Political awareness alphabet book

I'm working on an alphabet picture book that explains some abstract concepts of slightly higher difficulty than "A is for Apple." Here's the text. Next, I need to get on with the illustration.

A is for Anachronism, history out of time
B is for Budget, accounting for every dime
C is for Concept, an idea not concrete
D is for Diaspora, relocated in retreat
E is for English, colonial language of kings
F is for Future, not the present state of things
G is for God, a personification of morals
H is for Habitual, resting on your laurels
I is for Iconoclast, who fights against the norm
J is for Judiciary, those who keep the bench warm
K is for Karat, measure of golden worth
L is for Legacy, what's left when we leave Earth
M is for Management, who would organize all
N is for Neophyte, hoping to walk after the crawl
O is for Origin, where you got your start
P is for Power, influence over mind and heart
Q is for Quiet, the absence of sound
R is for Reconnaissance, seeing what's around
S is for Secrets, words no one will tell
T is for Truth, which claimants preach at a yell
U is for Utopia, not as perfect as you'd think
V is for Vermin, one you dislike or a mink
W is for Waste, leftovers after use
X is for Xenophobe, reacts to strangers with abuse
Y is for Youth, both fetishized and hated
Z is for Zeal, passion not yet abated

Making industrial boxfood at home

Earlier this year, I found myself explaining the procedure for making popcorn in a pot, on the stove, without pre-buttered, microwaveable kernels. I had never before realized that there are people who think that the only way to make popcorn is in a microwaveable bag. This revelation led to an idea: take foods that are best known in their instant format and create a cookbook/cookzine/cookblog explaining the procedure for making them the proper/old fashioned/slow/healthy way.

I can think of a few foods that might benefit from this treatment. Macaroni and cheese may be the most notable example. Among other boxfoods, though, there's stroganoff, french fries (which don't actually have to come out of a bag in the frozen food section), any number of sauces and salad dressings, the abovementioned popcorn and a whole legion of other foods. Suggestions in the comments, if you have something to add to the list.

Montreal Metro Map Circa 2032

One of my ongoing projects: imagining what Montreal's Metro system will look like in the future. Here's my fictitious 2032 Metro map, as released by the equally fictitious Societe de Transport du Quebec. (If you care to look at more fictitious future history, I collaborated on an article a couple months back about Montreal 2032, which you can read here.)

Bring back phone booths

I don't want to look like a fiend for nostalgia, but I think we need to reintroduce phone booths to the urban landscape. Why? I'm sick and tired of having private conversations in public. Cell phone saturation is high. More and more phone conversations (and important ones, at that) happen outside the home. There are very few quiet places to go when taking a phone call. I'd like to see phone booths, without phones, back on every street corner. It might just lower the incidence of people yelling in the street.

Print has problems

I'm catching up on my reading, going through a textbook about advertising and promotion, reading the bit about social networking sites as promotional tools. As is so often the case with textbooks, the information is out of date. Here's the problem: the book was published in 2008. Important news for textbook publishers: It's impossible to write about the internet in print. By the time the books gets to print and into the hands of readers, what was good, current information is out of date and outmoded. Print isn't fast enough.

What's the solution to this problem, then? A couple things. Thing one, I'd like to see my purchase of the textbook give me access to a pdf of the book as well. (A good example of a publisher doing this is The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Ubuntu Kung Fu, for example, offers a pdf option, as well as couple other neat things that I'm about to talk about.) Offering a pdf version means giving readers something searchable and easier to navigate than a physical book. That's important when the book in question isn't a novel. Thing two, I want to see online errata and updates. I know it's impossible to expect publishers and authors to constantly revise their books, but I'd really like a little community and challenge to build up around textbooks (for an example, look again at Ubuntu Kung Fu). Give me an errata section that users can contribute to, give me updates on the subject matter, give me a discussion board. In short, give me an online portal for the textbook. Make it relevant and timely. For marketing especially, things don't lie still. Timely subjects need timely textbooks, not a new version every couple years.

Artris

Illustration backlog: This one was for an article about video games as art.

Email? No.

Because I've been profoundly lazy about blogging lately, here's a nice, easy, pretty one. It's another darn illustration.

Being profound isn't easy

When very few people knew how to read or write, it must have been much easier to write profound things. Today, with the huge mass of voices, all demanding to be heard and all distributed worldwide via the internet, it's far harder to write things that people will actually pay attention to and remember. We have such a huge volume of information, now. It makes it nearly impossible to actually process and give consideration to everything. And if I blog that sentiment? It's just another bunch of words in our huge wash of constant data.

Another Kubla Khan

I'm kind of addicted to "Kubla Khan." It's a fantastic, profoundly strange and beautiful poem. It's also in the public domain, which lets me do nice things to it without infringing copyright. I've done an illustrated zine version in the past, I think I'm working on another. Just finished, though, is a very strange web based version.
It's kind of concrete poetry on the internet. Find it here.

Bank Machines in a cashless world

I think that a cashless world is far more likely to happen than a paperless office. What, then, happens to all the poor bank machines when we finally give cash the boot? They'll be sad, obsolete, unemployed, junked. We'll have a glut of clever computers in great big boxes.

Then again, who am I to say that we'll ever have a cashless world? We've been promised that world for years, and it keeps not happening. Who wants to buy a pack of gum on debit? It's a clunky and inefficient thing to do. Loads of cash replacement schemes have failed over the years, and so many people argue that cash is a better way of regulating spending. But, in the event that it does ever happen, I can't help but wonder what will become of the thousands upon thousands of unemployed bank machines.

A cocktail dress from a cocktail shaker

I'm working on a pretty interesting project at the moment. My favourite little gallery is having a rummage sale right now. They're inviting artists to take something from the sale and get inspired. The finished works are going to be shown at the closing party. So, you might ask, what kind of object did I take and what am I doing with it? I took this completely killer mid century cocktail shaker. It happens to be massive, as well as super classy. It's made of glass and has red, gold, and black birds printed on it. What am I making, then? As the title of the post says, I'm making the cocktail dress that should go with it. It has an empire waistline, and the bodice is entirely crocheted. That gives it a pleasant sense of both weight and naffness. The crocheted bodice is in cream and brown and looks very mid-century housewife. The skirt, though, is where it gets interesting. There are some disorganized strands of crochet, but the majority is a solid red jersey with gold birds drawn on. That's all the stuff that's actually finished. What I'm still working on is attaching shiny things to it. After all, I need to make it match the shiny bits of the shaker. For that, I'm employing little tiny plastic charm bracelet ornaments of helicopters and astronauts, as well as junk jewellery. That last bit of ornamentation won't be happening until my thumb recovers from the crochet marathon. Pictures when the whole thing is done.

Future Atlantis

I was thinking the other week about hydroelectric projects. Specifically, I was thinking about the towns that get flooded in the creation of new dam projects. Think: towns evacuated and flooded, buried under new lakes as if they never existed. These towns are the future Atlantises.

The Language isn't built for it

Science fiction writers (I'm thinking Douglas Adams and Spider Robinson in particular) always say that our languages (particularly English) aren't built to deal with time travel. Fine. But at this point in time, we don't have that problem. We still travel at a rate of one second per second into the future. But there are other things that English has trouble with that we have gotten around to.

I'm thinking, in particular, of transgendered people. If I'm thinking about someone I haven't seen since high school, who was a girl then, but isn't now, what pronouns do I use. I know that if I saw him on the street, in the present, I'd call him by his new name and have no trouble thinking of him as male. But am I meant to change my memories? Can I treat his memory as something separate from his present? Can he have two different sets of pronouns that apply, one for the past and one for the present?

I think I may have lied in the first paragraph. This is a question of time travel. The time travel in question is my travel to my own past experience through memory. In this case, though, the past tense works just fine. It's the pronouns that are broken.

When word processors are the old fashioned way

I tried to load my blogger dashboard, in order to write the previous two posts. No response, just the generic message from my modem, saying that it wasn't going to happen. Check the modem: no lights out. Check another site, internet working properly. “So,” I though to myself, “blogger must be down. I guess I'll have to write these the old fashioned way and upload later.” The strange thing, though, is that by “the old fashioned way,” I meant in a word processor. Which is to say, a word processor that is actually installed on my physical-right-here-in-front-of-me computer. When did that become the old fashioned way? I'm a little concerned that I might soon be an anachronism. More and more, our productivity apps are moving to the internet (just look at google docs). More and more, the app that people use most is their browser. Will I be hopelessly old fashioned with my word processor and my graphics clients and my email client? The smart money, I think, is on the answer to that question being “yes.”

Carpet Beaters

I went trekking through Parc Extension today. The very best thing I saw: a woman outside of her apartment, in the dead of winter, beating an area rug. I didn't really realize that there still exist people who take their rugs outside and beat them. I mean, it's something I never really think about. To the extent that I ever do think about it, it feels like a kind of anachronism. It seems quaint. It shouldn't, of course. After all, beating the dust out of a carpet takes no electricity. That makes it less energy intensive than using a vacuum cleaner. Very eco, right? Also, it's way more frugal. If you only have sweepable floors and area rugs, there's no need to own a vacuum. Sounds sensible. Having said all of that, even though it clearly makes sense to take carpets outside and beat them, I was surprised to see someone actually doing so. It was a profoundly nice surprise.