→ March 10, 2017 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
The computer only does; it doesn't know. You can confuse it and it can turn on you. It's up to you to get along with it. Still, the computer can go crazy and do odd and strange things. It catches viruses, gets shorts, bombs out, etc. Somehow, tonight, I feel that the less said about the computer, the better.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
→ December 4, 2016 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Shadow of The Wind. Like a spilled bottle of Gentian-Violet over fresh toilet paper. Or the other way around.
Here is a little list of things so far, this year. Now I can't sop worrying whether that first semicolon was egregious.
→ August 31, 2016 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
The Warhol book, one that reads—appropriately—like a bag of chips, is from JB.
Writers at Work gathered mite-tears sandwiched between slightly more cultured-looking hardbound volumes in the Institute library before I bailed it out into the rain and, for exactly thirty seven seconds felt the exact same kind of elation my mother usually feels after putting a frayed thread through a needle. A PhD. fellow who passed by, tried hiding behind a pillar unsuccessfully and leapt out after I did not slow down to attack. I was pretty sure he had sandwiches in his eyes and then I wasn’t sure anymore. He was probably just too late for the evening tea or liked the general idea of hiding behind pillars when running late for cheese (1-slice) sandwiches.
The thing is set in RCA VideoComp Avanta and smells of old tree stumps and dead pixels. A little bit of Google-fu brings up this PDF and then some, lining a rabbit hole slightly wider than something that can accommodate an atrophied miniature rabbit.
→ August 11, 2016 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.
Taking a Tire Iron to Techie Triumphalism, NYT Book Review of Kentaro Toyama’s Geek Heresy. References—I think—this paper (PDF) in 2006.
→ March 3, 2016 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Discovered (gave in to) Anita Desai thanks to this wonderful Professor we have. Lungi over manbun in love with Bimla now.
→ February 8, 2016 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Wait But Why has this long-ish post on Horizontal History—a fun and informative visualisation of history through famous names. It is at-least perspective-changing to think of Martin Luther King and Anne Frank as contemporaries.
→ December 5, 2015 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Craig Mod writes of pixels and ink; reading books on a screen and eventually on paper. Then Hugh McGuire says we can’t, anymore.
→ November 8, 2015 | Reading time: 2 minutes | Permalink
Burned through Eternally Yours: Time in Design and Vision in Product Design (design by Irma Boom, to boot) over multiple late-nighters in luxurious loneliness at the IDC library; we have on an 2030 to 2230 experimental extension. Eternally is, among other things, a set of monologues (and dialogues) on the dimension of time as applied to product (read interaction) design. It discusses the Long Now Foundation’s many projects, talks to artists/designers from across disciplines—the one on fashion is particularly worth reading twice, especially for like-minded cynics who end up here and read all the nonsense—and not-so-lightheartedly peddles Vivian, a non-object object that embodies the ideal of a product that steals time from others around. ViP is, on a too practical it hurts level, a how-to-guide on approaching the design process with a foot in the future. The focus is on interactions between products and people, more than the eventual product itself. Eternally has interesting parallels, where it takes apart this notion of planned interactions for a more realistic view on the place of things in the lives of people. Together, I wish these were appended in the reading lists for IxD courses, still largely concerned with glass surfaces and artificial intelligentsia.
Listen to Anab Jain talk at the NEXT conference, about what it means to be alive in the future. She has a blog post up walking through the talk, too. Happy to see her reflect at length and much more critically on some of the pet peeves of mine, with technology and non-removable batteries and the whole paying with data shebang. Discovered Magazine B.—the brand-videos are such nice propaganda. Maybe it was too early to quit ello afterall.
Acquired a mildly inoffensive fixed gear, and the thing still throws up a mighty surprise on descents, even after all thse years of riding around Gurgaon and its nemesis.
→ August 16, 2015 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Signed up for a JB membership, for yourstruly’s sanity and bank-balance seemed to depend on it. Post much wandering among the quasi-baroque of Hiranandani, one finds JB’s shelves lined with plastic-pouched paperbacks through a window that disappeared to take its condensation very seriously. It is packed with a surprisingly well-curated collection, playing to all ignored, weird corners of the gallery.
Got initiated into Bukowski with Ham on Rye, finished Looking Closer over two weekends in the main library, nibbled on Hello, I am Erik, Designing News, I Used to Be a Design Student, and Drawing Type. Tried reading Don Norman again, and failed to find myself a very good reason to go through the pain of rolling all the three shelves off for it time and again. The department library is disappointing and noisy; not how I like my Sulaimani.
→ June 4, 2015 | Reading time: ~1 minute | Permalink
Readying for a slight shift in coordinates, been working on fewer client-projects (the thinning enquiries help, a lot) and reading more off pixels and ink. Finished Murakami’s Underground after a couple years of turning the first page, Llosa’s Aunt Julia, Masters’s Genius in My Basement, and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. A cache of translated shorts from Murakami here, the beautifully designed, very-well curated Hopes&Fears, and most recently, Jina Khayyer’s shorts. Haven’t been able to pick up a copy of Colourless Tsukuru yet, owing to some little greenish, orangish pieces of papyrus not being where they ought to.
Monsoons are here.