Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
The headline from my THR editor was a straightforward pun: “John Wick Gets Lit.” Because you light a wick, get it? Like a candle? But my brain went elsewhere when I first learned it, to an entirely different place altogether:
There were reasons why this wasn’t a smart idea, not least of which being I felt self-conscious for just outright swiping Olivia Jaimes’ original “Sluggo Is Lit” image/joke. (It’s also the wrong shape/size for the newsletter format, but, I mean, I could have worked with that.) The actual reason it wasn’t used, though, is something far more straightforward: My THR editor didn’t know the “Sluggo Is Lit” meme. And then, when I was appalled and went to a third party, they didn’t know it, either. So, we ended up dropping it and trying something more traditional, but I still think it’s funny.
More graphics from the Heat Vision newsletter, including some we ended up not using for various reasons. Such things happen, as the newsletter comes together each week — stories slip out of contention (or fall apart entirely), even after we’ve imagined them being the big breakout for that week. It’s literally part of the process, and something that comes with so little ego that I genuinely can’t remember always which graphics we have used for sure anymore.
This one got a new headline at the last minute:
This next one required perhaps too much effort for the final result, but dammit, I really wanted to make a With The Beatles riff.
All photos taken within a year or so of moving to Portland. I became interested in colors and lines, apparently.
(I’m not sure when or why I stopped taking photos like these; I don’t have any after 2010, but I’m unsure if that’s because I stopped taking them, or I stopped keeping them. Either way, it’s a habit I wish I hadn’t gotten out of. I like these investigations of my environments.)
I can remember with surprising clarity the circumstances in which this photo was taken; I was walking around San Francisco in the evening, having just taken a meeting about my immigration status at the time. (I wasn’t a full citizen yet, but that was about to happen; that’s what the meeting was about.) I’d become obsessed with signage in the city, as well as images of decayed materials, so of course this called out to me. I didn’t realize at the time that I was going to leave the city for Portland within the year, but on some level, I must have known — before I left Aberdeen for the final time, I became equally obsessed with the signage in that city, too.
In contrast, I went through a Portland signage obsession maybe a year or so into arriving, and I’m still here, a decade later. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m going to stick around.
