Read. Watch. Listen. introduces you the personal side of our faculty, staff and alumni. Participants are asked to answer three simple questions about their reading, viewing and listening habits – what one book or newspaper/magazine article is grabbing your attention; what one movie or television show has caught your eye; and what album/song, podcast or radio show are you lending an ear to.
Mathew Hoy is a Senior Web Designer in the Department of Communications and Public Affairs.
Today, he takes his turn on Read. Watch. Listen.
Read.
Paper Girls is a comic book published by Image Comics that blends the Netflix show Stranger Things with David Lynch.
In the graphic novel (a collection of standard issues) I picked up recently, Paper Girls tells the story of a group of pre-teen girls delivering newspapers during the early hours of Halloween in 1988. While biking through their neighbourhood and communicating via walkie-talkies, they’re attacked by a group of robed teen-agers speaking in tongues. After stealing the walkie-talkies, the teens lead the girls through stinky sewers to the great beyond.
I read the graphic novel three times in a row to make sure I’d got the whole scary, strange, and suspenseful story and wanted more immediately. On Free Comic Book Day this year I picked up the second and third graphic novels in the series to keep myself immersed.
Watch.
I don’t really watch movies or TV. I tend to watch YouTube for eSports match recaps – Go, Team Liquid! – or for educational purposes and inspiration.
One of the latest, best videos I’ve seen is by an advertising agency called Psyop. Their video, Travel Oregon – Only Slightly Exaggerated, is a unique travel ad that encourages people to explore the State of Oregon. Done in the style of a Studio Ghibli film – think anime like My Neighbour Totoro or Princess Mononoke – the ad blends whimsy and imagination and possibility and mixes that with BMX biking, sailing, picnics, hot-air ballooning and agriculture, among other things.
Listen.
I listen to background music when I’m writing code or doing design work, preferably without lyrics because I can get easily distracted by them. Lately, Ben Prunty’s Cipher: the Score for Banking on Bitcoin (2016) has been the top of my Spotfiy playlist.
Prunty is an ex-Google janitor turned musician, well-known for his work on indie video game soundtracks like FTL, The Darkside Detective, and Intro the Breach. It seems like it’d be hard to write ‘computer music’ without it sounding locked to a specific time period (think Kraftwerk) but Prunty does it incredibly well, and maintains this quality over each of the album’s 31 tracks. I find Cipher to be a great way to block out the world around me and keep my head in web code.
* * *
If you have a suggestion for someone you would like to see in Read. Watch. Listen., or would like to participate yourself, drop a line to inside.western@uwo.ca.
