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 his thoughtfulness towards his art has been a source of great inspiration for me.

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 it is good for incompatible reasons), and that ranking the films is an equal to if not greater part of being a fan than watching them.

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, and fiction, but didn’t necessarily find standout works to excite me as I have in past years. I reintroduced the Kindle hardware to my reading practice, having spent the previous year reading exclusively on my phone, which enhanced the emotional aspect of reading, but actually caused me to read less. As it turns out, the best book is the one you have with you. Nonetheless I plan to keep reading on the Kindle. My enthusiasm for eInk as a technology keeps me believing in the product, despite the fact that the digital reading landscape is less competitive now than it was five years ago. I’m still looking for the type of product or service to take the place of Readmill, or to even convince me in any way that there are people outside Amazon and Kobo that still believe that reading technology has a place in the world. I’ve highlighted the books that struck a chord with me, and already have a stack of (ePub) books waiting for me in 2017.

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 content itself usually presents itself as somewhere between somewhat off-putting and visually baffling. It’s not always the case, but it often times is. I don’t consider myself too old or out of touch with the inherent culture of YouTube necessarily (though this article may itself prove that I am), and I don’t believe that the culture of YouTube in itself is specific or introspective enough to validate these specific anti-aesthetic decisions. What I mean is, I don’t think that the typical (forgive the generalizations, I could be very wrong about all this) content generators of YouTube are visually sophisticated enough to consciously decide to make something unpleasant in place of what otherwise would be visually pleasing for their existing audience. That the bombastic nature of their graphic design is not driven by the same unifying ethos as the equivalent would be in a punk scene, despite similarly effective visual results. That it is neither aesthetically, nor ideologically driven. My completely uninformed speculation is that they–given that they all have access to sophisticated analytical tools–are purely responding to the data they have in hand. That loud imagery beats out quiet, and big messaging overshadows modest.

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 at new technologies & forms and seeing in which ways they eat their own tail.

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 at new technologies & forms and seeing in which ways they eat their own tail.

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 bothered thinking about before, such as what technology is suited to a living room. N. and I went out first to buy an Apple TV first because no matter your feelings, buying Apple is never really a bad choice. Then we got skittish about spending $200 off the bat for a thing that in our case would be used pretty sparingly, and left with a Chromecast instead. Now I am totally enamoured with the little dongle, but there’s something about it that doesn’t click for me. It works beautifully, and it’s a delight to see the little cast icon appear on its own in apps I already have with me. I love the experience of turning on the living room screen, opening up Spotify or Mubi and having it just appear. And the fact that the device you use to host the content doesn’t have to give the Chromecast it’s full attention is a really thoughtful characteristic of the little media stick. But every time I use it, I hear a little voice at the back of my head whispering “but it isn’t Bluetooth”.

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 to lose sleep for weeks. I couldn’t even watch trailers for movies. But over time I learned the difference between a scary movie and a horror movie, and I learned that I actually really love the latter. The reason I can like horror and hate the sensation of fear is that horror works on an entirely separate system of psychological pulleys.

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, untethered adventure in the face of established distribution platforms like Medium and Facebook. But like anything that quickly swings into style, it quickly swung out of style, and with it went some newsletters that were simply too beautiful for this world (for posterity, I am referring to Matt Braga’s deep yet accessible security & technology newsletter The Dot Digest, and Robin Sloan’s wonderfully arrhythmic recommendation newsletter PRIMES). However many have still stuck with it, and every few days I’ll open up my inbox to find treasure mixed in with my receipts.

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 Surface.) and also of the transparency they practice in both their products and their process. This article is a smart distillation of something they’ve been conceptualizing for a long time (which beta users of iA Writer 3 were witness to, as they tested interfaces with text-only functions and actions).

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 that I was placing on it. Superficially, when I decided that I wanted to be a designer, it was in part because the idea of being a designer aesthetically resonated with me. So naturally, as I started to actually work as a designer, those superficial preconceptions started to dissolve. Part of this came from the feeling that my governance over the word was being stripped away by a shifting tide of what and who could be considered to be in a design role. People in connected, but separate professional fields were adopting the word and I became alert to managerial and organizational roles surfacing around me that I didn’t deem as being design oriented, but had very strong justifications for their use of the word. I realized that I didn’t actually have a strong definition of the word that I was letting define me and I wanted to correct this embarrassing fact.

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 establish early in their careers a sense of brand devotion. I was ecstatic to have a reason to buy a MacBook, it was the first year of the aluminum unibody, and the computer I had been using at home was a faceless Dell tower from three years earlier. The love affair with the MacBook Pro lasted until my second year, when the burden of carrying around a four-pound, 15″ slab of metal started to weigh on me. Then, one day a classmate showed up with a lean, shiny, new MacBook Air, and I stood there, with my aluminum anchor stressing the shoulder straps of my backpack thinking “I didn’t know we were allowed to do that”.

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 in. Ultimately I was too disappointed in my own answer to respond. After 6 years in the design environment my answer was “whatever your printers and developers need you to use”. And I know that this is the wrong answer, but it’s not the wrong idea, so I wanted to work out what I meant by that.

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 first to attempt photorealism. The entire film rendered out over 15 terabytes of data (in 2001 keep in mind), and took a cumulative 120 years of production time, split amongst the staff of 200. The aim was to create a world indistinguishable from our own, inhabited by characters that could be brought to life in a way no artificially created character had ever been in the past. The goal was to have the characters, particularly the protagonist Dr. Aki Ross, to have a life outside the film, and be “cast” in future computer generated films, or even alongside actual actors in live action. The film flopped, and any hopes of this extension of the characters or set were squashed.

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 out of eBook subscriptions and has  entered a period of ‘refuelling’, Oyster, the beautiful spiritual successor to Readmill has been absorbed into Google Play,  and the downward trend of eBook sales in favour of their physical counterparts continues to chug logarithmically along. It seems like the only players left in the game are Amazon, Apple and Google, and that’s never a position anyone likes a market to be in. What is a die-hard .epub fan to do? I am holding out hope for a technology that acts as more of a mediator than a content provider, so that the terrible economics of licensing content do not have to interfere with the technology through which we access that content (Rdio listeners will share that sentiment). That being said, I did read many books this year that I really enjoyed, and as a habitual list-taker, I’ve included them all in the list below for posterity. I’ve highlighted the books that I’d really recommend.

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 features, or how Michael Bay uses parallax, he’s slowly teaching a virgin public about the unseen details of constructing a visual narrative. I’m tempted to think of it as the cinematic equivalent of Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’. Here are two of my favourites:

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 in a previous time of his life was once meaningful and he now must return to. It’s amazing how many times he can write one story. Underground however is a staggeringly beautiful account of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway by the Aum Shinrikyo on March 20th, 1995. The interviews are thoughtful, deep, human, and on a few occasions brought me to tears. It took me over a month to finish this book and I can’t wait until enough time has passed to read it again.