designcult

What I'm thinking about this week

1. Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten's boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That's them up on the right there. I've owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to "garden use only" for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I'm in love all over again ...
2. Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg's usual group of slightly dotty British academics. 
3. The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I'm being guided by Adam Nash's personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one. 
4. Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess.  Think 2001 and Saturn 3.  Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
5. How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom. 
6. Occupy Wall Street. There's a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling's 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn't usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn't nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it's moments, and it certainly resonates today:
   
   

   “Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

   “A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

   “Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

Thief, thief, thief! Baggins!

I'm slowly reading "The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion" by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It's a dense exegesis of LOTR and clearly for pretty obsessive Tolkien fans only.

It's a lot of fun, though. My favorite so far is finding out that baggins is, among other things, English country speak for afternoon tea.There's also layers of bag related language play: Bag-end is Anglicized cul-de-sac (which is in turn faux French), Baggins vs. Sackville Baggins, etc.

I like dense naming. See also Warren Ellis's explanation of how he names characters, in part:

For instance: I’m working on something right now where I think I’ve nailed the character name finally. Birch. Birch = wood = connotes a degree of strength and basic groundedness. But also birching = flagellation. Also, “John Birch Society,” skeevy and untrustworthy. And it’s a hard, sharp word. There’s a lot about the character that unpacks out of the name.

I'm working with some folks on a product name right now. It's hard. And I think the good ones have dense (and sometimes non-obvious) layers of meaning, just like in fiction.

Reffell's law of PowerPoint writing loss

I'm in my home office, sorting old papers. And of course reading some of them. Apparently, in graduate school I was able to write clearly and analytically, at length, about complicated things like privacy regulations in the EU. There is little poetry, but there are thoughts, conveyed in English, by words on paper. There is clarity. There is precision. There are ideas that carefully build upon each other, in crisp sentences, stacked in well-ordered paragraphs, to a logical conclusion. (There are also too many commas and horrible typos, but that's always been true of my writing.)

I've had a Theory for a while (which for this post I've given a field promotion to Law) that explains why graduate school was the peak of my writing ability.  It is not because of age, or because I write less now. It is because of PowerPoint.

Reffell's law: For every year you write seriously, starting around Kindergarten, you get incrementally better at writing. And for every year you write serious amounts of PowerPoint (or Keynote) in a corporate environment, you lose one of those increments.

That's put me back, effectively, to my senior year in high school. (The startup years don't count for this, there's a low PPT count.) That's not so bad! I was a pretty good writer in high school. Better than a lot of adults. But it will go seriously downhill from here. Another two years and I'll be at 10th grade; two more and we'll be in middle school. Quickly we'll be in "Dick and Jane go up hill" territory.

I think, by the way, this is specific to intra-corporate use. Something about the highly concentrated jargon, shared assumptions, and positioning of cliches (verbal and visual) as a means of bludgeoning the decision-making apparatus into submission. Probably the decks you build for public presentations are safe. Probably.