RT @MatDolphin: It needed to be said — Let's ALL start properly critiquing design work » by @markboulton #crit ~@Ni ...

"Design critique is not a place to be mean, but it’s also not the place to be kind. You’re not critiquing to make friends. Kind designers don’t say what they mean. ‘Kind’ is not about the work, and design critique exists to make us better, but mostly, it’s to make the work better." Mark Boulton talks about the value of crits. I was introduced to the vocabulary and tone of the design/art-school crit at Berg, and find it useful, though I daren't think what 18-year-old me would have made of it. Stressing that it's not personal, it's about the work, and that that is contained within a magic circle, is really difficult, and it's really important.

For those who missed it, I blogged earlier about Design Critique: "It's Not Working For Me" - #crit

Blogged: 'It's Not Working For Me'. #crit

RT @markboulton: Blogged: 'It's Not Working For Me'. #crit

This is good from @markboulton, maybe it will help online design discussions become more sensible more often

Blogged: 'It's Not Working For Me'. #crit

Blogged: 'It's Not Working For Me'. #crit

To read, say, Walter Benjamin or Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes is to encounter a sensibility as distinctive, and a voice as powerful, as any in 20th-century literature. “The motive of the critic who is really worth reading,” as H.L. Mencken put it, “is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist.”

"[H]e sometimes sounded like Foghorn Leghorn with a bad coke habit."

And in news of unbridgeable pop chasms: Why is Jackson Browne’s 1977 live album Running On Empty now fascinating me? It’s all about drugs and how being on the road starts to kill you, total seventies backstage time capsule but really the universal story of the before and after the show, the soundguy losing the girl he likes to the drummer, cocaine, cocaine, Glen Frey singing backups on your song about cocaine.

RT @nathan_ford: A Better Critique Method for Web Stuffs: - A new post @markboultondsg.

Up Made Me Cry

In 28 Days Later it’s done much more skillfully than ever before. Oh god, the zombies in 28 Days are so fucking scary!!!!! How could anything be as scary as the first half of that film? Yet somehow the army guys are indeed more scary. At first it seems like they are rescuers, even though they shot Brendan Gleeson like a million times after the zombie blood fell out of the crow’s beak and into his eyeball–so, I mean, fair enough, but still. They take the survivors back to their compound. The survivors are sort of conveying that they don’t feel as relieved as they ought to feel; something’s not right. The compound is indeed safe from zombies. There are all these army guys there, the place is surrounded with guns, and the army guys have strict rules and patrols during which the also-aforementioned gleeful mowing-down of zombies occurs. But pretty soon we realize that these guys are psychotic, and it becomes this dreadful rape terror where they’re going to kill Cillian Murphy–leaving him for dead on a huge pile of corpses that it’s sort of ambiguously implied were army victims, not zombie victims, I mean, my god, it’s zombie apocalypse and the army is still taking hundreds of living humans out into fields and shooting them?? WHAT A WORLD–and rape the two ladies millions of times, and it’s just horrible, and suddenly you realize life was way better when they were out in the countryside just fighting off the odd blood-crazed zombie horde, a.k.a. life was better when they were FREE.

Now they live under the law again, under the protection (“protection”) of the military/government, which fights terror with terror, and actually shit is way worse than it was when they were fending for themselves. The fantasy of just “finding an authority figure” and then everything will be okay is here DESTROYED. Just as it is destroyed in real life if you stop to think for two seconds. I mean, I’m really gonna let the TSA feel up my crotch and racially profile random college professors and prohibit scholars of Byzantine erotica from re-entering the country because 0.00000000000000001% of humanity might one day once again hijack a plane in some hard-to-predict way? ARE YOU SERIOUS.