Adam Hughes girls

Comic artist and writer Adam Hughes feels he is being pigeon-holed as a drawer (that word is OK) of pretty girls. I think it's the problem of doing one thing "too well". People want more of it. When he is not doing girls, he's once again down at the level of competing with hundreds of other talents equally, and that's of course a bucket of cold water.

E-reading upheaval

You may have noticed, as a reader, as well as writer and a publisher, I am rather fascinated with where the digital publishing is taking us all, and whether there will still be much of a viable business there for anybody in twenty years.
So here are a couple of articles I found interesting.

Readers Are Abandoning Print, Yet Don’t Trust the Web, NYT article.

$200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math., NYT article.
Scott McNealy is pushing free textbooks.

No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment, NYT article.
So many people can't tell the difference between a Kindle and a computer? Weird. But perhaps the problem is that the owner of the cafe didn't inform his staff of the reason for the no-computer rule. I don't know, but perhaps he feels laptops take up too much table space during the busy lunch hour. Whereas a Kindle takes up no more space than a paperback book.

Post-Medium Publishing, Paul Graham article. He poses the interesting question:

"Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?"

I'm amazed by Paul Graham. With this article he once again makes me see a very central thing in a wholly new light. Highly interesting.

Gojin Ishihara art

Gojin Ishihara art.
Apparently most of it is from childrens book in Japan. Holy moly. They don't cuddle them like westerners do, it seems.

Finally explained

About design

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
           -- Steve Jobs

I've been trying to cut down on the Apple-related posts, but clearly it's a battle I'm losing. Oh well. C'est la guerre. 

I feel this is an important idea. Design is not just cosmetic. Design work, or at least good design work, goes right to the core of the object. If a designer is not working together with the engineers, he just can't do a good job.

Ballmer: If We Can’t Compete w/Google, Shame on Us; Apple’s Another Story

Ballmer: If We Can’t Compete w/Google, Shame on Us; Apple’s Another Story, article.
(Right now macobserver.com is not loading for me.)

This is a funny turnaround. Traditionally, MS has poo-poo'd Apple but taken Google very seriously.

I think though that he is putting a brave face on it. Even if Android is still a little green as a platform, it is already quite popular, and in any case it is way ahead of anything MS has to offer in smartphones/tablets. I think it will be very tough for MS to catch up when there are already two big platforms which have a head start of this magnitude.

Don't get me wrong, even if it would surprise me to see MS get ahead in this one, I would still love to see really good hardware and software from them in this area. The more competitors, the better for the buyers. (Well, except perhaps for compatibility issues, but I think cross-platform file formats have pretty much handled this.)

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm, TED Talk video.
For example, many people can get them from other things than genital stimulation.
Also, apparently more-often-than-weekly ejaculation keeps the sperm healthy. So masturbation is just basic instinct for the survival of the species.       :-)

Mary is cute. And funny.
She also shares that my native Denmark is ahead of the curve in pig reproduction, having established that if you stimulate a sow while artificially impregnating her, you get a six percent increase in piglet yield. Now, that's gotta be a weird job: "... sure, the real estate market is down, but I do OK. So what do you do?" -- "I give orgasms to sows."
Here is the kicker: she actually shows a clip from a DVD about how they do it. Now, this may be illegal to watch in the UK after their new law against erotica involving animals!!! (Which goes some ways to show that many sex laws are crazy.)
(OK, I'm not quite serious, since this clip is obviously educational, not erotica. But they do now have a law which includes illegality of erotica involving animals. As well as corpses! Neither is capable of giving consent, see...)

Bear cub in a tree

"This little cub got himself stuck in a tree around the same time that his mother wanted to leave."

A silver lining

UK Kindle store

Amazon has just launched their UK Kindle book store, which means bigger book selection for us UK (and European?) customers, and also means we now can get magazines, blogs, and newspapers on the Kindle, like US customers have been able to for a while.
Oh, and in case you have an iPad but no Kindle, don't forget that their free Kindle app for iPad allows you access to all that content, including a million older but free books.  And beyond that, some Kindle ebooks now include video, which plays on the iPad but not on the Kindle's own e-paper display (it won't update fast enough to show video). I guess this also works in the Kindle apps for Mac and Windows machines (less sure about the Kindle apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android). 

Mila’s Daydreams

Mila’s Daydreams, photo series.
Cool idea. At first I didn't understand all of them, how you're supposed to convert them mentally to three-dimensional pictures to get what she's "dreaming".

HP publishes (updated)

Digital mags, a new, fierce battleground.
Backer said:
HP will publish and monetize your magazine, but at the moment they insist it be given away free for the iPad: that's almost British in its spirit of compromise.

You can make your own mag, the digital edition is free, the paper version sold for a premium price, necessitated by print-on-demand prices.
I doubt anybody will get rich on this, but it might be fun for some.

Update:
It is looking like the free issues are only available in their (also free) iPad app. But then there are many many of them. An interesting development that the Kindle and the iPad have also become keys to getting a lot of free reading material, which either is not on the web or is just better organized and formatted, and easier to find on the smaller devices.

Of course much of the free material is only bait to lure people to the new platform. But it is going to continue for a while for sure. And then it'll be a bit of a trick to get people to pay for it, if they have gotten used to free, like we did with the web.
I do hope that some kind of professional platform develops on tablets, it'll help to get people to work to create professional-quality material.
They say though that the Wall Street Journal has 1.1M online subscribers, that's not peanuts, especially as they save printing and distribution cost compared to the paper version. So I think it's doable.