Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Chuunk indeed. Radio silence recently has been down not, for once, to overwork but to the opposite: I’ve been trying to cut back on work last week and this – I’ll actually be entirely offline for Tuesday through Thursday, shockingly (That said, my Time essay should be running on Wednesday, so you won’t miss me at all) – and so, this blog has been suffering. All apologies, as the saying goes.
We don’t go through life talking in text speak, just like in the age of the telegraph people didn’t talk like telegrams. Some of it makes its way into the language like “OMG,” but we saw the same thing with proofreading terms like “stet” and “ibid” or things like that.
People are always scared of new technology. On the first trains, people had nervous breakdowns, because they were going too fast. When the first bicycles came out, people were warned about getting “bicycle face.” [Atwood pulls back the skin on her face to demonstrate, looking like the victim of a bad plastic surgeon.]
What people were really worried about was that it could enable sex, because you could get away from the home and parental control. There were similar concerns about the automobile. And a similar uproar was caused by the zipper. People preached sermons about the dangers of zippers. And now we have velcro! That’s even easier.
From here. Margaret Atwood is awesome.
Okay, so apparently I took an extra day off from this blog than intended. That’s because yesterday’s return to the day job was slightly more hectic than I’d hoped, after a weekend that was much more hectic than I’d hoped, and to be honest, by the time I’d finished work at 10pm, the thought of writing some more just made me want to collapse onto a fainting couch with the back of my hand to my head. “Why, I do declayah!”
Back to fighting fit status soon, I hope. Stay tuned, Earthlets.
As I said on Twitter today, it’s been one of those days where work can expand to fill any free time around it. Realistically, it’s been a few weeks like that now, and between that and a couple other things in the real world, it’s been a completely exhausting period in general. I’m nowhere near caught up with where I want to be, either – I’m literally just in front of deadlines, and hoping that tomorrow will bring some kind of massively creative outburst that will allow me to jump ahead of everything else in my way and just get shit done enough for the weekend to bring something resembling relaxation. Quite how August turned out this weird, I have no idea, but I’ll be honest with you: I’m kind of over it already.
For the second time in a decade, the believability ratings for major news organizations have suffered broad-based declines. In the new survey, positive believability ratings have fallen significantly for nine of 13 news organizations tested. This follows a similar downturn in positive believability ratings that occurred between 2002 and 2004.
The falloff in credibility affects news organizations in most sectors: national newspapers, such as the New York Times and USA Today, all three cable news outlets, as well as the broadcast TV networks and NPR.
From here.
The one comfort I take from this is that Fox News’ ratings are pretty much the worst on the survey.
I love this list of the “20 irrefutable theories of book cover design” from the Guardian:
11. Unheimlich theory
This theory takes a familiar image or symbol and makes it strange or unsettling. One cover of Lolita uses the image of a girl’s bedroom wall to represent a girl’s legs and underwear.12. Absent presence theory
A gap is left on the cover, a missing image or text, that implies something. By having this space, the reader is forced to fill the gap with their imagination in order to understand the meaning.13. Ju Jitsu theory
The opponent, the cover, forces a view or conception upon the defender, the reader, such as the bloody, violent implications on the cover of Anthony McGowan’s love story Stag Hunt.
It speaks to the former graphic designer in me, as well as the lover of seeing trends and movements that may not really be there yet, drawing on threads to bring them together. Plus, you know, “Unheimlich theory” is just a great name for anything.
What’s even more impressive is that while high unemployment is driving the national labor-force participation rate down, the Portland area’s participation rate is now growing. In the aggregate, Texas is where people have been moving to get jobs, but if you like overcast weather and independent coffee shops, greater Portland’s not a bad alternative.
So what went right? To an extent, Portland’s benefitted from the fact that some of its local enthusiasms—bicycles, food trucks, microbrews, artisanal whatnot—have become more popular nationally, giving a boost to some growing local companies. The Portland area has also benefitted from the region’s green proclivities. Renewable energy has been a growth industry nationwide, and Portland is home to the North American base of Germany’s SolarWorld and Denmark’s Vestas, one of the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturers.
Way to go, my home town. From here.
For a certain period in every life, a person can do no wrong. That period may last an hour, a month, or much longer, and that is the real unfairness of fate. But length aside, there does come a moment for everyone when he is invincible, infallible, immortal. Even if it lasts only an afternoon.
– Jonathan Carroll, From The Teeth of Angels
