A recent interview with Neil Pasricha, author of 1000 Awesome Things, celebrating the release of The Book of Awesome.
His blog — some entries are nostalgic, reflective, but always positive — now gets about 40,000 visits a day, more than 11 million hits in total. His email box is regularly packed with readers’ messages, spilling out their woes and thanking him for lifting their spirits.
Neil was one of my editors at Golden Words years ago. He’s incredibly funny and well-deserving of the attention that the site has garnered. I hope the book sells really well, I’ll be picking up a copy when it makes it to this side of the pond, or next time I’m back in Canada. Congratulations Neil!
A beginner’s guide to OpenType, a good overview if you’re not familiar. Being a late-comer to the world of print design, I have to admit that I’m a fan of OpenType and what you can do with it in InDesign.
So you need a typeface? A fun flowchart for picking a typeface from Julian Hansen.
The Alice 100 collection at UBC contains hundreds of editions of the Alice in Wonderland, as parodies, film productions, stills and other works by Caroll. This article discusses the collection, and the variety of artwork that it has inspired over the years.
In other Alice related news, the British Library has made the first edition of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground available in its entirety, and there’s a version of Alice for the iPad.
Every black hole contains another universe? It’s possible that our universe is actually sitting inside the black hole of another universe and the black holes in our universe may lead to alternate realities.
According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.
Kurt Vonnegut at the blackboard describing the G-I axis (good fortune-ill fortune) and how it applies to different stories.
The great baseball card bubble, the collapse of an artificial economy. I started collecting baseball and hockey cards with my father in 1988, my interest peaked in the early nineties, but I remember pouring over Beckett’s and spending hours in the car to go to distant card shows.
Playing chess with Kubrick, a fond recollection of meeting with the director for an interview. Related but unrelated, an interview with Magnus Carlsen, the current world chess champion. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a fun interview to read, he comes across as relatively normal and down-to-earth. My introduction to chess was having my Dad destroy me in short order, kind of like a checkmate in four moves, but it might have been worse than that, thanks Dad.
Blood, Sweat and Photographic Tears, the story of a wildlife photographer in pursuit of that rare and fleeting frame. Greg du Toit spent eight months camping out daily at a Kenyan watering hole, enduring parasites and insects, to capture a photo of a wild lion drinking.
For the 2010 World Cup, Nike has created a recycled kit with recycled packaging. The shirts are made from nylon, produced from more than thirteen million melted-down plastic bottles, creating a kit 15% lighter than previous versions.
