More Insight and Not-Negativity

Monday, 19 May 2025

Some “thank god some of you remembered because I thought I was going nuts” follow-up regarding my remembrance the other day, “15 Years Later: ‘Very Insightful and Not Negative’”. I wrote:

So, what would you do if Steve Jobs was quoted in a viral blog post saying, “We think «Your Name Here»’s post is very insightful and not negative”? I decided to just sit there with a smug look on my face for a few days (which, arguably, isn’t all that different from what I do most days) and pretend that it was no big deal. I didn’t link to it or mention it on Daring Fireball, and as far as I can tell, I didn’t even tweet it. As best I can recall, I thought I should just play it cool. I mean of course my article about why Apple changed Section 3.3.1 was right. Why brag? Given that Steve Jobs was reading Daring Fireball, I didn’t want him to read a post from me acting like it was a big deal that he’d recommended a piece I wrote and agreed with it.

About a dozen long-time readers recalled that I did, in fact, acknowledge it on Daring Fireball — and as soon as I saw the first message, it all came back to me. I never linked to the viral blog post where Jobs was quoted recommending my article. I never mentioned it in a post. But I did acknowledge it, in what is clearly the most Daring-Fireball-ish way possible: I made it the slogan under the logo banner. That it was only ever a slogan in a PNG logo graphic explains why I couldn’t find it by searching. And I still have that version of the logo (because I keep everything):

I can’t remember if I omitted the very before insightful for aesthetic length, humility, or because I somehow thought it was punchier. But my 2025 self thinks it was a mistake to omit it. It surely looks blurry on your screen today, because it’s a 1× graphic scaled to the correct size. In April 2010, 2× retina resolution wasn’t yet a thing — remember, that was the very month that Gizmodo published details regarding a stolen iPhone 4 prototype, which was the device that introduced “retina resolution” to the world. At 50 percent, you can see it pixel-perfect (the slogan is rendered in Susan Kare’s exquisite Kare Five Dots pixel font), but small:

In the very early days, there was always a slogan under the DF logo. Originally: “Mac Punditry and Curmudgeonry”. Then, for several years, I’d mix it up, with descriptive slogans like “Mac + Web Nerdery, Etc.”, but also with ones that were just there for fun: “Now With Retsyn”, “Simple Tricks and Nonsense”, and, during the 2008 World Series, “Phillies Fever”. But for the last decade or so, I’ve left the logo banner slogan-less most weeks of the year.

Feels like the right time to bring back a little whimsy, so I’ve put “Very Insightful and Not Negative” back as the slogan for now, and I’m thinking I should keep occasionally having some fun up there.