As I'm sure many of you will have heard, Jean Giraud, the French artist known as Moebius, passed away recently. A number of authors and designers have commented (for example Neil Gaiman's post here and Aaron Diaz's here) on his impact. I grew up going to comic book shops and seeing his art displayed prominently. He did a lot of covers for French ( Read more... )

Holy crap it's been a long time since I've posted! I just restored from my last saved draft and it said "Happy September everybody!" Yikes. I have no excuse except to say that I have been crazy busy. I've hopped onto my friend page a few times to see how you all were doing but have been feeling very uninspired when it comes to posting.

Wow. Well, ( Read more... )

Excerpt from Umberto Eco's 1994 article on the "holy war" between Mac and PC (via the Guardian). Even more relevant today than when it was written:

"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is... cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by ( Read more... )

I just put in an order for the Bilingual Vocabulary for Governance, Public Policy and Administration. It's a Canadian French-English dictionary written specifically for bureaucrats.  It was written by a formal civil servant. Word geek that I am, I am quite looking forward to leafing through it.

I heard about the book when the author was interviewed ( Read more... )

The always fantastic Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com has written an article on the laws that kids make up. Unsurprisingly, kids turn out to be pretty sophisticated legal theorists. When you're as relatively powerless as a child, you tend to have very nuanced views about property and fairness.

What schoolyard or kid-created laws do you remember from ( Read more... )

I just spent the last 15 minutes reading BMW's 18,000 pixel-long banner ad. Comprising images and 5,526 words, it is, apparently, the longest ad ever written. I quite enjoyed it. While it is at times a bit to smugly aware of its own cleverness it is both funny and informative and keeps things rolling along.

My only irritation with it is that I can' ( Read more... )

Neat little video on the state of the internet. I really love these sorts of videos that display lots of information in an entertaining fashion. Very useful as persuasion tools. I wish I knew how to make them.

A collection of excellent but disturbing public service posters. Is the practice of using shock to motivate people towards charity ultimately ( Read more... )

My weekend mainly involved barbecues and Harry Potter, both of which I enjoyed thoroughly. Brainslie and I camped out in Chapters on Friday night to receive our hardcover copies of Deathly Hallows. Thanks to the fact that the cats' stomachs are now set to go off at 6:30AM, I was up in plenty of time to dig in to the 600 page final chapter of the ( Read more... )

Woke up this morning to find that the weather has gone haywire again. The cats were all yowly which led me to the belated realization that we had left the cat food in the trunk of the car downstairs. This led to my being far far more awake than I had intended, far earlier than I had intended.

On the plus side only one more week until Brainslie and I ( Read more... )

I first encountered Kurt Vonnegut's books when I was wandering through my Dad' s book collection, looking for something new. His books were strange and filled with odd characters saying odd things. His works embodied for me the true value of good science fiction, in that they challenges the way we see technology, society, ethics and ourselves as ( Read more... )