This is still my stuff.

Dropped in to see this today, entirely unprepared for the rawness of the experience. Leibovitz's book, upon which the exhibition is based, draws together commissioned and personal works from 1990 to 2005, including a lot of material from her family life and friendship with Susan Sontag, whose illness and death feature prominently. There's beauty and grace here but there's also sadness, frailty and fear, wrapped in Leibovitz's own humble, careful and generous descriptive text. Two portraits in particular, of Leibovitz's mother and the photographer Richard Avedon, dealt with their respective fears of aging, of beauty's collapse and ultimately of death, candidly yet with a gentle kindness; a photo of a freshly-dug grave (I assumed Sontag's, from the positioning) just whacked me hard in the pit of the stomach. A two-wall chronological mélange was a little too much to take in, indeed the curation as a whole seemed a little jumbled, but still Leibovitz's directness and power shone through.

I've been wittering on for ages about how meme-based films reflect society - why the wave of alien-invasion films in the Cold War, for example? - and these guys have kindly mapped a subset of it. I'm particularly keen to check out the 1964 classic "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies", no doubt inspired by cultural aftershocks after Sputnik went up. Via Matt K.

MIT-licensed project to implement sufficient Cocoa frameworks on top of an abstracted cross-platform Obj-C layer (including patched gcc toolchain) in order to make a viable Xcode -> Windows cross-compiler. Only Foundation is in place yet but apparently active work on CoreGraphics and AppKit is underway, along with some on CoreData. Seems it's got some way to go but looks good.

My friend from university Paul Pitchfork has been awarded the Military Cross for his efforts in Helmand province last year. It's a far cry from when we used to kick about: "In a fire-fight that lasted more than ten hours, the inspirational officer was under direct fire as he commanded his troops against a determined enemy." Ten hours. Completely outside my comprehension, and really quite awe-inspiring. Congratulations, Pitch.