Neven Mrgan's tumbl

Hey, guess who’s in issue #5 of Offscreen, a very nice...

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:14:44 -0700

Hey, guess who’s in issue #5 of Offscreen, a very nice magazine that treats software makers with the same care and respect that folks in the “old arts” are used to. That’s right, Jessica Zollman, Jon Hicks, and Naz Hamid! And me! Make your friends jealous, buy your copy here.

Are you undecided in the great Flat vs. Skeuououmourphic design...

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:11:00 -0700

Are you undecided in the great Flat vs. Skeuououmourphic design debate of 2012? Are you unsure of how flat is flat enough (but not too flat)? Wondering what it means to let a button be a button? Use this handy chart to pick the button that looks like a button to you!

"The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:11:21 -0700

“The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re going into one of those rooms to try and convince somebody to make it, I don’t care who you’re pitching, I don’t care what you’re pitching—it can be about genocide, it can be about child killers, it can be about the worst kind of criminal injustice that you can imagine—but as you’re sort of in the process of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a sentence and act like you’re having an epiphany, and say: “You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope.””

- Steven Soderbergh’s rant about the state of the movie business in Film Comment

"Following his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson’s body was preserved in a cask of..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 02:58:00 -0700

“Following his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson’s body was preserved in a cask of rum to allow transport back to England. Upon arrival, however, the cask was opened and found to be empty of rum. The pickled body was removed and, upon inspection, it was discovered that the sailors had drilled a hole in the bottom of the cask and drunk all the rum. Thus, this tale serves as a basis for the term “Nelson’s blood” being used to describe rum. It also serves as the basis for the term tapping the admiral being used to describe surreptitiously sucking liquor from a cask through a straw.”

- Wikipedia: “sucking the monkey, bleeding the monkey, or tapping the admiral”

“Work” icon

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:05:59 -0700

“Work” icon

"Honestly, I wouldn’t wait for fucking three hours. I think it’s crazy. I really think it..."

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:11:00 -0700

“Honestly, I wouldn’t wait for fucking three hours. I think it’s crazy. I really think it sucks when we have a wait. There’s an attitude out there where people feel like you are making them wait on purpose or that you are making it difficult to get in on purpose, which makes no sense to me at all from a business standpoint. I want you to sit down and eat and pay me for your meal. Why would I hold a table empty? I don’t understand why some people think we are artificially blowing up the line or not letting someone in because they are wearing the wrong shoes. I want people to eat and enjoy.”

- Andy Ricker of Pok Pok, regarding the wait times at his restaurants

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake AC GM served as a British agent during the later part of World War II. She...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:14:56 -0700

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake AC GM served as a British agent during the later part of World War II. She became a leading figure in the maquis groups of the French Resistance and was one of the Allies’ most decorated servicewomen of the war.

On the night of 29–30 April 1944, Wake was parachuted into the Auvergne, becoming a liaison between London and the local maquis group headed by Captain Henri Tardivat in the Forest of Tronçais. Upon discovering her tangled in a tree, Captain Tardivat greeted her remarking, “I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year,” to which she replied, “Don’t give me that French shit.”

Speculation regarding a possible "SmartBand" product

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:35:34 -0700

A few weeks ago, I briefly posted that between the two currently-rumored Apple products, I was more intrigued by the possible “watch” than the TV set. It seems simpler, more unique, and less of a logistical nightmare to build, sell, and support.

This was just an intuition, since I wasn’t really sure what this “watch” thing would do. Actually, let’s drop the “watch” moniker right now and call it a “band”; its primary function would certainly be something other than telling time; in fact, it may not include a display of any sort.

Today it occurred to me that it could have an interesting use: acting as a gestural, accelerometer-based, Kinect-like remote. Worn on the wrist of your dominant hand, it should be able to detect swipes and jabs, or even control an onscreen pointer. Ironically, this would make it a nifty controller for Apple’s TV—the set-top box, not the mythical-and-unlikely TV set.

That’s not the only thing it could control. Today, I use a Magic Trackpad in addition to a mouse. I find the trackpad too fussy to move the pointer, but it’s neat for gestures. This band product could replace it. How about being able to perform gestures on your iPad without really touching it? Or, in addition to touching it, making for a whole new “hover” layer, missing from current iOS devices?

This is all on top of its uses as an authentication mechanism, fitness and sleep tracker, etc. It would clearly be a satellite product—remember what I said about it not having a screen?—but it could become an irreplaceably magical one.

My screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic is coming along nicely.

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:43:35 -0800

My screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic is coming along nicely.

Brogrammer's Story

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:41:00 -0800

I guess you could say it all began when I took that Brogramming class in high school. To be specific, there’s one person you can blame: my Brogramming teacher. I was in need of a father-figure, and he was just that: a likable authority, a brominent brofessor. And even though in the end, he would turn out to be the broximate cause of a dark period in my life, in a way I’m thankful to him. It’s not his fault I was a real broblem child.

The thing was, we didn’t actually spend a lof time in his class learning about brogramming. Instead of reading about microbrocessors, broprietary networking brotocols, and harmonic-brogression algorithms, we practiced high-fives and beefing up our online brofiles. Instead of nerding out all day at a terminal brompt, we browsed CollegeHumor, Fark…all these websites considered imbroper and totally brohibited by the school.

I understand now that the brofessor was dealing with a lot at the time. Few kids knew that he had a brosthetic leg; we thought he just had a natural swagger. Someone said they saw him filling a prescription for Brozac at the pharmacy. It’s always tough when a brotégé sees through his mentor’s mask. The Brof. was just a regular guy, not some brophet. But as for his intentions, I know he was just trying to brotect me.

Anyway, things went downhill soon after I took this class: I bropped out of high school just weeks before brom, which made my mom totally freak out and broclaim I wasn’t welcome in her house anymore. I crashed a friend’s place, a real dump over in the brojects, a building echoing with the sounds of brojectile-vomiting all through the night. Still, this was a home when I needed one. My friend even brocured a job for me at his uncle’s meat-brocessing plant. That let me throw in a few bucks toward rent and Red Bull, though I hated coming home every night smelling like pork broducts. I hit peak Axe use around this time; I suppose that was my way of broactively taking control of my life, my idea of brosperity.

Eventually my mom tracked me down. I remember her walking in, assessing the lifestyle of her once-beloved brogeny, running her fingers along the cinder-block shelves I had put together, my one and only broperty of value in this world. The items on display said all there was to be said about my current brohemian lifestyle: Pilgrim’s Brogress, Marcel Broust, the Brontë sisters. Stacks of brog-rock CDs. Half-drunk brotein shakes. It was brofoundly embarrassing, now that I saw my mom seeing it. Once a brolific brodigy in her eyes, once showing so much bromise, I was now a bum.

“You’ve got to get your rotten life together, bronto”, she said. “Starting now, you are on goddamn brobation.” This was the first time I’d heard my mom use even such mild brofanities.

“I know, mom. It’ll take time. Brome wasn’t built in a day. I want to change”, I brotested.

“Do you?” she said. “Then brove it.”

And soon, something like divine brovidence seemed to steer my life. I kept my bromises and moved back in. I got a job as a broduction assistant at a local health brovider. (We’re small, but brofitable.) I mail out bromotional coupons for brostate exams, weird stuff like that. It’s not exactly “B = NB”; not what my childhood self would’ve imagined me doing at this point in my life. But hey, I’m not going to brotest it.

I’m sorry this has been such a rambling and brosaic account. I’m new to writing, and when I do write, I write more broetry than brose. I guess I was never the brains of the family after all; honestly, I can barely bronounce four-syllable words, or tell a preposition from a bronoun. In the end, you know who turned out to be the smart one? My prother.

Today's High and Low

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 14:32:00 -0800

Here’s a typical screenshot of Apple’s Weather app. It shows the current temperature and the forecast for today’s high and low temperatures. (Let’s ignore all the other data for the moment.)

Notice anything? Today’s “low” is predicted as 43º, and the high as 61º. Yet it is currently cooler than the low: 41º. Plus, no single hour of the day is expected to actually reach the high of 61º. By the end of this day, the hourly forecast was proven correct: at no point did it get warmer than 57º.

In my world, the app would currently be showing the low of 41º, and the high of 57º (assuming there isn’t some quarter-hour stretch where it will shoot up to 61º before dropping back down to 57º by the end of the hour, which seems rather unlikely.)

Apple’s app gets its data from Yahoo weather, but I’m sure I’ve seen this behavior in many other weather apps, websites, etc. They show the historical predictions for the high and low, failing to update them as the actual data comes in. If the low was predicted as 50º, it doesn’t matter if a freak storm should drop the temperature to 32º—the app still claims that “today’s low will be 50º.” The app is lying.

I’m tempted to believe that this nonsensical tradition of sticking to the obviously wrong predictions for the day’s high and low temperatures is some kind of professional-pride thing, like the meteorologists feel honor-bound to report their original guesses, right or wrong.

As a user, I really don’t care what was originally calculated. It seems obvious to me that if it’s currently cooler than you predicted it would ever be today, then that’s today’s low temperature. I admit it’s possible there’s some specialized reason to show the old forecast, but heck if I know why.

One Update, 2013. Mixed media.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:28:01 -0800

One Update, 2013. Mixed media.

"Real" Names

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 06:36:00 -0800

Yesterday I tweeted that Derf Backderf’s comic My Friend Dahmer was now available on ComiXology for iPhone and iPad. It’s a great book, and you should definitely read it even if you, like myself, aren’t interested in serial-killer-type stories, because this is a different sort of one.

A few people then asked me this: Is Derf Backderf his real name?

You know what they mean, right? Who names their child Derf, especially if their last name is Backderf? Well, the answer could be “his parents” and we’d still be no wiser about the matter. But that’s not the answer. Actually, the artist in question was born John Backderf (yup, Backderf) and he occasionally calls himself Derf. So, Derf Backderf is his “real” name.

See, I had never really given much thought to the term “real name” until I heard it used to dismiss the credentials of the magician/writer/outspoken skeptic James Randi. We were told that his real name was Randal James Hamilton Zwinge. Randi’s reply to this “charge” was that James Randi was as “real” a name as any other. He has lived under it for seventy years. Everyone knew him as James Randi, and few knew him as Randal Zwinge. His photo ID read James Randi. The name his parents had given him at birth wasn’t some platonic ideal, inked into the universe’s permanent records, immutable forever and ever.

Most of us have preferences regarding our names. My brother Daniel dislikes being called Dan. You may prefer to be Cathy rather than Catherine, Bob instead of Robert. Your real name is how you introduce yourself to people, what your friends call you, and, for legal purposes, what you can officially use without looking like you’re on the lam from the IRS.

So while it may not seem like a big deal at all, while it may appear an exceedingly PC thing to do, I’d like to politely suggest that we drop the term “real name” when talking about the name folks were given at birth. It’s not nearly as offensive as, say, asking who an adopted child’s “real mother” is, or asking a brown-skinned, second-generation American where they’re really from, but it’s still a patronizing expression. I know it’s usually not meant in a harmful way, but I imagine it can be a bit annoying to be told that the name you’ve called yourself for decades isn’t “real” and never will be.

I leave you with this tweet:

Dishes I can't believe aren't on every vegan restaurant's menu

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 09:49:01 -0800

The "whoa" business model

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:37:00 -0800

On Christmas Day, my wife and I walked into downtown Portland’s Regal Fox Tower, one of many such multiplexes Regal Cinemas operates. It’s a nice theater, with comfy seats, sharp screens, and friendly staff. I’m told the local owners are hip people, and this is evidenced by the oddball/artsy films they often run. Overall, however, this in not in any essential way different from other similar, big-name, popcorn-and-soda theaters.

Which is why it was downright shocking to me when, upon entering and seating ourselves, having chatted away the fifteen minutes we had until the screening, we watched the house lights dim down and the screen turn on—yes, it had been off until now—and the very first thing we saw was a grainy shot of some desert rocks, and the first thing we heard was a twangy guitar riff that opens Luis Bacalov’s theme to Sergio Corbucci’s Django, now repurposed as the opening of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

You read that right. The theater showed no house ads, no local ads, no previews for TV shows, no featurettes, no trailers. At 7:45 PM, the advertised screening time, they showed the movie we came to see.

It was magnificent. It felt like watching a movie, as opposed to going out to see a movie.

I’m sure that those local ads, TV previews, and trailers make money for the theater (by the way of making money for the studios etc.) I’m also quite positive that if this theater decided to show every movie this way—if that were even possible, because I imagine that the reels (hard drives!) they receive from the studios have some of this baked in?—they’d suffer financially and, potentially, legally. I don’t even know why it happened this time. Other screenings of Django Unchained definitely included all the advertising detritus. Was it because the movie is long-ish? Because it’s, uh, offensive to advertisers? Because, gosh darn it, it’s Christmas?

I wonder if there’s a business to be gotten into where one shows movies the way everyone wants to see them: just the movies, from the very first second you start watching. It’s a naive thought; I understand that. But I can’t forget that when those lights went down, when that screen went up, and when that twangy riff kicked in, there were audible gasps and cheers in the audience, and someone behind me yelled out “whoa, awesome!”

I want to believe that there’s a business to be gotten into that capitalizes on “whoa, awesome”.

2012

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:02:51 -0800

Last year I accepted that I’m always well behind the times and quite slow at getting into new music, books, and movies. The present always seems to me saturated with new releases to the point of suffocation, and I end up preferring a slow, relaxing walk to a quick, jammed-up subway ride. I’m not saying this is any way for anyone else to live; the trouble is that I mostly just walk around the same four blocks closest to home. But, I yam what I yam. The point here is, instead of offering a list of my favorite things that were new in 2012, I’ll share things I liked that were new to me last year. As with any such list, the value to you, dear reader, is introduction to something you might like; given that simple goal, let’s damn the release year and treat them all equally.

Books

I read 72 books last year, at about 45 pages per day. This is down from 122 books in 2011 and 90 books in 2010. My favorites were, in no particular order:

Fifth Business, Robertson Davies (1970)
To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis (1998)
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, David Simon & Ed Burns (1997)
Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn (1984)
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller (2012)
Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset, Rick Veitch (2003)
An Economist Gets Lunch, Tyler Cowen (2012)
Enigma, Peter Milligan (1995)

I record all the books I read, and sometimes I write a word or two about them, at Goodreads.

Music

That’s right, I liked a total of 1 (one) album released last year. It’s not that I disliked anything else I heard, it’s just that I probably didn’t hear it.

Locked Down, Dr. John (2012)
Return Of The Instro-Hipsters Volume 2, Various Artists (2011)
The Greatest, Cat Power (2006)
Escape From Dragon House, Dengue Fever (2005)
The Taking of Pelham 123, David Shire (1974)
Texas Thunder Soul (1968-1974), Kashmere Stage Band
Supergrass, Supergrass (2000)
Mark’s Keyboard Repair, Money Mark (1995)

Movies

I watched 81 movies, or about 1 movie every 4.5 days. Unlike with books and music, I make an effort to watch new movie releases. I imagine your habits are similar. I watched many classics and liked many of last year’s big releases—The Cabin in the Woods, Prometheus—so instead of boring you with those, I’ll mention the perhaps lesser-known movies I dug last year:

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
The House of the Devil (2009)
Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
The Grey (2012)
Sorcerer (1977)
The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Near Dark (1987)

You can track my movie viewing and read my reviews at Letterboxd.

Food

My biggest culinary discovery of 2012 was bittersweet: I made a few Malaysian dishes in my kitchen, was sufficiently intrigued that I sought out more while traveling in Melbourne, and had my mind totally blown by the food at Coconut House. It was a good restaurant, but even beyond that, the cuisine itself is just totally up my alley.

So that’s the sweet part. The bitter is that here in Portland, a food-crazed city, we have zero Malaysian or even Indonesian restaurants. In 2013, I’ll seek them out wherever I travel, and I’ll continue figuring out Malay dishes at home.

My other obsession in 2012 was Mexican food. I did not have a single burrito; instead, I enjoyed a wide variety of moles and perfected my corn-tortilla technique. This was largely inspired by the wonderful guisados at Mi Mero Mole, my favorite new restaurant in Portland in 2012, and fueled by Rick Bayless’ great cookbooks.

Last year I kept a mini-diary of foods I cooked. Whenever I made something remotely interesting, I’d snap a picture of it and post it to a Flickr set, with some notes on how the dish turned out. These are mostly notes to myself, but if you find any of this interesting, let me know.

We value your opinion

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:50:30 -0800

I used to work for a very large survey company. They conduct phone surveys, mail surveys, in-person surveys, and they gather data automatically using various gadgets, apps, and plug-ins. They gather all the data they can from as many sources as they can.

Let’s say you’re sitting at home one day and you get a call from this reputable survey company. They’d like to chat with you for a moment [3-5 minutes] about your thoughts on popular TV shows. You pour your heart out regarding Little Chocolatiers and Property Virgins. (If this were a written survey, you’d be given a full blank page to communicate these strong feelings you have about entertainment programs.) You then answer a few quick demographic questions—your age, race, education level, household income, the usual—and are thanked for helping the TV industry find out what you, the viewer, think about their offerings.

At this point you could reasonably assume that the survey was about the quality and direction of current TV shows. Of course, you also disclosed some demographic data, which makes sense; the networks would like to know what 40-to-50-year-old Asian women think about this season’s reality TV.

But this isn’t the case. The survey was about the demographics. What this large survey company wants to know is that a 40-to-50-year-old Asian woman who graduated from college and has a TV with a cable subscription lives at this address and phone number. This information is fed into the giant bucket of similar information: ages, races, different levels of access to consumer goods, and other metrics that can be summed up, averaged out, tracked over time, and projected into the future.

The free-form opinion you offered wasn’t even recorded. (In a written survey, your handwritten page of opinions would never be read by anyone.) The call-center employee just sat at their terminal, bored to quiet tears, while you described what all is wrong with youngsters these days. The call-center employee typed nothing. They had even been instructed on how to answer if you asked them to read back what you just told them. (Pretend to read back a summarized version from your memory, if you can?)

Your opinion can’t be programmatically consolidated or calculated. It’s hard to divine a meaning out of it that can be grouped with other similar opinions, and even if it were easier, the industry is just not that interested in it. There are plenty of people who will pay for pools of numeric, strictly typed data; there are few people who will pay for reams of subjective opinions.

There are notable, if minor, exceptions to this. Yelp, for instance, analyzes the (subjective, free-form, opinionated) reviews its users submit. They then try to divine usable, cumulative information out of those reviews: do many customers mention the beignets at this restaurant? Are there a lot of references to long waits?

You could also argue that Google’s does something similar with its statistical, cumulative approach to web search. They analyze lots and lots of free-text to figure out what web pages are most relevant to waterproof iPad cases. But note that Google’s money doesn’t come from excelling at this; it comes from excelling at showing you targeted ads, and selling those ad-spots to people with money to spend on them. Google has to make its analytical, statistical, meaning-from-free-text search product good for its users or there’ll be no users to show those targeted ads to. But Google doesn’t value the quality of your search queries; they don’t want to own them; they don’t care too much whether they can re-publish them or not.

I bring this up because in the wake of Instagram’s new, Facebooky terms of service, I’m seeing some worry that their plan might be to sell users’ photos. After all, these terms seem to say that Instagram reserves the right to use these photos however they want. Perhaps they will sell my cute baby pictures to baby magazines? This is incredibly unlikely for three reasons:

Your photos aren’t that good.
Photos aren’t that valuable. Even professional photos are incredibly cheap. Hence,
No magazine or website will risk using a photo with a sketchy, second-hand license when they could buy a better one for peanuts.

What they might do is use “interesting” photos (those with many views, likes, and comments) in Facebook’s business listings. If restaurant X doesn’t provide its own photos of the pizza they serve, here are five photos of said pizza taken by Instagram users. While some users might still object to this sort of use, it would be a far cry from “selling photos”, and it would not be a money-making scheme for Instagram. It would be a minor feature intended to beef up Facebook’s business listings, a way of keeping up with Google, Yelp, and Foursquare. Platform hygiene, basically.

Real money will likely come from the boring, old approach every startup hopes to avoid, and few end up avoiding: gathering targetable information about the users (demographics, location, social graph, habits, etc.) and using it to deliver ads to them. A bonus second step—again, usually more theoretical than practical—would be to talk users into advertising to each other, and to non-users. (“Check out this awesome Absolut ad I liked on Instagram!”) The photo “theme” of the app is sticky bait for the user, a reason to come back and pour more data into Facebook’s big user-data bucket.

You can see something similar going on with Twitter, by the way. They’re not at all interested in your tweets as prose. They’d probably prefer it if all tweets came from apps and “Tweet this” links; those are standardized, formalized, and free of all that pesky human abstraction. Of course, they need enough funny/pithy/scandalous free-form tweets to keep baiting users back to the service, but the real money is in having you retweet that link to the Paranormal Activity 7 trailer that your friend robo-tweeted from Gawker, not in selling postcards with your witty tweets on them.

This is still controversial stuff. But the controversy should focus more on large companies’ access to, ownership of, and sales plans for big bunches of data blobs that encapsulate how we the users are attractive to advertisers. Concerns over large companies’ plans to sell our precious works of art are misplaced; not because Google and Apple and Facebook respect our creativity and expression (which, I’m sure, most people in those companies do) but because Viacom and ClearChannel and GE don’t value them.

Put another way, the Advertising department has a lot of money to spend; the Photo department does not.

I don’t know what Instagram’s ultimate plan is, and it’s very likely that they don’t know either. But it probably has nothing to do with selling or abusing your photos. Your photos just aren’t worth much.

A transvestite hermaphrodite

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:14:56 -0800

This line by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite writers, often gets quoted by would-be writers and literary types:

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

This sort of exaggeratedly arbitrary, nose-thumbingly subjective opinion is exactly what we love in lovable writers, but it is also the exact sort of thing we should develop in ourselves, not mimic (or worse, throw as a “rule” at others when they fail to comply). I’m happy to have a writer who insists on something as inconsequential as eschewing semicolons, but I’m also happy to have a writer who, like Kafka here, in the opening of my favorite short story, The Bucket Rider, employs them masterfully:

Coal all spent; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold; the room freezing; the leaves outside the window rigid, covered with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it. I must have coal; I cannot freeze to death; behind me is the pitiless stove, before me the pitiless sky, so I must ride out between them and on my journey seek aid from the coal-dealer.

The Incident: The Music

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:49:48 -0800

The Incident: The Music:

For years now, Matt and I have been getting this question: when are you going to release the soundtrack from The Incident? Today, the singer/songwriter behind this wonderful, wonderful score has made it available for download.

Hit up Cabel’s new blog and get the back story plus some bitchin’ tunes!

Neven Mrgan's tumbl

Hey, guess who’s in issue #5 of Offscreen, a very nice...

Are you undecided in the great Flat vs. Skeuououmourphic design...

"The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re..."

"Following his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson’s body was preserved in a cask of..."

“Work” icon

"Honestly, I wouldn’t wait for fucking three hours. I think it’s crazy. I really think it..."

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake AC GM served as a British agent during the later part of World War II. She...

Speculation regarding a possible "SmartBand" product

My screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic is coming along nicely.

Brogrammer's Story

Today's High and Low

One Update, 2013. Mixed media.

"Real" Names

Dishes I can't believe aren't on every vegan restaurant's menu

Most popular drawings made by two-year olds

The "whoa" business model

2012

We value your opinion

A transvestite hermaphrodite

The Incident: The Music