markvictoryoung

[markvictoryoung]

Gertrude and Alice, reunited at last. Together almost 40 years, Alice was finally buried alongside her life partner 20 years after Gertrude's death. (Her name is inscribed on the back of Gertrude's headstone.) As she had no legal right to Gertrude's estate because no gay marriage at the time, Alice lived for many years in near poverty after the Stein family swooped in and removed her inheritance (paintings which would be worth millions today) while she was away on vacation. She did some writing to make money and even published her own autobiography (further to the one Gertrude wrote for her) in later years. Tellingly, her own life story ends with the day of Gertrude's death. Not every love story has a happy ending, and cancer is one of the ways that endings turn sad for sure. But there are worse places than Pere Lachaise for the final resting place of two lovers.

[markvictoryoung]

Thinking of that time that the photographs of Steve McCurry brought us to tears. Highly recommend you follow @stevemccurryofficial for always stunning and/or haunting images of exotic locales and locals. #photojournalism #worldofstevemccurry #photography #afghanistangirl #brussels

[markvictoryoung]

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." pc: @stellaayoung #HBD #oscarwilde #irish #writer #perelachaise #gonetoosoon #lgbtq

[markvictoryoung]

On this day in 1905, the great Winsor McCay launched his comic strip "Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland." The world had no idea what heights this nascent medium could and would hit. Love this strip. #comics #comicstrip #comicshistory #littlenemo #adventuresinslumberland #artist #winsormccay #genius #fantastic #dreams

[markvictoryoung]

A nice clean version of the photo I put up just now. “No more Regency Silver Snuffboxes.” They are shooting it as I type this. And oh, they are wonderful.

[markvictoryoung]

"Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." #ladyliberty #tribute #whoisshe #kim #youre #doing #great #sweetie #baddabing #baddaboom #thats #how #the #cookie #crumbles #statueofliberty #model @stellaayoung

[markvictoryoung]

Terms and Conditions: the bloviating cruft of the iTunes EULA combined with extraordinary comic book mashups

Back in 2015, cartoonist Robert Sikoryak started publishing single pages from his upcoming graphic novel Terms and Conditions, in which he would recount every word of the current Apple iTunes Terms and Conditions as a series of mashup pages from various comics old and new, in which Steve Jobsean characters stalked across the panels, declaiming the weird, stilted legalese that “everyone agrees to and no one reads.”

Incredibly, impossibly, Sikoryak finished the project, and it is now available in book form from Drawn and Quarterly.

In his end-notes, Sikoryak notes that he didn’t try to match the language to the action in the panels, drawing his pages first then shuffling them and flowing the text into them. What’s interesting (and revealing) is how often there is some weird confluence between the text and the pictures, and this says something important about the Terms and Conditions Sikoryak is lampooning.

Terms and Conditions are weird legal constructs. We are meant to take them seriously – the companies’ lawyers would strenuously argue that just being in the vicinity of these documents constitutes comprehension and consent to their terms – but everyone knows that no one everreads them. A surprising number of times, it turns out that even the lawyers themselveshaven’t read them. The original Twitter T&Cs were sprinkled with references to Flickr – references that hadn’t been purged when the company lifted Flickr’s agreement and search-and-replaced through it. Famously, no one had ever looked at the Myspace T&C’s, so everyone was genuinely surprised when Billy Bragg pointed out that the company was claiming ownership of all the music its users uploaded to their bands’ pages.

T&C prose is thus a kind of oracle, read by none, dreaded by all. The fact that its gibberish can be made to seem sensible when randomly juxtaposed with comics mashups tells you that it has no meaning of its own, but rather takes on all its meaning from the context around it.

To add to this, there is the figure of Steve Jobs, haunting every page of this book in his many guises. Jobs was a famous minimalist control freak, a man on a lifelong mission to eliminate fans, floppy drives and extra mouse-buttons. Yet, this control-freakery manifested itself in the sprawling, nonsensical T&Cs through which the Jobbsean will would be imposed upon Apple’s customers, who were constrained by its fine print to act exactly as they were told.

The contradiction here is amazing, really, What could be less Jobbsean, more superfluous, than titanic legal documents that no one is ever, ever going to read? If the design aesthetic of iTunes – and its hardware brethern, the iPods and iPhones and iPads – is to eliminate ornamentation and streamline every corner to lickable curves, where does tens of thousands of words of crufty garbage-prose fit in? What could be a starker juxtaposition than the single, four-letter “iPod” wordmark etched into those original gadgets, and the word-salad generated by feeding a monopoly law seminar into a Markov chain that hung off the back of that gadget?

Terms and Conditions [R. Sikoryak/Drawn and Quarterly]

https://boingboing.net/2017/03/03/compliance-is-mandatory-resist.html

[markvictoryoung]

Arrete! C'est ici l'empire de la mort. #mementomori #catacombs #happymonday

[markvictoryoung]

She's a born mimic, this one. Here she is performing her spot-on imitation of Georges Prosper Remi aka #Herge, the internationally-renowned cartoonist. You'd swear it was him. :) #belgianartist #mimicry #100thpost #centurynow #imitationftw #whoisshe #hashtags

[markvictoryoung]

We have our Anathema, our Sister Mary, our Hastur and our Ligur.

[markvictoryoung]

Had the most amazing vegan food at this little deli in Glencoe today. So worth the drive from London! Haven't had moussaka in over a decade and their bechamel sauce was heavenly. #delicious #vegan #justveganthings #hashtag #glencoe #delifood #eatenright #vegansofig #cheeseygoodness #baddabing #baddaboom (at Main Vegan Deli)

[markvictoryoung]

It's a grand place. #fitforaking #architecture #deconstructed #bombardment #reconstruction #neogothic #publicspace #museum #collage #fractured #image #blueskies #nofilter

[markvictoryoung]

Destination: fun. #walkingonthemoon #tintin #comics #redrocket #spacesuits #lunarlanding #explorersonthemoon #nofilterneeded

[markvictoryoung]

When it's #caturday and you're hungry, it's time for a #catcafe meal. Be prepared to spend 3 hours, depending on your dining companion. :) #catstagram #catlover #cafe #cafestateofmind #lunch #impatience #kittycuteness #cuteoverload #letsgo #whoisshe #baddabing #baddaboom #lockedandloaded #lbd

[markvictoryoung]

25 years ago today. #luckyinlove #suddenlysilver #anniversary #weddedbliss #weddingday #tbtuesday #love <3

[markvictoryoung]

Another beautiful day in #oldsouth #ldnont overlooking the #riverthames. Like a castle rising above the forest. #gartshore (at Old South, London)

[markvictoryoung]

Celebrating World Plant Milk Day by having Vanilla Almond Milk on my cereal and flashing back on this pic of our well-stocked fridge. It's a good day to try a new plant-based milk. What will you try? #worldplantmilkday #ditchdairy #dairyisscary #plantbased #dairyfree #vegansofig #govegan #almondmilk #vegan #endofthemilkera #plantmilk #plantstrong #highcalcium