I love Kanye West. I think you need brazen, arrogant fearless artists that think and say preposterous things in order to move the thinking of a society for the better or for the worse. He has a dozen songs that I simply love that are older but still on my playlists, and I love that he immerses himself in creativity.
Sure, he can be a colossal ass sometimes, but I still think he's an important part of our societal ecosystem. We need people like him in our pop culture just like we need Stephen Hawking, Maya Angelou, Muhammed Ali, etc.
I fire up either Kanye West or Jay-Z whenever I have that feeling in the pit of my stomach before doing a difficult thing. Sometimes you just need a little bit of brazen, bombast to get started.
If you listen to Kanye's music, he is highly self-critical and introspective at many times. I think this is a type of fearlessness, specifically the ability to be so publicly vulnerable (though I don't know if that's what GP had in mind).
Kanye's public image is reflective more of the pressures of his industry and how our celebrity culture depicts famous artists. However I think it goes beyond that to broader social and economic factors. Consider how many conversations there are on HN about dealing with imposter syndrome; if you compare Kanye's media portrayal and his music, I think there are strong parallels many people here could identify with.
Excellent. I guess I ought to use this post to plug the Command Riker as a Service (CRaaS?) which I put together a while back, which operates in a similar vein.
I suppose someone should put together a directory of these things at some point. Give it twenty years and we'll have a full universe of personality imprints (a la the McCoy Pauley) talking to each other over REST.
Hosting the site cost nothing. Using $7/mo Heroku server for API with HTTPS and custom domain. Firebase can quickly start to cost money. Domain around $32/year. So it definitely does cost money to run, but not much at all.
If you want to reduce your costs, you can have HTTPS with a custom domain on a free Heroku app by using Cloudflare. Why are you using Firebase to serve quotes? I imagine the dataset could number just a couple thousand quotes max, which is fine to serve from memory after loading from a file at startup.
Or if you're using Firebase as a convenient interface for adding new quotes, the app could update its internal cache of quotes once a day, without having to pay Firebase for each API call.
Yeah, I realized that after it started getting a lot of traffic. The problem is I kinda just made this for fun and have no idea what I am doing. Do you want to contribute? https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest
Yeah... I have a small codefund ad on the site, but that doesn't do much because this product is an API. I have a support link, but I don't expect anyone to donate for something they will likely never use seriously.
Using Firebase to more easily add quotes. However, I did not anticipate this much traffic. As another user pointed out, I am probably going to need to cache the quotes to prevent an enormous amount of reads to the database. Feel free to contribute if you have good ideas :) https://github.com/ajzbc/kanye.rest
Sure, he can be a colossal ass sometimes, but I still think he's an important part of our societal ecosystem. We need people like him in our pop culture just like we need Stephen Hawking, Maya Angelou, Muhammed Ali, etc.