The Silent Garfield

Garfield has been dull for the past several years. The witty comments dried up in the height of its fame, yet strangely its popularity remained while its quality faded. Now it appears that removing Garfield’s dialogue instills the strip with a sense of surrealist pathos. It is, after all, one thing to talk to your sarcastically intelligent pet feline, but quite another to find yourself trying to communicate with a fat, unresponsive, lazy housecat. And suddenly the dismal life of Jon holds a newfound gravitas.

Neil Gaiman‘s site has been redesigned at some point in the recent past — I haven’t been visiting often enough to say exactly when. It’s a stylish result with a much cleaner interface and far easier to read, and yet it seems to have lost the quirky heart that made the old version feel so appropriate. It’s a prime example of how objectively improved site/graphic design is not necessarily an improvement in representing a product or connecting with your target users.

I haven’t mentioned the Oscar nominations, much to many people’s surprise, because frankly they’re not that interesting. I’m not nearly excited enough to watch the show and I doubt I’ll be clamouring to find out the results either. For the big four I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to suggest that Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Reese Witherspoon might be feeling rather smug by the end of the night. I have my reservations about Brokeback actually being “best picture” material, but having not managed to see it, I feel it would be unfair of me to comment in great detail. Suffice to say it appears to be a beautiful, thoughtful and well directed piece, but has attracted such acclaim more for its content than its skill. I would humbly suggest that the other four nominations are more deserving on merit, despite not having made quite such an impact on Hollywood. But then that’s totally missing the point of the Oscars, I suppose.