as we may blog

Photo of Camden Yards by wallyg on flickr.

In a fascinating essay about the design of new baseball stadiums, Michael Beirut asks a simple question: “Why is it so hard to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?” It’s been sixteen years since Camden Yards opened in Baltimore and he is discouraged by the Camden-esque design of seemingly every new baseball stadium built since. He feels the Mets missed an opportunity to break out of this pattern with Citi Field, due to open in 2009.

But in reality Flushing Meadows is hardly the middle of nowhere, and has a potent design tradition of its own. Originally a city dumping ground memorialized as The Great Gatsby’s “valley of ashes,” it was cleared by parks commissioner Robert Moses for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and fifteen years later, the 1964 World’s Fair. Its grounds were the site of some of the most iconic and entertaining visionary architecture ever built in North America: Wallace Harrison’s Trylon and Perisphere, Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama at the General Motors Pavilion, not to mention the Unisphere, which still stands today within sight of the new Citi Field. Wouldn’t any of these have made great precedents for a new pleasure dome to be built in Flushing Meadows?

This seems like an interesting way to blur the line between web and TV content, at least on the face of it. Lots of people are out there creating this kind of content for their own blogs, and I’m sure the audiences for Vox and This American Life overlap heavily (i.e. LIBERALS with nothing better to do than BLOG).

While it makes sense from a marketing perspective, I suspect there isn’t much of a creative or artistic use for these videos. I doubt anyone’s video will be featured on This American Life, in large part because the show isn’t about people telling their stories, it’s about Ira Glass telling other people’s stories. User-submitted content isn’t going to fit that format.

All that is tangentially related to the site about which I intended to blog but don’t really have much to say (except “check it out”): 6 milliards d’Autres. I love the use of high-res video for a project of this nature. Be sure to click the “high bandwidth” version to see it, though. Story Corps should do something like this.

OK, that’s just about enough seriousness for 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. Time to report to the garden for the long holiday weekend.

I have a new blog! It’s sanscomicsans.com and it operates under the bylaws of The Content Webring.

I’ve had this going for a little while but I wasn’t sure what exactly to do with it. It’s more professional in nature so expect to see posts about design, user experience, and technology. Today I posted a riveting analysis of a WEATHER GRAPHIC. Don’t everyone rush over there so fast that you bring my server down.

Giving those posts their own home seemed logical, since it seems like most of you are here to read about sports and Brooklyn gossip. Anyway, if you do wander over there, leave a comment if you find something interesting. I’d like it to be more than just another blahg about design. I’ve got a few ideas up my sleeve.

Many of you remember last summer’s experiment with home improvement. I certainly do. Sometimes I dream that I’ve been sitting for a long period of time at that slightly-too-tall table and I wake up in a cold sweat, arms asleep from the shoulders down. That Mags gritted her teeth and worked at that table all summer is a testament to her can-do attitude and OSHA’s inability to arrest me.

Anyway, after agonizing over how such a well-planned intentioned project could have turned out so lackluster, I realized the fatal flaw. The solution was so obvious!

We needed shelves this summer for all those books that we read two chapters of in college and just keep around now to impress friends. Armed with my own righteous sense of direction, we headed again to Home Depot, purchased the requisite lumber—no pressboard this time, thanks to a 3rd place finish at CHI—and found hardware more suitable for joining wood than last year’s shelf brackets. We returned home and consulted the drawings one last time.

After an in-depth examintion of user needs—taking special care to understand the environmental factors and cultural contexts into which the shelf would be born and from which it could not possibly hope to disentangle—it was time to put my new plan into action. I grabbed the drill, a bracket, and a few screws. I handed these things to Mags.

"You probably should start on that end."
"Mm-hmm."

And with that, our new bookshelf practically built itself.

Bay City Rollers lyrics have never hit so close to home. This is the post where I give my readers a glimpse of my debauched Saturday nights.

While other twenty-somethings are out popping their collars and enjoying drinks of booze, I sit at home frustrated by how poorly Windows renders fonts compared to Mac OS X. Furthermore, the lack of CSS2 support for text-shadow in any browser but Safari is frustrating because text-shadow looks pretty damn good. E.g.:

Internet Explorer 6

Safari

I won’t even get into how backward the computing experience is for everyone who doesn’t have the Optima font family installed.

I’m gonna catch hell for this post. On the plus side, I downloaded some new music today after a nice conversation with an Iowa City ex-pat at the bar last night. Talking with him rekindled somewhat romanticized memories of times when I was far more aware of new music than I am now. As a result of that conversation, Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm Remixed is kicking my ass all over this sleepy township.