Month: November 1999

Nude Teen Stick Figures. I have to wonder if the author was inspired by Scott McCloud’s discussion of realism in illustration, as described in Understanding Comics

11/21/1999
Nell Lancaster identified the “I don’t know karate, but I do know crazy” mention a few days ago. It’s from James Brown (from ‘The Big Payback’: “I don’t know
karate, but I know ka-razor..”). Thanks Nell!

11/21/1999
hmmmmm, michael, whose dog wants to be on the radio, doesn’t read this site in the morning but waits ’til later in the day. I wonder if it’s because of my new goth design with the metallicky background images and all? Maybe it’s like eating Chinese food for breakfast?

The design is really rather darker than I am as a person, I was just experimenting to try and simulate the look of light-on-metal on a computer screen.

My amateur graphic design analysis went something like this:
Looking at metal stuff, it has essentially a monochromatic color makeup. The perception of metal is basically a glint of white that fades to gradually darker shades of grey. When trying to reproduce this as a web page background, I didn’t want to use some massive image that would cover the entire background. Enlarging a smaller image using an HTML tag destroyed the subtle glint. So repeating the image was what I ended up with.

Then when I attempted to place text over images that consisted of alternating black and white I found that neither light nor dark text could be read – a major flaw in the design. So I had to darken the images to make the white text readable, causing the images to look like plastic or curtains or metal painted black. Good thing no one is paying me for this!

11/19/1999
It seems every organization on earth has decided to produce some sort of millenium exhibition. The only one I’ve bothered to visit so far is the Letters to Future Generations developed by UNESCO. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Keep Poetry Alive! is particularly moving.

11/19/1999
Megnut’s chants for everyday life (see November 16) embody an inspired perspective on life.

11/19/1999
My notes-so-far on the general structure of the patterns in A Pattern Language:
They are hierarchical, starting from the most general and working down toward the most specific.
More specific patterns are dependent on the corresponding general “parent” patterns (my term). More general patterns rely on the implementation of the more specific “children” patterns.
The patterns are inherently practical, addressing problems with solutions.
As the word “patterns” suggests, these are repetitive fixes that recurring problems.
Patterns include a repetitive problem and its solution.
Patterns are expressed in the following format:
1. picture
2. introduction
3. headline
4. body, consisting of some background info, evidence for validity, and range of occurances.
5. the solution, consisting of the physical and social relationships necessary. Itakes the form of an instruction. The solution must fix the “invariant property common” to every instance of the problem.
6. This pattern’s relationship to other patterns
Re-reading that, it sounds a bit dry (or maybe I’m just really tired), but it’s just enough structure to build a communicable language without so much restriction that hinders it’s flexibility for creating other languages.

With regard to interaction design, much work has been done: The Interaction Design Patterns Page

11/19/1999

Watched this amazing episode of New York: A Documentary Film on PBS last night. The most gripping part of it was the account of a famous fire at a textile sweatshop:

1911 – 146 people — mostly young, immigrant girls — are killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. A crowd of helpless bystanders watches in horror as some of the victims jump to their deaths in a vain effort to escape the heat and flames. The owners are tried for manslaughter for having locked their employees in the building but are acquitted.

I realized this building is only a few blocks out of my way to work, so I stopped by this morning. It’s now part of New York University. There’s a plaque on the building telling of the fire and of the building’s national historic status. Looking up at the 8th and 9th floors I imagined what it must have been like to lean out the window trying to avoid the flames and then eventually jumping to certain death. Thousands of onlookers stood below helpless, the ladders too short and the nets broken. The documentary included accounts from the scene, journalists describing the thud of women hitting the ground and dying instantly, one after another.

I don’t think I could work on those floors, knowing it was where the dead women were piled up, dead from smoke inhalation or burning, just outside the doors that were locked from the outside.