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At the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival, Indian director Payal Kapadia etched her name for eternity in the annals of cinema history by winning the 'Grand Prix.’ Kapadia's debut feature All We Imagine As Light, was singled out among 22 entries. Her contenders included the likes of Andrea Arnold, Francis Ford Coppola, Jia Zhange-Ke, Paolo Sorrentino, Sean Baker, and Ali Abbasi. Kapadia is the first Indian woman filmmaker to win …

Just a brief update here -- I recently had the honor of participating in Rock Paper Shotgun's "what's on your bookshelf" interview series.It's one of my favorite gaming journalism things happening at the moment, full of interesting book recs and observations from smart people like Alice Bell, Josh Sawyer, and Xalavier Nelson Jr. Check out the full series listing here.The implication is that I too am also a Smart One. …

Typographic glyphs have their moments. The @ symbol was barely used before it became indispensable for email and social media. The creation of the single European currency saw thousands of fonts being reissued to include € at the turn of the century. It’s likely that some crypto-boosters are hoping this will happen again, and the […]

This is going to be somewhat rant-y. I’ll hopefully get something longer written about this at some point, but for now a brief post will have to do. I struggle a lot with finding satisfaction in...things. I have to be careful, because at least some of this is biochemical, and it’s easy to find something that would make sense as a cause and assume that it’s actually the cause (as …

My family just returned from 2 weeks in Japan, broken up as such: Tokyo (4 full days, plus the evening of the day we landed) Japanese Alps Matsumoto (1 day) Takayama (2 days) Kyoto (3.5 days) Osaka (2.5 days) This is very much a first-timer’s trip, hitting the main three cities. We added the Alps to get away from dense urban spaces for a bit, and also for the historic …

When did we start using the ch unit to specify the maximum length for a line of text in CSS? To do so makes assumptions that don't necessarily hold up, and there are more appropriate units to use. Also: was it my fault? Read more.

I took a little break from sharing to get used to my new normal. A week ago I had to have some blood work done and for the first time in my memory I engaged in the process. Usually I would be sick from nervousness for days before. I would avoid and postpone. I would get to the blood draw place and start to panic. When it came time for …

Are you paying for servers sitting idle in the middle of the night? When we talk about scaling a web server, we often focus on scaling up. Can your server handle a spike in traffic? As your business grows, can your database handle the growth? There's less focus on scaling down. It makes sense, because most businesses are focused on growth. Not too many are looking to shrink. But if …

Over the past few weeks, I've been experimenting with painting in watercolours using my AxiDraw plotter. Watercolour is a medium I enjoy painting in (by hand) as a personal hobby, kind of separate from my public art making, so it’s been interesting to combine it with code. I’ve thought about trying this for a while but I was finally spurred on to do it after I visited Licia He’s studio …

CrankWheel uses Maxio (née Chargify) for subscription management. It’s OK but I’ve never been super duper happy with it (mostly because I chose it for its flat fee structure, then later they switch to charging a flat fee plus percentage… and the switching costs are high). Today, I present another small gripe with it: The filename of invoices sent by Chargify looks something like _541780067.pdf, and this can’t be configured. …

Credit: ApexToday, Apex announced their Series B funding round, led by XYZ Ventures and CRV, with participation from Upfront. And if you spend much time in LA, you’ll quickly realize that we’re in a groundswell of space and defense startups.Is it because of the rich engineering talent coming out of Caltech, UCLA, USC, Harvey Mudd, and all the other universities?Is it because of the long history in the region of …

Travel today is often portrayed as a healthy activity, good for body, mind…and what’s left of the spirit! A good holiday is generally viewed as a tonic, and holiday company advertisements extol the virtues of ‘getting away’, encountering new places, people and cultures and (if you want to ‘live life to the full’) experiences. As one travel website rather cheesily puts it, “jobs fill your pockets, but adventures fill your …

I guess this is goodbye. I thought we still had a little time. Even though I said it was okay to go, I held onto a spark of hope that I could squeeze your hand one last time on earth. Oh, how I wish the flight had been a little earlier.The past few months have been heart-achingly gut-wrenching. I'm so sorry I took you out of your house. I'm sorry …

“Swedenborg’s visions were not events imposed upon him by some outside agency. They were the agency that he had always, from the beginning, solicited with his eyes wide open.”—Iain Sinclair ... The post SWEDENBORG’S LUSTHUS first appeared on Iain Sinclair.

Sometimes, I’ve just felt a meeting or pitch slipping away from me. In desperation, I start to thrash around for a way out – throwing new ideas or angles into the conversation, trying to dig my way out of the hole in the hope that something – anything – lands and gives me firm ground […]