Tag: twitter

Published July 20, 2023

Corrupting Souls

Tom Gauld‘s Midsummer’s Eve cartoon for The Guardian is from last month (obviously!), but I’m borrowing it to make a bit of boring and overdue social media housekeeping more interesting!

While I haven’t yet asked Wizard Toby to deactivate the Casual Optimist account like a some kind of despairing Baphomet, I have pretty much abandoned Twitter. It’s disappointing because I’ve met some great people through the app and it has always been a tremendous resource, but I can’t support it any more.

I’ve always hated Facebook and I haven’t posted to the Casual Optimist page there in at least a couple of years. I did, however, start an Instagram account which I’m trying to update at least once a month if you want to follow along there. I think it’s pretty unlikely that I will do anything with Threads.

I’m not on Bluesky, but I am trying out Mastodon. It promises a lot, I’m just not quite convinced by it yet (and I gather from more prolific posters than me that there is something of a sea lion problem there). I’ll post a link if/when there is a proper Casual Optimist account. In the meantime, you can find me here.

There is an RSS feed that you can subscribe to if you still use a reader (I use the Old Reader FWIW; I’m not sure what the cool kids are using), or you can get it as an email (it’s not perfect but it works).

Updates are also sent automatically to Tumblr if you’re still rattling around that haunted abandoned mansion.

Anyway, sorry for being very online and tedious. I’ll try to post some more interesting stuff soon (if I don’t quietly pack it in completely and put myself out to pasture…)

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Published January 18, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Rubbish — Rachel Cooke on the artist Kurt Schwitters at The Guardian:

Merz doesn’t mean anything: it is a nonsense word (it comes from Commerzbank, an ad for which appears in one of his earliest collages). But after 1918 everything Schwitters made was Merz, whether it was periodical, painting or poem. He was a one-man movement. “The word denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes,” he said. “And technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials… A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.” In other words, art could be made from the things most people regarded as rubbish. Almost overnight, he became a collagist.

There is a slide-show of Schwitters’ collages here.

Also: Merzman: The Art of Kurt Schwitters, is a fascinating 30-minute BBC Radio 4 documentary about the artist and his work in Britain.

The exhibition Kurt Schwitters in Britain opens at the Tate January 30, 2013.

Going Underground — The iconic London Underground typeface, designed by Edward Johnston in 1913, turns 100:

“Underground” — later known as “Johnston” — was circulated as a lettering guide for sign-painters and also made into wood and metal type for posters, signs, and other publicity materials used throughout London’s transport network.

Johnston himself only drew one weight of the typeface. He based its weight and proportions on seven diamond-shaped strokes of a pen stacked in a row. This gesture even shows up in the typeface itself, with the characteristic diamond used as the tittle of the “i” and “j”. He felt so strongly about the weight of the design that when another student of his agreed to create an accompanying set of bold capitals, Johnston wouldn’t speak to him for decades afterward.

And finally…

Fire Hose — James Gleick on the Library of Congress collecting and storage of Twitter messages, for the New York Review of Books:

This is an ocean of ephemera. A library of Babel. No one is under any illusions about the likely quality—seriousness, veracity, originality, wisdom—of any one tweet. The library will take the bad with the good: the rumors and lies, the prattle, puns, hoots, jeers, bluster, invective, bawdy probes, vile gossip, epigrams, anagrams, quips and jibes, hearsay and tittle-tattle, pleading, chicanery, jabbering, quibbling, block writing and ASCII art, self-promotion and humblebragging, grandiloquence and stultiloquence. New news every millisecond. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances. Now comical then tragical matters.

Call it what you will, the Twitter corpus now forms a piece of “the creative record of America” and therefore falls squarely within the library’s mission…

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Published November 19, 2010

The Bends

The Guardian has posted an transcript of this year’s Andrew Olle Lecture given by their editor Alan Rusbridger. The subject of his talk was “The Splintering of the Fourth Estate”, and even in its edited form, it is a long and fascinating read that covers movable type, the BBC, Rupert Murdoch, social media, pay walls, collaborative journalism and more. It’s essential reading…

It’s developing so fast, we forget how new it all is. It’s totally understandable that those of us with at least one leg in traditional media should be impatient to understand the business model that will enable us magically to transform ourselves into digital businesses and continue to earn the revenues we enjoyed before the invention of the web, never mind the bewildering disruption of web 2.0.

But first we have to understand what we’re up against. It is constantly surprising to me how people in positions of influence in the media find it difficult to look outside the frame of their own medium and look at what this animal called social, or open, media does. How it currently behaves, what it is capable of doing in the future.

On one level there is no great mystery about web 2.0. It’s about the fact that other people like doing what we journalists do. We like creating things – words, pictures, films, graphics – and publishing them. So, it turns out, does everyone else.

For 500 years since Gutenberg they couldn’t; now they can. In fact, they can do much more than we ever could.

(via Jay Rosen)

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Published August 16, 2010

Permanent Beta

Blogging is a learning experience. At least it is for me. Every day I discover a new way to make things better and I tinker with things. I don’t usually mention all the minor changes I make, but I’ve recently made three significant changes to the blog that I wanted to draw your attention to:

Permalinks: For reasons really too tedious to get into, I have changed the permalink structure of the blog. Theoretically anyone visiting here via an old link will be redirected to the new URL, but I have no faith in technology so I thought I’d better let you know about it. I’m sorry if I’ve broken anything important.
Comment Guidelines: I’ve not felt the need to have a comments policy before — and I’m still not 100% certain I really need one now — but I have found myself deleting more comments than usual recently and so this is an attempt to explain why I do and don’t post certain comments. The short version of the guidelines is “keep it constructive; don’t be a dick.” You can find the full version here.
Twitter: I’ve been feeling self-conscious about repeatedly tweeting everything I blog, so I have created a dedicated Twitter feed for The Casual Optimist that will automatically update with links to new posts. I will occasionally post links to the blog from my personal twitter, but I plan to do that less and less.

Thanks for your patience.

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Published June 16, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Jimmy Corrigan Japanese Edition Poster from PRESSPOP (via Flog!).

Zingers — Film critic and blogger Roger Ebert, who has lost the ability to speak unaided, on Twitter:

Twitter for me performs the function of a running conversation. For someone who cannot speak, it allows a way to unload my zingers and one-liners… This has become addictive. I tweet too often. I actually go looking for stuff to tweet. I have good friends who suggest things… I was doing this daily, but have scaled back because it was keeping me up too late.

I’ve made a change recently. After writing my blog, “The quest for frisson” and reading two recent articles about internet addiction, I have looked hard at my own behavior. For some days now I have physically left the room with the computer in it, and settled down somewhere to read. All the old joy came back, and I realized the internet was stealing the reading of books away from me. Reading is calming, absorbing, and refreshing for the mind after hectic surfing… I like the internet, but I don’t want to become its love slave.

Landscapes from a Dream — James Pardey (The Art of Penguin Science Fiction) on JG Ballard’s early novels and the Penguin cover art of David Pelham at The Ballardian:

Pelham’s covers featured a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth as the backdrop for an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly, these machines depict ‘the debris of our society’. Pelham, the article explained, ‘finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now’. But the paradox of Pelham’s artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half buried or submerged, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. They are icons, but only of man’s arrogance.

JG Ballard’s archive was recently acquired by the British Library. The Guardian has an fascinating slide show of the archive, including pictures of Ballard’s annotated manuscript pages.

And finally…

4CP | Four Color Process — A blog of comic panels enlarged Lichtenstein-like to reveal the CMYK halftone dots.

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Published August 19, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, August 19th, 2009

‘The 100 Best Comic Book Covers’ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 at Kelly Thompson’s 1979 Semi-Finalist blog. I am not a comics nerd (believe that if you will), but there’s some great stuff (new and old) in this epic list…

Open to Question — The New York Times reports on Sony’s decision adopt the “open standard” ePub format for all their digital books. This means that “books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub”. Progress of sorts I would say, but before you break out the bunting, David Rothman questions how “open” this format actually is at TeleRead.

Book Design on Twitter — Ben at the Book Cover Archive has posted a list of book designers who Tweet.

Ben’s list was also a nice reminder to mention Jennifer Tribe‘s amazing directory of book industry people on Twitter.

Book Worship — Shawn Hazen’s blog cataloging “graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.” Lovely (via Book Cover Archive blog).

Penguin Symbols — I know I just mentioned designer David Pearson’s Flickr the other day, but how fantastic is this? “An investigation by Production Manager Hans Schmoller into the origins and usage of Penguin devices”

And speaking of Penguin…

Covers And That — Jim Stoddart, Art Director of Penguin Press, discusses their book cover process and looks at some of the new covers for book released this month:

Each cover may face a wide range of hurdles and conflicting opinions, this is the very nature of book covers. Good designers tend to be very focussed and resiliant, and the value of a good sense of humour cannot be underestimated. As with most design jobs there is a balance of concept, craftsmanship and time dexterity required. Any number of changes to the brief may occur even once the design is finished. But in Penguin Press it is widely appreciated that the more a cover is ‘tweaked’ by a committee the less chance there is of retaining that original spark that we all know helps a book stand out in a world where thousands of books are vying for attention.

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Published July 3, 2009

Something for the Weekend, July 3rd, 2009

Who Was Abner Graboff? — Frustrated with the lack information available online about artist, designer and illustrator Abner Graboff, Ward “Ward-O-Matic” Jenkins decided to do some digging himself. His research — now available in a three part series — includes a host of great images of Graboff’s children’s books and book cover designs, as well as a nice interview with Graboff’s son Jon:

Throughout my father’s career, he did hundreds of book jacket designs and I once asked him, in a slightly condescending way, if he enjoyed that kind of work? He said he loved it because he had to nail the vibe of the book in a single illustration and when he got it right, that it was very satisfying. There was a long period of time when I could walk into a bookstore, look around, pick up a book and look at the jacket design credit… and more often than not, find his name. Later on, I started to get fooled. Other designers were either copying or being heavily influenced by his style.

Calling Bullshit on Social Media — Scott Berkun, O’Reilly author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen (via — irony alert — Mark Bertils on Twitter):

TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well. Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.

Berkun’s definitely onto something here and it probably deserves a whole post (maybe later!)… Certainly, he’s right to point out (earlier in the essay) that there have always been social networks. But he doesn’t note that for many city dwellers traditional social and familial networks have been breaking down in the post-war period, which I suspect is part of the seductive appeal of connecting online for us slightly older urban types whose use Twitter and Facebook a lot… Anyway, it’s interesting that some of Berkun’s points about technology probably also apply to e-books.

Berkun’s essay also reminded me of an article I read in Fast Company earlier in the week, Our Kids Aren’t Web-Addicted… Are We?:

It’s only we adults that are at PC workstations all day, looking for ways to avoid doing work or trolling the boundaries of our IT-installed browser filters. And we’re the only ones who have social networks big enough to require a tool like Twitter. Imagine how absurd Twitter seems when you only have 10 or 12 friends, not a network of 300+ coworkers, college buddies and colleagues?

And finally…

Krazy — Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, on George Herriman’s seminal comic strip Krazy Kat, reproduced at This Recording (via Bookslut):

Krazy Kat gains its momentum less from the personalities of its characters than from their obsessions. Ignatz Mouse demonstrates his contempt for Krazy by throwing bricks at her; Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs of love; and Offissa Pupp is obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and punish Ignatz’s “sin,” thereby interefering with a process that’s satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons. Some 30 years of strips were wrung out of that amalgam of cross-purposes. The action can be read as a metaphor for love or politics, or just enjoyed for its lunatic inner logic and physical comedy.

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Published June 25, 2009

26 Things Not Related To Amazon

Oh dear. I’m really not an Amazon-hater. But this morning I inadvisedly took Fast Company magazine to task on Twitter for only writing book industry stories about Amazon and the Kindle.

In their response, Fast Company rightly pointed out that the Fast Talk section of the April edition of the magazine featured technology — aside from the Kindle — that is changing book publishing. It included (short) interviews with Josh Hug, CEO and co-founder of Shelfari (which is in fact owned by Amazon), Julia Cheiffetz, Senior Editor at HarperStudio, the team behind Scholastic’s 39 Clues, Steve Haber developer of the Sony e-reader, and Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb.

Funnily enough, I had actually bought April issue of Fast Company and completely forgotten about this (admittedly somewhat forgettable) feature. Suitably chastened, I apologised for my sweeping generalization.

I am grateful (and slightly amazed) that Fast Company took the time to reply to my glib missive and put me straight. However, I do think there is a tendency — not just isolated to Fast Company — to use Amazon as the only frame of reference in stories about the book trade.

With this in mind, I challenged myself to pull together a quick list of current book-related things that I think are exciting that don’t (as far as know) have anything to do with Amazon (yet).

So here is a completely personal, off-the-cuff list of 26 book companies, ideas, projects, blogs, websites and trends that I think are inspiring, interesting, exciting, or worth watching (and are unconnected to Amazon):

(And yes, I realise there is a certain irony in writing a list that’s not about Amazon just to prove not everything has to do with Amazon)

Who or what would be on your list?

*Full disclosure: D+Q are distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books.

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Published June 17, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, June 17th, 2009

Claustrophobic and Irrational — I love these elegantly understated designs by Rodrigo Corral and Christopher Brand Jason Ramirez for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books published by W.W. Norton.

A Strategy For Authenticity — Don Linn, prolific Twitterer and publisher at The Taunton Press, on O’Reilly’s Twitter Boot Camp and Twitter as a marketing channel:

I’m relatively new to twitter, but what I’ve loved about it since discovering it is its immediacy and its spontaneity. That’s where the joy is and, in my opinion, that’s where the power is (witness #iranelection and related topics). My fear is that the suits will “Clear Channel” (yes, that’s a new verb) this simple little application into nothing but a giant vanilla message board filled with thinly-disguised spam, planned spontaneity.

Cars and Books — Sean Rogers discusses Dutch cartoonist (and cover artist) Joost Swarte at The Walrus:

Swarte has some mild fun, on the Walrus cover, with the nutty rush out of the city that clogs our highways every summer. But the assignment also offers Swarte the opportunity to clear-line the hell out of some cars and books, a couple preoccupations that crop up all over his work.

Why Ulysses? — To coincide with Bloomsday , Gary Dexter explains how Joyce’s masterpiece got its title:

The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.

The problem starts with the title. Early readers of Ulysses, exhilarated and appalled after 800 pages, were often still left thinking ‘Why Ulysses?’ Ulysses is barely mentioned.

And lastly… I can’t thank the chaps at the BCA enough for the link love . You are gentlemen and scholars.

And thanks to the scarily talented Nate for creating the Paradox of Awesome album cover yesterday afternoon and sharing on Twitter. Hilarious. Or maybe you just had to be there… It made my day anyway…

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Published May 26, 2009

Meanwhile, Elsewhere…

As is probably obvious, I spend a lot of time online clicking on stuff.

The things I bookmark, tag, and mentally store away that are (vaguely) about books end up here in one form or another.

But because I have eclectic interests, I bookmark a lot of photographs, illustrations, videos, and other things that just don’t have place on The Casual Optimist.

I’ve been mostly collecting these together in a digital scrapbook at Image Spark.

Image Spark has a really useful bookmarking plugin for Firefox so it’s easy to use and I really like it — despite it’s occasional slowness.

But whilst Image Spark is great for me, I don’t think it’s so good for sharing.

I tried Tumblr and discovered I didn’t particularly like it (no offensive Tumblr — it’s not you, it’s me… Well, it’s a little bit you…), and so I have switched (at Ehren‘s suggestion) to Posterous which has a neat bookmarklet that makes it incredibly easy to post things when you see them.

So The Accidental Optimist is up and running. It’s just images and videos that I’ve stumbled upon. There’s links and tags but no commentary.

Inevitably there is some overlap with my Image Spark stuff but I don’t post everything to both, and I think the new blog will take on a personality of its own.

Anyway, like The Casual Optimist, it’s a work in progress, only it’s not about books (or anything really — which breaks about a bazillion rules of blogging).

Recent posts include a photograph of World War II airplanes in Texas, a bonkers animated music video by Mcbess and an Eric Gill quotation, so — as I say – eclectic. But maybe you’re interested? OK, maybe not…

(You can also find me — grumpy and misanthropic — on the Twitter if you care to)

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Published May 22, 2009

Something for the Weekend

Das Boot — David Drummond’s cover for Canadian Water Politics Edited by Mark Sproule-Jones, Carolyn Johns, and B. Timothy Heinmiller has been selected for the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers this year. The book is published by McGill-Queens University Press who clearly take pride in the look of their books and have some other rather nice cover designs on their site.

The Long Goodbye — Another long, hard — and somewhat cynical look — at the state of the book industry. This time it’s the turn of Elisabeth Sifton, senior vice president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in The Nation.

W. W. Norton Book Design Archive — Publisher W. W. Norton have started posting their book cover designs to designated Flickr set (Crime by Irvine Welsh, designed by Darren Haggar pictured above) . I’d love to see more publishers do this (via The Book Cover Archive Blog).

Bird Brained or Brilliant — The contentious issue live-tweeting conferences. I only mention this because it tallies with my own recent experience of live-tweeting Raincoast’s Fall 09 Sales Conference. And because I’m a nerd (via Kate Trgovac on Twitter).

Gigantic Robot — the awesome Tom Gauld is publishing a new 32-page comic called The Gigantic Robot this summer. According to the Creative Review blog it’s “a fable concerning the production of a secret weapon whose promise apparently goes unfulfilled”. Can’t wait.

And finally (on a completely un-book related note)…

Redux — Muxtape is dead! Long live Muxtape! Whereas the late, lamented Muxtape was a place to upload mp3 ‘mixtapes’ (that fell foul of the music industry lawyers), Justin Ouellette’s new site is a platform for bands to share their music. Nice (via ISO50).

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Tag: twitter

Something for the Weekend

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Permanent Beta

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Midweek Miscellany

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Midweek Miscellany, August 19th, 2009

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26 Things Not Related To Amazon

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Something for the Weekend

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Tag: twitter

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