Saturday 21 December 2013

c'est ne trappe! or blue harvest

 
The Star Wars franchise is making an official foray into social media, as Laughing Squid reports, and in embracing and celebrating fan-art of all sorts, including memes and remixes.
For Star Wars' debut on Tumblr, here is R2-D2 projecting a holographic photo-stream (as opposed to Princess Leia's distress message) for Luke Skywalker, C-3PO and Obi Wan Kenobi back at the moisture ranch on Tatooine, and although the premiere is part of a promotional campaign for a new television spin-off and the cinematic continuation of the saga's middle chapters, this expanded universe is sure to be a lot of fun and have a lot of classic homages.

gazette or worth-1000

Here is a thoughtful essay from veteran blogger Jason Kottke that expands on the lingering and drawn-out obituary and eulogizing of blogging as a form of communication that have been steadily eroding the format for sometime.

It's really thought-provoking and Kottke is being a gad-fly in demonstrating how journals and journalism are being splintered into different presences and personae spread along a variety of specialised platforms that are very compart- mentalised and don't communicate very well with one another. Taking any usual type of sharage to task, one would probably not describe the activity or announcement as web-logging—or writing. Surely no one old school gets to gauge quality by virtue of formatting and window-dressing alone, since expression is a plastic and ever-evolving thing and means are just media. It seems to me however, there is an important distinction with a blog that lies in the difference between what one might list as a hobby, a project (or a passion or a living), and what one might list as a habit, an interest.

haus am see or sugarcubes

This isolated structure located on the Icelandic island of Elliรฐaey is actually a lodge established in the 1953 just as the last permanent residents were leaving for the mainland.  
As the sustained isolation made it not an ideal place for ranchers and fisherman, a group of hunters had the lodge built, though called the Bjork Hรบs it has nothing to do with a grace-and-favour residence being granted to the singer Bjรถrk Guรฐmundsdรณttir for being a national treasure or for making Iceland famous, as a place to gather for annual puffin-hunting expeditions—which would not be an activity that I would like to have my name connected with. The pictures of the place are really breath-taking, however.

Thursday 19 December 2013

narrative-arch or denouement

Fast Company presents an interesting study in the grammar of comic strips and finds that the human mind interprets the funnies, according to their established conventions, as a distinct lingual system.
The brain probably makes its own ways of making sense or following a story or a message presented in any venue or format and comics offer a good test subject as there are measurable elements of predictability from the set-up to the punch-line and when presented with irregular panels the departure was registered as jarring, like a linguistically value but non-nonsensical construction. I suppose there are too many variables within the plastic arts, a meme for example, to understand how it might be comprehended—or got.