Author Archive
Let fly and channel
Here is a poster for Ruby’s music/dance collective, Red Aveline.
Will you be in Naples on the 11th of October? Ok great!, go along.
:-)
Here are some of Skype’s new-and-improved chat emoticons. Designed by Jon Hicks and animated by me.
They’re an update of the original set, with a few new ones, a range of sizes for different screens, and more realistic puke.
If that sounds like your thing you can see the rest in the latest desktop Skype client (PC/Mac).
Additional credits: Skype Design Director Steve Pearce; original emoticons by Priidu Zilmer; Lord of the (dance) Mark Lacroce.
Pre-release hype
Sam and I are making an iphone game. Hopefully it will be fun. Sam is doing the hard bits, I am drawing the spaceships.
Here is a spaceship:
Here is a spaceship:
TMI
I enjoy being surprised by stories. Taking a ride and not knowing where I’m going or when I’ll arrive. So I was disappointed to see a (non-removable) progress bar on the Kindle Vera got for Christmas.
Part of the enjoyable ‘not knowing’ in movies is their varying lengths. If I don’t know a film’s duration it can end at any time. My experience of a moment isn’t precontextualised by the knowledge that there is still 40 minutes to play and therefore this is cannot be the climax. Or conversely, that the climax must surely arrive soon as there are only 4 minutes remaining.*
Thus I find myself more absorbed in the story and thinking less about the story.
Paper books are physical progress bars so you can’t not know how far through you are.** I was looking forward to the new experience of reading an e-book and experiencing it without the meta-knowledge of its length. But Kindle, you deny me this.***
*Other sometimes-irritating signifiers include famous actors (“she must be a significant character” and/or “he won’t die this early”) and censor ratings (“contains a sex scene”).
**Though I have been fooled by long afterwords.
***While we’re on the subject of unnecessary ‘information’ added by dimwitted IAs doing their best to smother the heart-opening mystery of art by teaching people to demand foreknowledge of every emotional experience they’re about to have, and to think they have understood it afterward if they’ve categorised and quantified it with the laziest of measures – I’d prefer if you could turn off the ‘track length/time remaining’ display in iTunes. I do not care if a song’s duration is easily calculated, or even critical to the software. Being reminded of it constantly is as necessary as having your pulse taken by the person you’re kissing.
