Textism

Click-throughs built the pyramids

28 Apr 2008, 6pm

However you may happen to feel on the subject, I’m pleased as punch to have been asked to participate in , the rakishly named advertising network ‘reaching creative, web and design professionals’ run by Coudal Partners in Chicago. Textism now joins , , , and suchlike damn fine web sites providing the goods and asking little in return but the occasional pause to click through and consider a product or service that may be of use. If not, not. Your call.

My only condition for joining was free license to slap around others in the network, and the advertisers themselves, to which Jim Coudal’s response was ‘of course’, so, as they say, sorted.

This is a paid advertisement

Ads via

Yet another peony

28 Apr 2008, 12pm

This one is in decay, which makes me think of absinthe and black kohl, sweat, amphetamines and teenagers working through anger and rage in notebooks full of crap.

And, after a weekend up to my armpits in it, may I make the following observation: Aperture (and, to a lesser degree, Lightroom) is to Photoshop as a finely honed chef’s knife is to a factory full of circular saws.

On cameras and flies

25 Apr 2008, 5pm

I am as they say hereabouts nul when it comes to taking photographs. As a designer slash art director I think I had a fairly good eye for what makes a picture work, and what makes one work in a layout – at least I hope so, wouldn’t want those thousands of hours spent squinting into loupes over light tables saying nope nope nope to have amounted to nothing. When it comes to taking the things myself though, always a frustration. Press the shutter release, hope for the best, and never ever end up with what was expected (well, maybe once). Not entirely unversed in the logic of exposure time and apertures, but ultimately just too impatient to develop anything like the supple knowledge photographers whose work I like can access in an instant. That and I’ve been using the wrong goddamn cameras.

For years now I’ve used Leica (or more often the Panasonic Lumix versions, which have the same glass and electronics but come much cheaper) consumer-end cameras, mainly because some lingering art school snobbery I picked up as a teenager dictates that anything Leica or Hasselblad marks you as a better photographer than any Japanese silliness ever possibly could. True or not (not) the pictures kept turning out wrong: impossible to get a good white balance in anything other than direct sunlight, noisy junk all over the place at any speed greater than 100 ASA, slippery autofocus that took, like, a couple hours to lock in before firing the shutter. Finally it dawned on me after a few years of blind brand allegiance what Leica’s consumer products are: a brilliant, razor-sharp lens up front, a webcam on back.

I’ve always been reluctant to use a DSLR – the one sure thing about being an expat is you never want to look like a tourist – however having just this week received a lump sum payment that has at long last made its way through the barely perceptible movements of the rusty squeaking gears that is accounts payable at a certain publishing concern that shall remain, er, unnamed, I did two capricious things I’d been champing at the bit to do for ages: bought Herself (who is, justifiably, more than a little tired of being given my smoked and smudged hand-me-downs) a bright shiny white portable computing device, and myself a Nikon D60, with the standard vanilla 18–55mm kit lens. After all I’m now at the stage in life where, looks-wise, coming off as a tourist occupies the least of my concern.

First fly spotted this year. Many billions more will come.

Christ on a bike what a difference. I feel like someone handed a slice of hot toast spread with cultured butter after a lifetime breakfasting on Skittles and government cheese. I mean, it does what I want it to! It autofocuses in less time than it takes my eyes to imagine what a proper focus would be! You can take pictures in tungsten light without tacking a fucking white card to the wall and metering fifteen times! You push the button and it takes a fucking picture! I am in consumer ecstasy! I am in consumer ecstasy! NyQuil! Advil! Malt liquor! 

Ahem. Gonna go take pictures of my feet.

Podswollop

24 Apr 2008, 12pm

Alright, here’s another item about a well-established phenomenon that everyone has already commented the bejaysus out of, but I’ve decided it’s my turn so deal.

Back in the day, by the time Winer (is there anything Dave Winer doesn’t claim to have invented?) and Curry were at mortal combat over who came up with the podcast, the format already had so firmly applied that the time requirements and relatively laborious process of trying one out just to see if you like it were plainly unworthy of the effort. One morning, so it seemed, there it was: an ocean of audio to choose from, and any programmatic or communo-Darwinian attempts to filter out quality failed or dried up in no time. Sure, if you’re the sort of person who takes Lost seriously, you’re going to listen to a Lost podcast; to each his own cultural flags and lapel pins. But the stylistic arena of text and images is so exponentially more vast, and so much easier to negotiate a rewarding path through, it’s hard not to think of the format as broken, a dead end. Perhaps that’s why many come and go so quickly.

Tim Bray twat something which I think goes to a core problem with podcasts: they’re useless unless you’re driving, or cooking, or exercising, or doing anything at all other than thinking.

That said, and as eagerly as I concur with Maciej’s timeless of the early hype, it seems podcasts have to an extent matured, however little they’ve ‘revolutionised’ ‘blogging’. And the early awkwardnesses of delivery are clearly gone as well: consider the various excellent tools that iTunes offers to let you get to your music. Sorts, searches, ratings, playlists, smart folders: all good stuff, and I can’t think of much more you could do to make navigation easier, but despite having music absolutely ground into my DNA, I still gravitate more nowadays to podcasts. I realise this has more to do with their listen-once-then-delete nature versus the pleasures of hearing music again, but the way iTunes and iPods handle podcasts is just so much better: you know right away how recent something is and whether it’s been heard or not. Both will happily resume playing an item at the exact spot you paused it weeks before. And of course the process of passive subscription via XML feed is perfectly executed.

As to the qualities of maturity, here’s what I currently listen to:

The Daily Show’s John Oliver and standup Andy Zaltzmann bicker, snark, and bicker some more about the week’s news. Very funny and surprisingly rude considering it’s done under the imprimatur of the Times of London.

The best cultural round-table show in existence, I think. Every week the BBC’s Andrew Marr gathers together a group of people with something to plug, and forces them to comment on each other’s work. This can get uncomfortable. First thing I listen to when it shows up late Monday.

The BBC’s Friday afternoon movie show. Don’t care about the star interviews or the poets brought in to review the new releases, I just like Francine Stock’s voice.

No words needed, really.

Always good weekly wrapup of the week-nightly BBC arts and letters programme. Mark Lawson is a very sharp writer and broadcaster, but if there is such a thing as an English honky, his voice would be easily considered the definition thereof.

Those unfamiliar with Jonafan Woss’s TV talk shows and radio gig at BBC2 may recall him cavorting and picnicking with Ricky Gervais in the second series of Extras. Standard celebrity interviews and banter about his dogs, fascination with contemporary Japanese kitsch, usually worth a chuckle while, I don’t know, making lunch.

This is the only radio that I sometimes listen to streamed live. A vainglorious, tetchy, pompadoured skiffle musician with the balls to refer to himself as ‘Dr Kermode’ because he once completed a thesis on genre fiction bickers with the rather more sports-focused host about the week’s movies. Kermode is best when he goes off on a tear, the Da Vinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean III rants being good examples easily found via a quick boo at them video sharing sites.

It kind of irks me that this flawlessly researched and always interesting show lets its political allegiances slip so often, whether I agree with them or not, but Terry Gross is easily the interviewer I most want to hear confront the creative and the powerful. And Gene Simmons. Less xsittinginforterrygross though, please.

The format never changes, Carl Kassell never gets the jokes, but it’s always hilarious, in that gentle, not-too-far, NPR way.

Even more politically slanted than Fresh Air, but always interesting and tenacious. Wish they’d change the theme music one of these decades.

With Kurt Andersen, the only Spy magazine founder who didn’t go on to embody everything that Spy magazine used to mock. Great piece recently about Will Self’s habit of getting into town from airports on foot.

For someone so relentlessly deft with language, the neologisms he’s been flinging about at stephenfry.com (‘blessays’,‘blisquisitions’,‘podgrams’) are downright cloth-eared, but no matter: the posts are great, the geekery is great, and the podcasts are just bliss, as intimate as good narrative radio, but notably, what, self-consciously unselfconscious? So much has been said about Fry’s ability to just talk, and here, in unedited and largely improvised sessions, he does just that.

(I was going to mention , but stopped subscribing to it because as much of a fan of Robert Krulwich I am, the mannered nature of the show’s production makes listening to it not unlike trying to read a good science book surrounded by kids on a playdate, and then there’s , but that one’s on a timeout for now, until we can have a wee bit less merkins and baby vomit.)

Dog day morning

22 Apr 2008, 2pm

It likely goes back to the childhood tendency to resist bedtime because you don’t want to miss out on anything, but after a lifetime of thinking of sleep (or, more precisely, the effort of getting to sleep chemically unaided) as an enemy of sorts – a boring frustration to wage a war of resistance against – I’m now that guy who’ll willingly hit the sack at, say, nine, and get up at, say, five or six. Living rurally this is of course standard; people get cracking early because there’s work to be done, real work involving maybe the employment of machines and livestock, or the government of children, not sitting around all confused about why your left joins are borked or blathering on about your sleep habits.

The bonus of step-fatherhood, at least inasmuch as I’ve managed to wrangle my way into it, is never having to have gone through the years of constant sleep interruption brought on by infants. (I really don’t know how you people do that. I mean, I admire the skill and tenacity required, but find it difficult to envy: sleep anxiety or not, once you go under the last thing you want to do is stop.) When I arrived here the kids were just approaching tweenhood, now they’re away at school most of the time. Lovely when they’re here (well, ‘lovely’ factoring in every possible variation of the stupidly bothersome cliches of the worldwide alliance of teenaged girls rulebook) but when they’re not, meh, I’m going to need someone to explain the downside of this ‘empty nest syndrome’ to me in plain language. Plus I can sleep whenever I want.

No matter how early I get up, the landlord slash neighbour slash troublesome IT client’s lights will already be on. As a retired bureaucrat, he has no real labour to get to; most likely he’s doodling little hearts and teddy bears in his Nicolas Sarkozy notebook.

Anyway I’m pretty sure it’s not the quiet tranquility of the early morning that has caused this behaviour shift – quiet tranquility piles up like uncollected trash here in hicktown France. It’s not the GTD, cleared inbasket, mailbox zero efficiency that the extra time offers (though it is useful to get a head start violating the copyright of whatever interesting happened to be on television the night before throughout the commonwealth of english-speaking content provision, and, for better or worse, I suppose it’s had a lot to do with the return of this site). It’s not the beauty of sunrise, so much in favour with businessmen after that first heart attack. I’m hoping it’s enough to conclude that it’s learning, however late, to think of a day as connected in some way to what went on during the one previous, and what will on the one following, rather than treating a day, as I have for years and years, as something to pad with distractions and microscopic achievements until it’s time once more to wage war with sleep. I’m aiming to have some understanding of this time-as-continuum business when I grow up, but in the meantime Russian poetry has started making a lot more sense.

The dogs, amazingly, are approaching this new early-rising folderol with rather less nuance, reflecting not at all on anyone’s considerations of sleep and time. Their math is simple: light plus vertical people means dogs go out for walk then dogs eat full stop. They’re reasonably well-behaved – not Cesar Milan well-behaved, not dog borstal either – and the natural weimaraner tendency to own the room at all times has been lessened over the years, but Hugo before the morning walk, man. Imagine commanding a rolling tank to keep it down and hold on a minute before flattening that there house, fella.

Given that we prefer to take the boys out for their walk together, if I get up at, say, six, and Herself opts to sleep until, say, nine, the dog choices are as follows:

Leave both in the bedroom with Herself
This results in both dogs pacing, whining, and pressing the small of her back with cold wet noses in case she is unaware that, hello, the day has begun, but I get some nice quiet time downstairs to drink coffee and write bullshit like this.

Leave Oliver in the bedroom and bring Hugo downstairs
On his own, Hugo can be weirdly calm, even in advance of the walk. He’ll just sit at attention beside my desk, confusedly staring. Oliver, upstairs, will be pacing and whining, but to a smaller degree than if Hugo were there (they bring out the worst in each other). He’ll also climb up on the bed when I’m not around, the presumptuous bounder.

Leave Hugo in the bedroom and bring Oliver downstairs
This is not an option, as Hugo’s tendency to go jealously mental if there’s any possibility Oliver is having more fun than he will contribute, eventually, to the universe collapsing on itself.

Bring both dogs downstairs
This can work. Let the boys out for a quick drain in the back yard, then they just sort of hang, quietly anxious, in my office. I can usually shush the pacing and whining, but if it gets to be too much, the all-purpose timeout zone that is the cages in the room next door works a treat. So long as the occasional rustle of noise indicates I’m still nearby, they’re perfectly calm. However. If I leave my office for any length of time, for, say, ablutions or another cup of coffee: imagine the sound of a packed kennel just as a cat steps through the front door, and multiply by seven.

A friend writes

21 Apr 2008, 12pm

I don’t know what kind of self-important fucknozzle you have to be to consider your personal correspondence worthy of interest to site visitors, but it turns out I’m one of them:

Dean

re “Still looks like complete pants on Windows, but no surprises there.” (April 8 post)

Isn’t this proof of your excellently muddled citizenship? I mean, to use “pants” at all reveals a man who knows his Amis (and not just his amis), a Londoner at heart; and the addition of “complete” is Canadian through and through; but to say something looks “like” pants is pure American, surely. Proper Ye Olde English usage is simply “looks pants”, no?

Good to have you back – and very glad last summer is gone.

Best wishes to you and Gail.

yrs Matt.

I nominate this to be awarded the prize for the greatest email ever written, in a competition to be judged by a panel of me and my affectations.

Please stop doing this

19 Apr 2008, 10am

Surely any semantic machine doing semantic machine-reading will be semantically smart enough to know what to look for. Do we really need to think about it every time?

Just a feed that works will do nicely kthxbai.

20 Apr 2008, 11am

UPDATE  Having seen to this, it’s clear I should’ve been less terse here. My point is that feed autodiscovery as it is in Safari (and Firefox, Camino, Firefox 2 on XP, Opera, iCab) is a very good thing, and I agree it’s perfect for , allowing feeds carrying different content to be quickly tweezed out without one having to hunt for links on a page. If however you argue that multiple formats are important because, say, Microsoft prefers RSS while Google prefers Atom, then it’s trivial for you, Microsoft and Google to work that out amongst yourselves (think CSS). Just please don’t require every single person who tries a feed autodiscovery popup to have to decide if they want their ice cream served in a boot, a Pontiac, or a waffle cone.

21 Apr 2008, 9am

UPDATE  Oh, clarity, clarity. For the record I should say I in no way intended to ‘call out’ Dan Hill or his excellent site  for doing any wrong whatsoever. I merely happened to be subscribing to his feed and was reminded how annoying this particular annoyance is. Really it was just intended as a yo to those now producing templates for web publishing apps to be aware that browser feed autodiscovery + multiple = vastly bigger problem than any solved by multiple formats.

Twitch

18 Apr 2008, 3pm

Okay, so: a couple weeks in, thirteen items – whup, I guess fourteen now. Long mea culpa: check; lazy satire of silly hype: check; dork meme: check; create even more unhelpful about page than that dinosaur from 2003: check; unnecessarily detailed food porn: check; bit of oldskoollinkylove: check. What else what else. Oh: write for the sake of writing.

Where we live now is forty five minutes from everywhere. It takes just as long to get to Nîmes as to Avignon, to Alès as to Orange. Montpellier and Marseille (much more desirable destinations) are an hour and fifteen minutes each. Montpellier is the good Asian food store, the good Apple-centric shop and, lately, Ikea. Marseille is the international airport and, until recently, Ikea.

It’s only now, in my forties, that I’ve developed involuntary physical reactions to trivial stimuli. For example there’s that Scandinavian pop song (whistling, bongo drums) from last year that was firmly, intractably stuck in my head during a patch of time that was so bad it seemed the world was quietly and meticulously toiling away at ever more bad news to send my way. Song and bad patch are melded together, like chewing gum and sand. I’ve deleted the song from every device and playlist, but each time I go to the more desirable grocery store (seven minutes away, as opposed to the less desirable’s five), I keep forgetting that they play its opening hook over the PA every fifteen minutes or so, presumably to perk my attention before a honeyed voice-over artist delivers the assertion that the experience of shopping there (not the goods therein, nor the store itself) is making my life simpler. In some ways this is true, but let me not digress.

So the scene goes like this: tallish, po-faced man is scanning the dairy aisle for the ever-elusive, elastic and frankly invisible dividing lines between yaourt, fromage frais and fromage blanc; he has a crinkled look that says, this really should make more sense, and then whup, here comes the big whistle and the bongo drums, and he twitches around in a three-quarter turn as though someone had just emptied a cup of warm water into his waistband. There is little dignity in this.

I think it’s pure coincidence that the other example of a small stimulus – I refer here to Ikea – causing involuntary reaction is Scandinavian, but perhaps not. I do know that what greets you when you walk in the door: the smell of dirty children screaming in the ball room, the smell of cheap sausage meat steaming, right beside the entrance, in the exit snäkbär, the smell of MDF, of balsawood, of Lithuanian pine, the knowing you’ll have to do the grand tour or get lost rather than just find something and leave, the cheap shittiness of everything on display, even the little fucking pencils, combined with that fact this inescapable blue-and-yellow thing has gotten rich via one of the most , well. Last time I actually started twitching in the parking lot.

And that darling one is why we’re not going to Ikea any more.

Shiny shiny

17 Apr 2008, 9am

• . Stupid flash interface (+ beside ⇥ beside ▸ means what now?) but a grand nostalgia ride all the same.
  
• ‘Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us’. On BBC4 last Monday night (UK residents can see it on the BBC’s , for the rest of us it’s up on the usual, erm, channels). Surprisingly thorough documentary in which the Man with a Brain the Size of Hugh Laurie is humbled and amazed by all that went into the production of Gutenberg’s . He cuts, smoke-proofs and casts type (well, an e), has interesting asides on what really goes into making vellum and on Gutenberg’s financial woes, makes paper from rag pulp, assists in the building of a press, prints a page, and, finally, dons the cotton gloves to leaf through a copy of the real deal. Fry’s shows are always a treat – his journey on the genealogy program ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ a couple years ago was truly moving – and this’n be no exception.
• . Similar in scope to the of a few years ago. How nice is it to have someone going through a daunting cookbook recipe by recipe so you don’t have to. My own experience with The French Laundry Cookbook has so far been limited to failing at making the veal stock, but this site does give one courage.
• . Happened upon while looking around for info on the 1970s Pepsi/Stolichnaya barter deal. ‘Printing plants were centralized. There were two plants in Leningrad which were printing labels for ¼ of the whole country.’ Evidently only one standard die shape too.
• . Strangely dry collection of TOCs published in pamphlet form by the AIGA last year. Other than Air Guitar, the Nabokov and of course the Bringhurst, I fear there’s not much there, there.

Some day you will know what you are doing

16 Apr 2008, 5pm

I direct your attention to a magnificent piece by Maciej Cegłowski on not tango but (people who dance Argentine tango always do hasten to point out the distinction, or so I have noticed, but then what the fuck do I know I can’t even cha-cha).