Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Amazon recently bought Twitch for a billion dollars. If you are wondering what Twitch is, let Peter Kafka and Eric Johnson explain : “For the uninitiated, Twitch is a platform for making and talking about videos of videogame play. About a million users a month record themselves playing videogames, while the rest — pegged at 50 million unique viewers in July — watch and comment on the videos.” If that sounds insane to you, consider what John Gruber has to say : “The future of TV is online streaming, not traditional “channels” that come through cable or satellite…My son and his friends watch far more YouTube content than they do traditional TV. Cable TV is dying.” Seth Godin commented on how he had a similar idea way back in 1989! Of course, back then, it meant making “videotapes of people playing video games”, not online streaming. Godin though isn’t bitter: “No, the hard part isn't merely thinking of an idea…The truly hard part is, 25 years later, sticking with it lo...

A young writer presented his first work to Philip Roth and this was how the conversation went: “he (Roth) told the guy to quit writing. Here’s the exact quote: “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.” Elizabeth Gilbert argued against Roth’s advice: “Now, listen. While it is certainly not historically unheard of for famous authors to complain about their torturous lives (Balzac: “I am a galley slave to pen and ink”; Styron: “Let’s face it. Writing is hell”; Mailer: “Every one of my books killed me a little more”) this statement — by one of America’s most lauded living novelists — struck me as particularly cranky. Because, seriously — is writing really all that difficult? Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally — but is it that much more...