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How to Become an Early Riser
Morning person, night person? Just points on the compass, Mr. Bond. Here's a guide to getting up early.
It boils down to:
1. Don't bother going to sleep early.
2. Wake up when your alarm tells you to wake up.
Is it me, or are personal productivity bloggers basically restating the obvious in instructional form?
Thinking Sexy
We will forgive them for using comic sans, if only because it's used in the correct bubble-caption context. Creating Passionate Users talks about Sexy design. Which raises the question, what makes a design sexy?
Clearly no one is lining up to hump an iPod. But it's often cited as a sexy product design. It makes us covet, and that's hard for a chunk of plastic to do. Is it:
1. scaling -- perfectly sized for hand.
2. controlled palette - two-tone silver and white, or brushed colored aluminum and white.
3. simple interface
Or: is it possible that what makes the ipod sexy is that it's a caricature of a gadget, sort of a cartoonist's rendering of a handheld device? This would make sense when compared with the iMac, the Volkswagen Beetle (both old and new), and things like the Michael Greaves teapot.
If it helps, you could think of Apple's single-buttoned mouse as a four-fingered cartoon mouse. Cartooning often challenges the animator to evoke a personality with minimum lines, and successful product design might be doing something very similar. We might think of it as akin to functionalism, but instead of form following function, form follows signification -- the gadget design that appeals to us most strongly is the one that seems most gadgetlike, or conveys "gadget" most economically.
But is this sexy or cute?
We might refer to it as sexy because sexiness works the same way: while natural selection might give us a set of heuristics for fertility, our minds don't register it as such -- we seek sexy for sexy's sake, and the right combination of variables sets our brains awash in the hormones for desire.
Whereas "cute" is a lot more specific. "Cute" requires an infantalized feature set. The Volkswagen is cute because its profile is soft and bulbous, and its hood is small in proportion to its cabin -- it looks like a baby car, if there were such a thing.
So, next time you see a sexy product -- is caracture at work? Does the design strive to distill the object into its quintessence? What is the platonic ideal of a vaccuum cleaner?
The Gray Lady goes to Gray's.
The New York Times on Hot Dogs. Rutt's Hut is mentioned, although the author finds them mushy and bland. Heresy!
Making Trekkies look cool
It's like shooting womp rats in a barrel. The Parade of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes. (via ToastMonkey)
(To be fair, some of the costumes here are quite well put together. But, you know, they're Star Wars costumes. So fun can be made.)
Star Wars III: The Galaxy Starts Drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon
So I just got back from the new Star Wars. I'm not going to say it was good or bad, as only a Sith thinks in absolutes. But here are some extremely unstructured impressions.
The Dark Side:
Awful dialogue.The script should've been cast into lava. And whoever allowed Darth Vader to shout "Noooooo!" should be dispatched by clones.
The acting is worse. Not just Hayden Christensen but also Natalie Portman, who actually dies of a broken heart in the movie.
Then there's some plot holes:
- Wouldn't Darth Vader look for his kids on Tattoine first? You'd think Luke'd be a gonner. Even if he thinks they didn't survive Padme's death, you'd think he'd at least check with Uncle Owen, no?
- And there's still the matter of why Darth doesn't recognize C3PO.
- Also, they're already building the Death Star at the end, which means it took 17 years to finish. The second death star took only from 1977 to 1982. Apparently the empire didn't get around to dissolving the Teamsters until they took over Cloud City.
- In several scenes Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine remind me of Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein.
The Chilling Transformation of Anakin Skywalker
The Light Side:
Motion. It's often said that Lucas can create fantastic special effects but lacks the ability to put together a story or create anything with a big A art. I'd argue that his work is very artful, and very filmic, when he gets to move things. No other filmmaker has ever been able to nauseate with such precision, and the Lucas gang can convey almost any "mood" in a collision, acceleration, or deceleration. Things bounce right, crush right. Dodges are as satisfying as crashes.
There's a basic human joy in speed and intricate physical activity, present in dance and sport, that the effects of Star Wars manage to get across. Kubrick went out of his way to liken space travel with a precision ballet, Modern and utopian. The Star Wars universe is dystopian, postmodern, Jane Jacobs to Kubrick's Le Corbusier. Lucas's spaceships careen and bank as we'd want them to careen and bank, not how Newton would demand. We know intellectually that Obi Wan Kenobi wouldn't survive a 200 foot fall into water, but our caveman mind doesn't know that water is like concrete from that distance, and we're satisfied to see a big splash and know he's ok.
Ian McDermid is fantastic for the first half of the movie, when he's seducing Anakin. He's mastered a world-weary smirk that suggests that evil is just the result of an exhausted conscience. Once the cat's out of the bag and he's electrocuting Sam Jackson, he reminds us that RSC stands for Royal Scenery Chewer.
Production Design. They get the look right as the Republic goes to shit and the universe decides to give vinyl another chance. This movie's got feathered hair. Big switches, blinkenlights, knobs. The spaceships are starting to resemble the first movie's spaceships. It works. Although it seems as though Palpatine had already designed all the costumes for his Empire. Worked for Hitler.
If I could indulge another theory, it's that this movie is biographical. Consider: Showing promise as a young man, Lucas made some moves that led his compatriots (New American Cinema directors Scorcese, DePalma, Coppola and various critics) to question his motives and allegiance. In the meantime he was getting praise and encouragement from an ancient master (Joseph Campbell). Under the tutelage of his new master, he turned against the Council and made a mint while the Council's early eighties projects bombed. Francis Wan Coppola ended up on the planet of Napa making wine and hoping that his young daughter could restore balance to the indie. DePalma is probably in a swamp somewhere.
But this is probably overreading. My girlfriend summed it up best when I asked her to watch the original: "Star Wars is stupid." Sure it's stupid, hon, but spaceships are cool.
One small step backwards
So I've gone from Treo to moleskine. I still have the Treo, mind you -- and will still have its contacts there when necessary. It's just that I'm going to start using the moleskine for writing down notes, to-do, etc. Haven't decided on calendar yet. It doesn't really lend itself to a calendar, but who knows?
Why have I switched? Ease of entry. Typing something in the treo takes several steps, and then the actual typing is quite slow. This thing whips out of my pocket, looks quite stylish, and I'm writing within seconds.
Also, I completely drank the kool-aid on the matter. These things are the new ipod according to the blogosphere.
Anyway, I'm hoping that in the very least, it acts like Dumbo's magic feather, and gets me organazized. Time will tell...
Tips for Improving Your Handwriting
Unless you're donald rumsfeld, correspondences don't sign themselves. According to this site, the trick is to put your whole bod into it.
Open Source bong-hits
Apparently, the secret to hacking while stoned is mouse avoidance. Craig explains.
Nothing Happens
...In which a webcam tracks the progress of a cardboard box towards the end of a shelf. Each user click moves the box towards its climactic tumble. It's a little like watching Charles Grodin's talkshow.
Via ;0.
The dangers of perception
The Instituto de Estudos Orientais needs to rethink their Pagoda / rising sun logo. Via BoingBoing.
The ascent of animated Man (and Mouse)
And last but certainly not least, Steven Jay Gould on the evolution of Mickey Mouse. Where the Batmobile and Superman's changes amount to different sideburn (or fin) lengths, Mickey continually becomes more infant-like, and less rat-like. Gould makes the point that this mirrors human evolution, as we're a neotenic species. Meaning that we're primates frozen in an earlier state of maturity.
Which pretty much describes the phenomenon of superhero comic websites, doesn't it?
