Project Ethel (27.05.14 – 07.01.16): Pages 1-8

April 10, 2018March 9, 2019 | Paul Greer

Beginning a large project of uploading old notebook pages. These are not high res scans as that would considerably increase the amount of time needed, so these would have to do for now.

These are all generally going up on Instagram first.

Ethel Spread 1 — Opening page of Notebook: Ethel. I’m going to be uploading notebooks in a more systematic fashion (with sensitive info deleted obvs). Notebook Ethel is a few years old. This is before I started using the first page spread as an index for the rest of the book. So the lists here are largely inspirational items and ideas of content capture. There’s not much order and I tend to fill empty spaces with bits of ephemera stuck in and doodles.

Clifton windows, lists and words.
This is a systematic uploading.

Notebook: Ethel Spread 2 — First drafts, mug drawing, rough mind map, comics and a quote from Lynda Barry.
It’s along the lines of: “I’ve come to regard comics as something like a song. It can be about anything. We can address all sorts of things in a song, love gone wrong, truck driving, Daddies, smoking, boots, birthdays, cheating, space travel, big butts, revenge, war, a turkey in the straw, regret, genders, hands, purple haze . We can this way we can make comics about anything.” – Although I did write it down in a hurry!

Notebook: Ethel Spread 4. — Daily mini-maps, plans for website, doodles and the like.

Notebook: Ethel Spread 5. — Preliminary notes on Shark Brains, Art Speigelman on Maus: “Reality is too complex for any media” “Ironic Distance” “Fourth Wall” “Blank expressions allow the reader to impose their own” “I draw my comics one to one” “The past and the present intertwining, simultaneously in the same space” …& Ray Bradbury on writing: “Libraries are full of people not books” “Love what you do. Do what you love” “I don’t write the book, my characters write the book, they come to me and they tell me” “Stand on the top of the cliff, jump off, build your wings on the way down.” etc…

Notes for a very short film called “Bevel’s Nub” that appeared in the @strangealtars project a while back.
Marker pen, biro, pencil.

Notebook: Ethel. Spread 7. — Mind Map of the early days with Arnold and Maya before he full recent integration.

Mind Map on understanding Linear Colour Space within Maya and Arnold back when we first started using it.

April 6, 2018September 10, 2018 | Paul Greer

Wow. I was just reviewing my RSS subscriptions and most of the tumblrs I follow haven’t posted in over a year.

Blue Planet 2 Titles BAFTA nominated!!

Link | March 22, 2018December 27, 2025 | Paul Greer

Great news.

Blue Planet 2 is BAFTA nominated for Titles and Graphic Content.

Tonight’s sunset and what it did to the inside of the window fram

Image | March 12, 2018September 12, 2018 | Paul Greer

Out of practice so I practice drawing hands. After Shiele. Also some little men.

Image | February 22, 2018March 9, 2019 | Paul Greer

Silos and the Open Web

Aside | January 25, 2018December 27, 2025 | Paul Greer

On Blogs, RSS and Social Media:

The Open Web movement asserts a special role for public, cooperative, and standard World Wide Web communications; it opposes private, exclusive, proprietary Web solutions.

Computer scientist Tantek Çelik gives three aspects of the Open Web:

publish content and applications on the web in open standards

code and implement the web standards depend on

access and use content / code / web-apps / implementations

— Wiki

An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system or subsystem, figuratively trapped within a container like grain is trapped within a silo: there may be a lot of it, and it may be stacked quite high and freely available within those limits, but it has no effect outside those limits.

— Wiki

Another thing, if enough people use the open web, not very many, we'll be able to boot up more open stuff like blogging, podcasting and RSS. All that stopped because y'all are using silos now, and that cuts off innovation.
— Dave Winer (@davewiner) January 24, 2018

Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to go full-bore blog again, like in the old days. Twitter’s only real use is as a notification system, after all, so you’d just pump out post links to it from your blog. You know, the way people used to, when having a place for your own voice and your own thoughts was a good thing.

When I was in the swing of it, way back when, it was like the world’s most minimalist radio station. A Station Ident post to start the day, a Night Music or Closedown post at the end of the day, littered with whatever strangeness and wonder passed my screen in between.

I miss that long moment when the web seemed full of people doing the same thing, or thinking in public. It happens in the Republic Of Newsletters, now. But it was nice to have all those little radio stations broadcasting in the night.

— Warren Ellis

The above tweeter, RSS pioneer, David Winer has made an RSS feed for journalists. Eliot Landrum has followed suit with an RSS feed for Open Architects. These are in the form of OPML files that can be read in your RSS reader of choice.