History in jeopardy

Benj Edwards wrote a very good post at Vintage Computing and Gaming, which begins: For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse. Among there, he notes: And there’s another problem. Very […]

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Luxury Facts on the Jaguar rebrand (featuring Cristián Saracco and me)

Jaguar Type 00 concept in purple, shown directly on the side.

A nice way to conclude 2024: my name in a real article by a real journalist with quotations attributed to me that are actually by me. I’m so grateful to Tejashee Kashyap and Luxury Facts for interviewing me and my friend Dr Cristián Saracco, and to our friend Philippe Mihailovich for connecting Tejashee and me […]

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A bronze at Best

Front cover of booklet, Pīwari the Kaitiaki, with a bee illustration.

I’m proud to say I had a small part to play in Pīwari te Kaitiaki, which took out a bronze in the Social Good category at the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand’s Best Design Awards. My role was helping realize the translated version in te reo Māori, and it was an absolute joy to work […]

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Carry on designing

Journeys through time are fascinating. Earlier this week, I looked at some of the websites we liked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section. In many cases, it was a trip down memory lane, as some sites still had their 2000s layouts. Sadly, this could mean that a few of them will disappear in […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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Two Mastodon polls: on 50 shades of Grade, and the best non-Bond Roger Moore film

Asking the tough questions on Mastodon. Very tiny samples, and I was limited to four possible answers—but now you know.       Meanwhile, I see Linkedin has not been very good at removing misinformation about me. Not as bad as Quora, but still down there. The latest post says ‘jackyan’ is a metaphor for […]

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Who pioneered phone food ordering and delivery?

Not that any search engine will find this, but according to the BBC’s The Secret Genius of Modern Life (episode 2), the inventor of the phone orders for food was the Kin-Chu Café at 137 South Brand Boulevard, Glendale, Calif., in 1922 (another link here). ‘Special Delivery Service 11 A. M. to 1 A. M.—Phone […]

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A second excellent piece by Eda Tang: where New Zealand Chinese Language Week gets its money

  Eda Tang’s excellent piece revealing that New Zealand Chinese Language Week receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party came out last week, but unfortunately illness kept me from blogging about it properly. It was to have been my final post for September. Many of us suspected this from the start, […]

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Forget the “shoulds”

My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I […]

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I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix

Warner Bros.   Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]

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