I’ve had an exceptionally heavy heart since seeing the unfortunate results from North Carolina’s vote on Amendment 1. I usually steer clear of all things politics. I loathe politics. I’ve never gone to a ballot box trusting that any of the candidates I was voting for would have my interests — and the interests of those around me — in mind. Not once. When I vote for President in November, I can absolutely assure you that neither Obama nor Romney will get my vote with any sort of zeal. They’ll both fail me in a plethora of ways. It’s just how it is.
But there’s something different about Amendment 1. For one, it’s putting a truly heinous spotlight on the state that I was born in, and choose to live in. I adore North Carolina. I have been to every state in this country, and NC is still home to me. It saddens me beyond belief to know that some 61 percent of those who trudged out to vote on May 8th would willfully walk up to another countryman — nay, statesman — and tell them to their face that they do not deserve equal rights. That children of unwed parents don’t deserve health insurance provided by their parent. That victims of domestic abuse don’t deserve the protections they currently have (had?) against their abuser. That two people who want to devote themselves to one another don’t deserve to file their taxes jointly.
And the worst part is this: too many North Carolinians are using Jesus as the reason for their stance. I shudder to think what the Jesus I know — a God that loves unconditionally — would say about proclaimed Christians demonstrating hate in His name. You may say that there’s no “hate” here. But it is hate. Looking at someone as less than another, even as you force a smile at them, feels like hate to the person on the other side. It’s just rude. It’s just mean. And in what way does this planet need any more meanness? It’s a tragedy of epic proportions just how much discrimination and hate exists already in the name of religion; why add to the fire?
What really blows my mind is how this issue is even voteable. Perhaps it speaks to my ignorance of politics. In my eyes, allowing folks to marry who they please simply broadens a state’s tax base, encourages a far more diverse economic landscape and — most importantly — gives us one less reason to discriminate. And really, discriminating against someone based on the gender of the person they love? That’s almost as stupid as discriminating against someone for the color of their skin. Or the origin of their birth. Or the God they choose to believe in. I recognize that you can’t coerce another human to not discriminate without a change in their own heart, but in no way, shape or form should discrimination be allowed by the government when it comes to taxes, protection rights and hospital visitation. In fact, keeping my fellow statesmen from discrimination is one of the few things I actually want the government to do.
I’m not asking the government to say that gay marriage is “right” or “wrong.” I’m not asking the government to affirm or deny a denomination’s “definition of marriage.” I’m asking the government to just let married people of all genders enjoy a few rights.
I firmly believe that privately financed churches should retain the right to marry only those that they wish. It’d be an abject violation of the separation of church and state — which I’m increasingly unsure is more than ink on paper — for the government to force a church to (or not to) marry someone. But telling two men, two women or two transgendered individuals that they cannot peacefully walk to their local courthouse and grab the rights that I’m blessedly able to have as a married heterosexual is not something I can comfortably do. At its most molecular level, it’s meanspirited. And as a fat kid who was bullied mercilessly in grade school (and someone who strives to simply not be a complete and total jerk), I’m just not super keen on being mean.
As said earlier, I can’t believe this is even a voteable issue. I’m certain there were people who also couldn’t believe that we once had to vote to give women voting rights. It just seems so obvious that it’s the right thing to do, that I can’t even wrap my brain around the fact that there would be an option to do the opposite.
And to those who are tarnishing the view of Christianity in the eyes of the world, riddle me this: would Jesus stand in front of a hospital door and tell a loving man that he can’t visit his male partner on his death bed?
When it comes to voting, this isn’t a religious issue. This is a human rights issue. Let’s fight for our rights, and save the religious banter for theological seminars.
(For more on this issue, I’d strongly recommend a few pieces from men of faith that have a far greater grasp on religion than myself: Hugh Hollowell and Aaron Saufley)
“Going to print”
Three little words, but to me, they mean so much. In a matter of weeks, I’ll be a published author. The book is titled “iPad Secrets,” a guide to everything possible on your iPad that you may not have ever known was actually possible. It’ll ship to a slew of e-tailers (including Amazon outlets around the globe), and a bunch of well-known brick-and-mortar outlets as well. The publisher is John Wiley & Sons, also known as the company that publishes the famed ‘For Dummies’ line (including a pair of spectacular reads from a dear friend of mine, Chris Ziegler).
The book itself has been a monumental labor of love, and it has been an amazing learning experience. I was tasked with assembling a guide that would touch on all three of Apple’s iPad units to date: the original, the iPad 2 and the new iPad. Within the covers, you’ll find nifty shortcuts, tips and outright trickeration that relates to all three, and I’ve spent untold nights making revisions to ensure that the latest and greatest information is in here.
I highly doubt I’ll ever forget how this came to be: I was sitting in Denmark, just days after speaking at one of the most exciting and pulsing conferences I’ve ever been to (Next 2011, put on by Innovation Lab). I received a note from an acquisitions editor at Wiley asking me if I was interested in a book project. I knew that I didn’t have time. I made time. I knew that writing a book would be tough and relentless, but I couldn’t say no. After 20,000+ posts (and counting!) at Engadget, this felt like a beautiful way to extend what has become my career and touch the lives of a different sect of people who use consumer electronics.
Writing a book is exactly like you would imagine it to be, and nothing at all like you’d imagine it to be. Throughout the process, I have to say — Wiley was amazing to work with. I’ve heard some horror stories when it comes to publishing (even a sad tale from my main man Tim Stevens), but I’ve no regrets about diving into this.
It was easily the most challenging single project I’ve ever undertaken, but also one of the most rewarding. Now I understand the look authors give people when they say they’re about to write a book. Unless you’ve done it, you have no idea how long and winding the road is. That said, it’s really a grand feeling to see something of yours in print. As a boy who grew up penning his tales on a screen, there’s still something amazing about the printed word. I’d bother listing out the many, many people I owe thanks for, but all of that is within the front matter of the book.
If you (or someone you know) is interested in taking their iPad relationship to a new level, check out iPad Secrets. Hopefully you’ll find it infinitely useful and enlightening. It’ll ship on April 3rd for those that order online, and it should hit B&M stores a week after. Happy iPading!
P.S. - If you want to pre-order the book, you can do so at these fine e-tailers:
(If you’re looking for it elsewhere, the ISBN is 9781118247365)
Amazing vista overlooking east O’ahu and Rabbit Island.
Hawaii is the jam.
2011 was bananas. A roller coaster to end all coasters. 2012 is going to be equally wild, but I’m pressing pause on life for a month to go far, far away with my wife and enjoy a number of precious moments that aren’t promised to any of us. Even in all of my jaunting, I haven’t taken more than 24 straight hours off of the internet since I got into this industry over five years ago. Hopefully I can now. If I don’t respond immediately to your tweet, poke, email or call in the next few weeks, I assure you I’m not ignoring you. You can feel free to say hello IRL if you’re in O’ahu, Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa or American Samoa soon.
Let me know if something cool happens. Mahalo and fa’afetai.
[Note: That title should say: ‘Chris Grant is leaving Joystiq, and other crazy clarifications / confessions’]
It’s true. One of the most upstanding people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work alongside of is leaving Joystiq at the end of this year, and he’s taking two of his confidants with him. And yes, he’s headed over to Vox Media to start its gaming vertical. If not for me revealing this ahead of Chris’ departure post, the reactions would write themselves. “More great talent flees AOL — it’s all over! Run!” “AOL can’t keep talent — what’s going on in there?!” But here’s a thought — why don’t we take a moment and think about what’s actually happening before publishing a pre-written, sensationalistic story with a few new names pasted in? I’m going to warn you that what follows is long, and a lot of it links back to events that happened earlier in the year. But without that perspective, none of this Chris Grant news really comes into focus.
For starters, I want to say that Chris is an amazingly talented and hilarious human. And I’m thrilled that he’s pursuing something that he wants. I know for certain that he was offered a spot over at The Verge when all of that was coming together (as was I), and we both eventually decided to not jump at that particular junction after much deliberation. But the opportunity to start a new gaming site and dictate how each piece is built — now that’s another thing entirely. So, it shouldn’t shock anyone that he’s grabbing the opportunity. It’s a good one.
But there are two main things that no outsider will openly recognize about this. Maybe they just won’t bother to actually call or email anyone within the AOL Tech organization to fact-check their stories, or maybe they’d just prefer to publish something littered with fabricated drama in the interest of clicks. Whatever the case, I’m here to make a couple of points crystal clear.
First off, this shift has been in the works for some time. Anyone who assumes that the recent departure of Heather and Vaughn from TechCrunch has anything to do with this is high on meth. Vox Media isn’t a place that makes reactionary, snap decisions based on blathering in the tech space. It’s a company that’s methodically piecing together an army of sites. To assume that they’d just think of snagging Chris last week — and similarly, that Chris would leave behind the staff that has built up his entire career — is ludicrous. So, before you think of connecting the two, don’t. I’m saving you from publishing patently untrue information.
Speaking of that whole “methodically piecing together an army of sites” thing that I referenced earlier, it’s probably worth looking at the writing on the wall now, just so the collective tech press can’t feign surprise when Vox Media does its darndest to convince the Editor-in-chief of Autoblog, Car & Driver, Motor Trend or any other flagship automotive site to come over and kickstart its own auto-related site. My gut tells me travel will come after that — if you’ve got any seniors over at Condé Nast or Travel & Leisure, it’s now safe (and sensible) to consider them a flight risk. And if you’re covering this industry, please don’t assume that [insert organization here] is falling to pieces when it happens. It will happen. It won’t have anything to do with anything falling apart. It’ll have everything to do with a hip and cool new company tossing over competitive offers to talented people who may be intrigued with the idea of doing something different. Sorry, I know that’s not the drama-filled story you’re really after, but it’s the truth.
Secondly — and without question, most importantly — how is it news that AOL has issues? AOL hasn’t been tremendously relevant in just about anything in at least five years, probably more. Acting like it’s just becoming irrelevant in 2011 is simply bad reporting. We have a saying at Engadget that seems to apply here: you can only truly report on the present if you understand and integrate the past. And here’s the past that no one seems to pay attention to when writing lighthearted jabs at AOL as a whole: the tech side of things has followed a completely different trajectory over the past five years than AOL itself. Even while the company was flubbing untold things over the past five years, Engadget and Joystiq have done nothing but grow larger, more sophisticated and more trusted.
It’s proof-positive of one truth that no one seems to grasp: AOL may be troubled, but someone at the company has always been intelligent enough to not meddle with tech. For right around nine months now, I’ve been increasingly frustrated with a perverse and thoroughly incorrect notion that AOL has anything to do with the editorial of Engadget and Joystiq. It makes for a sexy story, but it’s indubitably false. I mean, it could not possibly be further from the truth. Again, sorry to burst your bubble.
It all links back to The AOL Way. But here’s the drama-free truth about The AOL Way that no one has cared to dig up: it did not, ever, at any point in the history of humanity, apply to AOL Tech. Literally the first time I, or anyone else at Engadget and Joystiq, ever heard about this rubbish was when it leaked on Business Insider. Why? Because someone was smart enough to realize that we’re doing just fine on our own, and that there was no conceivable need to even bring this into our purview. Shocking, right? Not really. Look at the content on Joystiq and Engadget. The tone and style has remained the same since launch. Even as employees come and go, the tone and style remain. It’s entrenched in our training processes, and that process on Engadget was hand-crafted by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas. No one at AOL even knows what we do to train our employees. And no one at AOL has ever done something as idiotic as to even think of sticking their hands in any of our editorial decisions.
I just don’t know how to make this any clearer: AOL and Engadget couldn’t possibly be any more separate unless some other media company came and started cutting our checks. If not for a faded logo in the corner of a paystub, I’d never actually know that AOL was even remotely connected to Engadget. It may shock you to hear it, but we do whatever we want. We don’t ask anyone at AOL for permission for anything related to editorial. We write what we want. We skip what we want. We choose the angles that we want. We choose the employees that we want. The AOL Way never, ever had even a 0.00000001 percent impact on anything that Engadget (and Joystiq) ever did. Anything you read to the contrary is a complete and utter lie, and I’ll go on any record I have to on that.
At this point, you’re probably wondering why — if all of the above is true — The Verge was ever created. Surely Arianna ran those guys out of town, right? Right? Wrong. What’s wild is that people again assumed that something as gigantic as The Verge could’ve been completely decided upon and hashed out by all parties in a matter of weeks. With that “matter of weeks” being the day that Arianna walked in compared to the day that Josh and co. walked out. Anyone with any insight at all into these kinds of arrangements would understand that it took many, many, many months for that deal to be worked out, and the reality is that Josh’s decision was made while the prior AOL administration was in power, not the current. But that’s not news, now is it?
David Eun is largely credited with championing The AOL Way initiative, and he left AOL right around the time Arianna came in. So far as I understand it, that’s about when The AOL Way as a whole died; I wouldn’t know specifics, because a) it was never pushed onto Engadget and b) Engadget is kept too far away from the typical AOL happenings for us to even know how it affects other properties. But I can certainly say that before Arianna arrived, it was nigh impossible to get a full-time hire at Engadget. Some would say that AOL left Engadget too alone — when we attempted to reach across the divide that had smartly existed for as long as the two were brought together in a business deal, the folks that came before Arianna simply didn’t see a need to increase headcount when we were doing just fine as-is. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a man responsible for the future success of a site may start looking at other options when he’s being left so alone that his hiring abilities are hindered. After Arianna waltzed in, we finally had someone in that spot that understood what a blog was. You could say that she’s allowed Engadget (and Joystiq) to start hiring simply because people were fleeing due to the previous administration’s efforts to jade existing employees, but frankly, it matters not. She’s more than open to hiring new faces at both properties, and indeed, Chris is leaving Joystiq with more full-time staff onboard than it has ever had before. Just think about that for a second. More people in successful operations — that is, by all accounts, a positive thing.
One has to wonder how everything would’ve shaken out had Arianna arrived six to twelve months earlier than she did. Perhaps everything would be different. Perhaps everything would be exactly the same.
I say all of that to say this: the folks that will remain at Joystiq in 2012 are no less capable, creative and talented than they are today, with Chris Grant still on the masthead. Don’t forget that. They also aren’t “sellouts” or slaves to an “AOL Way” that never existed in Joystiq-land to begin with. The folks that Chris ends up hiring at whatever his new site will be aren’t going to be “magically better” than their Joystiq counterparts, just because it’s “new” and “exciting.” They’re still humans — still editors who will need to be trained and honed to do excellent work. And amazingly, both groups of people will work within a corporate shell that has real limitations, real politics and real growing pains.
Chris is going to do something new because he wants to. No one at AOL forced him or his staff to do weird editorial things. And honestly, there’s probably not a sensible amount of money that AOL could’ve paid Chris to stay — sometimes it’s not as simple as money. Sometimes one season ends and a new one begins, and grasping for an unsurprising reason just leaves everyone looking stupid.
And yes, pretty much all of this also applies to the tremendously talented Engadget team that stands today. I’ve grown increasingly disgusted by wafts of condescending attitudes towards Engadget since the creation of The Verge. Would I seriously be more of a talent at The Verge than at Engadget? Could the same question be asked in reverse? What (most) everyone fails to realize is that it took every single editor that walked away an incredible amount of time before any of them were capable of doing Engadget proud without any behind-the-scenes hand-holding. Every single one of us had to crawl, get kicked around and edited until we were pulling our hair out before we learned to fly. The teaching methods that applied to The Verge crew still apply to the newer faces that are gracing Engadget’s pages — there are still very, very strong roots to Peter and Ryan here at Engadget, and no one — no one — gets the opportunity to post anything on this site without going through the same editing hell that I went through with Mr. Block as my guide.
I want to close by making one thing about myself exceptionally clear: I am not a shill for AOL. But Engadget as its own pulsing entity is extremely dear to my heart. I simply owe everything — my entire career — to Engadget (again, not to be confused with AOL). I refuse to stand idly by while anyone talks down about the insanely dedicated staff that keeps this organism thriving 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. It is not easy to emulate. If you have any doubts whatsoever about that, ask any senior editor at The Verge how much sleep they’re getting. Seriously. Ask them. It’s not a lot.
I love and respect every single soul that parted ways with Engadget and went to start The Verge. I talk with them frequently. We share intimate secrets and weird gifs over Skype. And you can definitely expect to see both Engadget and The Verge sharpen their respective skills in the years ahead — if you’re a reader of technology news, there has never been a better time to be you. Even if AOL melts away and some other mega-corp tosses its logo in the top-right of our paystub, Engadget will always be Engadget. Our training guide will always have been written by its founders. And our mission will never be swayed by whoever decides to cut our checks. Oh, and the same is true for Joystiq, in the effort of coming full circle.
The only lingering question is TechCrunch. It seems to me that Michael Arrington doesn’t really get along with Arianna Huffington. So, maybe that’s the way it is. Maybe that’s why he’s no longer working for the site. But as further proof that AOL isn’t shoving some sort of AOL Tech-wide initiatives down our throats, I honestly have no idea what’s going on at TechCrunch. It’d be about like asking me if I know what’s going on at PCMag, BoingBoing, C|net or I Can Has Cheezburger. The only reason I have even a smidgen of a clue about what’s going on at Joystiq is because I spoke with Joystiq. And that, folks, is that.
P.S. - Apologies for the length!
