The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is coming to Atlanta on September 7. "These two great gamers, one Salieri, the other Mozart, have grown to despise and fear each other and in so doing alienate the only person truly capable of appreciating their own achievement and greatness."

Alright, here's a rendition of my own personal info-designer chart:

• 20% easy access to both sides of the brain
• 30% curiosity about pretty much everything
• 10% drawing and writing treated as equals
• 15% a wee bit of perfectionism
• 10% tech savvy
• 15% sense of humor aka sense of proportion/balance

For those of you just tuning in, I'm talking about how Austin described his self-portrait in response to my snippet referencing Michael Surtees' post about an image from Steven Heller's book, Nigel Holmes on Information Design, which I probably ought to buy.

In Believer Magazine, The Official Guide to Official Handbooks: The Rich Legacy of Putting Others in Their Cultural Place:

Americans love to believe that with the right wardrobe and vocabulary, anyone can become anything. We also love the righteousness and special insight that come with being an outsider, from being turned away from the clubs that matter. People don’t make their mark by writing books about how swimmingly they fit in at boarding school, or about how their blue-blooded family isn’t stocked with alcoholic lunatics. The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), along with lesser followers like The Official Slacker Handbook (1994) and The Hipster Handbook (2002), capitalizes on our ambivalence about exclusivity.

Elliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity is a rolling, interminable voyage through a literary version of modern life. Long, but worth seeing it through. The story is told from seven points of view, events mainly surrounding a character named Simon, who, depressed and still obsessed with a college ex-sweetheart, kidnaps her child while absently maintaining a lop-sided relationship with a hooker who's been servicing the ex-sweetheart's current husband for the past two years. Et cetera. But for all the antics, it isn't soap opera. It's built from a slow, discursive, minutely detailed remembrance. There are also extended tangents into topics like health care, poetry, and the science of blackjack.

What it takes to be an information designer.

"I'm on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That's where the writers are most likely to be... I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak."

From The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I.

Del.icio.us is giving away free stuff, stickers and bookmarks and what-not. You have to snail mail them, so I'm all over it.

My employer has a new blog, BrainStuff. Time will tell.

I just started reading The 4-Hour Work Week. I admit, in the beginning, I didn't want to like it. Part of me wanted Tim Ferriss to be some shallow, cocky blowhard with a couple hundred pages of motivational fluff. But... he won me over by page 11 with a passing reference to J.B. Say, and it's been all good ever since. This book has me fired up.

A brief little comedy routine about how not to use Powerpoint.

Bruce Schneier interviews the head of the TSA, Kip Hawley. It's a really good exchange. I like this bit about a kind of intentional internal sabotage that TSA conducts:

We also do extensive and very sophisticated Red Team testing, and one of their jobs is to observe checkpoints and go back and figure out—based on inside knowledge of what we do—ways to beat the system. They isolate one particular thing: for example, a particular explosive, made and placed in a way that exploits a particular weakness in technology; our procedures; or the way TSOs do things in practice. Then they will test that particular thing over and over until they identify what corrective action is needed. We then change technology or procedure, or plain old focus on execution. And we repeat the process—forever.

Sounds like a cool job. [via blankenship]

One of my ongoing fascinations is with sense of scale. Here's a couple other interesting thought experiments to understand the immensity of our universe:

Suppose that our Earth is the ball in the tip of a ball-point pen. How big would the Sun be, and how far away from the pen tip? First, Hold the ball-point pen up in the air. Now hold a ping-pong ball about 15 feet away from the pen tip. This is approximately a size and distance scale model of the Sun and Earth. The moon would be the size of a dust speck beside the ball in the pen.

These cool American propaganda posters from World War II are at once hilarious and frightening. I kept telling myself I was going to liberate them from from the Northwestern University database and put them on Flickr, but I just haven't gotten it done (yet). You're on your own (for now).

A brief interview with William Gibson. Not a lot of new material, but I love this: "I’m a very pro-art kind of guy, but I’m not that visually literate. My inner redneck looks at something and says, 'Oh, that’s so cool.'"

The 2007 Portable Film Festival is in progress. "Everything in our programme is curated, free and portable thanks to our loyal community of film and mediamakers who submit their work to us from around the world." That's what I like to hear.

Steve Martin interviews Roz Chast.

A very cool bit of wisdom from Hugh MacLeod.

I remember Robert Hughes, the great art critic saying in his wonderful book, "The Shock Of The New" that the Conceptual Art scene that emerged in the 1960s-1970s was actually good for "Painting".

Why? Because with everybody else scattering bits of string around gallery floors and calling it “Art”, or covering themselves with butter, rolling themselves in the grass and calling it "Art", the only people left painting were those, as Hughes put it, "who still actually wanted to paint".

And paint they did. Hence the big painting revival in the early 1980s. Artists like Julian Schnabel, Francisco Clemente, Basquiat, Keith Haring etc.

I feel similarly about blogs. With new tools like Facebook and Twitter springing up, there's no need to have a blog unless you really want to, unless you really want to devote that kind of time and effort to it.

[via blankenship]

There's an Amazon interview with Douglas Wolk about his new book, Reading Comics, and another recent interview with Newsarama.

Octavo publishes old, significant books in digital form. I love me some rare books.

The Dvorak Zine is a 24-page web comic about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. Pretty cool. [via comics pundit]