Here are some rejected-by-the-publisher proposals for my latest book cover project— a lovely Romanian folktale-ish novel that I’m a bit stuck on: I don’t have that much to say about these. They basically cannibalize the collage stuff I did for the Right Reasons web site. I like them but don’t love them, and don’t begrudge the [...]

A friend recently exposed me to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs— my first taste of this author: I enjoyed this in part because it so clearly evokes a peculiar moment in technological history— 1994— when computer culture both was computer culture and also wasn’t. The narrator comments on the rise of the geek class, rails against the [...]

• This is my first winter in Berlin… and, man, it gets dark early here. We’re already down to 4:30pm daylight curfew and there’s still a month to go to the solstice. I’m about ready to curl up in the solarium with a few bottles of vodka for the next few months. • I caught [...]

In yet another very old post, I unveiled The Old Apartment Rule, my proposal that anyone ought to be allowed to ask for a quick five minute tour of any apartment or house that they’ve previously lived in from the current residents. I finagled my way into a real-life instance of this last week when we [...]

Longtime readers may recall a post that the since-deceased Krafty wrote on the topic of the Uncanny Valley: Perhaps, at the time, you marveled at the splendid oddness of this shiny new meme. Maybe you studied the graph carefully enough to realize the ‘prosthetic hand’ is cleverly mapped to TWO data points, one on the [...]

Fireworks at Helmholtzplatz two nights ago. Somehow, in all my days, I’d never before been close enough to the actual detonation site of a fireworks display to see how the magic works. You can imagine my surprise at seeing these occult-looking lamps set at even intervals along the ground. I’d always been misled to believe [...]