Mark got his first issue of Make magazine a few days ago. It seems really nifty, and I can imagine it’s the sort of thing I’d like on my coffee table. I’d also like to get my subscription to Res back and, of course, finally go through with that subscription to Giant Robot. I like the short formatting of magazines and also the portability of a magazine as opposed to a news website or online content aggregator.
Please don’t use the word aggregator around me. It makes me think of agriculture, and by way of association through a lens of non sequitur, makes me think of a ponderous beast of farm equipment weilding silver bladed arms and a crop thrashing set of teeth lining its cavernous maw. This steel skinned, dielsel smoke belching abomination harvests, not assorted crops as foodstuffs to feed the mouth, but RSS feeds, emerging ever so slightly, like juvenile stalks of corn, from a rich soil bed of digital content, in order for we, the digital populous, to feed our brains. It’s a complex scenario to build that takes up most of my ability to process information, and makes it difficult to pay attention to, nevermind take part in, a conversation. Oh, how I digress.
To say that I like magazines is a bit aside from the point. The point may well be that I enjoy magazines. Especially the monthly Res DVD that came slipped inside the magazine, serving as a sort of extra dimension for illustrative purposes to the articles and reviews. This comes across to me, as the extra mile between description and experience. That’s where Make comes into the picture as a tome of experiential articles that beg to be attempted. The city smiles contentedly for homebrew kite photography and your handicam yearns for a chase scene, if only you’d build him the stabilizer he could don, just to make you proud of the footage, calm as a windless lake. Make magazine shows promise, and may well be one of the magazines I subscribe to.
Where does Giant Robot fit into my peculiar appreciation of periodicals? If you’re thinking that I need it as little more than a centerpiece to my coffee table, or because the title “Giant Robot” showing cleverly from my magazine rack would make me seem trendy and not just a little smart, then you’re only slightly right. I mean, who doesn’t love Japanese culture? If, right now, you’re saying that you don’t, then you’re engaging in what we in the business refer to as “lying”. You know you like it because that’s what it’s all about. It’s engineered to be likable and in some spots absurd, bordering on insane. They’ve had many, many years to design a culture that their expats can research, critique, review and present to you in glorious dead tree formatting.
It’s really something, how a collection of strangers opining on subjects at least tangentially related to your interests can be organized into something you’d pay to have delivered to your door to read. And with that reflection on the magazine business, we see my hurdle in getting in on this trade. My door keeps moving, and to be unsure of where you’d like your mail delivered, is to be left out of the monthly portion of shining golden content of magazines.
Oh well, maybe when I move again to a residence a bit more permanent I’ll get back my subscriptions. It’s not like I have any shortage of reading material. The stack of unread books is towering over me by now, and even with short format selections to keep the pace up, such as The Best American Nonrequired Reading series, I can’t seem to find the end of the queue. Hopefully, I never will. Continue reading →
Yeah, the photo should get your attention. This is one step closer to the Kitty-Cat Bullet Cam idea, but used in a practical sense… Putting dogs in dangersous situations that humans need not be in. As much fun as it would be to watch a “well trained” police sniffer dog fetch dynomite (No, it’s really not fun at all), I felt I just needed to post somthing.