My 'main' blog is very broken, so I guess I'll be spending more time here…
Category: Uncategorized
QotD: In-Flight Entertainment
How do you pass the time during a flight? What do you bring in your carry-on?
Archos 404, PSP, Lego Star Wars II and Guardian G2 crossword
Italian pooch sadness
Just crusing around some old photos and found this dog from Ivrea, which through the lowlight/camphone-lens looks like an oil painting to me. Lovely thing.
QotD: Give Me A Ring
What is your favorite ring tone?
Submitted by rach.
A guy I work with has the Mario theme as his ringtone.
When someone calls him our entire corner of the office starts humming, whistling and singing along.
Which makes me happy.
Smart Furniture
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Something by my friend and ex-colleague Bernie that raises “a smile in the mind”
Any SxSW tips for a first-time speaker?
Confirmed today that I'm going to be at SxSW Interactive this year, thanks to the kind invitation of Mr. Kevin Cheung.
I'm going to be on a panel talking about design for mobile, which is going to be a little wierd because what I do in the day job generally is help design mobiles themselves, their interaction design frameworks, the GUI and the apps on top – but I haven't really been up in the content layer for a while… Also, generally I'm working on stuff 18 months to 2 years out.
I hope people will be entertained / informed if I talk from that perspective and reach up to the content layer concerns as best I can. I'm not so familiar with SxSW – having only attended once and never spoken. I know a lot of people in my neighbourhood on Vox have – any tips?
P.s. I scored a room in the Hotel San Jose, which was a great place to hang out last time I was there.
Nemesis: twisted world-building at it’s best.
Just spent the last few days ill – and indulging myself with The Complete Nemesis The Warlock: Book 1.
2000AD was a formative influence in my life (as it probably is for many 30something British Males) but I'd forgotten just how much of that for me was down to Nemesis the Warlock.
2000AD as an anthology comic franchise has more famous characters – especially Judge Dredd – but nothing really appealed as much as the out-and-out wanton weirdness of Kevin O'Neill and Pat Mills at their creative height. Mills wanted to create something as weird and wonderful as he found in the pages of Metal Hurlant, but with the dark humour that 2000AD was known for.
Mills in his introduction to the collection:
"I liked the way the French would come up with crazy 'throwaway' worlds and plots; it reminded me of some of the wilder rock videos and, hence the musical references in the early Nemesis stories. With 'Terror Tube' and the tales that followed, Kevin an I were 'comic jamming' – writing and drawing the wildest stories we could think of, deliberately avoiding the traditional comic approach."
Of the creative partnership Kevin O'Neill states in the afterword to the book:
"We were never short of material for Nemesis – indeed we probably only put in a fraction of what we discussed… Ten pages made up as we went along – both desperate to top one another's mad flights of fancy"
The sheer amount of detail, in-jokes, strangeness, stomach-churning tentacular appendages and visual easter-eggs in each page is wonderful. Also, Mills creates a dark, funny and rollicking adventure that works as well if you are 9 or 34 years old.
Of course, as required of all great epic-adventure fictions, it has a really, really, really good bad guy in Tomas de Torquemada. Particularly once he has become a phantasm after a grizzly accident with a teleportation system. O'Neill runs wild with him from that point, and Mills gives him diabolical dialogue a-plenty to create a Moriarty-crossed-with-Matthew-Hopkins.
A fantastic, phantasmagorical blast from my past which I'd recommend anyone with fond memories of 2000AD to reacquaint themselves with; or if you've read 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' to see where Kevin O'Neill's brand of dense, twisted world-building began to hit it's stride.
Prepare the House of Shields!
I'll be in San Francisco/Palo Alto for work 10th-13th January, pretty much occupied in the days, so hopefully get to see a few of the neighbourhood in the evenings…
With the ill behaviour
In Grant Morrison's magnificently-wierd "The Filth", he proposes that we are all dancing to the whims of the billions of bacteria, mitochondria, and other microscopic lifeforms that inhabit us. Free will is an illusion brought on by human scale alone.
After this holiday season I know this to be true – I have been pole-axed by the common cold at one scale and the corporation at the other. My only days of paid leave that I used were spent coughing, sneezing, generally oozing mucus and feeling sorry for myself.
As the holiday season ebbed away, so did my illness. I can literally feel my cold winding down in perfect asymptotic minute-by-minute countdown synchronisation to my return to work.
Bloody marvellous.
On the plus side, I did get to catch up with quite a bit of television taped off the internets.
"Heroes" is fine nonsense, isn't it?
I got ‘5 thingzd’ by Matt Webb
My vox blog seems to be the place for these sorts of 'LiveJournally' things, so I hope Webb doesn't think I'm cheating.
Here are five trivial things that most people won't know but couldn't possibly be used to socially-engineer me (I have a theory that all such memes are a masssively-distributed I.D. theft scam) – enjoy!
1) I illustrated a two-page Judge Dredd story at age 14. It was in the 1987 Judge Dredd Annual, and was the only story ever to feature Dredd and Ace Garp. I'd won the chance to do it through a children's TV show called 'Splash'. It was written by Alan Grant who was wonderful about it all (as were the entire editiorial team, including Steve McManus/Tharg) and spoilt me rotten with advice and help. I got paid for it (handsomely, I thought) and put the money towards buying an Atari 520STFM. I never got to draw comic books professionally, but perhaps I will when I grow up.
2) I wanted to study graphic design or typography at college, but got disuaded by a combination of my father, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I thought graphic designers would be on the Golgafringian B Ark) and having a massive unrequited crush on a girl who was going to university, not art college. Hence, architecture – and all the fun since. The irony, of course, is that I now have a job that is deeply 'B Ark'.
3) I had glandular fever through my 'A' levels (the final exams you do before leaving secondary school around 17/18) which meant that I kept falling asleep during the exams and had to be nudged awake by the invigilators. I got it from snogging someone on my 18th birthday, who then dumped me. All I remember about her now is that she wore pop socks. I probably benefitted from some kind of lucid dream recall effect, as I got pretty good results.
4) I got a travel scholarship from my university to visit Los Angeles in 1994 and stayed with an alumni of my architecture school who was working for Richard Meier on the Getty Center. I got back to Cardiff and couldn't afford to publish my report in order to claim the balance of my scholarship, so I taught myself HTML and published my first website, which got me my first job working on the web back in 1995. My queries on web design and HTML were answered by Rob Hartill, who was at Cardiff working on the very first version of the IMDb and Heather Champ, who was creating lovely websites for the architecture school at Princeton.
5) I have pissed against what is widely accepted to be one of the most magnificent pieces of 20th Century Architecture – The Salk Institute, La Jolla. This is a secret shame I share with Matt Webb.
I guess this is where I'm meant to tag five people? So I would like to hear from Jack Schulze, Dan Hill, Chris Heathcote, Desiree Milosevic and of course, Foe Romeo…
Petafloptimism 