BL: What is the difference between the BoingBoing gadget blog and Gizmodo when you wrote it solo? How has your experience changed the way you think about this stuff?
JJ: Man, hard to say. I think it'll be pretty similar to my solo Gizmodo days, minus any external impetus to blog about products I really don't give a crap about. I'm trying to write about either the really good stuff or the really bad stuff, because all the junk in the middle is just, you know, junk. Unless you mean how I feel about gadgets. In that case, I still hate almost everything about them, except when I am completely enamored by them. It's almost like my relationship has changed with games as I've gotten older: I almost enjoy reading and writing about them as much as I do actually using them.
BL: So you're basically freeing yourself up from the churn, and focusing on stuff that has an impact on your life?
JJ: That's the plan. There's a place for comprehensive, kitchen-sink blogging, but I think Gizmodo and company probably have that covered. I'm prolific when I'm in the pocket, but I don't want to try to post about every single new widget that falls off the assembly line.
BL: That makes sense. Because of the Gizmodo churn, I actually play with the gadgets I own less now, and frankly, I'd like to spend more time holing up with the ones I have and love, and hack them, install ware on them, and use them in new ways. Will new uses for old stuff be part of the focus, as opposed to the newsy stuff?
JJ: It might be. MAKE usually covers that pretty well for me (as do the rest of the Boingers, actually), but if I see something cool that I don't think is getting enough coverage, I'll definitely write about it. I'm actually less interested in writing about hacking gadgets—as cool as I think that is—than I am in writing about ways to make commercially available gadgets better off the line. It's stupid that we should have to hack so many gadgets to make them do what we want in the first place.
BL: What about your Dethroner project?
JJ: (Just a second. Posting something.)
[1 minute later] JJ: Dethroner is still happening, for what it's worth.
BL: How are you doing both?
JJ: Well, I've only been doing both for about a week, so all bets are off. But for now I'm using a technique I learned in my early twenties, called "drugs."
BL: I know that you use a MacBook and an iPhone like I do. So if you're focusing on the stuff you like and would use, does that mean you're skewing toward Apple coverage?
JJ: I've actually never been identified as an Apple fanboy, so thanks for blowing my cover, you prick.
BL: Oops!

[Gadgets.boingboing.net]

Consumer electronics are a joke. It's everyone's fault but mine. You assholes.

These guys want me to write a weekly column, but I hate consumer electronics, I hate marketing, and I hate you people, because you're all so dumb. If you're lucky and I need the money, I will.

I gave up two years of my life writing about gadgets for this site. Waking up every morning at 5 AM, chewing up press releases to find the rare morsel of legitimate information, chasing down "hot tips" that ended up being photochops of iPods with reflections of genitals in the touchscreens. Oh, and the worst: fielding emails from PR parasites eager to suck away precious time in a half-hour phone meeting while the Senior Vice-President of Smoke Blowing tells me about how his company's software—based on an idea cribbed from Google—is going to change the way I look at something I didn't care about in the first place. (Inevitably, "forever.")

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

You want to know the punchline? The average Joe that makes up the market is smarter than you saps. The market-at-large waits until a clear leader emerges, then takes a modest plunge. You may think you're making up the "bleeding edge" of "gadget pimpatude" but you're really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money. "Give me the latest version," you coo, hiking up your skirt another inch over your exposed wallet. "Point Oh One upgrades make me so hot."

And for god's sake, Gizmodo, stop giving this stuff such a free pass. Stop using terminology that they've programmed into you by puking it into your eyeballs via press release after press release. What is this "unleashes" horseshit, Deleon? You're not in marketing. Don't write like you are. This is obviously a not a real product, Frucci. Did you even read the site you linked? Are you actually writing boosterism-filled copy about products that don't actually exist? Oh my god, Wilson, you're writing about that house-printing machine? I wrote about that almost three years ago. (You get a slight pass because I couldn't find my old link in Google because of Gawker's inexplicable "Wheel O' Permalink Syntax," but still, you guys are supposed to be well-versed experts about technology. You should know about this stuff. The C in "Gizmodo" is for "some fucking context," which you should provide, even if you only get paid per cock joke.)

While we're on the subject of your torpid, irresponsible copy, stop calling stuff "*tastic." Especially "geektastic," your slackest-jawed portmanteau. Would you drop that bon mot to a woman you were trying to hit on in real life? Of course you would, because I know you guys, and you're dorks.

Get it together: every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives. Circle back again in six months when they're shilling the incremental upgrade and ask them why the last version didn't cut the mustard. Step out of your blogging trench and ask yourself what your responsibility is to the tens of thousands of idiots who are reading this site right now to determine what they should spend their next paycheck on. They've already proven they're too imbicilic to make any smart purchases on their own. (Remember, Gizmodo was a nexus of debate over which MP3 player was going to "kill" the iPod two years after Apple won.) If you write like another stupid fanboy who ricochets a pillar of spunk off the roof of his gaping mouth just because something is glossy and uses electricity, you're just doing the work of the companies trying to get rich selling us broken promises.

Ah. I feel better. Didn't help a thing, but I feel better, and I'm what's important here.
–Joel Johnson

There is no cover to enter the event, but bring some dough for the raffle and prepare to rock out. Hit the link below for more information. – Travis Hudson

Fünde Razor II

Not to spoil anything for you—J.K. Rowling gets remarried!—but part of it involves a gnome and choice of inputs. – Jason Chen

Choose Your Own Adventure: The Cave of HDTV [Dethroner]

Dethroner

I've had the good fortune to step into a new position here at Gawker Media—something we're calling 'Executive Editor, Technology.' That means I'll be helping the editors of Gizmodo, Lifehacker, The Consumerist, and Kotaku continue to provide you daily injections of news and (occasionally, inadvertently) perspective on all the latest and greatest around the web.

I rewrote that paragraph about five times before giving up, so if I sound like a stuffy prick, forgive me.

What's that mean to you? More of what you've grown to love about Gizmodo—and hopefully less of what you haven't. I'll be, you know, around, learning and loving.

To that end, I'd like to hear everything you love about Gizmodo and everything you hate. That can be editorial focus, site design features, tone—whatever. We've got a better team at Gizmodo with John Biggs and crew than we've ever had before, and I want to know what I can do to help them keep improving.

Shoot me an email at joel@gawker with your suggestions and critiques.

Joel