Let’s not be friends on facebook.

Pals, Politics, , , , ,

Let’s be friends right here.

I’ve got a website and I’ve got a feed reader. That’s how I “publish to the world”. See, all Twitter and Facebook really are is a way to post and get a feed of all the things your friends are saying. But someone is selling your friends to you.

You can get a website for free. You can get a feed reader for free. Google Reader or Bloglines or net news wire – etc.  There’s tons of feed readers out there.

I like google plus, and yup, I’m on google plus.  It’s got the same privacy concepts as diaspora, but unfortunately centralized.

I’m on twitter and identi.ca.  But they are just microblogs.  Oh – they also have direct messages!  That’s micro-email!

So just email me.  Just get a WordPress or Blogger blog.  And when you want to step up to your own website, I’ll help you set that up and import all your old posts in. It’s super easy.  No one will sell your friends to you and someone else’s website going down won’t blow up yours.

Project Idea: A story illustrated with Cinemagraphs

Animation, Art, , , , , ,

Cinemagraphs are beautiful little pictures where most of it is still and some of it is moving.

Let me show, not tell:

Cinemagraph from If We Don't, Remember Me

Yes, this one is moving. Patience.

Our vision works by making comparisons to what it last saw. This is why we are best at seeing things that are in motion. This is why advertisements always have things zooming at us and flashing. Your whole visual system is designed to detect big differences and motion. They are what prey and predator look like.

This is why the best cinemagraphs are subtle, so very subtle.

A Cinemagraph from Ghost World, where only the record and her chest move.

My first thought was: Oh, like Harry Potter.
And then I thought – wouldn’t that be so boss to write a story and have these little gems in it?

So far, I’ve written a story that illustrates itself anew every viewing by grabbing pics from flickr and a poem with moving tentacles. If I have another story, and it fits, I’d like to illustrate it with something still and small and wonderful like these.

Some places I’ve seen great cinemagraphs:From Me To You and If We Don’t, Remember Me.

The Colophon

Books, Design, ,

Entering the Fjord
A special thing in this world: the little note at the end of a book about the typeface. Sometimes there are little stories. At the end of Carl Hiaasen’s “Star Island” you find this:

A Note on the Type

This book was set in Janson, a typeface long thought to have been made by the Dutchman Anton Janson, who was a practicing typefounder in Leipzig during the years 1668-1687. However, it has been conclusively demonstrated that these types are actually the work of Nicholas Kis (1650-1702), a Hungarian, who most probably learned his trade from the master Dutch typefounder Dirk Voskens. The type is an excellent example of the infulential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon (1692-1766) developed his own incomparable designs from them.

Composed by Creative Graphics Inc.,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics,
Berryville Virginia
Designed by Virginia Tan

What a tale! Kis, who travels from Hungary to study under Voskens. The conclusive evidence produced by some painstaking type researchers that establishes the true founder, long forgotten.

These stories at the end of stories are like swimming in a river, then hearing on shore the history of the water, the movements of the glacier that the water flows from, the land that it traveled over.
Approaching the Glacier after a Stormy Sunrise

Book Review: “Star Island” by Carl Hiaasen

Books, Reviews, ,

You have a friend who you see rarely, but always in a time loop. You tell the same stories, the same jokes, you laugh and drink the same beers. It sounds lame, but really these are some of the best friends to have.

Every Carl Hiaasen book is the same book and they are all great. They have righteous rage at evildoers and they have a strange hero that stands strong where others cower. They have a few good people and many many scum. They are funny as hell and they are full of violence and tragedy.

In Star Island you see Skink, the ex governor who lives in the everglades again, but he isn’t at the center of the book. He’s barely in it. There is a good woman, named Ann, and she’s in danger, sort of. There are a bunch of scum, and they behave poorly to each other and the world. A real estate developer has a sea urchin strapped to his scrotum. It’s a Carl Hiaasen book, how could that not happen?

 

Let’s call it a night after this beer, I’ve got to get going. But I hope to see you again next year, buddy.

Faces in the clouds

Video, , , , ,

What does technology want?

Can we reasonably expect a protopia from the system of people, laws, and technology? Or should we expect darker things from Industrial Society and Its Future?

My favorite theory of consciousness is that it doesn’t exist – it is an illusion that a system creates to handle all the conflicting demands of subsystems. The internet doesn’t seem conscious yet – but it seems close. Perhaps we are putting our pareidoliac predilections on processes that have no analogue to our lives, seeing faces in clouds of networks and switches.

Doesn’t it seem that a system that spends so much time looking at itself will begin to have a working model of itself, that it will eventually build feedback mechanisms that reshape it in even more interesting ways?
Will it be a community or an entity or are both the same?

Greasemonkey Hack: Adding tags and autosuggest to trunkly

Dev, Hacks, User Experience, , ,

The Backstory

del.icio.us was awesome. It was my first introduction to truly social software. It was my first introduction to tags and folksonomy vs. taxonomy – which blew my tiny mind.

And it was useful. Immediately, quickly, crazy useful. You could find the stuff you had seen! You didn’t have to be on the computer you had originally seen things on! You could bubble up lists of things you were interested in! I was struck with love.

Then Yahoo bought it and did the thing that Yahoo does to promising and interesting websites. It starves and kills them. So delicious is now getting bought by AVOS.

The New Thing

I’ve moved on and Trunkly looks like the best replacement so far. It is free, they will import all of your delicious bookmarks, scrape your twitter and facebook feeds, and one of the first things they built was a way to get your stuff back out of the site. I always like to have an exit strategy. I suggest trunkly as a delicious migration. The developers are really responsive and they have the freedom right now to do new and surprising improvements.

Not a small benefit: It is EARLY and short names on trunkly are available. So I was able to get http://trunk.ly/mk

Finally, the Point

The trunkly submit bookmark form is a bit crap though. I fixed it. See:
ungreased_trunkly
Turns into:
greased_trunkly_tags

You need the Firefox browser and the excellent Greasemonkey addon. Got those installed?

Great – now click here to install Autosuggest Tagging for Trunkly.
. You can always see the source or file bugs on it at the UserScripts.org page.

A Poem about Proper Paperwork

Animation, Art, Hacks, Lit, , , ,

Today is my birthday, and I’ve been overwhelmed with happy birthday wishes. I’m very fortunate and grateful.
I’d like to give you a gift back.
Here is a poem about the importance of filling out forms.
Please enjoy “We Know” in a browser like Chrome or Firefox.

Tonight we will be having dinner at Superfine in DUMBO and then off to see “Black Watch” at the St Ann’s theater. Perhaps we will see you Saturday at Cinco de Matto?