Category: Blog

This week David Berman – poet, musician, primary member of Silver Jews – passed away. And while I typically go out of my way to not make an event about how any celebrity tragedy impacts my life (because, obviously, it isn’t about me), his writing and music has had an enormous impact on me, and…

Jacob Hall for Esquire put together a ranking of all villains in the James Bond franchise. Two things about about this franchise will always be true: There is no such thing as objectivity when talking about these movies (Your favourite Bond movie is someone else least favourite, and each movie is exactly as bad as…

I found a long lost list of the books I read it 2017 – It was a little shorter than I’d normally like, but sometimes life gets fast and reading gets slow. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953) Shady Characters by Keith Huston (2015) Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami…

Every Year I publish a list of the books that I read throughout the year. Last year I was disheartened by the state of the digital reading industry (is that even something?), and I think it had a real effect on how and what I read this year. I split the year reading technical books, books on dharma,…

I spend much of my video-watching hours on either YouTube or Netflix. Or, I think I do anyways. I missed the wave of YouTube becoming a dominant cultural platform, and as a result, I still feel awash with confusion whenever I go to the homepage. The interface is more or less fine–staid, you could call it–but the…

In Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan established a collection of effects that apply to any new media. The fourth of these asks the question “When pushed to the limits of its potential, the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” I’m interested in looking…

In Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan established a collection of effects that apply to any new media. The fourth of these asks the question “When pushed to the limits of its potential, the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” I’m interested in looking…

N. and I just moved into a new apartment together, and for the first time in my adult life I’m looking at my physical environment as more than a temporary place to leave my backpack at the end of the day. This is a very exciting feeling, and with it comes a whole slew of things I’ve never…

My friend J. and I are suckers for horror movies. We get together every so often to watch movies, and usually end up on something campy, violent and gross. This isn’t something I would have ever predicted for myself, because growing I had a hair trigger imagination, and anything even remotely frightening would cause me…

In 2015 it seemed like the idea of newsletters as a writer’s distribution was coming back in a mean way. I was constantly being turned towards really interesting daily or weekly snippets that I could herd into my inbox. It was a cool idea. It felt like bloggers had abandoned their fortified homesteads and taken to the seas for a rocky,…

iA wrote a wonderful piece on the use of icons within tactile and navigational interfaces, as a way of promoting their new game Iconic. I’m a big fan of their software, which I use on both phone & desktop (losing access to iA Writer for my personal computer was one of this biggest concessions I made when switching to the…

In 2014 I was going through a professional crisis of identity. I was a year into working as a graphic designer, but I felt like I was getting lost. The word design was tripping me up. I was too reliant on it, and it’s a word that doesn’t hold enough meaning to bear the weight…

In the graphic design program I attended at OCAD, one of the expectations was for all students to buy (from the school at a modest discount) a new MacBook Pro with Adobe Creative Suite. This was in part, to ensure that all students had the same resources available to them, but also I believe to…

A few weeks ago my friend L., who recently enrolled in a design program in Japan, asked on Facebook what tools for visual design she should be investing her time in learning. I was eager to send her a response, because it’s a subject I care about and hope that I have a level of expertise…

A few years ago I wrote a piece about the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi. The piece was about the production of the film, and the weird, cyberpunk, multimedia world that could have been. Spirits Within was a part of the first wave of entirely computer generated feature films, and possibly the…

This year felt like an off year for me when it came to reading. I’ve long been an evangelist for electronic reading, and every year for the last half a decade or so has given me reason to continue my excitement until this one. Blloon, an alternative to Kindle Unlimited, has not been successful in creating a sustainable business…

I’ve been thinking a lot more about editing than I ever have before. That’s largely because of Tony Zhou, and his video series Every Frame a Painting. If you haven’t seen them, they are short (5~10m) videos where he dissects a particular filmmakers specific hallmarks. Whether it’s the use of the lateral tracking shot in animated…

A list I feel much better about is that of the books I’ve read this year. By far the stand-out of the bunch is Underground by Haruki Murakami. It’s unlike many Murakami books in that it is non-fiction, and not about a benign 30-something man with an underplayed talent who has to leave Tokyo to find a woman who…