Recently updated blogs

Continuing a thread about vintage TV ads we last did on September 8, today's post delves into 1950's and 1960's Commercial Land, specifically cigarettes.To get in the mood, it's time for a cuppa joe from Conquistador Coffee!Since the September 8 post started with animated ads, here are some very good ones plugging Lucky "LSMFT" Strikes.While I don't know offhand who produced the stylish "It's Light Up Time" ads, they are …

Well this is just a really nice piece of flattery, and a nice breakdown of my design system masterclass I delivered at HATCH Conference in Berlin last year. I truly enjoy teaching masterclasses, running workshops, and working with teams to help people understand important concepts, provide resources, and share my own experience working with dozens of teams on design system efforts. Thanks Zoi!

The New York Times recently ran a one–two punch of stories about the ostensibly softening political involvement of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta — where by “punch”, I mean “gentle caress”. Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac on Meta “distanc[ing] itself from politics”: On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And …

Endre Penovác (Serbia, b. 1956) paints cats using a unique wet-into-wet technique. He uses a wet-in-wet technique, which involves applying wet paint to a pre-wetted surface. This approach allows the pigments to blend and spread organically, creating soft, ethereal effects.More about how he paints these cats on my Substack post

Nancy Friedman is one of my favorite writers on language, so I was over the moon to read her write-up of my book Gobsmacked! I can’t imagine a better appreciation of what I’ve tried to do with the blog and the book. Her piece also reminded me that, some months back, Nancy had suggested I write about “pap”–a noun for paparazzi photographers, and a verb for what they do, as …

• 4-star hikes • 4 mile out-and-back • Medium difficulty | Gain 1,750 feet • Sandwich, NH | White Mountains . Looking towards the White Mountains from the summit. Standing at 2,636 feet of elevation and located just four miles north of Squam Lake, Mount Israel's trails lead panoramic viewpoints in all directions. From up here you can enjoy sights that include Squam Lake and the ragged Sandwich mountain range …

“Committees are an infrastructure designed to race you to the bottom of opportunity!” – Futurist Jim Carroll Committees kill ideas. Committees kill all initiative. Committees kill the idea of innovation. Committees are the destroyer of all things. Did I mention I think committees are a bad idea? “Let me check with the committee.” “We’ve got a committee looking into that.” “There’s a committee involved with the decision.” “We’ll send that …

In searching for a prototype modern hermit, one is confronted by the reality that after the Middle Ages, hermits in modernity were destined by authorities to disappear. In order to survive, eremitism transformed into solitude, and hermits transformed into solitaries. Unlike historical hermits, however, who seem so similar regardless of geography, culture, or era, solitaries present more variable phenomena. Life styles of modern solitaries depend more on circumstance and personality. …

In this blog, I offer an autoethnographical account of what it means for TV scholars to take part in the conference continuum, which I argue is both familiar and strange in every iteration. Whether you are an ardent follower of certain large-scale conferences, or a serial “dipper in” to a plethora of small-scale events, you might not realise how to “find your fit” – when you turn up… Source

The Galileo Project's Papua New Guinea expedition "has culminated in the publication of a major new paper by Professor Avi Loeb and his team in the prestigious Elsevier journal Chemical Geology. Thus Harvard's announcement, which also details some "key findings" from the 1.5M dollar effort. The announcement retains the claim the meteor was "interstellar," with admission that some spherules were "potentially of terrestrial origin," and, while stressing the "BeLaU" subset …

Modern computing is just trying to keep up with all of the places where people have changed things for bullshit reasons, and fixing the resulting broken processes, until you die.

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.The thing is, I still believe that...

I’ve already mentioned Tom Harrison’s “Headline of the Day” email list, which is always entertaining and often good source material for Lowering the Bar items. I highly recommend signing up (email: tomharrison711 at gmail.com). I have an email distribution list too, of course, but HOTD can offer you similar entertainment in far fewer words. The cost is the same. A recent link led to the headline, “A World Naked Bike …

No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a profile of Nathan Cleary, the Panthers halfback, and veritable introvert: Nathan Cleary could have the time of his life, “just the most …

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in …