kip/bot/blog

While I am big fan of the Kindle, thisstory from mobile entertainment news - referencing Amazon’s statement that they sold more e-books on Christmas day than real books - is silly. I mean, didn’t anybody stop to think about the number?

Of course, more people bought e-Books than real books on Christmas Day. Who goes to Amazon on Christmas Day to order a real book? (On Christmas Day, amidst the egg nog, the coffee cake, and all the gifts, what kind of doof says “oh I’m going to need this real book in a couple days, better go order it.” None, aside from me.) OTOH, how many people who received a Kindle on Christmas day immediately go and buy some books? Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

#brainfail

Just finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays about being a father, son, husband, former child, and writer. I read the book almost immediately and instantly, underlining lots of passages and phrases (wasn’t available in Kindle). Interestingly, it looks like guys on goodreads.com dug it less than women (might be more accurate to say several man trashed it while women gave it consistently high marks).

Beyond the observations about specifically male things, Chabon spends a great deal of time writing about how we flex our imaginations, and how we play and create as children and adults. He hits a lot of the same themes, through very different angles, as Gever Tully of the Tinkering School does in his various talks. While Tully talks about how we overprotect children and have lost the early male ritual of receiving a pocket knife, Chabon talks about the pointlessness of teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. When he rode a bike, he would disappear from his house for the entire day, exploring the neighborhood, visiting friends and just riding. Today, he feels like that has been supplanted through a fear of abductions and that kids have much less uncharted play time.

That theme of uncharted comes up throughout these essays, especially in “The Splendor of Crap”, an essay where he talks about the importance of junk culture in imagination, childhood and even adult play. I just love this passage about the old TV show The Planet of the Apes:

“There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars, TV SF to address weighty issues … But it remained a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequels to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had, crucially to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, even its cancellation . . . it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.”

Along these lines, he is actually rather critical of Pixar films (the first voice I’ve come across doesn’t worship every aspect of Pixar and its work). Chabon describes today’s animated movies:

The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

In a different essay, he makes a point that actually snapped my head out of the book. His biggest gripe about Pixar is the way they make Sid the villain in Toy Story. When Sid puts dresses on the cowboys and mixes parts and breaks the toys to see how they work, Chabon asks, isn’t he doing exactly what kids are supposed to do with toys? I had unquestioningly bought into the movie’s narrative, but after that comment, the good kid reminds me of a nerdy toy collector, keeping things MIB (mint in box), and suddenly I realize that leaving aside the ham-fisted presentation of Sid’s sadism, I actually relate much more to the dirt and grime and dark of Sid’s place than our hero kid’s room.

Not new, necessarily, to fans of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or Steven Johnson’s Emergence, but a nice twist.

I’m getting some traffic from a few places where I’ll be speaking/visiting/workshopping next week and the most recent posts don’t make me look particularly good. So here are links to some posts which put a better face on me and might be interesting to read. And yes, of course, this screams of the need to re-design, get some WP modules, and making the thing decent again . . . meanwhile:

A revelation I had about the difference between design and creative (at least in interactive and marketing)

A curmudgeonly screed complaining about how simplistic our notions of design thinking have become.

More churlinshness about innovation and what a weasel word it is.

If your read only one (and why should you even bother with that?):

A happy post about innovation and craft and a jubilant post about that awesome young man who built the windmill in Malawi. You’re probably better off going to his site. I just wanted to counterbalance the crank with something positive.

Some thoughts on simplicity in web design, by way of tests I used to give IxD candidates interviewing for a job.

An overview of my obsession/fascination with emergent design

Several posts about craft and the XO people (additional obsessions)