The Verge - Paul Miller: Offline

Offline: how to use the internet

2013-05-03T21:25:01Z

Whew! What a week.

First came Monday, and then Tuesday, and then there was the internet. You know how in Star Trek when they engage the warp engines and the Enterprise kind of stalls for a moment while its projection blurs toward the future, toward the stars, and then it’s gone? I’m in the blur phase.

I feel severely disoriented, totally overwhelmed, and kind of… happy about it?

At 12:00AM on Wednesday, May 1st, I rejoined the internet. I guess I thought I’d just start using the internet again, see some funny cat videos, and that would be that. Instead, I almost had a panic attack as I attempted to pull off basic 21st-century maneuvers like managing multiple tabs in a single browser window. Of course my inability to cope,...

Offline: boiling it down to the essentials

2013-03-26T18:00:06Z

At the end of a Veggie Tales episode, from his perch on a kitchen counter, flanked by his faithful sidekick Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato asks, "what have we learned today?" It’s an important part of classic children’s programming: after the entertainment comes the morals. Come for the hilarious veggie hijinks, stay for the turn-your-life-around-kid Bible verse.

Well, my veggie hijinks are about to come to a close, and now it’s time for me to boil them down into digestible Life Lessons and, you know, write a bestselling book about my experiences.

Except I’m having problems with the distillation process. Virtually since day one of my time without the internet I’ve been considering a book on the topic. I’d expect no less...

Offline: making music and fighting my computer

2013-02-27T18:00:07Z

Computers are where music goes to die. Now, I frequently like to point out that my internet abstinence has nothing to do with a dislike of technology itself — gesturing toward the iPad I’m holding to illustrate the point — but with music, I find technology to be the very devil itself.

Perhaps it traces back to my folksy upbringing. My dad had his own bluegrass band while I was growing up, and many an evening the Millers would gather ‘round and jam out classic gospel tunes. I was typically on the “drums,” which is not a traditional bluegrass instrument (guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, fiddle), and therefore I was often admonished for my volume and “untraditional” rhythms. But it was this very give-and-take between the...

Offline: love, loss, and dating without Facebook

2013-02-06T15:15:06Z

There’s only been one girl in this year without the internet. I liked her “that way,” and she didn’t like me “that way,” and so that was that. But it was fun while it almost lasted.

Our original chance encounter was brought on by boredom. I was sitting alone in my apartment, and none of my friends were returning my calls. It was a holiday weekend, I have lame friends. So I called my parents, grabbed my skateboard, and puttered around Union Square while I confessed my problems with singleness to my folks. They were literally pitching me on a sort of embarrassing meat market conference meant to pair off Christian homeschoolers, when I saw a familiar face.

It was an old friend from an old church I used to go to, and she was...

Offline: my quest to find a ‘StarCraft’ replacement in my life

2013-01-30T14:00:05Z

I miss StarCraft, man. I just miss it.

StarCraft wasn’t a game for me, it was a lifestyle. It was a “no, I can’t go out tonight” sort of thing. A start-at-7PM-end-at-2AM thing. StarCraft bent me to its will. It made my brain operate in new ways, taught my fingers to click and type in a new rhythm, conditioned my ass to fight the burn of sustained sitting. It asked me to learn how to lose without rage, to learn from my mistakes, to iterate, to memorize stupid build orders. Most of all, StarCraft was a new way to be friends with people.

Offline: how my creativity got killed

2013-01-17T18:00:02Z

Last week I found myself slouched on a couch, ten feet away from a pair of $107,000 speakers. I was on the 35th floor of The Venetian hotel, which towers over the tail end of the Las Vegas strip. I was listening to an overwrought piano cover of Joni Mitchell’s immortal “A Case of You.” I was unhappy.

Moments before I’d listened to a pair of $75,000 speakers. Moments before that, I enjoyed my second demo of the best-of-show favorite Oculus Rift VR goggles. Maybe I was still nauseated from the Oculus demo, or maybe I was just a little tired, but I got to wondering, “Is this all the pleasure that a $107,000 pair of speakers can really provide?”

The thing is, CES has always been about consumption. People spend billions of...

Offline: why am I here?

2013-01-08T12:00:06Z

When I was a kid I had a box of “electronics.” Basically, it was cannibalized parts from various decrepit gadgets, like RC cars, walkie talkies, and cassette players. I always dreamed of mashing together a few circuit boards and making something new, but obviously had no knowledge of that process. But I kept the box. There was something intrinsic to that tangle of wires and transistors that felt like technology to me.

CES is televisions, and car stereos, and iPod nano armbands

I still have collections of useless electronics. I don’t take them apart anymore, but I keep them around “just in case.” My old GameBoy Advance that I don’t have any games for. Adapter dongles for anything to anything. A Sanyo Xacti, that little Nike+...

Offline: listening to music

2012-12-18T16:30:04Z

New York Magazine just recently listed its top 10 albums for the year. I only had heard one of them; in fact, I’d only heard of one of them.

The album is called good kid m.A.A.d city, a Short Film by Kendrick Lamar. It’s by some fella named Kendrick Lamar. I bought it on a recommend from my good friend and editor Thomas Houston, the unofficial tastemaker / GIF-tracker around the Verge office. I asked innocently what he was jamming out to at the moment, he told me, and so I went to Best Buy and paid Real Deal Paper American Dollars for the album on Compact Disc. When Thomas recommends something, I listen. When he Tumbles a GIF, I lol. At least I did back when I could Tumble online. This guy has taste for days.

I paid Real Deal Paper...