Hot in the city ... 2

So this is the other half of the blog the NYC blog my Blogger email account missed. Please sort out Blogger email. 

Sunday night was Tash's birthday in the Meatpacking district, frequented by drag artists and old friends. We've been over to Brooklyn this afternoon to see her and get an update on the movie. It's coming along but as usual these things take longer than expected.

Last night we saw a bit of jazz in Central Park and tonight we're at a wine tasting. Tomorrow I'm going to see the Mets play. Don't know anything about baseball so it should be interesting.

****
There's a crack in the universe similar to the one in the current Dr Who series, which is either a huge cosmic coincidence or the BBC marketing department has too much money:http://tinyurl.com/389ljpv

Hot in the city...

So I'm in New York and it is hot. Damn hot. So hot bits of me are
sticking to other bits and I have to prise them apart in the evening
with a fridge cooled spatula.

Modern Media Initiative

Let's all move to Iceland (country not the shop).
A unanimous vote in Iceland's parliament has seen the country pass its
so-called "Icelandic Modern Media Initiative", giving it the mandate
to create what are intended to be the world's most stringent laws
preserving free speech and a free press.
http://tinyurl.com/367gfy4

Cool Wall
Architect Bill Peterson renovated this 14th Street townhouse so that
the living room wall rolled up like a garage, leaving it open to the
street, with an "air curtain" to keep the heat in
http://tinyurl.com/33hdotr

Links for Today

"The real problems are twofold. First, even though the content is digital, the reader loses most of digital content's benefits. I can go to the Wired website, link to articles there on my blog, share them via email or Twitter and use the power of the web to share and opine. The iPad edition offers none of that flexibility -- and it doesn't offer any of the flexibility of paper either. I can annotate my paper version of Wired, clip out articles, or even pass the entire magazine on to you and you can in turn pass it on to others. I can't do any of those things with the iPad edition."
Martin Gartenberg on the problems of digital magazines. We're just not quite there yet.


"sprawling and sticky spideweb-like installation"
From Hi-Fructose


"An animated short by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham, MARS! tells the story of, well, the planet Mars."

MARS! from Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham on Vimeo.



Time and Again. Life, don't get me started on life. From Jacques Khouri. Comic book art animated.

time & again from jacques khouri on Vimeo.

Lost Myths

Lost Myths: new stories in an old format:
"Tinkerhorn Muziek (Lost Myths Records LM-0013) was a 10-inch 78rpm
released only in Europe in 1927. There was only ever the one pressing,
and it's unlikely that there were more than a few hundred copies
made. Only seven copies are known to still exist. The original tapes,
along with any documentation that might have helped us understand this
music better, were lost in a fire in 1940, when the Nazis invaded
Amsterdam."
From http://lostmyths.net/

EMA

Waiting for a plane at East Midlands Airport. Saw an iPad for sale, thought about it but decided to wait until New York in a week.

Wedding was good and it was nice to see so many old faces (and some of them were looking very old indeed).

Have a bit of time before my flight so I'll get on with a bit of 'Cell' as this week is very busy.

Cloud Printing

I'm off to another wedding tomorrow (what is it about 2010 that made everyone get hitched? Do they know something I don't about the end of the world? That 2012, right?) so here are a few quick links to keep you brain active.


Jan Chipchase on Cloud Printing
"whilst its not socially acceptable today, in time someone will subsidise the cost of individual prints by inserting subtle advertising by manipulating your photos."


The Leith Festival is on this weekend and my agents are sponsoring the Literature Festival. If you get the chance, pop down. 


Now, get off the interweb and back to work. 

Robots and Weird Laws

Robotics developers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich's
Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control have built autonomous robots
that drive, dock with their peers on the ground, then fly into the air
in coordinated swarms.... http://tinyurl.com/2w42fcy

DivineCaroline.com has a list of 50 weird US laws, including the
following:
Alabama: It's illegal to wear a fake mustache that causes laughter in
church.
Alaska: Whispering in someone's ear while he's moose hunting is
prohibited.
Arkansas: It's illegal to mispronounce the name of the state of
Arkansas.
California: You may not eat an orange in your bathtub.
Florida: If you tie an elephant to a parking meter, you must pay the
same parking fee as you would for a vehicle.

'Cell'

'Juvie' 2 is currently titled 'Cell', which when you read the book will make much more sense as it has a double meaning. I'm currently about 11k words in and going strong. The book has a more dirty urban feel to it and it opens up a concept about the 'Governors' that is only hinted about in the first book.

You’ll also notice lots of new short blog post here as I’m having a go at posting them in via mail so ensure all my links and ideas are in one place. Some of them might be of interest to you.

****

Wasting Time

Great little comic from Luke Ferenc which sums up mine and many others feelings about the internet

Nollywood

Nollywood is said to be the third largest film industry in the world, releasing onto the home video market approximately 1 000 movies each year. Such abundance is possible since films are realized in conditions that would make most of the western independent directors cringe. Movies are produced and marketed in the space of a week: low cost equipment, very basic scripts, actors cast the day of the shooting, “real life” locations. Despite the improvised production process, they continue to fascinate audiences. In Africa, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of self-representation in the mass media. From Pieter Hugo

Ideas are Immortal by Alan Moore

Ideas are immortal, or at least as long lived as the culture that comes up with them, whereas the objects, the monuments and even empires those ideas inspire are transient by comparison.

Though I don't agree with all Alan say's, this is an article worth digging out.

****

Finally got around to reading Warren Ellis’s and got introduced to the character Spider Jerusalem (interesting as I have a character called Spider in ‘Juvie’), one of my favourite new characters in comics. He’s a gonzo journalist of a the future, a drop out city survivalist who has to return to write those books he promised his editors. It’s anarchic laugh-out-loud with plenty to say about society and where it’s going.

Read this week

Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

Minority Report Style System

Human computer interface.

Today's Links

Chinese mods. Turning corporate built hardware into free thought
hacked builds. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/1/chinese-pirates-are-tech's-new-innovators

Want something like this in Edinburgh.
TAM, or The Amazing Meeting is now an annual fundraising conference
that raises money for the James Randi Educational Foundation, which
promotes;
critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with
reliable information about pseudoscientific, paranormal and
supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today.

http://tinyurl.com/39cjefg

Ink on Paper

This is a really interesting insight into the future of print/books etcetera from the blog of the graphic designer Frank Chimero:

• Question: What is the future of print design? How will the tangible, ink-on-paper pieces that designers love coexist with design on digital platforms in the years to come?

Things are changing. We want to know where it’s going. But, hell if I know, or any one else has more than a hunch. Craig Mod calls it the PRE/POST era and I think he’s right. As I’ve said before, we break stuff before we know what replaces it, and we invent things before we know what they are for. Maybe we’re now living in the future tense.
Next thing to clear up: Books are not music, so I’d stop looking to apply the patterns from that experience to ink on paper at a high level. (Though, it could work at a smaller level.) Music lacks a physical form, gained a physical form for a short while, and some people made loads of cash selling that artifact. Some people made bookoos of bucks selling stacks of vinyl and cassette tapes and CDs. But now music is moving back to the vaporous state from whence it came. Neat. Wait. Magazines are like that. Just sub out reams of paper. Damn it.
But not so much books. Literature requires an artifact, whether it’s ink on paper or e-ink on e-paper. We have to see the words with our eyes, which means they need to exist in meat-space. Maybe I’m overly romanticizing this. Books could be considered to be vaporous (storytelling has its roots in the oral tradition), but the idea of “story” is bigger than the idea of “ink on paper,” so you’d spread yourself too thin to think about where story is going to live in the future. (I’d say television is just as good a receptacle now for some stories. In fact, in some instances it’s better.) And, I’d say, really good literature requires an artifact. But that’s just me. I think quality creative work deserves a physical form that achieves some sort of permanence. It’s the reward for producing something good. I know reading Infinite Jest wouldn’t be the same if you didn’t have to pay the penance of carrying around that monolithic paper slab on the bus, and risk being judged terribly bookish by your neighbors sharing the ride. (Still haven’t read it. Going to give it a go again this summer. We can do this Frank, we can do this. This time!)
So let’s talk about ink on paper. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but here is what I want to see: I want to see things earn the privilege to be objects. If we have the option of things being “real” and “not real,” I want the real stuff to be really good. I want the times when ink hits paper to always be beautiful, useful, and desirable. It seems like such a shame to cut down a tree to print this Land’s End catalog, with the thin model coyly smiling at me on the back in her awkward swimsuit. I bet it bunches up in the wrong spots. It seems silly to give permanence to a thing that was meant to be ephemeral to begin with. This goes for junk mail, beach-books, handouts for students, whatever. If your shelf-life is shorter than forever and ever amen, I think we need to think about whether or not it needs to be printed. (Although, it is so damn nice to print something to proof-read it. But that’s a different story.)
If I’m thinking as a normal consumer, I don’t really care terribly much about what the future of ink on paper is going to be. I care about what the future of content is going to be. I want fuller, more thoughtful, more substantial, more enriching, more nourishing content. I want good stuff. I want stuff that doesn’t feel like a chew toy. I’d suppose that the only people who care about the future of ink on paper are the people who make their money (or not) selling the paper that has the ink on it. (Or if your magazine is named PRINT.) Those of us who consume the content, I’d suppose, don’t give much of a rat’s ass. We want convenience and access, and then after that quality.

It’s easy to think of a future where the predominance of ink on paper is minimized. And, as a designer who practices the kung fu of deciding how that ink gets slathered on that paper, it’s scary. But, here is my tip to you: stop thinking of yourself as a print designer. You’re not designing for print. You’re designing for content.

Also on CarrollBlog