'Bred Crumbs

Link underlines have been gradually going extinct on the web for a while now. Why did we all collectively dispense with such a useful tool?

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In the Family breaks a lot of rules, boldly, with quietly spectacular results. It strays dangerously into Lifetime-movie territory with its plot but emerges clean of melodrama.

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During a recent trip to Palm Strings, we picked up, in a charming book and gift shop called Just Fabulous, a handy little book: 101 Things I Learned in Film School by Neil Landau with Matthew Frederick. It’s a short and sweet reminder of key tenets of filmmaking.

After seeing In the Family, I wondered if I ought to throw the book out.

It was the briefest of considerations: the tips in the book are time-honored for good reasons. Filmmakers who successfully break them do so by understanding them.

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This blog is under const— in beta. Despite the few entries and remaining tweaking, you can get a sense of where the design, code, and content are going.

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This is a blog. My blog. On its way to returning in full.

I haven’t added enough entries yet to called it launched, and there’s still tweaking and testing to do. But you can see some of what’s going on. There will be responsive design — the layout will suit whatever you’re looking at it on. I’ll be taking an experimental approach to the design that fills all those different screens. There will be a balance between what works and what I just like.

And, inevitably, I’ll be finding ways WordPress, great though it is, doesn’t quite give me I want. Then finding my way around that.

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Some nights when the fog doesn't quite make it in, a few puffy clouds are left scooting across the night sky, making my mind leaps to a particular, unlikely place — and a host of balance-challenging moods.

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Some nights, especially as San Francisco nears its typically, lovably perverse summer in September, the fog doesn’t quite make it in or falls apart and retreats, and a few puffy clouds are left scooting across the night sky, low enough to distinctly reflect the city light. When I see them, my mind leaps to a particular, unlikely place.

Panama City Beach, Florida. The Riviera of the South. A white-sand strip of bucket-drink beach clubs, pirate-ship restaurants, mini-golf, and stilt-walking summer homes where a friend and I fled to from Kentucky for two vacations in the late ’80s, finding brief refuge from our deteriorating work situations in a free house whose topside deck had a view over an undeveloped sandy lot to the gently lapping sea just a few blocks away.

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A New Yorker article on the difficulties of filming the novel "Cloud Atlas" reveals a crucial difference between films and novels: films, by their nature, demand attention to detail, while too much detail can bog down a novel.

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A New Yorker piece on the Wachowskis and their struggles to film David Mitchell’s outstanding, complex, centuries-spanning novel Cloud Atlas (opening Oct. 26 with me in line), includes a nice detail about a key difference between novels and movies: detail.

The scene in the control room, for example, features an “orison,” a kind of super-smart egg-shaped phone capable of producing 3-D projections, which Mitchell had dreamed up for the futuristic chapters. The Wachowskis, however, had to avoid the cumbersome reality of having characters running around with egg-shaped objects in their pockets; it had never crossed Mitchell’s mind that that could be a problem. “Detail in the novel is dead wood. Excessive detail is your enemy,” Mitchell told me, squeezing the imaginary enemy between his thumb and index finger.

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Trend: A quote, explanation, or joke shared as an image containing the text. Reflexive reaction: If these words were really meaningful, they wouldn't need to be pasted onto a stock photo.

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• Trend: A quote, explanation, or joke shared as an image containing the text.
• Reflexive reaction: If these words were really meaningful, they wouldn’t need to be pasted onto a stock photo.
• Considerations: It’s easier to share the message this way in Facebook. Maybe on Twitter too, where that quaint old character limit is probably too brief for the message — though viewing tweeted images is still kind of a pain in the butt, especially with certain apps.
• Caveat: If the message is political in nature, it’s almost guaranteed to be a lie, distortion, or laughably naive observation.
• Conclusions: The photo-text thing is an overly numerous vehicle that clutters up feeds, so I’m probably not going to enlarge your photo meme. If the image text is too small or too lengthy for me to easily grok from the thumbnail, I’ll be scanning right past your message.
• Exceptions: E-cards are almost always good for a chuckle.

My long-dormant blog returns, this time focusing on UX (web and beyond, design and code), movies and videos, and writing.

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