I just reorganized my library, so what did people gift me for my birthday? More books, of course. I guess nature really hates a vacuum.
Apps
Affinity. I was fully expecting Canva to radically simplify the Affinity suite, but i wasn’t expecting it to merge the three separate apps into a free all-in-one picture, vector and layout editing app. It’s a devilishly good idea, though. Professional users don’t need much more: it might convince some of them to switch from the Adobe Creative Cloud, which will hurt Adobe’s distribution and advertising business in the long run, a market where Canva is conspicuously absent… for now. Rank and file users will need help using this powerful tool: it might convince some companies to shell out for Canva’s subscriptions, which include templates, stock content, and (of course) AI tools. This move is straight out of Microsoft’s “embrace, extend and extinguish” playbook.
Books
The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge. I’ve read The Campus Trilogy and The Art of Fiction multiple times, but i’d never read David Lodge’s earlier work. The British Museum Is Falling Down is a comic novel following Adam Appleby, a 25-year-old student of English literature who would very much like to work on his thesis in the reading room of the British Museum, but is too distracted by the possibility that his wife might be pregnant with a fourth child. Written during the Second Vatican Council, it’s equal parts lay argument for artificial contraception and experimental literature riffing on Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses.
Links
Here are some links for your consideration:
- “Is Finishing Fonts a Lie? Lessons from a Production Sprint” by Flavia Zimbardi
- “Learning Curves” by Jason Santa Maria
- “Reproduced and recovered: the first Chinese keyboard-based MingKwai typewriter” by Maya Posch
- “This Apple Pie Contains Only Apples” by Atomic Shrimp
TV shows
Nobody Wants This S2 by Erin Foster. Will they, won’t they? Maybe they will. I sure won’t.