All that trepidation wasn’t without good reason, as it turned out. You could hardly count layer tennis as physically demanding, but its breakneck speed and creative intensity do require dexterity and stamina — the fifteen minutes allotted to each volley is surprisingly intensive and vanishingly brief. Still, what I didn’t expect was how much fun the live atmosphere of layer tennis was. In the past, I’d always come to layer tennis matches after they were over and done with, perusing each match’s archive of volleys after the fact. Layer tennis in real time, though, is where the fun is.

Most people, I suspect, regard Mike Judge’s movies with similar levels of mild interest, even those who are devotees of his unexpectedly great classic of the cubicle age, “Office Space.” At first glance, Judge’s movies are deceptively unremarkable, even generic. But upon closer inspection, they turn out to be surprisingly memorable — very nearly indelible — and his thus far brief oeuvre has already made for a directorial record that many other auteurs would envy. The satirically dystopian future he imagined in “Idiocracy,” for instance, is probably more accurate and certainly more entertaining than most of what science fiction has ever offered us. It also happens to be more hilarious than most movies of any genre.

Layer tennis, for those unfamiliar with it, is that curiously un-aerobic Internet sport in which two graphically adroit competitors, armed with Photoshop, swap a single image file back and forth, embellishing each volley with collage-like visual ornamentation. Oh, and it’s all done under the watchful eye of a stopwatch, so the pace can get kind of frenetic; each volley is fifteen minutes long, and the match is over after just ten volleys. Fun stuff. Check out the archive of previous matches to get a sense of what’s ahead. And point your browser to Layertennis.com on Friday to see Nicholas probably kick my ass.

Here’s my assessment so far: it’s a superbly crafted entertainment but it executes itself haphazardly. I find myself easily drawn into its fundamentally strong storytelling tactics, but even after watching the best episodes, the momentum of the series inspires no real confidence that the next installment will be any good.

And, frankly, I don’t really get what’s happening. What is this show about? A time shifting island? A fractious fraternity of metaphysically-challenged losers? A just-in-time catalog of bogus belief systems? I have no idea, really, but to the show’s credit it’s all good enough to keep me thinking about it. Herewith, then, are some random notes from a Viewer New to “Lost”

However. I’m pretty sure that I’m in the camp that believes that this is not the salvation that most publishing companies have been looking for. Not that the device falls short in some way, but rather because nothing can save publishing as it’s been operating for the past several decades. The iPad does nothing to change the brutal mandate that has been pushing publishers to change for these many years; if anything it compounds the imperative.

As a general principle, there’s no way around evolution, and in this specific instance the reality is that there is no direct translation of the print experience to digital media. That is, the content can be translated, but it’s not likely to be as literal as many might expect or even hope. Those looking to the iPad to return us to some semblance of a print-like reading experience are basically wrong, I believe. In fact, lots of really smart people will continue to get this wrong going forward. We’re all still figuring out. That’s the definition of an opportunity.

I still like writing about movies though, still enjoy articulating my thoughts about them, trying to get at the core ideas in filmed media that matter to me. Whether or not anyone really likes them, or whether the generally design-centric audience for this blog finds anything relevant in them, I’m not sure. But writing about shit you like is one of the perks of having your own blog, so I’m going to keep doing it — when I can. I’m just going to have get used to writing more succinctly, and get over the embarrassment of sometimes only publishing my thoughts long, long after the movies have left the current spotlight. Here are three write-ups to get started.

Looking back, I liked a lot of the music I heard, and got reasonably excited about it too. Maybe not as excited as I used to get about music, back when I had a lot more free time, a lot less money, and a mistaken belief that pop music could be useful a framework for living one’s life. But for the first year in many years, I got genuinely enthusiastic about what seemed like a lot of new acts. Maybe it was a subconscious attempt to retain or rekindle youth as I entered parenthood, or maybe it was the fact that a brilliant record label run by a friend from my twenties came roaring back even more brilliantly than it had ever been before, but I found a lot to like when I plugged my earbuds into my iPod last year. Anyway you look at it, there were a lot of good tunes in 2009, and I’d like to share some of them with you.