By now you prob­ably real­ise the dire state of read­ing on the web. Art­icles will be split across mul­tiple pages, anim­ated Flash ads will do what they do best: dis­tract you, the back­ground will clash with the type, the text will be too small/big, the meas­ure too wide/narrow and the list goes on. All in all; it makes for a ter­rible read­ing exper­i­ence. Enter (about a year ago): Arc90 with Read­ab­il­ity.

I star­ted using Read­ab­il­ity when it was first announced, and although I wasn’t imme­di­ately impressed in a big enough way to give it pride of place in my book­marks I still fol­lowed any updates with great interest. Now with the latest edi­tions – annot­ated hyper­links, Typekit fonts, and more options – I’m just about sat­is­fied … though not com­pletely so.

Here we have Jim DeVona com­ing in to pick up the slack with McRead­ab­il­ity. Just swap out a single CSS file in your Read­ab­il­ity book­mark and you too can enjoy mul­tiple column read­ing. I’m still not 100% happy but until I get around to build­ing one just for me, this will do fine.

Con­tinue read­ing: On Read­ab­il­ity & McReadability

There is noth­ing on this world as enlight­en­ing as irra­tional, petty hatred.

Noth­ing as puri­fy­ing and renew­ing and cer­tainly there’s noth­ing as fun.

Of course, I’m not talk­ing about hatred on a large scale — like Hitler hated Jew­ish people and hugs or Richard Dawkins hates God. That kind of hatred is all encom­passing and blind­ing. It’s not good. Like with most things it pays to, like the French say (although I’ve yet to hear an actual French per­son say this and sus­pect that it’s use may just be a myth) to carry out ‘everything in moderation’.

This espe­cially applies to hatred.

Con­tinue read­ing: Hand­ling your anger the awe­some way

Super­broth­ers: Sword & Swo­cery EP is home to the col­lab­or­at­ive work of Super­broth­ers, Jim Guthrie, and Capy. They’re work­ing on a game together and I’ve gotta say I’m pretty inter­ested in what it will be like. To explain to you just why I’m inter­ested I’m going to have to break it down.

Super­broth­ers
The first I heard about Super­broth­ers was when art and design blogs flipped their shit for their videos, and rightly so. Embed­ded below is my favour­ite of these: Dot Mat­rix Revolution.

Con­tinue read­ing: Super­broth­ers: Sword & Swo­cery EP

I have to admit that this is one I’ve been sit­ting on a while, I should’ve got­ten it out there much sooner so every­body could share in the joys of über cheap re-tensionable screen­print­ing frames. A caveat here though, they’re cheap for a reason: to get them to lay flat you may have to modify your plat­ten and regis­tra­tion can be a bit iffy. How­ever, I’ve found that once prop­erly ten­sioned they’ll keep for months, and because the only thing hold­ing the mesh to the frame is glue, if you rip it while reclaim­ing the screen (as I have done too many times) it’s easy enough to ten­sion up some new mesh.

First off, tools. The only tools I really need are a shift­ing span­ner, a hack­saw (please make sure you get a metal and not wood saw), and a c clamp. If you don’t have those then don’t worry, you’re going to need to make a trip to the shop for some 15mm cop­per pip­ing (usu­ally found in 3 or 4 meter lengths) and 90° com­pres­sion bends. Back from the hard­ware store yet? Mouse-over the images below for the process.

Cop­per pip­ing, cut to length. I find that 300mm and 400mm a side works best for A4 prints. Note that I’ve sanded them slightly to allow the mesh bet­ter pur­chase .

Con­tinue read­ing: Cheap Reten­sion­able Screen­print­ing Frames

Movies. I’ve watched a lot of them lately. Here are some words about some of them.

Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea

Trailer

This is Hayao Miazaki so it’s obvi­ously Stu­dio Ghibli so you can’t escape how good it’s going to be. Beau­ti­ful, fully real­ised yet simple and easy to watch this re-weaving of Hans Anderson’s Little Mer­maid is one of the best things I’ve ever looked at.
Luck­ily for the UK it’s hit­ting cinemas soon, although per­son­ally I’d ditch the Cate Blanchett headed dub and hold out for a sub­titled screen­ing if you don’t want to catch the Dis­ney­fic­a­tion effect of Noah Cyrus and try­ing to hard to talk to kids. Either how­ever, is bet­ter than not see­ing it though. Espe­cially if you have some kids to take with you. They’ll love it just as much, if not more than you.

Con­tinue read­ing: 3 Months Of Movies

The first time I heard about Andrew W.K. I was some­where out­side of Glen­rothes on a stage­coach Cityl­ink bus. It was a Fri­day and I was 18. I hadn’t as yet heard any of his music, although admit­tedly at that point I hadn’t heard much music at all, but from what I could gather from Ker­rang magazine he was young, appar­ently music­ally gif­ted and THE NEXT BIG THING in metal. At the time I was younger, music­ally inept and hor­ribly eager to learn about any­thing my new group of “mosher” friends were inter­ested in. Years later this art­icle would be the only thing that I had per­man­ently filed away in my memory from my brief flir­ta­tion with heavy metal journ­al­ism, apart from a story I read on another bus jour­ney about Slip­knot being pel­ted with Mars Bars by the angry fans of another band dur­ing a gig.

I always hated Slip­knot and was obvi­ously grat­i­fied other people felt the same way.

I wouldn’t actu­ally hear his music until another Fri­day night a few weeks later. This time I was slumped ungra­ciously in front of a friends tele­vi­sion, per­us­ing his music chan­nels. I had none of my own, liv­ing as I was between Uni­ver­sity halls of res­id­ence and a selec­tion of sofas scattered around Dun­dee. And it was here that I heard Party Hard for the first time. It was, like the art­icle in Ker­rang, inter­est­ing in a way I couldn’t quite pin down. There was some­thing about the man and his music (apart from his seem­ingly never end­ing legs, unwashed jeans and wet strag­gly hair), that was fas­cin­at­ing and judging by the way that the song fol­lowed me around dif­fer­ent club nights for months after­ward and filled dance­floors every week it indic­ated that other people thought so too. Party Hard was essen­tially a song that did what it said on the tin — insert CD, crank volume, rock out. The fol­lowup song She is Beau­ti­ful and the video (which I still believe to be an accur­ate por­trayal of a day in the life of Mr W.K.) was the same. I couldn’t fig­ure out why I liked him and I cer­tainly couldn’t begin to under­stand why the hell I thought he was so cool.

Con­tinue read­ing: Andrew W.K.

There are a lot of com­ics on the inter­net. They’re called web­com­ics and there are sup­posedly over 18,000 of them and they’ve been around for roughly the same time as the inter­net. So you’ve prob­ably read a few your­self and have now real­ised that unfor­tu­nately most of them are unbear­ably bad.

That’s the the prob­lem with the kind of self-publishing involved in the “web­comic scene” — there are no qual­ity con­trols save for those of the artists and a lot of those artists are terrible.

So when someone men­tions a ‘good’ web­comic to you and tells you to check it out you may be loathe to take the advice. Which is a real shame because amongst the dross and white noise of the inter­net there are also some true gems out there. Gems like Gun­nerkrigg court.

Con­tinue read­ing: Why You Should Read Gun­nerkrigg Court

You know how it goes — you see some­thing here or there, some form of enter­tain­ment media or curio item and for some reason you can’t seem to cat­egor­ise what it is you’ve actu­ally seen.  You watched the whole thing or picked it up and turned it round and stared at it but you just can’t fig­ure out what exactly you’re sup­posed to make of it.

Some­thing about it is ter­rible.  Stu­pid even.  Some­thing about it is deffin­itely off and you know that you just shouldn’t like it.  It would be ridicu­lously uncool to like it.

But then there’s some­thing about this thing that is also indes­crib­ably awe­some.  Time and time again, when you think no-one is look­ing you go back to it — this thing that lies some­where on the bor­der between fuck­ing ter­ri­fy­ing and unset­tlingly terrific.

Here at Super­Pos­i­tion Kitty we enjoy things like that and spend a good deal of time uniron­ic­ally lik­ing many things that per­haps we shouldn’t.  But what’s life lived without a few dirty secrets?  So in this spirit we present to you the first in a series of lists and art­icles con­cern­ing ‘things which may or may not be cool’.

This time round it’s music.

Con­tinue read­ing: Things which may or may not be cool

When I was a teen­ager I thought two things were cool — elec­tric blue and yel­low Adi­das sweat­shirts and Damon Albarn. Of course since grow­ing up is a pro­cess of try­ing on many dif­fer­ent iden­tit­ies, much like try­ing on a series of dis­tinct­ive hats, I dropped sports clothes and poor old Damon and picked up other sing­ers and dif­fer­ent clothes. Time went on and I decided that new and dif­fer­ent things were cool before throw­ing them off and mov­ing on to the next thing and this con­tin­ued on and on, shift­ing in and out of whatever I could get into.

But des­pite this — des­pite all of the things I have thought were cool or uncool I still don’t strictly know what cool is. And that’s the prob­lem with cool: there’s no way of put­ting your fin­ger dir­ectly on it and pin­ning it solidly to the page. Cool, by it’s nature is an indefin­able mass of cul­tur­ally dis­tinct, age spe­cific ideas, items or atti­tudes which are com­pletely sin­gu­lar to the indi­vidual or group con­cerned and yet which are entirely rel­at­ive to the atti­tudes, items or ideas of every other group or indi­vidual within a spe­cific soci­ety and the world at large.

It is there­fore a mess of social con­struct, zero sum game and per­fect tim­ing which is vital to indi­vidual iden­tity and abil­ity to func­tion in soci­ety. Rhet­or­ic­ally speak­ing to be cool is to be respec­ted, liked and sought after as a per­son ‘who knows what is up’. (To be uncool on the other hand holds con­nota­tions of shame and embar­rass­ment and of being some­thing less than desirable.)

It is import­ant then to be cool.

Con­tinue read­ing: An open apo­logy to Damon Albarn