is no place to look for love.
I suspect that you will have more luck on the Internet, but perhaps you shouldn't cast such a wide net -- so to speak. I don't mean to offend you, I just think you could afford to be a bit more... picky. You hardly know anything about me and already you address me as your new friend.
This isn't the first time you've done this, is it?
I'm worried about you, Rita. Do take care.
-Alexis
(my reply to the following email, posted in it's entirety)
I hope I'm not screwing with the mob and will end up with a hearty dose of radioactive poison in my gut.
Hi the new friend!!!
I saw your announcement on a site in the Internet. There there were many good people. I do not know why I have written to you, probably something inside has prompted me to do it.
I already during long time wanted to find to me directly people, but not from Russia. As in Russia very many bad people and are very difficult to find such person, which will serve me as a fine half.
My best girlfriend has found to itself through Internet good people.
Which has invited her in the country, and now they live together 2 months.
It also has pushed to find me to itself of the satellite .
Though I also do not believe life in it, that it is possible to find love through.
The Internet I should hope for it up to the last.
Now it - is slightly about me:
My name - Rita.
I the simple Russian girl who search for a basis
the person from abroad for serious attitudes in the future for
creations of family.
I live the Russian city Cheboksary. It - very beautiful city
In which I live.
I am long brave to write to you and have written in hope which you will write also to me
I hope for it, and I shall look forward to hearing from you.
P.S. If I though have slightly interested you, please write to me the answer
On mine E-mail: ritkasweet@yahoo.com
I shall hope, and I shall wait, that you nevertheless will answer it soon. Please try to send your message on email. As I was very bad to use the Internet.
I shall send the image in the following letter. With hope your new familiar Rita.
Hopefully this new release will clear up some of the nagging issues I've had with previous editions.
The good folks at Wired mag approved this new ad I put together to run on reddit. Now go buy a subscription :-)
Hopefully this will spawn an entire "PRINT: It's the future" campaign...
I was getting throttled by Steve's sister in Wii Tennis last night, which shouldn't have surprised me. At some point the sweat on my brow began to bleed into the tears in my eyes -- I needed to pause the game.
As I dried myself off, something in the pause menu caught my attention.
It was the tilt of the "e".
While eating my cereal this morning, something dawned on me:
If I have zero tolerance for intolerance, what does that make me?
It's questions like these that philosophers like Socrates undoubtedly also pondered over Special K® Red Berries. Any philsophy majors wanna rationalize this one for me?
You're all probably too stoned to bother anyway...
The holiday was first observed in 1921[1] as "Americanization Day,"[2] and was intended to counterbalance the celebration of the Labour Day on May Day — May 1, which was perceived as communist.
Time for another week of blatant Y Combinator startup promotion in the logo doodles. The Winter Founders wrapped up a month or so ago and I extended them the same offer I made to the Summer Founders. Not that it's likely to bring them much traffic, but along with the logo, I'd promised to write an objective, thoughtful, and hard-hitting review of their site. Here goes.
This is overdue, I know, especially considering today is Earth Day.
The last time I was in San Francisco, riding a bus out of the Haight, a group of six high school kids got on behind me. Despite not having been raised with younger siblings, I've gotten used to hanging out with young people. I feel quite comfortable around them.
Sprawled across the seats, this particular group looked just like an American Apparel ad: young, interracial, and apparently high. They were all clad in a colorful set of distinctly AA hoodies and shirts. Giggling, poking, pushing, laughing, they were all oblivious to the rest of us on the bus.
It almost felt voyeuristic, only I was in the ad with them -- wearing the same brand of sweatshirt. That, and I was definitely not high. But one out of two isn't bad.
So with all this lucidity, I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed. Not just because I was sober, but because I liked American Apparel simply because they manufactured shirts here in the USA. And more importantly, they're not being manufactured in foreign sweatshops (presumably the working conditions here in the States are more humane -- sweatshops suck, where ever they are). All of our reddit shirts have been American Apparel for that very reason, even though it costs us a bit more.
Why is it that I don't know of any other companies doing it? Even mainstream business magazines have reported on American Apparel, so they must be doing well. We even parodied their ads on Gawker with a set of our own.
I chose to welcome spring this year with a daffodil (harder to draw than you'd think).
Steve surprised me with a link yesterday to a site called Octopz. Some of you may remember that we'd considered calling reddit "octopop". (The site would ironically have more than 8 popular articles on the front page.) As you know, we stuck with reddit, but we developed an affinity for all sites named octo-anything.
But not only is this startup -- which I know absoutely nothing else about -- named Octopz, it's also got an octopus for mascot.
Fake names are a violation of our Terms of Use. Facebook requires users to provide their full first name and at least one letter of their last name. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited. Nicknames are only permitted if they are a variation of your first or last name.
A while back, when Justin was just a guy wearing a camera (the feed hadn't gone live yet) they were looking for a logo. The fundamental part of any logo -- any website -- is undoubtedly the mascot. In fact, I think Emmett and Justin attributed the end of kiko to the absence of a mascot (c'mon, that calendar with only 6 days in a week was hardly a mascot).
So when they asked me to try making a gorilla mascot for their guerrilla tv campaign, I was happy to help (because I love puns). Once the logo was done, the emoticons had to follow. Now stop reading this blog and go watch Justin.tv!
(I got 20% equity for the design work!)
Well, we got rid of almost everything (and made $110 for TBTS in the process). There are still a couple futons and a computer chair left, but I was quite pleased to see that we helped furnish the homes of as many folks as we did. A top-10 redditor even dropped by and left with a few new (old) things. No karma-for-cash was exchanged in the process, don't worry.
He also had some good ideas for reddit's future, with the kind of perspective that the four of us on the "inside" could never have. Maybe we should do this sort of thing more often. We don't have enough furniture to do it again, but perhaps a bar/restaurant would be a more suitable location... or hell, maybe the Wired offices...
Since planning this sort of thing doesn't involve any programming, I guess it's my responsibility. Stay tuned.
A big thanks to everyone who turned out (or couldn't, but still sent an email lamenting not being able to make it to lovely Somerville, MA). I've gone ahead and matched the $110 we raised, which I donated to TBTS just a few seconds ago. Brain cancer's days are numbered.
These things are depressing as hell. I just remembered that after walking by one in the airport today.
It's like a terrarium with seating. Only it's full of smokey death. And there are no turtles. But there are a few really sad-looking people inside -- instead of really sad-looking turtles.
Don't smoke [cigarettes], kids. There are massive companies counting on you to help keep those plexi-glass cells full (really, I've seen the powerpoint slides; their customers have a bad habit of dying).
We had to vacate our beloved Davis Sq. apartment pretty quickly after we sold reddit, so we left all of our "furniture" behind. I type "furniture" because it's not exactly a collection you'd probably want to furnish your home with unless you were a few cheap recent college-grad startup founders. Nevertheless, we're trying to find a home for all of it so it doesn't end up in the dumpster. I'm going to be back at 265 Elm St., Somerville, MA (a block from the Davis T stop) this Saturday, April 7th, from noon to 4pm. Steve and I need to get rid of all our stuff, so we're asking that you name your price for everything.
We don't want the money, though, any cash we collect is going to be donated to the Brain Tumor Society. We hate brain tumors.
Steve's not going to be there, but you could be the proud owner of the cheap table he used to write reddit on, or the recliner he napped on! We've also got a fine street sofa that Chris, Steve, and I carried up three flights of stairs with the alcohol-enhanced strength from a long night at People's Republik (yes, the same sofa that newly Internet-famous Justin Kan used to pass out on covered in Sharpie). OK, so it's just the same crummy furniture you'd find at any open house. But I plan on having some beer there, too.
Anyway, it'd be nice to see some of our friends from the Boston startup scene, since we left too quickly to have a final rooftop party (maybe that was for the best...)
And to prove that I'm serious, I even put up a craigslist ad.
About a year ago, I started working on a bunch of design templates for the ill-fated infogami project. Aaron unfortunately stopped development before he could do anything with my html and they've just sat on my harddrive ever since. He recently reminded me of them, so I've cobbled them all together and uploaded them under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. My HTML and CSS is pretty rough, but this license means you can use them for anything (commercial or not) and only need to attribute them to me. It'd be cool if you emailed me, too, but I like surprises.
So have fun with them, I've been told enough times that I don't have any taste ;-) but maybe some of these can be a springboard for some great designs. Here are just a few of them, along with their hip, one-word titles [link to all of them].
Waited in line (why, oh why do New Yorkers say "on line") for a little over 2 hours to get one, but it gave me time to run a few Google BlogSearches on reddit. I came across this fantastically thorough (and aptly titled) review, "Reddit - Everything you ever wanted to know about it".
Maki did a splendid job with this -- so splendid in fact, that I was feeling guilty for how our own documentation pales in comparison. But before I sit down to overhaul it, I really ought to demolish Steve in a few rounds of WiiTennis...
The best feedback emails we get usually start with "I hate reddit..." (they also end with something along the lines of "...because now I can never get any work done.")
We take great pride in maintaining a site that makes a few folks just that little bit less productive. But alas, we can't take much more credit than that, since it's not like we're creating all that time-consuming content. Here is someone who did create something cool:
One redditor, Matthew Inman, wanted to procrastinate. In doing so, he created illustrations to represent the major social media websites. Steve IMed me the link and it got me giggling.
Corporate taxes are due at the end of the week (this was definitely quite a surprise the first time around) but don't worry fellow startup founders, they don't take very long to do when you don't have any revenue.
But we've got professional help now, so all I had to was fax over some signatures. I figured it'd be polite to include a cover sheet, since our accountant is undoubtedly quite busy this time of year. Certainly my copy of Microsoft Word 2004 for the Mac would have a suitable coversheet...
That's when I found "Whimsy". Really, they were all pretty ugly, but this one was something special (they even remembered Comic Sans and Curlz!).
Some of you may have noticed a rather homogeneous reddit front page a couple days ago. Nearly all the top stories were for a good chunk of the day somehow related to the impeachment of the President and VP of the United States. Fortunately, thanks to the nifty "hotness" algorithm Chris and Steve developed, the links cooled and fell off the front page (they won't tell me how it works, partly because they know I'd quickly divulge it under torture [authorized here in the States] and partly because I just wouldn't understand).
What I do know is that over the course of the day, links actually rise and fall on the front page. So the older a story is, the more up votes it takes to keep it "hot". It just happened to take a little while for the front page to cool off.
Anyway, Randall over at xkcd had an idea (I don't even know why I bothered to hyperlink that, since it's on the reddit front page every MWF). He setup a wiki for folks to continue the reddit activism.
His comic also happens to be why in today's logo, our SuperSoaker™-wielding mascot is petting a velociraptor covered in grape juice while standing in a pile of pure Colombian blow.
It was just a weekend getaway; I'd wanted to see New Orleans again ever since Katrina. And not in some voyeuristic way, although it certainly felt like that first, but like every American should want to see what progress has been made and help out as best as a tourist could -- with money. (Tourism was the city's #2 industry, not sure what it's ranked now). Then there was the guilt for only going as tourist, not as a volunteer. Fortunately, it's not that long of a flight from NY, so by the time we landed, I was ready.
What I wasn't ready for was the destruction that flanked the highway into the city. "Eighteen months later?" was the refrain in my head. It was never too muted, even during nice dinners in the French Quarter or smothered under fabulous beignets. Those sorts of indulgences can make you forget the whole thing ever happened. The downtown is just as it was five years ago when my parents took me. Except this time I'm allowed to go into the bars on Bourbon.
But I thought some of you might want to see the photos I took from my journey outside of downtown and maybe it'll motivate a trip down to N.O. Everyone we met wanted us to go home and tell our friends to come visit; the city, the people, they needed tourists to return and spend away (and if there's one thing we Americans do well...).
But folks were divided on the story we should tell. Yes, you could spend a weekend downtown, down a few Hurricanes (it's a potent drink) and maybe earn a few beads, just like always -- tell that story: things are great!
Or, tell them to get out and see the devastation for themselves, entire derelict neighborhoods -- even middle class neighborhoods -- with no power, no one coming home from work or going to school anymore. They ought to see that part, too, so they don't forget that eighteen months later hospitals are still closed and so many families are still living in doublewides. The scandal that this could be happening in this country, that part will never be on the postcards, but Americans need to know -- tell that story: things aren't so great.
So I thought I'd tell both. You can take my word on all the vices and delights of the downtown (they're all still there, I just wasn't foolish enough to upload any photos of me indulging in them). Here are some photos if you want to see proof of the rest.
