David Ely

  • Ten years ago Flex Mentallo was a rare comic that could never be reprinted due to convoluted legal issues. Now there’s a Doom Patrol TV show. Most of these links are probably dead, but here’s my Pinboard archive on that weird, wonderful comic.

  • Okay, Doom Patrol, I like your show a lot, but I’m halfway through and you’ve blown two chances to have choreographed dance fights. (When Dr. Harrison tells her patients to dance, and the drag queen vs. g-men face-off.)

    Legion got this right.

  • I’ve had Apple’s Magic Keyboard for a few months now and thought I’d write a bit about it. In short, it’s a remarkable accessory, but not one I think I’d recommend widely.

    I have a 27″ iMac that I use for programming. I wanted a portable machine to use for writing (when it’s safe to leave the house), but didn’t want to buy a whole laptop just for that purpose. The iMac is my home computer, the iPad is my portable one. It seems silly to buy a second portable computer when the iPad already fills that role. So, while the Magic Keyboard is expensive, it’s much cheaper than a MacBook of any variety. It takes my iPad, which does well for a number of functions, and turns it into a pretty good writing device.

    The thing about writing is, a lot of it isn’t typing. I spend a good deal of time looking at my notes, flipping back to previous chapters to remember what I’d named a side character, looking stuff up in ebooks I’ve saved as research, going online to figure out what the currency in Austria in the 1770s was, and so on. On a Mac, I’d have each of things things open in a window and could easily switch between them. On an iPad, doing that is cumbersome. So while the Magic Keyboard’s keyboard is fantastic (I’m using it right now), iPad OS just isn’t Mac OS.

    Nor do I want it to be. I love being able to tear the iPad off the keyboard and use it in regular tablet mode for most of its functions. I wouldn’t want iPad OS to lose its comfort and simplicity. I have a Mac for that.

    Putting that all together, it’s likely that the right setup for me might be a good laptop that stays docked to a big screen most of the time. I could unplug it and take it on the go when needed, but would have all the monitor’s space for Xcode use when I’m at my desk. In the meantime, the iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard is a great compromise. But it is a compromise.

  • I’ve been expecting the Mac line to get a redesign as rumored here for a quite a while. The iPhone and iPad Pro have been symmetrical for years while the Macs still have uneven screen bezels.

  • The kids and I are all really liking HBO Max’s new Looney Tunes Cartoons.

  • A short thought experiment: Imagine that walled garden social networks never caught on. Instead, people post things to their personal blogs or use services like Tumblr, Blogger, Flickr, or newer sites that had come along for their thoughts and photos and such. People still have timelines where they read their friends’ posts, but they’re less centralized, backed behind the scenes by RSS, maybe with some extensions to make replying and such work nicely. (Though people don’t need to actually know what RSS is; this is how podcasts have always worked.)

    In this setup, when Trump or any other white supremacist posts something, he does it to his own site (whitehouse.gov or trump.edu or whatever). People who follow him still see it in their timeline, but it’s not owned by the same entity that runs the timeline.

    The provider of your timeline is just an aggregator. They scrape up posts from your friends and combine them into a timeline for you, but they don’t own the posts; they’re hosted elsewhere. As such, it’s not their problem if someone posts misinformation. It’s that person’s host.

    The government could require that anything posted by the president use the official whitehouse.gov feed, which would have associated guidelines and an appropriate understanding of what force of law it’s communicating.

    Again, as far as you the user is concerned, you’re still just reading a timeline containing the stuff the people you follow post. We’re just talking about where those posts are hosted, who owns them, and who’s responsible for banning those users who post stuff they deem objectionable.

    The difference, I think, would be that instead of having just two social media giants making these decisions, we’d at least have a wider breadth of hosting services in the mix.

  • Doom Patrol has good music. By which I mean music that Gen X types who read the Grant Morrison & Richard Case comic would like.

  • If you’ve never seen the original Japense Godzilla (not the Americanized version), you should. It’s on HBO Max. It’s not as much about goofy rubber-suited actors as a horror movie about an atomic monster made fewer than ten years after the bombs dropped.

  • Cast iron skillet pizza with roasted garlic and rosemary. (Baby Yoda’s having a frog.)

  • Takenoko. 🎲

  • At the start of this century I had a magic box attached to my TV with a well-designed remote. I’d turn it on and it would give me a friendly list with all my unwatched shows and movies in one place, accompanied by pleasant bonks and boops.

  • The Up Next list in the Mac Music app should really be a source list like your playlists, which would let you drag and reorder multiple songs at once. Except it has to have feature parity with iOS where that sort of interaction isn’t possible.

  • The kids watched Labyrinth (again). 📽

  • I feel like every store I go into should be selling 5-packs of cloth masks but I’ve seen exactly zero for sale. Isn’t there money to be made here? (Plus, you know, saving lives.) 😷

  • I like that two of the best mainstream comics being made right now are Lois Lane and Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.

  • Distance learning is going well.

  • I made a Fleischer Studios Superman t-shirt for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It looks great in-game. The colors and S-shape are taken from The Mechanical Monsters.

  • Setting up the next week’s Dracula Live tweets is a task I do weekly that would be unbearable on an iPad. I need Safari window with the table of contents open so I can link to the appropriate entry from the novel. Then I have a folder on my computer with all the entries that are titled with the date and time they need to be posted, which I need to schedule the tweets in Tweetdeck (another Safari window). I include a frame from the book’s scene from one of four movies, so I have a folder with those open. I pick a movie that includes that scene, open the movie, it, and grab the frame. Could I do all this in iPadOS? Probably, but flipping between all those apps would be so tedious I’d probably give up on the project. Having all that open on the Mac is the only way.

    I really do like the iPad, but it just doesn’t let me do this sort of thing in any way that resembles how I actually want to work, which is to spread all my (virtual) materials out and use them.

    More, though, I don’t really want to argue that the iPad necessarily needs to allow for this. If what I’m doing really does only require one or two apps, having a dedicated device that just becomes that tasks is preferable. No menu bar or Dock to get in the way. If asked to choose, I’d prefer the iPad to stay simpler rather than sacrifice some of its elegance for the ability to do a job the Mac already does well.

    I’d sort of like to find a way for the iPad, and iPadOS and iOS, to not be seen as lesser just because they’re not optimized for multi-part workflows. If all you need to do is hammer something into the wall, you use a hammer, and you don’t blame the hammer for not being a complete workshop.

  • Short Magic Keyboard review: it’s great in all the ways people have been saying. I generally prefer the iPad as a touch device but it adds a new mode allowing it to work well for simple-to-medium “computer-like” tasks. Stuff needing multiple windows, though, you still want a Mac.

  • imported Breath of the Wild soundtrack today, I think. 💿

  • It’s easy to forget how unlikely it was the Switch would work so well as a true hybrid system. Both handheld and docked modes are great. 🕹

  • If you have Apple TV+, watch the fifth episode of Mythic Quest, “A Dark Quiet Death.” It’s a one-off; new characters, self-contained story. It’s not quite “Blink” or “San Junipero,” but I liked it.

  • Here’s my mask selfie featuring the 🍣😷 sushi mask my wife made.

  • When Force Awakens came out a popular comment was that where Lucas had, in Star Wars, remixed all his influences—westerns, samurai, etc—Abrams had made a remix of Star Wars. Except someone beat him to it 10 years prior—and did it better—in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

  • I’m watching Superman: The Movie with the kids. So far it’s going over really well.

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