I’ve always liked how Craig Mod writes “satellite” articles to his main essays, and after my post on cars was up, I realized there were a few things I forgot to add, and it didn’t feel right to just shoehorn them in. So consider this an addendum.

Senna
After I tweeted a remark about watching the Senna documentary last night, my friend Jairo Neto (@jaironeto) — who is also organizer of the PechaKucha Night series in Sao Paulo — replied with a few remarks that I’d like to share.

man, did I cry with this documentary
the most important thing that he did was that he showed that you could be a winner with discipline and focus..
and that was something unique at the time. Brazil was just coming out of a military dictatorship, people were stunned by Senna
yes, and by that time, he was investing in his Institution for children, so there was a comic book character called “Senninha”
so for young kids (like me) he was a real living hero

Arcade Racers
I think that what I wrote makes it sound like I no longer play arcade racers, but that’s not true at all. One of my favorite games of recent years is Split/Second — I loved it so much I played through it twice — and I’m a huge fan of the Burnout series. I also quite enjoyed last year’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit — it was a blast alternating between the speedsters and the cops, and also trying to beat the times of my friends (which usually ends up being CheapyD, who’s my only friend who likes racing games as much as I do). And after playing the demo for Need for Speed: The Run, in which avalanches are happening all over the place as you speed through a mountainous road, I’m looking forward that too. It reminded me of Speed Devils, which was my favorite racing game on the Dreamcast.

Forza + Top Gear
One of my favorite things to do these days is to take the cars that I see featured on Top Gear for a drive in Forza 4 — even better, I can actually try them out on the Top Gear test track, just like The Stig does, since it’s one of the tracks included in the game.

Pagani Zonda Cinque
My favorite car to drive in Forza tends to evolve the more I play — especially as I discover new cars to drive — and my current fave is the Pagani Zonda Cinque. It drives suprisingly well (tight controls) for a car that has that much power.

As of a couple of weeks ago I’ve started spending more time at the Klein Dytham architecture office in Ebisu, and that’s given me an excuse to do a lot of biking again. That’s still my bike pictured above, a Bianchi BD-1, that I bought from Craig Mod close to 3 years ago. At first I told myself I’d maybe go to the office by bike on one day a week, but so far I’ve been doing it more often, and rather looking forward to the ride.

From my home in Ikebukuro to the KDa office takes me about 40 minutes, with a distance of around 10km — even though it’s a very easy ride, since I’m pretty much just on Meiji street from start to finish, things always slow down around Shinjuku, when I start hitting all those traffic lights. I had a blast last night when I left the office after a meeting with Ian Lynam and Mark McFarlane, as we all biked together until Shibuya before separating, side-by-side on one lane (traffic was light).

And yes, this does mean that I’m out and about more, being based in Ebisu (and often with a bike), and can be easily bribed by coffee or drinks if you want to meet up with me.

I gotta say I’m getting a kick out of this: In the past 24 hours I conceived of a site, a name, bought the domain, got it working, installed WordPress, imported posts from this site, found a theme that I modded to my liking, and have now launched my latest project, something I’m calling The Magaziner. What’s a magaziner you ask? Here’s my made-up answer:

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

It all started last night when I was reading a comment on Facebook by Craig Mod, who suggested that all of the magazine-related coverage I’ve been doing over the past couple of months is getting lost within the rest of what I post here. I think he made a good point — and god knows I have a lot of respect and admiration for what he’s accomplished over the past year or so — and so I decided to launch a new site that would be exclusively for all of the magazine stuff. Expect the same kind of coverage you’ve been seeing here — commentary, news, new release announcements, reviews — that weighs heavily on the emerging digital side of the magazine publishing industry, something I’m quite passionate about (although I do still love my lovely print publications, thank you very much).

So this site returns to being a hub for news on me and all of my various projects, which on top of The Magaziner includes Codex, my new weekly music podcast, Radio OK Fred, SNOW Magazine, PauseTalk, and other fun stuff. Hope you’ll continue to follow what I’m up to here, and if you really enjoyed the magazine coverage, then please head on over to The Magaziner — and you can of course subscribe to an RSS feed. There’s a Twitter account too (@the_magaziner) that I’ll be using to post magazine-related news as well.

Oh, and one more thing about The Magaziner, please consider this a beta version of the site. As I said at the top of this post, it all came together rather fast, so over the coming weeks I’m sure I’ll be changing things here and there, fixing things I missed, and maybe coming up with new features or sections to add.

I’d like to follow up my post from earlier today — about how I felt that Craig Mod’s recent pieces on digital publishing don’t really take into account the desire for beautiful magazine layouts — with a few comments that were tweeted to me by Craig in response.

Everyone is conflating my desire (demand? :-) for real text with an anti design stance. Not the case at all.

I want layouts just as interesting / unique as today’s magazines. But with more accessibility / respect for digital text.

I’m arguing not for a certain type of book or magazine, but a certain kind of accessibility of text.

Sure, then it does sound like we’re on the same page after all. I think the problem I had with his recent essays — and the latest one in particular — is that he continues to push for a better kind of accessibility of text in digital form, but from all of the examples that he tends to give, some of them just don’t jive with creating an iPad-formatted page (using those dimensions) of a magazine that can’t be affected by user interaction.

There’s no reason why text in iPad magazines can’t be selectable (a few examples have been popping up recently), which could then mean adding text copying/sharing and the like. But part of his “accessibility package” — as far as I can tell — also includes being able to adjust text size, and that just won’t work.

I do have a solution though: For every article in a magazine, include a button that lets you open just the text as a separate “window,” which would be adjustable. It’s similar to what you see in certain magazines on Zinio — instead of having to zoom in and out on each page to read text that is too small, you can read the text separately, at a larger size, on a separate page.

And I said my favorite *reading* experience is Instapaper, not ‘favorite magazine’ ;-)

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, but I was pretty sure he said “magazine,” which is why it stuck with me.

I want someone to build a magazine that’s as comfortable from a content consumption POV as instapaper. I’d happily read it.

That’s something I can definitely agree with. As I said, I absolutely love what Instapaper has done in terms of making long-form journalism (or essay writing if you will) more accessible. I’d love to see magazines do their own thing to make this happen, just not in the same way.

readability + accessibility + well considered typography != anti-design.

Yes, it certainly is, and it’s what made me want to write that post. I don’t think that a good magazine can really be “anti-design,” and so by promoting all those other things, it sort of contradicts the idea of beautifully designed magazines (in terms of graphic design, layouts) also attaining the pure goals of that trifecta he so holds dear (although I think two of them can easily be achieved).

Craig Mod recently posted a new essay in relation to digital publishing — the throat swallowing titled “The ereader incompetence checklist (for discerning consumers, editors, publishers and designers” — and as with everything else he’s written of late, it’s a must read for anyone with even a passing interest in the topic.

BUT, I do have to say that I’m starting to disagree with some of his stances, and mostly because I feel that he continues to treat the digital treatment of books and magazines in a similar manner, while these are in fact quite different mediums, and the way we interact with them is quite different as well.

The biggest issue I have with his views on magazines is that he prioritizes readability over any thoughts of design, and that’s just not how I experience most of the magazines I love. For me, the beauty of the magazine medium is in its marriage of text and images, and the ways that art directors manage to combine these in an appealing presentation. Text alone or images alone do not make a magazine (although I’ll readily admit that there are some magazines, like The New Yorker, where it’s really just about the text).

While we were out for drinks the other night — in commemoration of his leaving Tokyo for more “digitally charged” pastures — he mentioned how his favorite magazine experience on the iPad is through Instapaper, and I think that says it all. Don’t get me wrong, Instapaper is not only of my favorite apps (on both iPhone and iPad), it’s also one of the apps I access the most, and it’s because of it that I was able to get back into reading long-form journalism (something I’ve never felt comfortable doing over the web). But a great magazine experience? There’s no magazine experience there at all, it’s just a better way of reading an article, independently of any design touch.

For me, same goes for Flipboard, the “Social Magazine.” While yes, it does offer a more pleasing (compared to the web) and magazine-y way to read collections of articles, the fact that it’s automatized means you quickly tire of the layout. I think “Social Newspaper” would be a better way to describe it, since most of the time (and emphasis on the “most,” since there are definite exceptions out there) layouts in newspapers tend to be conservative and relatively standard. It’s why I love the New York Times iPad app, and wouldn’t really want it to change (although I’m quite tired of the inclusion of image heavy/slideshow photo rounds-ups, with the images missing).

So going back to Craig’s piece, I’m of course all for a greater level of accessibility in digital texts, but when it comes to magazines, not at the price of losing any though of layout that doesn’t simply copy a web-like approach (long flows of text).

Update: The discussion continues — with a response from Craig — in this post.

I’m pretty sure I hate Craig Mod, and the reason is because he keeps writing awesome essays and is doing plenty of things — like starting a “publishing think tank” called PRE/POST — that make me jealous. You really do need to go read his latest journal entry, “Kickstartup,” which tells the story of how he used Kickstarter to successfully fund the new edition of Art Space Tokyo, sharing everything he learned from the process. And even though it’s long, don’t Instapaper it, because you’ll miss out on the beautiful layout.

Pictured, Art Space Tokyo covers drying, after they’ve been hand-printed.

Well, what a great PauseTalk we had this past Monday (Vol. 42), with a terrific group of 36 participants joining up for some good talk, laughs, and maybe even a bit of inspiration (OK, yes, I will make public my complete and utter admiration — and jealousy — of what Craig Mod has been doing of late).

The next PauseTalk (Vol. 43) will happen on the first Monday of next month, as usual, which falls on August 2, and it also doubles as a reception party for the SNOW Magazine Cafe, and will hopefully include lots of magazine-related talk.

As I did last month, I put out an attendance sheet to fill out, and so here is a partial list of attendees (just email me if you want to be added).

• Andrea Hope (Sandwich Maker/Zine Distributor)
• Calvin C. Chan (Web Developer)
• Claire + Sofie Tanaka (Translator + Kid)
• Edward Harrison (Designer/Illustrator)
• James Kay (Game Developer)
• Jean Snow (Executive Executor)
• Jeremy Staples (Indie Publisher)
• Jody Godoy (Writer)
• Michael Lam (Filmmaker/Animator)
• Nick Bruscia (Architect/Professor)
• Niko Lanzuisi (Filmmaker/Illustrator)
• Robb Englin (Industrial Designer)
• Ryan Winterhalter (Writer)
• Toby Klüpfel (Software Engineer)
• Tamio Teshima (Web Designer)
• Verena Dauerer (Editor)

One thing that’s happened to me over the past few years is that I’ve pretty much stopped taking photos. Sure, the odd iPhone-to-Twitter shot is still a regular occurrence, but in terms of taking photos with a relatively descent point-and-shoot — in my case, a series of Canon PowerShots — either for this site, for other sites, or even just for personal use, that just kinda stopped. You’ll notice it also if you check my Flickr account — except for a little rekindling courtesy of an iPhone/Toy Camera fling last year in Macau, not much has gone up over the past couple of years, to the point where I haven’t even renewed my pro account in years, and this coming from someone who was particularly active there.

So why? That’s a good question, and there are several answers to it. One thing is that I grew dissatisfied with the quality of what I was taking and sharing, but lacked the energy (and money) to move up to decent gear and shoot (yeah, pun sadly intended) for more. It also doesn’t help when you have a lot of friends who are so damn talented when it comes to photography — some would say this can be inspirational, but I’m on the side that tends to think, oh well, better leave this to those who are better at it.

But to be honest, the biggest reason is one that actually affected a lot of the content that you saw appear on this blog, and that’s even pre-SNOW Magazine. It got to a point where I just couldn’t “experience” anything for myself anymore. Every time I was out and about and spotted something interesting, I was immediately composing a blog post in my head about it (even if I had absolutely no intention of writing one) and taking photos to “document” it. This ended up literally getting in the way of my enjoyment of things. Many are sure to say that this is a handy skill to have, and I wouldn’t disagree, but it can also be a negative in the sense that I started losing something rather important, and that’s the pure sense of enjoying the moment/space you occupy.

Sure, this wasn’t just about photography, but I think one way to fix this for me was to remove that part from the equation. And you know what, after a while it did in fact work. I no longer cared which angle of what I was seeing or experiencing would best tell the story.

“OK, Jean, but this post is titled ‘Panasonic Lumix G2,’ no?”

Yes, how perceptive of you.

My wife has been wanting a decent camera for a while now, at first mostly to use for her next field research trip to China, but also to just start taking better photos of the things around her, including of course our dog. She finally pulled the trigger on a purchase yesterday and ended up getting the aforementioned Panasonic Lumix G2, the follow-up to the company’s G1, the camera that kicked off the whole “Micro System” craze. For months I’d been suggesting to her the GF1, in part because of Craig Mod’s amazing field test article, but also because at least 5-6 of my friends ended up buying one, to great satisfaction. She was able to get something a bit better — the GF1 is sort of a paired-down more compact version of the G2 (or rather its predecessor, the G1).

So this means we have a nice new camera in the house, and she says I’ll be able to use it when I want — although there seems to be some sort of unwritten rule stating that such sharing will happen after a fixed amount of time. The prospect of learning photography has me rather excited, and despite my fears of getting back to that sense of always being in reporter mode, I’m thinking that it will help get some more original (not reblogged) content on SNOW Magazine.

To be fair, I also have a feeling that the iPhone 4 is going to help with that. I finally got around to ordering one yesterday — the wait will take up to a month though — and from the examples I saw in this Boing Boing post, I think it will make for a great device when you’re in a pinch. But more than just the camera, it’s the prospect of HD video recording that has me excited, and I’m hoping that you’ll see the results on SNOW as well — and hey, that G2 takes some pretty decent HD videos too, just look at what Craig was able to get out of his GF1.

Next up is moving to some more serious photo editing tools — iPhoto and quick Photoshop touch-ups have been fine so far, but I want to move up. After asking about Adobe Lightroom versus Apple Aperture on Twitter, the feedback was overwhelmingly pro-Lightroom, and Adobe certainly makes it easy for you to try it out for yourself. It seems that Lightroom 3 was actually released just recently, so looks like I’m hopping on at a good time.

What you see at the top of this post is just me having fun with some of the filters in Lightroom, on a photo my wife took of me this morning — this is pretty much what I look like, and where I find myself, everyday. Funny how adding a vignette/sepia filter makes everything look oh-so serious. Looking at the photo, I really feel like a hard-working writer. Yeah.

Some great news today: as of an hour ago, the Art Space Tokyo team reached their goal of raising $15,000 to reprint/update the book, as well as produce a free iPad version. Keep supporting the project though, because I know they low-balled the amount (if you don’t reach your goal on Kickstarter you get nothing) and so every bit more will help make sure Craig and Ashley can both devote the amount of time necessary to making this as awesome as it deserves to be.

My friends Craig Mod and Ashley Rawlings produced this terrific book a couple of years ago called Art Space Tokyo, you may have heard of it — I’ve certainly plugged it and recommended it countless times to anyone I talk to when it comes to the art scene in Tokyo. It has unfortunately been out of print for quite a while now, but Craig and Ashley recently got the rights back (as Craig is no longer involved with Chin Music Press), and they’ve launched a Kickstarter project to not only get an updated version of the book back in print, but to also produce a free iPad version. So go, and support what will undoubtedly be an awesome pair of products.

Craig Mod follows up his recent Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 field report with a closer look at the video aspects of the camera, including a video gallery.

Craig Mod posts a terrific write-up on his experience with the Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 — a camera I’ve been lusting after — during 16 days in the Himalayas.

If you followed the link in my last post about next year’s Web Trend Map Atlas, you’ll find Oliver mention that the project will be done in collaboration with “Books We Make.” Visiting the website, I see that it’s a new project by Craig Mod, and I’m quite upset that I don’t know anything about it.

If you’re into the web and design, there’s a very good chance that you already know about Information Architect‘s annual Web Trend Map poster. Going one step further this year, iA teamed up with Craig Mod to create an online web app version of the map. The way it works is that when you populate a map with Twitter feeds, the system looks at all the links that are posted, and creates a “Trending Links” list, which appears in the sidebar on the left. It’s an awesome way to get a quick heads-up on what people — or “micro curators,” as iA and Craig describe them — are linking to and talking about. You need to have an account in order to create a map (and to do that, you need to purchase the original Web Trend Map poster), but anyone can access the maps already created.

My contribution comes in the form of my “Gamingsphere” map, which I describe thusly: “Tweeting games by people who play them, write about them, talk about them, and just plain love them.”