Blog

  • Imitation is bad!… in the immediate

    This post over at CBR had an interesting take on some of the Art vs. Language issues that I discuss, so I felt I should link to it. One of its main arguments is the common thread of “don’t imitate other people’s styles,” i.e. be an individual. The anti-imitation viewpoint (what I call related to…

  • Dunkin’ pictograms

    Speaking of pictographic writing systems that will never be universal, Fabricari sends along this logo from Dunkin’ Donuts: I’ve been seeing that logo for over a year now, and never quite got that the images were supposed to be a pictographic sentence until a few weeks ago! I had just thought that it was a…

  • Sorry, there will never be a universal writing system

    Jochen Gos emailed me awhile back with news of her new book Icon-Typing and website Icon-language which is a font that creates pictograms when a person types in their own language’s sentences. Unfortunately, it’s taken me a rather long time to finish this post about it. While it’s a fun idea, and reminiscent of other…

  • License plate linguistics

    Here’s a little fun with writing and ambiguity. A few nights ago I saw a license plate with some friends that read: OYABABY Oddly enough, I parsed this first as being “Oya Baby” — drawing from my Japanese knowledge. In Japanese “Oya” is “parent”, and there is a dish served with chicken and eggs over…

  • Bizarro Scholarship

    While listening today to the last lecture of this semester’s Intro to Linguistics class that I TAed for, I was thinking a bit about how some of the underlying issues of scholarship in visual language contrast the way they’ve been approached in linguistics. By and large, I would say that my intentions for a cognitive…

  • More reruns! Comics≠art

    Continuing with the re-posting of my Comixpedia articles, Sequart.com has a posting of my old article Comics’ Identity Crisis: Claiming “Art” is a Misguided Quest. It’s weird to see these older papers of mine as if they’re new again, and kind of fun. Perhaps if people jump into them again they’ll find something new in…

  • I love this time of year

    And now, for the 2006 edition of my annual Big Game poem: Why so sad little stanfurd tree?By Neil Cohn, November 2006 Oh why so sad little stanfurd tree?Afraid you’ll lose to Berkéley? With a team like yours, I can guess the shameThat you must feel as you enter Big Game. Your talent this year…

  • Time essay analyzed

    In Derik’s continuing exploration of panel transitions (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), he does an interesting job of dissecting my latest essay “Time Frames… Or Not.” To keep things localized, I’ll make my responses there, but he seems to have done a fairly thourough job of it. Worth perusing. Also, Blogger has helpfully decided…

  • The Brain

    Not much is known about the Brain. Here’s a nice little video explaining about it:

  • Problems with Transitions

    Over at Derik’s blog he’s been examining McCloud’s panel transitions based on influence from film theory (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 …more to come). While Derik only does it a little bit, the application of film theory to panel transitions isn’t altogether new. John Barber essentially grafted McCloud’s and my…