I’m tired of my artist friends fetishizing pre-web media, feeling that to matter they have to print a book, get published at a magazine, or get funded to film a cinema movie or start a “real” startup. Fuck that.
You know how those over 40 make fluffy pronouncements about new digital literacies?
Well, the new literacy is PUBLISHING: reaching hundreds, thousands, millions through web media, for next to nothing, and learning to hold their attention. It’s only tangentially a technical challenge.
End rant. I love you artist friends.
I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.
So I created this
experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story,
linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to
first sources as much as possible. The
favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.
Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.
At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling
highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:
The idea is to
highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to
lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the
high switch is turned on again.
It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.
Before I came to Japan, I used to pester my sister who had been here with the question of what exactly did Japanese people do during their looong commutes (around 1 hour each way!). It’s perhaps the biggest free time chunk of one of the biggest economies in the world, so it intrigued me and it still does.
Well, they read Japanese books
(usually quite compact because of kanji’s density) or the newspaper
(carefully folding it halves or quarters), play Nintendo DS or Sony
PSP, listen to music, sleep… But mostly, they use their ketais. Not to talk, no one ever talks on the train
(despite the alleged perfect reception), but to
text, watch TV, check train routes, surf the Japanese mobile web…
8 of the 10 persons in the front row in this picture are using their phone (!). And the guy in the mask whipped it up a bit after I took this picture.
Chiba is where she’s from. William Gibson’s Neuromancer also took place here. It’s the eastern sleeperside of Tokyo and I currently call it home. Its kanji mean thousand leaves and so, of course, the mille-feuille is the official cake. Japanese make a great deal of its shape and 2 animal logos based on it are in current use. Isn’t the yellow one captivating in its deformity?
Similar cover articles have been common for more than a decade now.
In computer magazines.
This is a women’s fashion magazine (!).
220 sites you’ve never heard of, devoted to makeup, fashion, beauty, style..
The jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks—we’re all webheads now.
I’d rather be a maker than an employee.
I’d rather craft products than nurse a job.
And I’d rather be a customer than a boss.
Another day of beautiful food. As have been the case as far back as I can recall these days. Hog heaven on Earth, me proclaims it. I feel so blessed.
Khanom Kui Chai: Fried vegetable puddings sold by a smiley street seller. Chewy and delicious, swimming in sweet sauce and sour sauce.
Luk Chub: tiny colorful mock fruits made of bean paste
(!).
Yum Tua Poo: winged bean salad with chicken, egg & shrimp, bathed in a tasty tasty curry. With steamed white rice on the side, of course.
Sai Grok Esan: North-eastern style Thai sausage with lettuce, fresh ginger, chillies,
shallots (little, mild-flavored onions), lemons and peanuts. The sausage was lightly grilled but everything else was raw. This was a stellar dish. All the pieces may seem randomly assembled but they go together superbly. Crunchy, nutty, sour, pungent, fresh, fatty, spicy mouthfuls. The fat in the sausage even makes bearable chewing the chillies directly.
Then
Bua Loy Nam Khing, sesame-filled rice balls in hot ginger soup, for dessert!
We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.
What I remembered was that it was written by that
famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous
swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google
“federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.
This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.
The quote?
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb.
Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
David Foster Wallace
