Author: Paul L

Paul woke up one day and discovered that he is from another planet — and he's been pointing out to anyone who will listen what is wrong with this planet, ever since. Which makes him quite obnoxious. Occasionally, he codifies his objections to this particular plane of existence into a webcomic called Hypothesis, featuring Photoshop paste-up art, autobiography, classic gaming, obscure web technologies, short films, and heady intellectualism, all mashed up into a preposterously anti-commercial gumbo that everyone so far finds pretty incoherent. What did you expect? He's from another fucking planet. Rumours that Paul is secretly working to build you a storytelling engine based on alien technology are quite inaccurate — it is not for you. You will see no mention of it here whatsoever. Go away now.

Cut&Paste Asks Toronto Designers To Do the Fairly Ridiculous

January 2, 2009July 25, 2009 Paul L 4 Comments

That’s how contest founder John Fiorelli himself describes the Digital Design Tournament challenge to take up pen and tablet and create something from scratch in 15 or 20 minutes on stage, in front of a cheering crowd. Begun in New York in 2005, Cut&Paste has dragged its lasso from Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston, over to London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, and now, finally, Toronto — which the press release memorably characterises as ‘kissing Lake Ontario’… um, ptooey? The magic wand-off will take place on March 14,…

Blog@Newsarama to Highlight Webcomics

January 2, 2009January 2, 2009 Paul L 4 Comments

There is an entirely new blogging team at Blog@Newsarama, the old team having quit en masse last month due, as far as I can ascertain, to a surprise redesign and a glitchy comments system. The new bloggers seem, so far, eager to connect with the community, and particularly bullish about webcomics, which would be encouraging if it weren’t for the way they parrot all of the current conventional wisdom about ‘new’ media. That the web is only good for bite-sized information, for example. (Perhaps we should just pat HTML on…

Australian Net Censors To Target P2P

December 24, 2008December 24, 2008 Paul L 1 Comment

Imagine that you went back in time to the invention of the printing press, which revolutionised human communicative efficacy, only to discover the Kings and Queens of the realm trying to install unwieldy automated mechanical filters on every typesetter. That’s how truly bizarre it seems to me to watch a human government attempting to stifle P2P applications like BitTorrent: technologies which have hit upon, by amazing groundswell, the most robust communication protocols yet known. [Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]

Human evolutionary ‘tree’ reveals why video games suck

December 21, 2008 Paul L 6 Comments

Scientific American has posted a Hominin evolutionary tree, which is interesting, if for no other reason, then for the way they posted it — via the publishers of effortlessly zoomable online documents, issuu.com. The science is fascinating, but I’m more intrigued by this new method of online presentation than by the magazine artist’s visual rendering of evolution. Ever notice the way the living Hominins (i.e. you and me) will consistently squash any inconveniently branching structure into a linear one of their choosing, as if that is a good way to…

Canadian Builds Robogirl; Feminists Panic

December 17, 2008December 17, 2008 Paul L 12 Comments

From my home Toronto suburb of Brampton, ubergeek Trung Le, in “[his] basement using [his] credit card and [his] entire saving account as funding”, has made international news by building a robotic companion who answers simple queries, responds to pain, and who looks like a classic anime ingenue but talks like Data. (“I do not like it when you touch my breasts!”) It’s all quite simultaneously interesting and funny and disconcerting and slightly sad. In other words, awesome. But according to quite a large portion of the commenters on Feministing.com,…

I guess Google never promised to ‘SAY no evil’…

December 15, 2008December 15, 2008 Paul L 2 Comments

Here’s a scrolldown link to my comment on Google’s Public Policy Blog post on Net neutrality and the benefits of caching, where I pointed out that although Google’s “offer to ‘colocate’ caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities” is probably a good thing for the internet and should be supported for the time being, it is obviously not “net neutral” nor is it “edge caching”, as Google wishes to pretend. [Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]

Oblong’s G-speak Points the Way to Tomorrow’s Interface

November 21, 2008November 21, 2008 Paul L 3 Comments

When I first laid eyes on Jeff Han’s next generation touchscreen interface, it gave me that tingle that told me, “Welcome to the future.” The same tingle I got when I saw my first command line interface in the late ’70s, or when I spotted my first GUI in the mid-’80s. Oblong Industries’ newly available (after more than a decade in development) “spatial operating system“, G-speak, has turned that tingle into a burning itch. Nothing I have seen in tech innovation has made me as eager to live long enough…

Bought a New MacBook? Throw Out Your Cinema Display

November 19, 2008November 20, 2008 Paul L 7 Comments

Ars Technica (and other outlets) are reporting that via the ‘DisplayPort’ external video adaptor, Apple has placed an HDCP-like DRM chokehold on iTunes-purchased video playback from its new MacBook and MacBook Pro models to a big-screen monitor. This is a consumer rights issue in more ways than one, including some pretty serious and unprecedented ways (at least in the Apple world).

Wall Street Journal Welcomes iPhone Overlords

October 29, 2008October 29, 2008 Paul L 18 Comments

The Wall Street Journal has raised the spectre of smartphones replacing laptops, not even realising, it seems, that it is a spectre. Apple’s “cutting-edge” iPhone is held up throughout the article, without a hint of irony, as the prime example of the sort of device that the author sees one day bumping your main mobile computer into a Sarlacc Pit. No mention at all is made of the completely closed and capriciously-controlled nature of application development through the iPhone’s App Store (practical unofficial alternatives to which, in a 180-degree turn…

Why It’s Hard to Hate Google

October 9, 2008October 9, 2008 Paul L 2 Comments

Because they do things like this [quoted from the company’s ‘unofficial’ human web portal, Matt Cutts]… Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube. Some Googlers thought that was a pretty fun suggestion, so they did it. YouTube now has an audio preview so you can listen to your comment before you post it. I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature. Click…

Apple Beset by Criticism From Leading Mac Bloggers

September 15, 2008September 15, 2008 Paul L 37 Comments

When lodestar users like Harry McCracken, Dave Winer, and even John Gruber are gunning for you online, you know your mobile platform has a real problem on its hands. Thus, is Apple reaping what it has sowed with its increasingly pathological obsession with control.

Yahoo’s Homepage to Get Even HEAVIER

September 12, 2008September 13, 2008 Paul L 1 Comment

While Google tries to hold its homepage word count at 28 — that’s right: 28 words — Yahoo suddenly gets it in their heads that what people really want is to download a few more thousand, socially networked words, thus continuing the company’s long-term slide toward forcing you to download the whole internet before you search through any of it.