Ryan Cecil Smith

One guy named Bill suggested:

1. Fat kids
2. Comics based on sitcoms
3. Dramatic hot rod stories
4. Funny hot-rodding characters
5. Comics with the word “Pal” in the title

Here are some pictures from Yokoyama’s curent show in Tokyo. I heard about it through Dan Nadel right before my trip to the big city. If you wanna look at the grimy details of the pictures you can click on them.

It’s a nice, small show. There were original works like this, as well as a couple of screenprints from his older books, and some paintings that I think were created “live” at the opening.

Just kidding! That last one was on the sidewalk outside the gallery.

John K has been posting about this guy a lot lately. This entry in particular hooked my attention. It’s like John says: not only is every angle of the scene different, but he draws so many creative angles around the characters (instead of just profiles and 3/4 views), without calling too much attention to it. Wow wow wow.

Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation’s public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.

Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn’t necessarily making things better, just different.

I nodded so vigorously at this article in the Washington Post. It relates to my personal, education-related technology purchases and my Board of Education’s technology purchases. Like I said before, the prefectural government seemed amazingly bad at spending money on the schools’ behalf. Even with my own interesting purchases, it takes a lot of work – no less than it did before, that’s for sure – to transform the physical materials into real educational matter.

My hunch is that I can make the decision to buy something for myself, and use it in my classroom. If it goes poorly, I have only myself to blame. When a BOE makes a stupid purchase, everyone in the prefecture can blame them. I wouldn’t say I’m better at spending my own money than they are at spending the prefecture’s money: perhaps it’s a matter of the teachers’ ineptitude with technology, although I think that’s less likely. I would rather think about this in a less-generalized and more specific way.

More on that later.

Via the sometimes caustic but always thought-provoking blog Cafe Hayek

Watching The Reader and really enjoying. Great fashion all over. The blue shirt, her patterned dress, even boy scout big handkerchiefs with the clip in the front. Do want!

Plaid swimsuits, nice vests, a lovely red apron…. It just doesn’t stop! Where is this movie taking place, anyway? Was only kinda paying attention in the beginning.

The movie just becomes amazing. Whoa, whoa, and whoa. Just got hit in the gut after Hannah’s sentencing, after a series of cold, fast punches as we saw her bullied, isolated, and then trapped by her secret we had long seen coming, right with Michael. I think it’s amazing that, like the Odyssey, our characters make bad decisions out of character traits that we understand and foresee even as we know they are wrong, and we still yearn and empathize for them.

And then he pulls out the Odyssey, so my feeling is confirmed.

The movie has a moving sensitivity for beauty – I mean, it affects me emotionally, but also I mean that beauty is a variable that is deliberately narrated. I feel this strongly when time passes forward in the prison, and Hannah has lost her youthful color. Then, it makes me think about how much brighter and prettier the early scenes were, in the Golden sun at the lake, or the subdued light in Hannah’s apartment.

To speak of beauty is a kind of classical way of talking about art, which seems appropriate in light of the literature reference.

I realize how ashamed Michael is, when he meets Hannah again. How astonishing that the feeling passed from her to him, mirroring something that his professor told him before he made his decision not to help her: “If I can’t help you from making the mistakes that people like I made, then what’s it all for?”

The white, decorated modernity of the survivor’s daughter’s rich apartment is kind of new-worldly environment and it comes after the death of our tragic woman. There is the space of less than half a minute where i wonder if he will tell her Hannah’s secret, but he doesn’t and that’s settled rather quickly. And then the ending moments of the movie wraps it up, with that important matter, because it had to be settled.

This week:

1. Watching old episodes of DragonBall Z
2. Drawing digital manga characters (including but not= limited to Dragonball Z)
3. Preparing for a weekend in Tokyo, with hardly any plans?
4. Buying reams for a couple of long-delayed print runs
5. Staying up late every night, napping every afternoon
6. Hanging out with Sayaka’s friends in Umeda

Yeah, okay, so, I’m going to go to bed before midnight for once.

My plans for 3 days in Tokyo:

1. Attend 2 days of meetings at the CLAIR Office.
2. Sleep in the “Eco-Dormitory” at the Sakura Hostel in Jinbocho.
3. Go to a pizza lunch with other Tokyo Orientation Assistants
4. Find the Yuichi Yokoyama exhibition
5. Go to the great great great Ukiyoe museum!
6. Check out the manga publishing neighborhood right outside of my hostel and perhaps Nakano Broadway

• romaine lettuce
• little mixed lettuce leaves pack
• edam cheese
• alfalfa sprouts
• tomatoes
• tofu
• almods
• kidney beans
• oil
• balsamic vinegar
• lemon juice

The almonds and the cheese are the best part. Everything else is good.

Here’s a little story: Yesterday I locked my bike to a pole near a bike parking lot. In fact, it was literally in the parking lot, but not on one of the paid lock machines. I did this because my bike doesn’t have a kick stand, and none of the free spaces had something I could lean the bike against. I left the bike there overnight because I had to carry a bunch of bags home from the city, so I took a bus instead. When I came to pick up my bike today, the bike police had left me an extra present:

I want to say that I have thought of all kinds of devious machinations by which to retaliate against these… these… these bike bike police. And some of them are really good, too. I had 30 minutes to think of nasty plans while I carried my bicycle home over my shoulder. But in the end, I would like to be able to park my very distinctive bike safely in the vicinity of Koshien stadium, so instead, I will write a sincere letter of apology to the bike police, and I will not park my bike illegally in their parking lot again, and I will not seek revenge. Also I will find a means to get this lock off my chain as immediately as possible.

I am always kind of tinkering with my website. I wish I could just write up all the code and be happy with it, but there’s always something else to do. Here are a couple of internet links that help me to think about what I want in a website and a blog.

• Ogiue Maniax is a blog about anime. I liked this recent post about the standard format that blogs tend to drift thoughtless towards. It’s a reminder to stick to aesthetic as principle, not surface appeal.
• Marco Arment wrote a post that stuck with me about how his website is his own thing, and he doesn’t want to cave into any weird pressure to make it something else. I think that’s cool. He maintains a very cool and smart perspective towards his place on the internet.
• Dash Shaw’s blog post on Comics Comics about Edward Tufte was a reminder to think critically about my presentation on this website. Tufte advocates making content first and foremost. Here’s a post about the iPhone’s interface that I thought explained his principles very well. Here’s a post about another phone that can provide some more perspective.

Three websites whose designs I have imitated, copied, or stolen from are

• http://kimbost.com,
• http://daringfireball.net, and
• http://whatthingsdo.com (actually I am in the process of imitating this site now, but haven’t finished)

I want to be open about the sources that I “reference” when I am building this site. I want it to be totally original and personal, but frankly that takes a lot of time and I am kind of lazy. But I am always learning more and more as I go along and I am trying to do my best.

My favorite radio show is WNYC’s On The Media with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. It is great, because they just don’t report on the news: they report about the news, why something is or isn’t news, and how different media work, interrelate, and evolve. I listen via podcast.

In last week’s segment about the future of telecommunications, guest Clay Shirkey had this to say about the (lack of) convergence of devices or screens:

CLAY SHIRKY: No, that’s right, both the number and proximity of chips around us is continuing to grow. I mean, the whole conversation about digital convergence and we’d all have one device, do you know anybody who owns one device? I mean, it was clear that the devices were coming together, but they weren’t converging, they were mating. Right? And there were lots more of them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I’ve always been a believer in the one-screen theory.

CLAY SHIRKY: Do you know anybody who has fewer screens now than they used to? I mean, I do an exercise with my students at the beginning of class where we take every CPU in the room and we just pile it up on a table, every computer, every noise-canceling headphone, every digital watch, every iPad, every phone. And it is a stack of technology, layers deep.

And I point out to people that in the developed world, we are living in a CPUs-per-person world, and try to get them to realize that in the developing world, the people for whom we are trying to make appropriate technology, they are in a people-per-CPU world.

But I think the CPUs-per-person curve is going to continue to rise in the west for the foreseeable future.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That sounds horrible. I mean, just carrying around a huge bag of a bunch of a little things?

[OVERTALK]

CLAY SHIRKY: The things get smaller and smaller all the time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

CLAY SHIRKY: Eventually they’re going to go into the back of your neck and you won’t notice.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’re just going to wear them all, and that-

[BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

CLAY SHIRKY: Wearing them is the second-to-last step. Embedding them is the last step.

So something about this strikes me as very true. I used to count myself lucky to have a computer. Then I got a laptop, then a phone, then a smartphone, and soon I will have another magical category of device. I think Shirky is right that the direction of the business is NOT convergence. Maybe I used to think that Apple’s iPhone was a step in that direction, but actually it relies on a computer, and the iPad is the same way. And there are tons of companies making small niche devices.

This podcast comes from America. In Japan, a lot of people use their cell phone for everything, but a lot of people own more than one cell phone! They will buy one for each carrier so they can talk to different friends. Or, they’ll but a Japanese phone to use Mixi with, and an iPhone to use all its other apps with (that’s actually just an insane problem with Mixi, IMHO). So in Japan the particulars are different but the story is the same: that people are buying more microchips, not fewer.