Neil Sarkar

camh: Mexico.

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:05:00 -0400

Walking back from the beach with Kevin.

We had all the bacon. (Neil)

The most ridiculous beach house in Yucatán. (Kevin)

Joey

(me sunburning)

The beach. Like 100 yards from the house.

Action shot!

camh:

Mexico.

joey: I strung together some video clips taken while I was in...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:13:51 -0400

joey:

I strung together some video clips taken while I was in Austin for SXSW and then Mexico on vacation with Cam, Kevin, and Neil. They’re mostly unpublished Vine videos (a couple by Pasquale).

I sang Say It Ain’t So with Amanda Palmer, didn’t sleep, danced a lot, and generally made a huge fool of myself. It was fun.

thejana: The whole gang (and an awesome cameo from Amanda...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:08:27 -0400

thejana:

The whole gang (and an awesome cameo from Amanda Ferri).

evanfordebarden: Has anyone noticed how similar the logos are...

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:42:30 -0500

evanfordebarden:

Has anyone noticed how similar the logos are in each of the NFL Divisional Series match ups this weekend?

Just look at this!

Ravens vs Broncos: Two animal heads facing to the right.

Texas vs Patriots: The only two NFL logos with this particular shade of blue in a red/white/blue scheme, and the only two logos to feature a white star. Also, both teams are named after a regionally specific people *and* were chosen by a public poll.

Packers vs 49ers: Both logos are ovals with internal lettering. That’s good enough. But also consider that both teams are from two-word cities-on-the-bay and and both have names tied to professions (49ers for the goldminers 1849 and packers for the Indian Packing Company, of which the team founder Curly Lambeau was an employee).

Seahawks vs Falcons: Two right-facing bird logos. BIRDS.

Photo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 11:01:21 -0500

patnakajima: New Intern Day at GroupMe!

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:20:33 -0500

patnakajima:

New Intern Day at GroupMe!

groupme: Introducing GroupMe 4.0 Just like you, we love our app...

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:37:58 -0500

groupme:

Introducing GroupMe 4.0

Just like you, we love our app and use it all the time. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve it. Sometimes that means adding a feature, or fixing some bugs. Sometimes, it means taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture.

Six months ago, we took everything we had learned about how people use GroupMe – what worked, what needed to be fixed, what needed to be added or removed – and went to work.

The result is GroupMe 4.0, an app that’s simpler, easier to use, and more beautiful than ever before. It’s available today for iPhone, iPad, and Android (beta).

Here’s what’s new:

Completely redesigned look and feel:

Chats are front and center — and easy to read

Photos in chats are big and beautiful

Share your location or where you’re going with a small map

Fast switching between conversations in the left drawer

Huge avatars for your group and its members in the right drawer

Tap any user’s avatar anywhere in the app to send a DM

Plus:

Now on iPad and iPad Mini — one of our most requested features!

Starting a group is easier and faster than ever

Invite people to your group with a simple URL you can post anywhere

Faster performance on every device

Rejoin groups that you previously left

We can hardly say how excited we are to get this app out there. Our team absolutely loves using it, and we think you will too.

So come on! Get it today for your iPhone or iPad. Or, read more about our Android beta.

Love,

Team GroupMe

Photo

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 11:24:18 -0400

thecompanynyc: For all your reblogging needs.

Mon, 28 May 2012 11:21:26 -0400

thecompanynyc:

For all your reblogging needs.

Why I'm sober this year

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:00:43 -0400

A lot of people have asked why I quit everything for a year, and I don’t have a good one or two line answer.

So here is the journal entry where I figured out why I’m doing it. I’m just going to leave this here and refer anyone who asks me why to this:

09/22/2011

Today is the first sick day I’ve taken at groupme. It’s also the beginning of my quitting drugs for a month. I’m trying to get in better shape for the reunion, sure, but I’m also gearing up for 2012: a year without drugs.

It’s an experiment that came to me one night when I was lying in bed and wishing for what ultimately amounts to freedom from the various addictions in my life. I mean how nice would it be to be able to get on a roll, to build up something steadily without being derailed by benders.

The part that’s hard to come to terms with is the social anxiety. Honestly, drugs are a significant part of my identity. The fact that I’m a little worried I’ll lose friendships or not be entertaining enough if I’m not allowed to drink for a year is the surest sign that I should quit.

And this monthlong run is going to be a good test. It’s going to be a little strange saying “I don’t drink” for an entire year. I’m just thinking now about what I’ll do for Abe’s wedding but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’m trying to analyze and get at the heart of what I feel I’m losing by being seen as someone who doesn’t drink. First off, and very cliche, is that I feel I’ll be seen as not cool. The point I started being cool and liking my image is when I started drinking, junior year of high school. It provided me with the confidence to express myself in an unfiltered way, and I’ve clutched dearly to that crutch ever since. I’m worried about what James and I of 2002 would think of this me, while still aware that the judgment of immature frat boys is kind of marginal, especially when compared with the judgment of women.

That’s what this all comes down to, it’s no surprise: I need to take drastic measures to make myself a good gift to a woman that deserves it.

The other judgment I’m worried about when presenting myself as a teetotaller is one that unfortunately is not irrelevant to women: weakness.

People see someone who has to get help and follow a program to fix their ailment as weak. Even admitting that an ailment is affecting you is weak. And admitting that you can’t even control it is weak. But being afraid of that perception is something I’m just going to have to get over. It’s like Anthony said in class, you can’t hide in plain sight. I may delude myself into thinking I’m concealing my weakness, when I’m sure if you candidly asked anyone that knew me, they judge me far more for my current failings than they would for being a teetotaller.

Improv is something that’s certainly going to help. Hopefully I can replace this approximation of courage and confidence with the real thing. I gg to the dentist but the final thought swimming in my head is that I don’t need a good “why” for when people ask me why I’m quitting. I just need to be OK with being perceived as weak. In fact it might be freeing to respond: “because I’m weak and I can’t control myself and my drug abuse is the primary reason I never get laid”

I may never actually say that, but I should keep in mind that the loss in social currency of uttering that explanation is well worth the gain of an identity reboot.

Break Up Your Band: Baseball Season

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:12:47 -0400

Break Up Your Band: Baseball Season:

breakupyourband:

The tendency of a lot of young improvisers, and improvisers who aren’t so young, is to approach every scene like a baseball team that has somehow gotten it into their heads that every game is a home run derby. The point is not to get out there and swing for the fences on every at-bat or even every…

stevespillman: GroupMe’s Christmas tree (Taken with instagram)

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:06:14 -0500

stevespillman:

GroupMe’s Christmas tree (Taken with instagram)

patnakajima: GroupMe Ping Pong Ball

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:18:32 -0400

patnakajima:

GroupMe Ping Pong Ball

Photo

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:50:36 -0400

Photo

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:48:44 -0500

"What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable..."

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 17:08:46 -0500

“What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks – empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.”

- http://www.merlinmann.com/better (via thedame)

Why #firstworldproblems are as important as starving children

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:04:00 -0500

Just finished reading Chip Conley’s book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow and the book had its interesting moments, but by far the most profound lessons in it were directly paraphrased from the work of Abraham Maslow, whose books I am now eagerly anticipating reading.

You may have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Basically it says that humans have physiological needs: the need to eat or sleep or have sex, then once those are satisfied they need stability and security, then social belonging, then esteem, and finally they can reach a place where their need is for self-actualization and transformation.

Each level must be satisfied for a person to start focusing on and filling the next one. For example if you desperately need sleep or food, you don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about you or if you belong to any community…you have a ringing alarm in your head from your reptilian brain that drowns out any higher order desires.

Similarly, if you haven’t found a community you identify with, or a comfortable social position where you are secure with the people you have relationships with and content with your status within the groups you circulate through, you’re going to be too focused on that to worry about whether your time in this life is being used to express your unique talents in a way that furthers a purpose you believe in. You’ll just want to fit in.

It’s the top of the pyramid that’s most interesting to me. Every person does have a need for transformative self-actualization through pursuit of a purpose larger than themselves. How few attain this? How few ever even aspire to it?!?

Maslow was interested in answering the question of how we can get more people to the top of that pyramid. That’s where Maslow diverges from what most people think of as psychology. Freudian psychology is focused on studying people who exhibit neuroses and psychological issues that are particular to the human animal, and its goal is to negate or suppress these abnormalities.

Maslow takes the opposite approach and says instead of studying the weirdos and fucktards, let’s look at the inspirational people, the ones who have cultivated and actualized their innate abilities, and who do amazing things at a level that most people never even strive for, let alone attain.

I love that approach. I mean, if you focus on not losing, you’ll break even at best. Sure, if you ignore pitfalls you won’t succeed…but at some point you have to focus on taking scary chances that will help you win, or all the treading water will be fruitless.

When I was younger I would say that I don’t get why people give to charities to feed starving kids they’ve never met, rather than giving their money (or better yet, the thing money approximates: time) to help the people around them whose characters they know and love and want to support.

Within Maslow’s framework of human development, this impulse question is given creedence. There’s a trendy twitter hashtag #firstworldproblems. It’s what your friend might say when she’s going through some personal conflict or some annoyances at work and is meant to juxtapose her being tired on a monday morning with a kid starving in Ghana, rendering her problems unimportant.

Well you know what?? Who’s to say that your friend’s inability to satisfy her social/belonging needs and eventually transcend them to self-actualization is less important than that child’s inability to satisfy his physiological needs of food or water and eventually transcend them to security and then further up the pyramid??

Equality goes both ways. If that child’s life and happiness is as important as your friend’s, then her life is as important as the child’s. And if your friend never in her life transcends their social needs to realize their potential, is that not ultimately as tragic as that kid starving to death?

I truly believe that #firstworldproblems are equally as important as #thirdworldproblems. Not more important, not less important, equally important. For human society to progress, humans need to support each other through each tier of the pyramid.

If we are all focused on pulling those starving and freezing to death up to levels of subsistence, then what??? What is the point?? If we’re focused only on survival, then we’re worse off than animals. We don’t get to reap the higher-order benefits of our ability to analyze and collaborate, and we have far less visceral pleasure from eating, fucking, and killing than your average animal.

That’s a good baseline for whether a human life was successful: did they create more happiness for themselves and those around them than an animal would have? Did they utilize their unique talents to create something of themselves that only a human can?

Surely, this is just the beginning of my foray into understanding the field of positive psychology and the importance of self-actualization and how to enable and support that growth in myself and in others. I love Maslow’s fascination with group therapy, and his idea of the professional sphere as an untapped resource for promoting individual growth towards self-actualization.

This arena of human development is woefully underserved, and it would make me really happy to see us make strides towards making the default job for an educated professional not a corporate soul-sucker, but rather an essential vehicle that supports individuals mid-level needs and guides them to their happiest, most fully realized states.

Matt Ridley on Sugata Mitra's Web-Based Education Project - WSJ.com

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 11:01:56 -0500

Matt Ridley on Sugata Mitra's Web-Based Education Project - WSJ.com:

love this guy…and i love that they’re taking the india hole-in-the-wall computers thing and applying that as a complement or substitute good for traditional teaching.

one of the biggest issues people face in their transition to adulthood or self-actualization is that they have difficulty shaking the assumption that there is an authority figure whose job it is to ensure that they are growing, and as long as they pay attention to that figure and do what they are told they will continue to grow. many people have extreme difficulty solving problems with unknowns in them.

this would be a great evolution in education, if children were trained from an early age to find answers through exploratory discourse with their peers, rather than within a closed system (a class textbook, for example). moreover, they would understand that their confidence in their answer should not be contingent on that answer being verified by the authority figure.

So long as you don’t get attached to any one particular outcome, everything tends to unfold...

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:20:00 -0500

So long as you don’t get attached to any one particular outcome, everything tends to unfold perfectly.

Anchoring

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 10:14:58 -0500

Fuck I haven’t written consistently enough at all. it’s not like I’m disappointing a readership, but it sucks for me because when I do write about a concept it invariably helps me understand and remember that concept…and over the past month or so I’ve been learning a ton that I would like to not forget.

The concept of anchoring (from dan ariely’s “predictably irrational”) has been a really salient one for me since I first read about it. He says that everything is relative for people, and we tend to “anchor” the value of something to the first price we consider paying for it.

Couple interesting things here. Everyone knows first impressions are important (I love that he uses the gosling analogy as well…that a baby goose imprints the first moving thing it sees as its mother) but this delves deeper than that. Well I guess actually it explicates on it.

As Seth Godin pointed out in “All Marketers are Liars,” you don’t have control as a business over when you make your first impression. That is, you can spend all of your efforts on putting up a facade, for a trivial and somewhat unrealistic example, having a fancy storefront made of velvet and gold. But you can’t predict when the consumer will start paying attention, and it will vary from person to person.

One person might be instantly attuned to the storefront and anchor their perception of your store to the overwhelmingly positive reaction they have to that. Another person might call in first and have a rude customer service interaction, and anchor their perception of your brand to that.

The conclusion that Godin comes to is that your brand needs to be uniformly represented throughout your company. In other words, your “company DNA” needs to be authentic. Or as Tony Hsieh said they can copy our website design and our business model, but they can’t copy our culture.

I just connected that Godin idea of uniformity being the best business practice to a post I read yesterday about Facebook database optimization — unlike many scalability experts who are concerned with optimizing for queries that are the fastest in good cases, Facebook optimizes to reduce the edge cases where queries unexpectedly take a long time, and is focused on minimizing variance

Anyway, back to Predictably Irrational, the most interesting idea that Ariely presents is a variation on this. He says (and shows through well-conceived experimental data) that people anchor a product to a price point only when they seriously consider purchasing it at that price, regardless of whether they end up purchasing it or not.

He does this using an experiment where you write down the last two digits of your social security number (for me that would be 01) and then decide whether you would pay that for a few items (wine, wireless keyboards…random shit) and then you make actual bids. He quizzed people when they exited and they said that writing down their SSNs had nothing to do with their eventual bids, although the data clearly showed a direct correlation. He describes the experiment in the chapter preview on his website.

So just setting a price doesn’t automatically make people think that your product is worth something around that (even if they think it’s vastly overpriced!) you need to get them to actually consider it. Like theres a different part of the brain that gets activated when a person has to actively judge whether to pay for something, and when that part gets activated, they try to nail down the value of each element they are weighing using whatever information they have available to them (the price being a major component of that) and some level of attribute substitution

As an aside, finding that attribute substitution link reminds me that if you’re interested in the psychology behind people’s decision-making algorithms (I’m fascinated by it) you should read this wikipedia article on heuristics in depth and click all the links.

There’s a few ways that all this relates to improv, which is the arena that always seems to be at the top of mind for me. Firstly, Godin’s idea of authentic dna holds true…unlike stand-up or other comedic formats, you can’t control how or when your message is received. Because each scene is different, you need to be authentically in the moment to be consistently good.

Also, and maybe this isn’t directly related to Ariely’s point about purposeful consideration being necessary for anchoring…actually, maybe it is. Anyway, the beginning of the scene is so fucking important. Conventional improv wisdom says that the scene is defined in the first three lines. I don’t know if that’s true (or maybe we’re just not good or fast enough) but the character of the scene is certainly defined in the first thirty seconds.

During that thirty seconds, the most important thing is that you and your partner anchor yourself in the same reality. From a listening perspective, that means “not just listening, but hearing” as our coach said yesterday. It means consciously considering and weighing every single word said, intonation used, and attitude conveyed by your partner. From an action perspective, it means making very clear statements to your partner…not being coy about what you want to express and making sure that they have the best chance of understanding what you intend to express for each early move you make.

Once this reality is established and you’re both anchored in it, you don’t have to be nearly as conscious of listening because it will all come naturally and the scene will flow organically as you’ve settled into your characters and the reality that you have created.

One thing our coach told us last week that has really stuck in my mind is to slow it down at the top of the scene. Don’t try to rush forward and present an immediately funny or interesting idea or worse yet a bizarre scenario. He was saying Neil Casey says “you can go to crazy town, but you have to take the local”

The most important thing then at the top of scenes, for the first 30 seconds, is not to generate laughs from the audience, but to establish a joint reality with your partner so that you can both comfortably react naturally, knowing that you share the same anchor.