Joshua Nguyen

“But don’t tell me it’s boring. Don’t tell me that a spit-curled demi-god near-immortal who can hear snails move across leaves and fly into a sun is a snooze. Don’t tell me that a hero who is designed to embody our smartest, kindest, best, most ethical selves and punch a bad guy across a state is dull. Look, we know the guy’s origin cold; God knows we don’t need it again. And tentpole filmmaking has been selling us the idea that CGI really can make anything we can dream up resonate on the screen, that movies have finally caught up to the dream logic of those Silver Age comics stories. Stop retreading. Stop thinking small and morally compromised. Let Superman be Superman.”

“As pieces of timely information become ever cheaper, deeper, more contextualized information becomes more powerful and valuable. Thanks to the networked power and immediacy of the Internet, we have almost perfected the “horizontal” approach to the distribution and consumption of media. Every person with an Internet connection now has a place to go to find news as it breaks. We are only just beginning, however, to realize the Internet’s power as a promoter of longform content, a recognition that is helping to drive the rise of micropublishing, a movement that emphasizes the quality of the publishing environment over timeliness, and one that eschews the primacy of the pageview. We are just starting to see the emergence of startup publications that are seeing opportunity beyond the blog format.”

“While Apple’s own weather app had nice realistic graphics of weather conditions, other apps were trending towards a very minimal interface using a simple, vector icon to represent the weather. I wanted to build something that would appear as if you were looking out of a window. I created OpenGL animations for various weather conditions, including a thunderstorm. Apple rejected it on the grounds that it was too simple: “We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can incorporate additional content and features.”