Semiotic Fluid

The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore (Scott Hanselman) and related discussion on Hacker News and this massive one that Stack Overflow

The real problem here isn’t that, as suggested in the article, so much modern UI iconography consists of representations of obsolete technology. The problem is (as immediately pointed out in the HN thread) those technologies (some of which are not nearly as obsolete as Scott Hanselman seems to think) when chosen to represent idioms in the digital realm, had unique forms which lent themselves easily to becoming phonemes (pun intended.)

A phone, back in the ancient and no longer relevant decades of my youth, looked like a phone. The outline of a handset is still recognizable. A television looked like a television, rabbit ears and static and all.

In fact I remember sort of coming across this problem making a logo for kwtx a couple of years ago, because the logo had to incorporate a tv. I had to add antennas to the top just so it would look like something.

Now so much technology has blended and merged into a nondescript visual gestalt. A television is a black rectangle. A phone is a black rectangle. A camera is a black rectangle with a lens (even granted that in some cases the phone, television and camera are the same thing, and the phone has a lens. The older forms were just more visually interesting.

just kidding it’s spiders

Adobe Business Catalyst sucks.

Karmic debt – cats.

If you want to make an omelet…

In which could possibly go wrong.

[Untitled]

Man, that Neal Stephenson.
He sure does like to digress, doesn't he?

fandom secrets

So it turns out i'm working on a fan film series of the Walking Dead called the Waco Dead, with an ex-colleague of mine who has a production company and wanted to do something other than 30 second spots. And so I've already polished dialogue for the first script (by removing most of it) and am working on the site. And probably other as yet undetermined tasks. And I will be a zombie because there is no budget and everyone has to be a zombie. It's the law.

I'm somewhat proud of the picasa and youtube plugins here on the test site for photos (which will hopefully exist) from the episodes (which hopefully will not suck) and videos that I think I will use it for my own site. http://thewacodead.businesscatalyst.com

Also I'm kind of thinking kind of not about Full Sail University.

Still haven't actually seen any of the Walking Dead at all. Probably should.

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