Recently updated blogs

THE FRIDAY PIC is an installation shot from “Amerika,” the wonderful new projection by Javier Téllez at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, a two-year-old space in Greenwich Village in New York. In today’s New York Times, I published a long feature explaining the genesis of the piece, for which Téllez hired eight recent migrants from Venezuela to collaborate with him on a Charlie Chaplin-inspired film, as both its …

"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial" is the first word that comes to this non-American mind, and not only in the predominance of books written by Americans. The word also applies to "best", …

Did you know that you can use AI for more than just looking up information? I experimented with using Claude AI to generate an interactive math activity out of HTML, where students could input variables to determine the area of triangles, rectangles, and circles.Claude generated code and suggestions in just a few seconds! The model offered students a visual aid, clear instructions to help them calculate the area, and a …

What is Templating? Templating in the sense of this articlee is when there is a text with placeholders that get filled in according to some set of rules (the templating language). Using templating is often easier than hardcoding some string assembly logic, it also has the benefit that the template could be read in from a configuration file. In case you've ended up here because you have some sample templating …

A weak note

– “I used to read Mr. Money Mustache”, some people say these days, “Until he got all rich and fancy so that he no longer understands the common person’s plight. Stash probably doesn’t even practice any of these money-saving things he preaches any more!” When I read things like this, I can’t help but laugh. Because on the one hand, when you put a bunch of personal life details online …

Exhibition catalogue published by PWP/Bloomsbury, design by Lucy Morton I've been fascinated by Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) ever since I began researching her first husband Eric Ravilious (1903-42). The works I saw here and there seemed dark and strange, not at all like his and not really like anyone else's either. As a writer, her voice runs through the Ravilious in Pictures series I wrote for the Mainstone Press between 2009 …

I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for community-led events in the front-end community, and I am forever grateful for that. However, I am heartbroken by the current state of the events. Many community-led events have recently been cancelled due to low ticket sales, which feeds a gigantic gap of events left by the pandemic. I remember we had to cancel the in-person London CSS and IndieWebCamp …

A while back I read Bruno Latour’s After Lockdown, his last sole-authored book. It is beautiful and written with the poetic vision of someone whose world, whose Earth, whose Universe has come alive with relations, actors and networks. It is excellent as a worked example of how to use Actor Network Theory to grapple with life as it comes at you fast (or slow). ANT itself is not mentioned by …

“Educational” games were all over the road in the late 80s and early 90s. Sometimes they’d just be a cartoon rabbit trying to get you to do math problems, and sometimes they’d have you driving across the country to try and teach you geography. But one game of the time stands out in my memory — and, I’d imagine, the memories of many who played it — for kind of …

Revelations come in odd places. I had gotten off the St. Clair replacement bus the other month and was walking across Maple Claire park from the Gunns Road streetcar loop. It’s the shortest and least aromatic path to the event space where I pick up the odd shift. Getting to work is an exercise in avoidance in the Stockyards. If you were to walk along Glen Scarlett you would pass …

Superhero shows are a weird subgenre of sci-fi. The super-powers and how the superheroes use them in pursuit of their world-saving goals are often the point, and so often skimp on the sci part of sci-fi. The Amazon original The Boys is no different, where the core novum is a chemical (compound V) that gives people superpowers. I love the show. Though it’s definitely for adults with its violence and …

8 months post-ice, it's time for something new!

If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve at least heard of A Book Apart (ABA), who published Design for Real Life, which I co-wrote with Sara Wachter-Boettcher back in 2016. What you may not have heard is that ABA has closed up shop. There won’t be any more new ABA titles, nor will ABA continue to sell the books in their catalog. That’s the bad news. The great news is …