tmccollum's blog

So, in response to the claim in Rob's post that Helvetica is Punk as Fuck, I decided to play devil's advocate and take a differing position.

I think that Helvetica in and of itself cannot be classified as "punk" or "establishment" or whatever. It depends entirely upon the context in which it's used. When it was first designed and presented an alternative to the jumbled mishmash of typefaces that were being used in public design, it definitely had a "punk" aspect to it, in that it was a conscious reaction to the established way of doing things. In the same way, when Elvis came on the pop music scene with "That's All Right" and "Blue Suede Shoes", it could be scene as a reaction to the pop vocal sensibilities of Frank Sinatra and other artists of the time.  read more »

Assuming that this picture upload works, you should see an example of a meta-picture that I have pulled from a comic book. The image comes from issue #15 (pp. 8-9) of Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III.

Promethea15p8-9: Promethea #15, pp. 8-9

(Yay, I got it to work! Thanks for the tips today, Zach!)

I recommend that you click on the picture to go to the content page and view it in its original size in order to read the dialogue.

In the image, we see Sophie and Barbara, two incarnations of the Promethea character, walking along a Moebius Strip. If you follow their conversation as they walk along the path, you will see that they are "stuck" in a loop. The only way for them to continue on their journey is for the reader to intervene by turning the page. This calls attention to the "characterness" of the characters. It's going to be difficult to explain what I mean here, so please bear with me.  read more »

When I found out that our first assignment would be to play a video game, I was pretty excited. About a minute or two into "Passage", however, I felt a little cheated. The graphics were blurry, there didn't seem to be any advantage to picking up the bookcase/treasure chests, and there wasn't a clearly defined objective. The symbolism and amount of ideas that could be "read out" of the game were interesting, but as a mainstream video game review might say, it has very little replay value. As an interactive narrative, I think that "Passage" works great. One of the main things I didn't like about it as a "game" was the fact that choices made by the player don't have that much effect on how the game ends, other than where on the map the character takes a dirt nap. As a medium for the discourse of a story, however, this works fine, because there is always a beginning and an ending to a story. As Chatman would say, or does say, there are infinite possibilities for what could be included in the story, but the act of selection by the author of where to begin and where to end gives each narrative text a finite quality.  read more »