All posts by Andrew Boardman

Designer.
Grotesqueries

Nietszsche BNG 12.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche translated using the The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator:

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

AND WE SHUD CONSIEDR 3VERY DAY LOST ON WHICH W3 HAEV NOT DANCED AT LEAST ONCA!11!11 WTF AND W3 SHUD CAL 3VERY TRUTH FALS3 WHICH WAS NOT ACOMPANEID BY AT LEAST ONA LAUGH!1!1!!1!1 OMG LOL

Thanks to John Gruber for the tip.

Welt

Playing to Lose.

It’s an unwritten rule of parenthood that, when you play games with your kids, you have to lose. It’s important for your sense of self-worth and, more importantly, for theirs, to lose. You have to lose because children have to win. They have to know that they can win, even against adults. Kids need to be able assess a situation, wiggle their way out of it, and come out ahead. Mostly, they love to win, even more than adults do.
I’ve learned the hard way that there are a few games that allow one to lose easily. Generally, this requires what I call “reverse cheating.” Reverse cheating means putting cards under your bum when the kid’s not looking or stacking cards in such a way that the kid gets the advantage or pretending to roll the die and always getting a “1” or checking off the wrong boxes. Here are a few games that are good for losing:

  • Clue Jr.
  • Concentration (card game based on remembering and matching cards)
  • Checkers
  • Candy Land
  • Chutes and Ladders

– Brought to you by the letter “C.”

Welt

Deleting People.

I’ve spent the past hour or so going through my address book in Microsoft Entourage. I’m preparing to send out my direct mail piece for the year for MANOVERBOARD and need to prepare the addresses for sending. It’s a depressing task, to say the very least.
I started with 1536 names in my address book. I’m now down to 908. Some of those were duplicates, others were lower-cased names that somehow got stuck in my address book over the past few years. Others were names I no longer recognize. I found the names of old girlfriends who had phone numbers but no email addresses – this was before the ubiquity of email. I found aunts and uncles and cousins with whom I haven’t spoken in many years.
Other entries were art galleries, in New York mostly; these were galleries to which I used to send slides when I was a painter. Ironically, every one of these gallery entries had no addresses attached to them; they’re perhaps ten years old.
Sadder still were the friends and family that had passed away. Some were very close, like my grandmother. I can’t delete her name and address and phone number from my address list. I just can’t. Others had passed and I kept their spouse or partner in the address book. It’s just a small way of remembering these people.
It also means that time has passed by, quickly still. These individuals lived and live and now they are just one small part of my attention; some more than others. The time goes and the entries go.

Art

Borat Good.

I just got back from seeing Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan with my friend D.C. Man, it was fun.
We got to the theatre right on time and, funnily, there was no one there to sell us tickets. Instead, we went straight to these machines and we had to touch their screens to buy tickets. We each bought one ticket, which cost $7.95. You had to swipe your credit card through the machine and get your ticket that way. Then the ticket came out. A receipt came out, too, which was weird.
We walked into the theatre and there were six teenage attendants standing around the concession stand, talking and looking at candy. No one was there to take our tickets but that was okay. I made it straight to the Twizzler Nibs and bought a pack for $5.13. (I actually wanted Sno-Caps but they don’t have those in Canada.) The bag was huge! I paid with a $20.00 bill and got back $14.87.
Then we sat down in the theatre. D.C. had seen the film before and it was packed but tonight there were maybe 15 people scattered around. We chose seats toward the front, probably in the sixth row, towards the center right, making sure not to block our fellow moviegoers’ views. There were no really good previews unless you count the upcoming Night at the Museum, but we did watch ads for Toyota Camry (it was pretty good) and a couple of other products that I don’t remember. I remember when they didn’t have ads in theatres and now they do.
When we got out, I was still laughing and we got back in the car and drove home. When I got inside, I ran the tap for about 30 seconds because all of the water in the house had been warmed and the water standing in the pipes outside is really cold. I had two glasses. Man, those were good.

Music

Joanna Newsom.

I’m listening to the aptly named Joanna Newsom sing her crazy songs. Her new album, Ys, borders on total brilliance. Newsom is a harpist and her incredible voice, wavering and pitching and heaving in the waves of her music, sounds like the harp she plays. The songs are orchestrally constructed, full of sweeping violins, plucking chords, and a rare backup chorale. It’s almost as if Newsom came down to our unholy earth and blessed us with these tidy morsels of overwrought, delightful Viking lust.
Kind of a cross between Kate Bush, Bjork, Sufjan Stevens, and a range of new music recording artists, the new album is phenomenally produced. Steve Albini, who produced some of my all-time favorite bands (The Pixies, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Superchunk, The Breeders, Fugazi, PJ Harvey and others) also produced one of the tracks on this little masterpiece. Newsom signed with my fave new label, Drag City, and she worked with Jim O’Rourke on the mix. It’s a bit of total turtle soup: there’s Jews Harp, electric guitar, harpy harp, cymbals, and a cameo of a singer that sounds like Nick Cave (it’s Smog’s Bill Callahan). The whole thing is just rattling around in my tin brain. It’s a rock opera for sad men, a siren call for mermaids, a plaintive cry for long commutes and desperate sonic youth.

Design

Thoughts in Grey.

I’m redesigning my business’ website. A few weeks ago, I tried converting the new design into pure gray and it looks really, really nice. (I don’t even know the proper spelling of gray/grey, and it still looked nice.) Lately, I’ve been thinking that everything will soon be in shades of grey/gray.
One of my favorite Mac/technology blogs has been in battleship gray forever. The author, John Gruber, and many others, believe that Apple’s new operating system, due out early next year, will sport a fine new graphical user interface that takes gray to the next level. Gone will be the translucent and transparent iconography that Apple and Windows users have come to enjoy. Gone, hopefully, will be red, green, yellow, fuscia, and lilac. (You can see a little of what the future holds by downloading Disco, designed by the Dutchman Jasper Hauser.)
Other things are grey. Mice are gray. They have been on the planet a lot longer than we have. Cockroaches, too, are often a shade of grey. They have been around longer than mice. Elephants and dolphins, who are probably smarter than humans are, are gray.
A few years ago, VW came out with a beautiful shade of gray for its Passat and Jetta cars. That gray had a blue feeling. I don’t know what grey does for driver visibility on the road. Probably not too much. This is probably why you don’t see too many of those grey VWs anymore.
I used to know somebody who worked at Grey Advertising. Grey has a terrible (and sadly ungray) website.
Sometime during the time I wanted to become a doctor, between the ages of 4 and 21, my grandfather gave me Grey’s Anatomy. I poured over it, but apparently not enough.
In Poland, there’s such a thing as a grey market. It was essentially a means for newly liberated citizens to find and get work without having to pay the government immense taxes. It worked. Perhaps it still does.
It’s said that when someone’s skin turns gray, they’re dead.
The aura that swamis and other priests see around people is usually a beautiful shade of some color or another. I understand that smokers cast an aura of grey.
I also think that we cold all end up as Grey goo. That might be fun. But I hope Apple comes out with its grey operating system first.

Welt

Starting.

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin, who has dropped out of sight (my fault) recently. He had a great post on his blog a few days ago, called When to start. It’s simple. Get to it. All that.
This weekend was the Canadian Football League’s Grey Cup, held here in Winnipeg. I’ve been hearing about it for months and I finally twigged on Tuesday that the Grey Cup is as big and dumb and fun as the Superbowl. It’s a big deal: $30 million will be brought to Winnipeg just this weekend, parties have been going on constantly since Thursday, major corporate sponsorships, huge hot air balloons flying overhead, traffic. It is.
After looking around for a few months for an onlnie task organizer and notekeeper, I’m trying out Backpack, the mid-weight information manager from 37signals. So far, so okay.