NOTEPAD-2018-Weeks-01-02

| Paul Greer

This is a list of things/songs/tweets I have found/been shown recently, that haven’t fallen into specific blog posts. I suppose if I ever had a newsletter it would probably be something like this. I was doing this regularly and then stopped so this is just since the start of the year.

There’s more after the jump…

Scaffold Light
See how the light playfully dances onto the terrace through the scaffold. Alas, their view of the sunrise will soon be lost. 🌅 😔

NEWS

https://twitter.com/DoloresTheHuman/status/952281968078569472 https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/951903986461716480
https://twitter.com/hipst_eria/status/690627784364916740
https://twitter.com/Theremina/status/950675015401316354

BOOKMARKED

  • Breathing Frame – Installation by Ryo Kishi “breathing frame is a projection device dedicated to transmit not information, but expression such as colors and movement. The color hue of displayed image changes by breathing on, So viewers become part of projection device as a actuator. They breathe new life into the device. The more viewers, the more attractive projection device becomes.”

  • Facebook chooses friends over publishers  “Facebook announced yesterday that it will begin to prioritize posts in the News Feed from friends and family over public content and posts from publishers. It will also move away from using “time spent” on the platform as a metric of success and will instead focus on “engagement” with content, such as comments.”
  • The long exposure works of Francesca Woodman  “Given that her complete catalogue is composed almost entirely of work she produced as a student, the posthumous critical esteem for American photographer Francesca Woodman is astonishing. Unlike music or math, where precocious displays of talent are not uncommon, photography tends not to have prodigies. Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981 at age 22, is considered a rare exception. That she has achieved such status is all the more remarkable considering only a quarter of the approximately 800 images she produced—many of them self-portraits—have ever been seen by the public.”

  • “…the main way that the Kindle and other digital devices have transformed books is to make them as liquid as possible.”  “At Wired, my old colleague David Pierce writes about a topic near and dear to my heart: Amazon’s Kindle, and its effects on how we buy and read books: For a decade, Amazon’s relentlessly offered new ways for people to read books. But even as platforms change, books haven’t, and the incompatibility is beginning to show. Phones and tablets contain nothing of what makes a paperback wonderful. They’re full of distractions, eye-wrecking backlights, and batteries that die in a few hours. They also open up massive new opportunities. On a tablet, books don’t have to consist only of hundreds of pages set in a row. They can be easily navigable, endlessly searchable, and constantly updated. They can use images, video, even games to augment the experience
. The next phase for the digital book seems likely to not resemble print at all. Instead, the next step is for authors, publishers, and readers to take advantage of all the tools now at their disposal and figure out how to reinvent longform reading. Just as filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh are experimenting with what it means to make a “movie” that’s really an app on a totally interactive device with a smaller screen, Amazon and the book world are beginning to figure out what’s possible when you’re not dealing with paper anymore. Except
 not really.”
  • PicSat: Eye on Beta Pictoris  “To understand why Beta Pictoris is receiving so much attention among astronomers, particularly those specializing in exoplanets, you have only to consider a few parameters. This is a young star, perhaps 25 million years old, one with a well observed circumstellar disk, the first actually imaged around another star. We not only have a large gas giant in orbit here, but also evidence of cometary activity as seen in spectral data. ÎČ Pic is also relatively nearby at 64 light years.”
  • Katzine: The Guatemala Issue – Katriona Chapman’s Autobio Series Continues to Display an Understated Charm and Make a Profound Connection with Its Audience “Over the last couple of years Katriona Chapman’s amiable and beautifully crafted autobiographical series Katzine has fast become one of the most respected mainstays of the UK indie scene combining, as it does, its author’s welcoming on-page presence and her gorgeously shaded illustrative tones. Comprising gentle social commentary, addictive trivia and small insights into her everyday routine, it’s almost a sequential art Sunday supplement version of Chapman’s life.”
  • GIF Tutorial: Animate Your Artwork And Mesmerize Your Fans (Photoshop) – Society6 Blog  “Grow your follower counts and increase conversions by making content every customer, fan and follower can appreciate–an animation of your artwork. Society6 Artist and GIF-maker, Cassidy Rae Marietta, shed some light on her animation process so you can do the same. You’ll get a step-by-step guide on how she takes her illustrations to the next level with animation, while stirring up new life on your social platforms.”
  • Moby Dick  “Melvyn Bragg and guests Herman Melville’s (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of a great white sperm whale that had bitten off his leg. He risks his own life and that of his crew on the Pequod, single-mindedly seeking his revenge, his story narrated by Ishmael who was taking part in a whaling expedition for the first time. This is one of the c1000 ideas which listeners sent in this autumn for our fourth Listener Week, following Kafka’s The Trial in 2014, Captain Cook in 2015 and Garibaldi and the Risorgimento in 2016. With Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds Katie McGettigan Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London And Graham Thompson Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham Producer: Simon Tillotson.”
  • STAR WARS: A FORCE FOR INNOVATION  “When George Lucas formed Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in 1975, the director’s aim was for the company to deliver the ambitious visual effects for his space opera, Star Wars. Of course, ILM went on to revolutionize the way effects and story meet in that film, and across nine other Star Wars saga movies, plus scores of other releases. Many of the innovations in visual effects that ILM has developed for the various Star Wars films shaped the industry, and continue to do so. VFX Voice takes a look back at just some of these leaps and bounds over the past 40 years.”
  • Exposed: London’s eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links – London Student  “A eugenics conference held annually at University College London by an honorary professor, the London Conference on Intelligence, is dominated by a secretive group of white supremacists with neo-Nazi links, London Student can exclusively reveal.”
  • ‘Black Panther’ breaks Marvel’s pre-sale record on Fandango  “Black Panther is the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry that looks like it’s going to blow our minds and it seems the general movie-going audience agrees as the film has set a new advanced ticket sales mark at Fandango for Marvel films.”
  • Moira Donegan: I Started the Media Men List  “In October, I created a Google spreadsheet called “Shitty Media Men” that collected a range of rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing. The anonymous, crowdsourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault. One long-standing partial remedy that women have developed is the whisper network, informal alliances that pass on open secrets and warn women away from serial assaulters. Many of these networks have been invaluable in protecting their members. Still, whisper networks are social alliances, and as such, they’re unreliable. They can be elitist, or just insular. As Jenna Wortham pointed out in The New York Times Magazine, they are also prone to exclude women of color. Fundamentally, a whisper network consists of private conversations, and the document that I created was meant to be private as well. It was active for only a few hours, during which it spread much further and much faster than I ever anticipated, and in the end, the once-private document was made public — first when its existence was revealed in a BuzzFeed article by Doree Shafrir, then when the document itself was posted on Reddit.”
  • SotD: Troy  “I bought SinĂ©ad O’Connor’s de­but, The Lion and the Co­bra, be­cause Mandinko was on the ra­dio and I liked it. The first time I played it, not hav­ing looked at the track list­ing, I no­ticed some med­i­ta­tive croon­ing about “Dublin in a Rainstorm”; the next time, a gut-grabbing throaty chan­t: “You should have left the lights on”; and then an­oth­er time a howl­ing dec­la­ra­tion about ris­ing, a phoenix from the flame. It took me a while to no­tice that all of these were from the same track: Troy. It’s a hell of a song.”
  • Darkest Hour portrays the wartime prime minister as a flawed leader. But we shouldn’t forget how he worked with Labour to defeat the pro-fascist sympathies of large sections of the British elite  “For days past there has been no real news and little possibility of inferring what is really happening,” wrote George Orwell in his diary, on 28 May 1940. “Last night, E[ileen] and I went to the pub to hear the 9 o’c news. The barmaid was not going to have it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.” That was the second day of the Dunkirk evacuation, and just hours after Churchill had made his speech to the Cabinet, which said: “If this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground”.
  • Where Has This Amazing Comic Book Art Been All My Life?  “François Schuiten, like the creator of Tintin, is Belgian, and he’s best known for his drawing in the series Les CitĂ©s Obscures, a collaboration with his childhood friend, BenoĂźt Peeters. They first worked together at the age of 12 on a school magazine; BenoĂźt wrote the fictional stories, Fançois made the imaginative drawings, and pretty soon the faculty tried to stop them from publishing it, preferring Latin translations and moralizing anecdotes as more appropriate subject matters.”

 

  • Poet Jane Kenyon’s Advice on Writing: Some of the Wisest Words to Create and Live By  “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.”
  • Ten things I learned from ILM about ‘The Last Jedi’s’ space battles  “Space battles are synonymous with Star Wars films. The original trilogy is fondly remembered for ILM’s use of motion control and miniatures. These days, like on The Last Jedi, digital ship models, photorealistic rendering and simulated crashes and explosions are of course the norm. But to ensure the space battles in this latest Star Wars adventure echoed those memorable scenes from the first films, ILM employed several ways to bring them to life, even starting an in-house project to copy – at least to some degree – the look and feel of the original motion control miniature movements. vfxblog recently visited ILM London to find out more on that process, plus a whole bunch of other things about the scenes in which Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) takes on the Dreadnought, and when Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) launches his spinning attack on the Resistance cruiser.”
  • The Scottish Sisters Who Pioneered Art Nouveau  “Most people have heard of Art Nouveau, but few remember two of the most influential figures in its conception. (No, not Gustav Klimt.) They were a pair of sisters named Margaret and Frances MacDonald, who, along with their Glasgow School of Art classmates Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair, comprised the Glasgow Four. Art Nouveau wouldn’t be what it is without them.”

 

PLAYLIST

You can follow my rolling playlist on Spotify, updated daily.

 

READING

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.