blog What or whom inspired you to become a graphic designer?
In one word: play. I used to really enjoy playing around with Geocities site builder in 1999, creating arrangements of text and image. Design was never something that I consciously wanted to do (I wanted to be a writer), so I didn’t feel any weight of expectation. Inexplicably I found that I had some talent and that some people actually wanted to pay me to design things. So I carried on accumulating experience, learning where I could, until I finally found that I could legitimately call myself a designer.
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22 Feb 2007
blog For all of “Dr” Gillian McKeith’s many faults, the initial impact of the You Are What You Eat cannot be denied. Though we are now inured to the sight of pale, viscous shit and flabby bellies, the first time you see it is a revelation. My own favourite bit is when they present the lardarse with a table containing everything they consume in an average week. Fatty usually breaks down in tears at this point. It is easy to convince yourself that one cream cake is excusable, but when you eat thirty it is difficult to deny that you have a problem.
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13 Feb 2007
blog To the qustion ‘why blog?’ must come the eternally blank reply. Blogging is writing without reason, pure expression, intellectual lumber. Blog posts can be well-crafted and clever, but they needn’t be definitive. They should be opinionated and grab the attention, but each has to make its way amongst an immensity of ephemera, as such it cannot hope to really lodge in the consciousness of its readers for long.
Unlike the newspapers and journals, it doesn’t decay physically and can be retrieved instantaneously in the same condition. Through hyperlinks it lives on in the blogs of others, creating an intellectual discussion that reminds me of my description of blogging as the modern equivalent of the 18th century coffee house. All human life is here, talking about everything from politics to pokemon. Indeed, if there’s anything that the blogger should take a couple of seconds to ponder it is this: what are they going to focus on?
My friend Will keeps a journal that has the sole purpose of documenting his travels when he leaves Greater London. At first glance it seems unnaturally restrictive, but over time it has built up into something that captivates. It is imposing this kind of arbitrary limitation that interests me in blogging and that is why I have come up with 4 blogging obstructions, a title that comes from Lars Von Trier’s remarkable film The Five Obstructions, which is about a sadist (Von Trier) who attempts to shake a hedonist (Jorgen Leth) out of his complacency by forcing him to remake a film with different impositions. Here are my obstructions:
1. To write at least one entry every day, even if it is just something on the linklog.
2. To write in a way that engages with the world, not just other bloggers.
3. To not post anything until I have an opinion about the subject (blogging should encourage thought).
4. To displays my actual reality rather than affecting an online persona.
These may sound vague to the point of excluding nothing, but it is helpful to have them as reminders and encouragement. In terms of subject matter, I want to limit myself to design and entropy, but I suspect that I’ll cross over into other territories almost immediately. Indeed, this whole subject made me think about what it is that I look for in a blog. Particularly in those blogs I read straight away, no matter how busy – what it is about them that excites me.
I managed to sift the list down to three qualities identifiable in three bloggers:
1. Dickon Edwards – Blogging is pure display and no one displays themself quite like Dickon.
2. Rhodri Marsden – Blogging is inevitably anecdotal and Rhodri never tells the same story in the same way. The man is practically allergic to unconscious use of cliche.
3. Nick Currie – His Click Opera is always opinionated, always engaged and always surprising. What more could you ask for.
Display, well-told anecdotes and opinion – this is blogging as it should be done and as I hope to do in the coming months.
12 Feb 2007
blog In the same way that Christians ask themselves What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), I sometimes watch films and think What Would K-Punk Say (WWKPS): his essays on A History of Violence and Batman Begins were so illuminating that some films can feel incomplete without his exegesis.
Children of Men was one of those films. It cried out for his commentary (alas, they could only get Zizek) and I emailed to telling him so, but due to him moving house he only recently got to see it on DVD with his eventual post linking it in with some atrabilious musings on the exhaustion of culture/capitalism and referring to a TV drama called Threads, which was apparently about the after effects of nuclear apocalypse. Needless to say, I ordered Threads immediately.
For I love apocalyptic dramas. As a ten year old I devoured Z is for Zachariah and Day of the Triffids. For years I helped myself to get to sleep by becoming absorbed in a fantasy wherein I was a survivor (protected by clambering inside my duvet cover) of a nuclear bomb attack. Walking into Wigston alone, I found myself struck by the silent, empty streets and wondered whether the populace had been wiped out. So let’s say I had high expectations for Threads.
Threads begins (spoilers follow) with a realistic depiction of ordinary Sheffield life, full of annoying families, back-street aviaries and fumbled fucks in Ford Cortinas. It feels less like a drama and more like a documentary replete with RP narrator explaining the increasingly tense geopolitical situation. The news – overheard in pubs, on the wireless, glanced at in newspapers – builds with devastating inevitability so that when the bombs fall it comes as something of a relief.
As Martin Amis said in Einstein’s Monsters, nuclear weapons are unthinkable. The reality of the consequences are beyond our ken. Civilization crumbles, hope dissipates, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. Selling sex for rats to eat – that is the reality of post-nuclear Sheffield. I mean, bleakness is so much part of Sheffield civilization that to see that civilization torn to shreds is to experience a bleakness beyond compare.
And yet, some people survive, more or less in starker and starker contrast to the RP announcer, who calmly explains what would happen to the crops, to the radiated children, and to the piles of rotting corpses. The viewer is left demoralised, barely able to face a future full of nuclear bombs in the Middle East, bird flu, global warming, and bioterrorism. I loved it.
11 Feb 2007
blog Ever since John Stuart Mill posed the question ‘what would you rather be a dissatisfied Socrates or a satisfied pig?’, intellectuals have been looking on swinish pleasures with a fustian disdain. Comparing Beethoven’s Ninth with Crazy Frog may show conclusively that pleasure can be ordered hierarchically, but never objectively. For what is pleasure but that which engages us? And that which is engaging must hold some kind of challenge within it, otherwise it would be boring. Nevertheless, being challenging doesn’t necessarily mean it has to have long words.
When my friend Tim came up to visit us a couple of weeks I was pleasantly invigorated by his uncanny ability to channel the zeitgeist into all conversations. As features editor on Channel 4′s Slash Music website, he spends all day talking to and thinking about the latest bands with their funny haircuts. He loves George Pringle, Girls Aloud and Coco Rosie, but he is also a Dylanologist who has studied acting theory. The idea that some of these pleasures are more or less worthy is abhorrent to him, guilt just doesn’t come into it.
Perhaps its a remnant of the days when people believed that culture moved forwards. Indeed, the clubbing phenomena is based largely around “cheesy” disco records, the kind of “naff” music that the year zeroism of punk attempted to obliterate. It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths people will go to in order to legitimize their tastes.
In last Saturday’s Guardian, the dubious concept of the guilty pleasure is used as a means to understand modern intellectuals. All the usual suspects are there – AC Grayling (Boxing), Richard Dawkins (Computer Programming), Steven Pinker (Rock Lyrics), Elaine Showalter (Trinny and Susannah) – justifying their lumpen pleasures. It’s as though the Modern Review never existed! Not that any of them are particularly guilt-inducing. Only Slavoj Zizek’s choice of Military PC games has even the slightest possibility of being offensive or sinful. Imagine if Roger Scruton had revealed a passion for necrophilia or John Carey for bestiality – that might be interesting – but no, it’s dull dull dull.
And me? Well, accounting for all my “guilty”, low brow pleasures would take all day but these are the ones that spring to mind. I love playing darts, watching buddy comedies, and reading science fiction.
What are your guilty pleasures?
Link: Guardian Weekend: Doh!
05 Feb 2007
blog Around twenty times a day I find myself confronted with a screen telling me that a certain webpage is off-limits. As a webdesigner, I have to take inspiration wherever I can find it. I also rely on fixes, hacks and plugins developed by kindhearted fellows who share knowledge on their blogs.The idea that I should be restricted from visiting these sites because of a rather arbitrary computer program is absurd, it’s just like being a Soviet scientist in the Lysenko era and trying to read about Mendel. Exactly like that (I have seen several of my colleagues sent to Siberian labour camps, one of them for the severest crime of logging onto livejournal).
The idea is that if you don’t restrict people’s internet use, they will end up squandering all their work time. This is sensible, you might think, and I would agree that squandering time does no one any good. Unfortunately the internet is one enormous distraction machine and however good your filters are, stuff will always creep through.
In another life I tried to remove all the distractions from my existence. I took down all the posters on my walls, I deleted all games from my computer, I tried to ban certain sites from my browser, I disconnected the internet unless I was actively working on a site, and I planned out rigid task lists for the day ahead. Did I get more done? Did I flow?
If anything, I got less done. By hemming in my mind, by constantly focussing on NOT doing things, I inevitably started looking for distraction. And, as ever, distraction was everywhere: in pseudo-virtuous activities like wikipedia, political blogs and time management tips.
The trouble is that the unconscious doesn’t understand the negative injunction: any not or no, don’t or never is ignored by the unconscious. Conversely, the object you are trying to avoid is recognized and grows larger with each injunction. The only real way to avoid distracting is to just not think about them or think about – or become absorbed in – something else.
And as to being banned from certains sites, well, there are such things as proxies, like allowu.com behind which you can hide all activity.
There is always a way.
31 Jan 2007
blog It has been a long time since I last tried to read Finnegans Wake. I think I managed about 3 pages last time. I got a bit further with the Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, but even that left me scratching my head, rolling my eyes and yawning.
Nowadays, I don’t even care for the idea/ideal of Finnegans Wake. I no longer feel the desire to spend countless hours dissecting a purposefully obscure novel. As Nabokov said: it is a 600 page crossword puzzle and you can’t even win a dictionary for completing it.
Nevertheless, in homeopathic doses, Finnegans Wake can be interesting, especially when you start unpacking all the neologisms. My favourite (everyon’e favourite) is the word funferal, which contains “fun for all”, fun, feral, and is overshadowed by its closeness to funeral. I was reminded of this when I saw that the Armitage Shanks urinals in the toilets where I work are controlled by an infra-red system called the Cistermiser. Joyce would have loved this word and might have extracted the following: cyst, systemiser, cistern, sister, sodomiser etc. I’m not sure if the company who created the Cistermiser anticipated all of these associations, but I’m sure they’ll be overjoyced to have them brought to light.
22 Nov 2006
blog A tipping point analysis of David Allen’s Getting Things Done would surely provide interesting reading. As Malcom Gladwell’s book shows, social epidemics require three types of people: Connectors (those who know everyone), Mavens (those who know everything) and Salesmen (those who softly influence others with their charisma). The tipping point of Getting Things Done (or rather its sexier abbreviation, GTD) is fascinating because it presents the uncommon situation where the three people required for an epidemic are concentrated in the person of the über-blogger.
Connectors
I think I first heard about GTD when Jon Hicks linked to Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders, but I can’t be sure. Both of these people are widely-read bloggers. 43 Folders is in the Technorati top 100. It is on lots of people’s blogroll and much linked on del.icio.us etc. You can’t get much more connected.
Mavens
What is a geek if not a Maven. These are people who not only read a book but spend hours discussing its finer points. Admittedly, a book about organization is incredibly pertinent for those who spend much of their days online, tempted by the infinite distractions of the internet (aka procrastination at the touch of a button). Mann is so much of a GTD geek that he has created a site devoted to just that one subject and the implications of its teachings.
Salesmen
Charisma is an innate quality that can’t be affected or taught. Nevertheless, there are certain stylistic ticks that apparently inspire trust:
“Here’s the deal”
“come on: something’s gotta give.”
“Well, heck.”
“Disco.”
“pretty freakin’ ace in practice.”
“Plus, kids, do remember”
“This is a truly great time to be alive.”
Mann is upbeat, cute, and slightly zany. It is sickening, yet not particularly grating. Perhaps the subject matter (productivity) makes it impossible to avoid self-help clich tropes. Of course, if you’re reading about it, you probably need pepping up. (I am reminded of Martin Amis’s attempt to imagine Samuel Beckett’s working day: “Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible; and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.”)
There you have it: worldwide domination for Getting Things Done (at the time of writing no. 49 on Amazon.com and 143 on Amazon.co.uk). Does it work? Well, it certainly presents an intriguing theory of the mind that sounds convincing. We are distracted by small actions that clog up our thoughts, we do need help to get in the zone, but there’s so many other parts of the jigsaw. Project planning, time management, dealing with soft addictions and self-discipline — none of these things are adequately addressed in GTD. It isn’t a magic cure-all, but then, there’s no such thing as a magic cure-all so why would you look for one in the first place? Oh, that’s right, because everyone keeps recommending it.
18 Nov 2006
blog Yesterday, despite all my scruples, I took part in a charity ‘Dress Down Friday’ at work. I had thought about following the advice of Guy Browning (no.12) to dress up, not down, but feared the social consequences of isolating myself from my colleagues at this early stage. One fellow jeans and T-shirt wearer didn’t understand why we – in the IT department – couldn’t dress down every day: we rarely get visitors and rarely visit others, so why not?
Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse. Dressing up is one of the key psychological tools we use to get ourselves in the right frame of mind for an activity. As Browning says: “If you are wearing a welder’s helmet people expect rivets, if you are wearing a suit people expect business.” It is worth noting at this point that Keats always put on his best clothes when he was going to write poetry. Work – from writing poetry to writing code – is a performance.
The question for any employer, given that work is such a psychological activity, is how do you get your employees motivated? The answer falls into two categories: carrot or stick. The stick approach is generally used in low paid jobs where employees are expendable and in the public sector, which don’t tend to reward performance. The carrot is the preserve of the private sector, particularly those which are sales based. It is the stick approach that I am most familiar, so I was delighted to get a carrot, which was getting to see the Glasgow premiere of Casino Royale. At the time I thought this was just a kind gesture, but on reflection the choice of Bond was a masterstroke of motivational management. For what could be more aspirational than James Bond? A lavish lifestyle of girls, champagne, caviar, and fast cars, a sense of purpose, despite Tony Blair’s dubious foreign policy, and immense, truly immense self-confidence; if the workers are imbued with even 1% of James Bond’s qualities, their performance would improve by leaps and bounds. It was a very canny move and the film was superb.
18 Nov 2006
blog After only a couple of days at my new day job I knew that if I didn’t do something urgently I was going to be crippled. My right hand, my mouse hand, was so full of aches and pains that it was disturbing my sleep at night. I tried to shrug it off, I did some yoga and other assorted stretching exercises (itself now a dubious practice); I tried all the hints and tips in the hewlett-packard guide to safe computing (straight back, feet on the floor, head level with monitor, changing position every ten minutes), and yet still the RSI in my right hand was getting worse.
Clearly something had to be done, but what? Losing my right hand would be awful, imagine being a singer and losing your hearing or a food critic and losing your tongue.
It was at this point I recalled the comments of a girl who, when I was fifteen, maliciously informed me that one of my biceps was bigger than the other. I laughed it off – she was a deeply jaded young hag – but immediately started experimenting with using my left hand.
I had never used my mouse left-handed, though. Like playing the guitar and writing, surely the mouse requires the kind of fluidity you can only get from natural predisposition.
Well, at first, it feels unnatural, there is a lack of sensitivity in your hand/eye coordination, but soon enough it becomes functional. Unfamiliar actions, like highlighting text and then pressing Ctrl-c are clumsy and awkward at first, but soon become if not second then third or fourth nature.
The only worry is that all I’ll succeed in doing is ruining my left hand as well. I can see myself wearing a stick attached to my forehead, desolately prodding the keys like those Romanian orphans who banged their head against the bars of their cot for stimulation.
Still, at least my index finger doesn’t ache any more.
17 Nov 2006