Via Kabir Chibber on Quartz:

Explore, remove hierarchies, and remember what you did wrong and tell someone:

I’ve made small changes to the FriendDA based on feedback to this post.

• All the proposed changes in the post have been put into the latest version of the FriendDA.
• I’ve changed the Creative Commons license to be ShareAlike – it is no longer No-Derivatives.
• There’s a Github repository that contains the current Markdown and HTML versions. Fork away.

These changes, I believe, will make the FriendDA slightly more useful. Thanks to everyone who contributed feedback.

Marvel announced their Phase 3 plans for the Marvel Cinematic Universe yesterday and the best way to describe my reaction is they succeeded in diffusing my excitement about Avengers – Age of Ultron and I’m pretty excited about that sequel.

Some brief thoughts on the state of Marvel:

• In 2009, Disney paid four billion dollars for Marvel. It turns out this was a tremendous deal. Check it out…
• The first Avengers had a production budget of $220 million and worldwide total lifetime gross of $1.5 billion.
• The last Iron Man (released last summer) had a production budget of $200 million a worldwide total gross of $1.2 billion.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (released this year) had a production budget of $170 million and, so far, a worldwide total lifetime grow of $752 million.
• You can check out the rest of the portfolio’s performance on Box Office Mojo, but the point is: it appears they’ve already made their money back in five years and then some.

Four billion dollars still felt aggressive in 2009, but think about what they were buying. They weren’t just buying a catalog of heroes, they were buying a massive collection of stories about these heroes, their origins, their adventures, and often, their deaths.

These stories have been tested. Marvel (and DC) have no issue mucking with continuity to improve the quality of the universe. It’s called retroactive continuity (or retcon) and it allows writers to resolve errors in chronology and reintroduce popular characters.

I think of retcons as bug fixes. It’s the writers not only making sure the stories all fit together, but also that the stories are relevant and entertaining. When you add the fact that comics are a visual medium, you understand that Marvel wasn’t just buying a catalog of heroes, they were buying a whole universe of compelling and tested scripts and story boards.

The cherry on top is the Marvel Cinematic universe is a retcon unto itself. The script writers of the movies are picking and choosing their facts and stories and knitting together what looks like decade long plot lines designed specifically for the big screen.

Can’t wait.

This might be my favorite thing ever. You must click and scroll:

Watch as 25 minutes of your life pass in an instant:

But soon after launching the site, Pretor-Pinney received a couple pictures that didn’t quite fit into existing classifications. One image, taken from the 12th floor of an office building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, looked positively apocalyptic — a violent and undulating thing menacing the city skyline. “They struck me as being rather different from the normal undulates clouds,”

Pete Warden on why nerd culture must die:

And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves even when nobody else would. The decades have proved that our way was largely right and the critics were wrong, so our habit of not listening has become deeply entrenched.

Back in January, Kottke reported that the soundtrack for Her would be released in some form at some point. We’re not talking the music inspired by Her, we’re talking the full Arcade Fire soundtrack full of strange, wonderful ambient tracks.

I’ve been checking every month or so and was delighted to find what appears to be this soundtrack on Grooveshark last night. It appears legit, but after a cursory search of the internet, it appears to be the only copy of the soundtrack available.