Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" The vision of the Internet as a vast digital wasteland isn't correct. Everything is awesome, and we have more stuff to read than we ever have in history. "
Robin Sloan
Internet
More
History
Related Quotes:
" When you do something a little bit extreme or weird, it helps make it more interesting and more amenable to being written about. "
Robin Sloan
Interesting
Little
More
" I was always a computer kid, and I grew up with the Internet and always found it fascinating. "
Robin Sloan
Always
Up
Kid
" Baking and coding involve using the same parts of your brain and a lot of the same skills, like being able to follow directions or create directions in a very systematic way. "
Robin Sloan
Like
Way
Brain
" I think one of the most exciting things about the whole digital side of publishing is that it eventually allows you to operate at any length. That also means shorter stuff, too. "
Robin Sloan
Digital
Side
You
" For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you're staring at the page and thinking, like, 'Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?' "
Robin Sloan
Good
Me
You
" There's just no escaping it: The half-life of media on the Internet is super short. Tweets flow and fade; pages that look great today will be gone or, at best, riddled with broken links and outmoded code in five years, tops. "
Robin Sloan
Best
Today
Broken
" Print books have an amazing superpower because they don't disappear when you're done with them. Books on the shelf remind you that they exist. "
Robin Sloan
Disappear
Amazing
Books
" When you close a tab or when you finish an article on the web, it's gone unless you go back into your history or search for it or explicitly try to find it. Apps on your phone have this special property: they hang around. In some ways, they're more like a book on a bookshelf than they are like web pages. "
Robin Sloan
Search
You
Phone
" Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness. "
Robin Sloan
Long
Life
Time
" If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside. "
Robin Sloan
I Am
Am
Window
" Books are anchored. You return to books. You don't return to a tweet. "
Robin Sloan
You
Tweet
Anchored
" I've never believed that Things Should Continue As They Are. "
Robin Sloan
Should
Things
Never
" I got a bike - a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can't let that stop you. "
Robin Sloan
Blue
Bike
Best
" I am comfortable combining the old and the new. "
Robin Sloan
Old
New
I Am
" For so long, the model for writing has been, you sit in a room alone for a number of days or weeks or months or years and figure it out. But now, you don't have to do that; you don't have to be alone in the room anymore. "
Robin Sloan
Sit
You
Now
" I think I'm one of those people that kind of thinks everybody's got an identity, and maybe that's the core of their personality. But I think we change enough over the years that it's like a succession of different people. "
Robin Sloan
People
Change
Personality
" A lot of folks focus on using Twitter as a marketing tool. They'll have a bump that says something like 'Tweet about the NewTeeVee show! Use the hashtag #newteevee.' And that's great - folks should definitely do that. What gets us really excited, though, is when they go an extra step and start to transform tweets into TV content. "
Robin Sloan
Go
Focus
Step
" If I am honest with myself, a not-insignificant fraction of my enjoyment of any episode of 'Game of Thrones' is delivered in its opening moments. I sit down, settle in, and... BUM-bum, bah-dah-BUM-bum. "
Robin Sloan
Sit
Down
Myself
" When you've biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems, frankly, pretty absurd. "
Robin Sloan
College
City
Quiet
" When you're making a print book in 2012, I actually think the onus is on you - and on your publisher - to make something that's worth buying in its physical edition. "
Robin Sloan
Worth
Book
Buying
" In the case of 'Fish,' I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I'd change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on. "
Robin Sloan
Change
Time
Writing
" There's certainly satire written about techies, but it's so snarky and snide and doesn't treat him as a whole person. The people I worked with at Twitter - they're very analytical, but they're also deep and thoughtful - I feel like they deserved a charismatic spokesperson. "
Robin Sloan
Feel
People
Thoughtful
" In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan. "
Robin Sloan
Public
Michigan
Some
" When MUDs appeared, that was an entirely novel experience, and often an addictive one. Long before Twitter or Snapchat, MUDs inspired the moral panic of the moment: a 1993 'Wired' article titled 'The Dragon Ate My Homework' described university students losing themselves in these virtual worlds. Keep in mind: they were just words on a screen. "
Robin Sloan
Moment
Experience
Losing
" Whether it's 'Fish' or 'Annabel Scheme' or 'The Truth About the East Wind,' I often find myself crafting custom containers to hold the kind of content I want to create. "
Robin Sloan
Find
Wind
Truth
" Social systems have values - arguments baked into their design. For example, Twitter's core argument seems to be, 'Everything should be public, and messages should find the largest audience possible.' Snapchat's might be, 'Communication should be private and ephemeral.' "
Robin Sloan
Design
Argument
Communication
" It's not like 'Print versus Digital - only one will survive.' We live in a hybrid world now, and I think the near-term future is also hybrid. "
Robin Sloan
Live
Future
Now
" Good writing is really meaningful, and it's one of the - it's still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people's attention. "
Robin Sloan
Best
Writing
Good
" When I'm using the Internet, I have 25 tabs open, and even if somebody sends me... something interesting, odds are I'll forget about it, or it'll get kind of lost in the shuffle. "
Robin Sloan
Me
Forget
Interesting
" We're looking at dozens, sometimes hundreds of things every day in articles, videos, and we never look at them again. Even if we do like them, even if we tweet them out to all of our followers on Twitter, we don't return to it. "
Robin Sloan
Look
Every Day
Day