January 21, 2012
Abstracting craft, Chicago, Future Tools, Language, Overheard, practice, Vocabulary

Word, Work

A group from Chicago visited Constant Variable last week. One student explains his mother is a publisher and that she compiled an on-line glossary of terms used in her mixed practice of printing, publishing and writing. It is stunning. For example, under W: word spacing: The amount of space between each word in typeset text. [...]

December 23, 2011
Abstracting craft, dilettantism, expertise, Future Tools, geekdom, Overheard, practice, theory, Watch this thread

The Dilettante Expert

‘Dilettante expertise’ as a way to make practice meet theory: Expertise is the classical foundation of all geekdom, whether it is encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, of the Star Trek universe or the registers of an 8-bit controller. Dilettantism is the unavoidable condition of drawing the bigger picture. It can end up badly like with the [...]

August 11, 2011
Further Reading, Future Tools, Networked graphics, practice, Reading, specifications, standards

retro-specs

MM reads the introduction to Mark Pilgrims’ Dive into HTML5: “HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versi…

August 2, 2011
direction, Future Tools, orientation, practice, Reading, Tools, Vocabulary

Shape and orient

Tools shape orient practice Practice shapes orients tools We are imagining the future of Constant this afternoon. At some point, we discuss Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, a book by Sara Ahmed we like. She uses queer both in the sen…