Television

This is the long story of a frivolous, fleeting creative project that came out of nowhere, completely took over my life for a few weeks, and was gone as quickly as it came. Let it be known that I regret none of it!

I’m a proud member of the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society. In the organization’s own words:

We carry on the proud tradition set forth by Psychotronic Film Societies around the globe by screening… See more →

In a revival of an old-school blogging pyramid scheme, my friend Dan Mall wrote about his typical day and tagged me and others to do the same. What follows is a mix of both the aspirational and the factual, and the distance between the two suggests that if life is time management, I’m not especially skilled at life. If you’re not either, read on for sweet, sweet validation.

My alarm goes off at 7:00. These… See more →

We passed a quarter million American COVID-19 deaths today. The virus is surging, hospitals are reaching capacity, the mortality rate is ticking back up, and the lockdowns are starting again. In a few days, an order goes into effect here in Philadelphia banning all public and private indoor gatherings until at least the end of the year. Gyms and museums are closing, indoor dining at restaurants and bars is halting. Outdoor gatherings are to have… See more →

Since we’ve all been stuck at home since mid-March, my friend Sequoia has been hosting delightful trivia nights for friends on Zoom. In Philadelphia, pub trivia is known as “quizzo,” so Sequoia’s weekly event is cleverly dubbed Sequizzo (or, if you don’t have time for all those syllables, Squizzo). This week’s theme was rock and roll, and when I was asked to commandeer a round, I decided to focus on fictional bands. My questions are… See more →

The Leaked Louis C.K. Set Is Tragedy Masked as Comedy

Over the years, C.K.’s comedy evolved, as any comic’s will, but at their best and most well known, his jokes were about interrogating himself as a means of interrogating American culture. As C.K. shuffled uncomfortably on stages and sets, clad in rumpled T-shirts and slouchy dad jeans, he served as his own act’s useful idiot: C.K., author and character at once, played the privileged guy… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

July is gone, but its links remain.

Apart from brief musings on films I saw recently, my lone post in July was a recap of my vacation in Brighton, from which I was reluctant to return. The ensuing extended brain vacation kept me from doing as much internetting as usual, so the collection of links is a bit thinner this month, but hopefully you can find something below worth scraping across your… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

June is gone, but its links remain.

It was a relatively busy month on my site! I had an unexpected reason to revisit an animated student film I made 20 years ago, wrote about designing better concert listings, chronicled my experience learning about the future of typography at the Ampersand conference, and offered middling reviews of the year’s most celebrated horror films, A Quiet Place and Hereditary.

This month’s links are the sort… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

May is gone, but its links remain.

The only thing I published on my site this month was a brief, snarky review of a 69-year-old movie (nice), but if all goes well in June, I’ll have a couple of substantial posts about creative projects (new and old) coming your way.

The links below include some meaty reporting on politics and a triptych of opinion pieces on our culture wars’ state of discourse.… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

April is gone, but its links remain.

I’ve been obsessed with my current personal project lately (more on that soon), so apart from a handful of very brief movie reviews, I didn’t do much writing in April, though the web designers in the audience might want to take a look at my notes from last week’s Generate conference.

The links this go-round include some gems for Prince fans on the second anniversary of… See more →

Hello dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.

This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

January is gone, but its links remain.

In my little corner of the internet, I posted a roundup of my favorite stuff from 2017 (including a look ahead at plans for 2018). As a subscriber, you may be especially interested in the stats I compiled about the 299 links I shared last year.

I released my first open source software project, Column Setter, a Sass tool for building custom responsive grids that… See more →

Happy New Year, dear reader!

December is gone, but its links remain.

I did some more film writing this month, most notably on The Disaster Artist and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I also published a collection of all the shorter film reviews I wrote in 2017.

This month’s links are a good mix of the topical (net neutrality, sexism, the new tax bill), year-end reflections, inspiring art and design, and more. I hope… See more →

Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’

Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.

Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”

The film’s director and co-­writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →

All the “wellness” products Americans love to buy are sold on both Infowars and Goop

Interesting look at how the same snake oil is marketed to very different audiences.

Trump and Putin’s Rashomon Summit

[T]he establishment of a cybersecurity working group with the two countries is somewhere between a head-scratcher and a punchline.

The Logic of Trump’s Sexist Attacks

The more a woman conforms to traditional gender norms, the more likely she is to experience… See more →

Toronto’s New Flag

I’m a big fan of Kenzie Ryder’s concept.

Key to Improving Subway Service in New York? Modern Signals

Over the years, the authority has kept pushing back the timeline for replacing signals. In 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.

London has moved more quickly on signals because officials completed the work… See more →

I worked for Jared Kushner. He’s the wrong businessman to reinvent government.

I worry that this new office will be more of the same: a vanity project, one that exists primarily to put Kushner in the same room with people he admires whom he wouldn’t have had access to before, glossing government agencies in the process with a thin veneer of what appears to be capitalism but is really just nihilistic cost-cutting designed to project… See more →

Blown Away

If you’re suffering from an excess of self-respect, the Corey Haim/Feldman erotic thriller is now available on Hulu.

King Crimson: Starless

RIP John Wetton. Colon cancer. Here’s my favorite King Crimson song, which he co-wrote, sang, and played bass on.

What Can Ivanka Trump Possibly Do for Women Who Work?

Before the election, her main interest in women was getting them to buy her clothing, her handbags, and her shoes. Who can forget… See more →

Rob Weychert’s Year in Review

My personal movie-watching stats for 2016, provided by the always delightful Letterboxd.

Why Classic Rock Isn’t What It Used To Be

But do radio stations rely at all on the institutional knowledge of their DJs to decide what to play?

Nope. The role of the song-picking DJ is dead. “I know there are some stations and some companies where if you change a song it’s a fireable offense,” Wellman said,… See more →

What’s Your Ideal Community? The Answer Is Political

It’s conceivable that people who live in cities come to value more active government. Or they’re more receptive to investing in welfare because they pass the homeless every day. Or they appreciate immigration because their cab rides and lunch depend on immigrants. This argument is partly about the people we’re exposed to in cities (the poor, foreigners), and partly about the logistics of living there.

The suburbs… See more →

Barbara Crampton on Stuart Gordon, Chopping Mall, and the new wave of indie horror

For fans of 1980s B-horror, here’s a good AV Club interview with the delightful Barbara Crampton.

Anti-Christ in a custom van: The churchy cheap thrills of A Thief In The Night

It may seem impossible to not think of the end of the world in poetic terms, but never underestimate the premillennialists.

Why Punching Down Will Never Be Funny

Watters and… See more →

Fear of a Female President

To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social… See more →

Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?

They had me sign my rights away for $1,” Ms. Crane told me. She never did get that dollar.

Meanwhile, in most areas of the United States, women still need permission from a doctor to buy birth control pills, even though they are arguably safer than a lot of other drugs now sold over the counter and there are very few health risks involved. It’s true… See more →

A Final Visit With Prince: Rolling Stone’s Lost Cover Story

“All of us need to be able to reach out and just fix stuff. There's nothing that's unforgivable.”

The Contributions of Others: A Session with Jeremy Keith

“I’ve found that on the web, it’s best to assume nothing. That might sound like a scary prospect, but it’s actually quite liberating. Giving up on “pixel-perfect” control doesn’t mean giving up on quality. Quite the opposite: it… See more →

Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?

“People are expecting more of body cameras than the technology will deliver,” Professor Stoughton said. “They expect it to be a broad solution for the problem of police-community relations, when in fact it’s just a tool, and like any tool, there’s a limited value to what it can do.”

Inside Operation Trump, the Most Unorthodox Campaign in Political History

Politics require some amount of cynicism and hubris. Trump… See more →

Anonymous BrooklynVegan Comments, Rest in Peace

Glad to see BrooklynVegan taking on its cesspool of a comment section. Rolling my eyes at the inevitable naysayers.

Lupita Nyong’o and Trevor Noah, and Their Meaningful Roles

My mom was like: “Jesus didn’t have his dad, either. You have a stepdad.” People always make it seem like there’s one experience that’s the gold standard to aim for. I didn’t grow up that way.

One of the best things… See more →

The NYPD Is Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime

“It’s an action about a place. It’s not about people,” says the NYPD, as it evicts innocent people from their homes.

The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor

“I think he doesn’t know where the lies stop and the truth starts anymore.”

Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point

Last fall, Derek Lowe, a chemist and… See more →

The Website Obesity Crisis

Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.

The 2015 ProPublica Year in Visual Storytelling

A nice roundup of ProPublica’s more visually and interactively rich stories from the past year.

Animated homage to The Wire

When I hear Blind Boys of Alabama’s cover of “Way Down in… See more →

A bout of insomnia last summer led me to sign up for a free trial of Hulu Plus, which would let me use my iPad to catch up on episodes of Bob’s Burgers I had missed earlier in the season. When I inevitably failed to kill the subscription before the negative option billing kicked in, I decided to make the most of the month I accidentally paid for by devouring the entire combined run of… See more →

Dear Frances Bean Cobain,

First of all, it was lovely having lunch with you, even if you did get a bit confrontational at the end there. I’m glad I woke up before I could rebut, because a cooler head has shown me that your assessment of my taste in music, if incomplete, was remarkably astute. Dark themes, deceptively simple songwriting, played loosely but with discipline. You kind of nailed it. And even if you didn’t,… See more →

Khoi does a pretty fantastic job of encapsulating Mad Men’s virtues.

I am so confused. How/why did this happen? Who the fuck are those three doofuses that keep popping up?

This is fucked up beyond belief.

I knew Windhammer was a Silverhawks character, but this description of his is pretty fantastic.

NSFW

I hope all you humps who like this stupid show are happy. Old City now has one fewer oasis.

Ugh.

Since the two series share subject matter, writers, producers, and many cast members, it’s impossible to talk about The Corner without mentioning its successor, The Wire. While The Wire explores the entire hierarchy of Baltimore’s failed war on drugs, The Corner focuses on one small community’s struggles with addiction and its baggage. The smaller scope gives this series a slower pace and a more easily managed narrative; at times, it almost feels like a stage… See more →

This final, extended episode of Extras follows the series template, but with less success than usual. The uncomfortable laughs are there, but they’re fewer and further between, and the tone in general is downright maudlin. None of the celebrity cameos is particularly funny, and Clive Owen’s is decidedly unfunny. Add an unhealthy dose of misplaced didacticism and you’ve got a disappointing finale to an otherwise outstanding show.

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The ninety-sixth episode of Full House, which marked the series’ halfway point, was called “Matchmaker Michelle.” In it, the youngest Tanner child decides to fix up her father with her preschool teacher, who is a generation older than him. What I find really interesting about this episode is that the catalyst for Michelle’s desire to find a new mother is her friend Teddy, who asks why she is always the daddy when they play house.… See more →

Today’s drive was by far the prettiest of the trip so far. If I could, I’d take it out to dinner and a movie. I’d bring it home to meet my parents. I’d buy it a blood diamond and audition wedding DJs with it. We’d honeymoon at Disneyland, put a down payment on a mortgage in a Toll Brothers gated community, and have cute disagreements over paint chips. We’d have three kids named after our… See more →

I was born on 3 June 1976. Today, I am thirty years old.

I share 1976 with some important stuff. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple Computer, which would inadvertently revolutionize creative technology and desktop computing. Seminal releases from the Ramones and the Damned—and a legendary television appearance by the Sex Pistols—brought punk rock’s disaffected bite into the public consciousness. We said goodbye to luminaries like Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, and Howard… See more →

It is a beautiful January morning in Philadelphia. The Pixelworthy office is incandescent, its twentieth story windows unable to find refuge from the sun. Shaded by a pillar, Stan glares at the iMac on his desk.

“Damn Zeldman. Fucking meme shit.”

A few feet away, Rob snickers into his cinnamon roll.

“Keep laughing. You’re getting tagged next.”

“Come now, Stan. I can’t break over three months of editorial silence by participating in some retarded meme.”

“Tough luck.”… See more →

Last week, the complete sixth season of “The Simpsons” was released on DVD. According to many geeks—myself included—this is possibly the single greatest season of the single greatest television program ever broadcast, so my anticipation for its release was tremendous.

Previous “Simpsons” DVD releases have taught me to expect certain shortcomings (usually dumbfounding interactive menu decisions, including custom animations that delay response time by minutes), but they never fail to deliver superbly in the most… See more →

In the 77 days since I last posted:

I started a new full-time design job at TMX Communications. My face graced television screens nationwide in several episodes of VH1’s ILL-ustrated. I finished the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Kutztown University that I started ten years ago. I saw Andrew W.K. for the ninth time. I had my 28th birthday. My bedroom was swarmed by dozens of winged ants. I got a cellular phone. I… See more →

Over the last couple of months, this site has offered its visitors little respite from boredom. I’ll make no apologies for this, since the lack of updates results directly from my own boredom, which is itself respite from my heated, ongoing battle with the coding of the site’s long-overdue web standards-compliant redesign. There have, however, been a few recent occasions that my attention has been occupied by something other than a spot on the wall… See more →

Last night, I registered team “BREDSTIK Entertainment” in the National Film Challenge, which works like this: At 7:00 PM on Friday, October 17, we will receive an e-mail with a randomly-generated genre and list of elements (a prop, a line of dialogue, and a character). We then have until 12:00 noon on the following Monday (a total of 65 hours) to create a short film (between 4 and 8 minutes long) in the assigned genre,… See more →

Consider this: Simpsons Kwizzo. To a bunch of hardcore Simpsons trivia dorks, the prospect of just such a specialized Quizzo event was thrilling, and so last night my friends and I trekked across town to the Low Bar in South Philly, where Simpsons Kwizzo is held on Thursdays. The rules required our excessive numbers to split into two teams; after conjuring probably upwards of 50 potential Simpsons-related team names, we decided on Malk and Hamburger… See more →

Working for the company that produces the Philadelphia Film Festival allows me convenient access to VHS screeners of most of the festival’s many films. Last night I brought home Alex de la Iglesia’s very enjoyable 800 Bullets, a comic homage to the spaghetti western. Before we started the movie, a new reality series was beginning on Fox. It was hosted by Monica Lewinsky, because she is famous for fellating the President of the United States.

At long last, “The Simpsons: The Complete Second Season” DVD set arrived yesterday. As with the first season set, the special features are pretty weak (I’m finding that to be the case on most DVDs now, actually), but those shortcomings are far outweighed by the fact that the season has been preserved in its entirety for consumer posterity. The commentary by various key players (Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, et al) is generally pretty good… See more →