Problems

Thu 26 Jul 200104:14 PM

My ISP got hacked a few times over the past few days, and so Subtraction.com has been down and email sent to me has probably been bouncing. It’s pretty annoying, but it’ll get it all sorted soon.

And Then I Snapped Out of It

Wed 18 Jul 200109:25 PM

For months and months, it seemed like I was unable to get motivated to do any substantial work on my own, personal projects. It was awful, like a haze, like a cloud of befuddlement. Every time I sat down to try and do some sort of work, I felt lost. I can’t cite a specific cause, but it looks like I’ve been able to snap out of that funk over the past few days, and it’s been invigorating. I’m cooking up something I hope to post here soon.

They Rule

Tue 17 Jul 200105:13 PM

This is a staggering site, the first in a long time to jolt me with excitement about the world of design and its relevance in modern society. Not only is it designed simply and beautifully, but it favorably represents the enormous potential of design to create tremendous windows of understanding from oblique data sources. “They Rule” is a dynamic representation of the intricate relationships shared by the men and women behind America’s most powerful companies. It’s a Flash presentation driven by a database on the backend that allows users to not only explore these relationships, but submit additional information — to add to the collective knowledge base. It’s a wonderful piece of work, but it will make your stomach cringe with a kind of horrible realization that we’s mostly all just peons.

In Absentia

Sun 15 Jul 200103:27 PM

I just spent all morning reliving the indecisive hell of last fall’s protracted U.S. Presidential election face-off. The New York Times published a massive article on that whole debacle in this morning’s paper, resulting from a detailed study of all the ballots (which resulted in what sounds like a complex analytical database). Journalists David Barstor and Don Van Natta Jr. focused on the Bush campaign’s mercernary approach to qualifying absentee ballots, and the results are disturbing. It just gets me so mad, thinking about the evil consortium of Republican playas who contrived to put that dolt into office…

“Beijing Wins 2008 Olympics”

Fri 13 Jul 200106:40 PM

I get a kick out of this headline, captured this morning from a story on MSNBC which has probably changed by the time you’re reading this, but luckily for you I’ve posted a screen shot of it here.

It has a bizarrely predictive quality, as if MSNBC looked into the future and saw that Beijing will basically sweep all of the games in 2008. What’s so interesting about this is how, unconciously or not, China is playing a larger and larger role in the West’s psyche. As the next great capitalist frontier, there’s a growing willfulness towards the idea that, if China does well, then we all do well. (Granted, there’s a corresponding anti-Sino mentality on the rise too.) I think that sentiment is very much at play here, not only in the Olympic Committee’s decision, but in MSNBC’s double-entendre headline. Get ready for more of it.

Does Whatever a Spider Can

Fri 13 Jul 200102:30 AM

As a former North American adolescent male, how can I not be completely giddy at the thought of the upcoming Spider-Man movie (due to be released in May 2002)? Columbia Pictures has just released the first teaser trailer for that movie in QuickTime format, and some of it looks fantastic. The bank robbery scene is filmed with a fairly generic hand, but the Spider-Man costume itself is an impressive feat, and the CG animation of ol“ Webhead swinging through Manhattan canyons is a pitch-perfect realization of a million hand-drawn comic book panels.

Secret Origins

Thu 12 Jul 200110:54 PM

Read this interesting article on the evolution of Photoshop. The screen shots of the old toolbars are great.

Action-Packed Weekend

Mon 9 Jul 200110:38 PM

A twenty-dollar bill threatened to burn a hole in my pocket this weekend, so I took the opportunity to go and see some mindless Hollywood actioners. The new Jet Li film, “Kiss of the Dragon,” is a competent facsimile of standard Hong Kong fare, and I got a kick out of Li’s kung fu mastery. In the final analysis though, it’s a squandered opportunity that never really rises above expectations — eerily similar to Chow Yun-Fat’s “The Replacement Killers.”

I had much lower expectations for director Dominic Sena’s “Swordfish,” if for no other reason than his “Gone in Sixty Seconds” was a pathetic waste of time and money. So I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be moderately entertaining. Though I think John Travolta needs a personal trainer and a year off to reconsider his approach to his craft, Hugh Jackman has the makings of a real star. No need to rush out to see either film; a Saturday night rental will serve you just as well, plus you get to hang on to a greater portion of your own twenty dollar bill.

Kottke.org

Thu 5 Jul 200109:15 PM

A kind of weird thing happened to me at work when a client asked me to make some type smaller. So I went to Hi-Type and found Silkscreen.

Which lead me to the home page of the author, JasonKottke. It’s one of the nicest personal Web sites I’ve seen; low on clutter and pretension, high on design smarts. Okay,maybe that’s not such a weird story, but it was a clever way of getting those links in there, no?