Soldier Ant 

Interesting article on Slate about a recent trend of throwaway Flash-based games as social commentary. Take a quick side-detour and play a round of New York Defender - as social commentary goes, it's kinda discrete (discrete more in the mixed-emotions response it teases from me than the brick-over-the-head 'subtlety' of the message.) And pretty disheartening. Powerful stuff.

It reminds me of Jon Haddock's Screenshots exhibit, that reframes real (and fictitious) historical events as video-game isometric projections.

Which itself brings a whole new set of associations: Reginald Denny and the brick somehow puts me in mind of State of Emergency - civil disobediance as voyeuristic entertainment. Wasn't the helicopter news footage of the Denny beating itself shot from a similar 3/4-overhead perspective?

And Haddock's spin on Ruby killing Oswald sent me on a furious search to find In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald, perhaps still the funniest, most morally ambiguous Photoshop manip I think I've ever seen.

These are probably not the associations that Haddock was going for in his exhibit. And I'm not sure where this entry leaves us when all is said and done. But hey -- as m'friend Duffy likes to say. This is a journal, not journalism.

I've been goofing around with Illustrator's auto-graphing features and I have to say I'm fairly impressed.

There's a whole hell of a lot that it won't do (no calculations within data cells, for instance) but then again, there's a lot that I've never been able to get Excel to do either (tasteful color selections, careful kerning, etc. etc.) I'd say that the design team made a carefully-weighed set of tradeoffs: just enough graphing abilities to give us the feature, not so much that you'd want to do your primary number crunching with it. Actually, Excel open in one window, pasting into Illustrator in the other is a combo that's hard to beat.

Oh, and if you find yourself having to do graphs in Illustrator? Download the PDF Workbook from IllustratorAnswers.com. It's concise, thorough and readable. And, please do leave a comment if you read this and have any cool Illustrator-generated data graphs that you'd like to share.

Here are a page full of statistics for Google Searches Related to 9/11 Terrorist Attacks.

This is a pleasant surprise. My Flickr User Model is the latest feature on visualcomplexity.com, a great resource for information visualizations of all kinds. I've noticed an influx of new visitors to the diagrams on Flickr, and I'd been wondering what was driving folks my way.

Note that Manuel (Lima, vis/comp's creator) chose to feature the first version of the diagram. This is getting to be a recurring theme: more and more people tell me that it's that version they prefer. This lesson learned, and others, will be discussed in an upcoming interview on Boxes and Arrows. (Dan Brown interviews me about the diagram, which is featured in his upcoming book, Communicating Design.)