8x8 (11. 770)

received pronunciation: expectation for Romans (and more broadly villains) with British accents in film  

bardcore: Teenage Engineering debuts a beat sampler for making Middle Ages-style music 

misery rankings: how painful would Olympic events be for average non-athletes—via tmn  

mpox: World Health Organisation declares latest outbreak an international health emergency  

growing up underground: the autobiography of Steven Heller  

a fable for the mind’s eye: the making of Star Wars as a radio drama 

radiophonic workshop: pioneering artist and engineer Daphne Oram—previously—introduces electronic music  

madonna odigitria: medieval icon of the consecrated Pantheon restored

the lower the stakes, the bigger the fight (11. 769)

To put forth PfRC’s style guide at the outset, we’d use Harris’ and Walz’ campaign for the US presidency—but we are really enjoying the outbreak of pedantry over the placement of the apostrophe (see previously) for the names of the candidates and how it’s an interesting case of overlap of grammar and morphology. While conceding that in conversation I may pronounce it Harrises platform or Walzes career, I think the construction is superfluous for names ending in s, z, x, ß (the medial ſ is never terminal unlike the former Esszet), ch and j (as the affricatives tʃ, dʒ), though the instruction if you say it, spell it does seem like a good rule to apply to spare oneself some grief. Should Harris win (otherwise we could all be Ofdon and Ofjamesdavid—the genitive case is weird), she will become only the fourth holder of high office to have such a surname ending (the last being Rutherford B Hayes), but a more recent contender, Michael Dukakis, interviewed for the article recalled no such controversy back in 1988 and agrees it should be s, apostrophe and that’s it.

ceefax (11. 752)

Via Web Curios, we are referred to a rather stupendous gallery of screen-grabs of broadcast teletext pages (see previously), first introduced in 1974 in data hidden in the signals at the extremes of the TV screen, with an assortment of nostalgic advertisements, closed-captions, games, viewing guides, alpha-mosaic art and news supplements whose rollout preceded and provisioned the internet with this ASCII grid of twenty-four by forty characters with some limited interactive capabilities (in partnership with a phone call usually) accessed by remote control. I remember exploring occasionally these embedded channels (which are mostly still available and offer programme synopses and transcripts) when the parallel online world was not so readily accessible.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a classic from The Small Faces (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: work makes us passionate quitters plus reflections on a total eclipse

eight years ago: misadventures in tourism, Dr Who remixed plus Dr Teeth live in concert

nine years ago: assorted links worth revisiting

eleven years ago: the origin of kids’ menus and the family restaurant

hasenpfeffer incorporated (11. 751)

While pursuing the long-tail of a rumoured solution to try to satisfy two Hollywood egos both demanding top-billing and one possible and now pervasive compromise, known in the industry as the Laverne & Shirley card, we got the opportunity to revisit The Art of the Title (see previously here and here) and explore some of the creative and contractual considerations that go into opening sequences. And while fascinating to learn about the more elegant and efficient way to make concessions to rising talent (bottom left and top right gives two stars more or less equal prominence), the hook was really the unique stalemate of the 1987 Arthur Hiller Outrageous Fortune comedy featuring Bette Midler and Shelley Long (or Long and Midler) with neither willing to concede to be second-billed. Strangely aligned with the film that takes its title from Hamlet’s “…slings and arrows…” about two acrimonious acting students who are dating the same mysterious individual, unbeknownst to each other, and manages to keep their shared tryst secret, the production studio commissioned two sets of promotional materials and title sequences for distribution in US East Coast and West Coast markets, in the respective actors’ home turf presumably with neither being the wiser—movie lore confirmed by a visit to the last video rental shop in Atlanta. Much more from 99% Invisible at the link above.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: artist Karla Knight (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: a proposed canal in Malaysia plus radio for dogs

eight years ago: assorted links to revisit, mass-transit upholstery plus Olympic typography

nine years ago: the Happy Birthday song plus presidential merch

eleven years ago: US government lapse in appropriations plus thoughtful souvenirs

7x7 (11. 732)

autotopia 2000: a consumerist satire from animation team Halas and Batchelor, best-known for their adaptation of Animal Farm 

broligarchs: the Trump-Vance tax proposal that is courting the support of Silicon Valley billionaires 

supermarket sweep: a monograph on graphic designer Ted Eron, who was responsible for the aesthetics of the food aisle  

kamal holding vinyls: Ms Harris will display your favourite album covers—via kraftfuttermischwerk  

run: an appreciation of the consequential and formative programming language BASIC—see previously—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

i’m a little teapot, short and stout: the analogy from Betrand Russell that shifts the philosophical burden of proof to the party making unfalsiable claims  

goalball: a team of animators illustrate explainers for Paralympic events

synchronoptica

one year ago: Christian comics (with synchronoptica), assorted links worth revisiting plus Molson Ice Rocks for Canada

seven years ago: Ottoman bird palaces plus superstitious etiquette

eight years ago: the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary and other mythical beasts plus custom automatons

nine years ago: Esperanto enthusiasts plus a helpful cheese chart

ten years ago: William Barker’s Schwa

⚶ (11. 696)

Observed between 1802 and 1807 before being identified as a minor planet by astronomer Heinrich Olbers, whom having already discovered and named what is now understood to be the asteroid Pallas gave the honours to mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose orbital calculations had enabled researchers to confirm the existence of the first such object in that region of the solar system, Ceres, presumed—incorrectly—to be fragments of a larger, destroyed planet, and called the discovery after the Roman goddess of hearth and home, Vesta. The Dawn mission, dispatched to explore the asteroid belt, entered into a year-long orbit around the brightest and second-largest asteroid on this day in 2011. Presently represented by the modern astrological variant of the original symbol conceived by Gauss, it was suggestive of the altar of the goddess and home-fire by extension, the first form is scheduled to return as a Unicode character, the pictorial representations repopularised following their retirement in the mid-1800s as impractical as the cosmic backyard became more crowded with eight major planets and over a dozen minor ones. During the interim until the 1950s, asteroids were given the naming convention of ordinal numbers, according to the sequence of their discovery, this one called ④ Vesta.

synchronoptica

one year ago: professional uniforms (with synchronoptica), an experimental overland train plus the Trinity nuclear test (1945)

seven years ago: a linguistic curiosity

eight years ago: a beach on the Île d’Orélon

nine years ago: classes of quarks plus a Mad, Mad, Mad Max mashup

eleven years ago: informant gadgets 

,,someone german is talking“ (11. 666)

Having pondered the meanings and styles of bracket-use before, we appreciated this xkcd (previously) comic panel via Language Log. What other orthographic conventions do you know? 『Someone is talking Chinese』— A James Joyce [or Leo Tolstoi] character is talking. — ,, A Georgian person is talking” >A Usenet user is talking " ⠦A vision impaired individual is talking⠴ [sic] A pedant is talking [recte]

7x7 (11. 618)

bernhard modern: pre- and proscriptions in font choice in legal briefs  

mind the gap: a huge collection of historic London Underground maps and posters—see previously 

in search of…: the Dogon culture and ancient astronomy

homebrewed: following his felony conviction, Trump’s licenses to sell liquor under scrutiny 

pay wall: you’ve read your last fee article, such is the nature of mortality

and peace and justice for all: Tweet of the Day re-litigates and exonerates all of Trump’s misdeeds  

poster child: the auction expertise of Nicho Lowry  

show bible: a reprinting of the DC Comics Style Guide from 1982

stack overflow (11. 616)

Courtesy of Waxy, we are directed to the flashy showroom of Terminal Text Effects, a collection of customisable coding scripts to apply to one’s website to create looping pages to assemble, decrypt and crumble content. There are quite a few to choose from and can be configured to match one’s themes and schemes. We especially liked the Burn, Black Hole and Rain routines and will one day learn how incorporate such pre-installs ourself although right now a bit too intermediate for us.

a compilation of reliable recipes with a casual culinary chat (11. 576)

Originally self-published in 1931 as means of coping with the loss of her husband, the jacket design which captured the popular poster, cut-out style of the day was created by the author’s daughter Marion Rombauer Becker, who helped write subsequent editions. The Art Deco cover features Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of Home Economics, vanquishing the dragon of domestic drudgery—according to the Golden Legend, the Tarasque, a fearsome chimera that tormented the people of Gaul, that Martha tamed with her faith, though once obedient and docile was unfortunately beset by angry villagers with rocks and spears until it died. Rombauer Becker was the director of the Art Department of a school in Ohio and the typeface is inspired by a Cassandre specimen of the contemporaneous excess of the decorative font Bifur. In print continuously since with over twenty-million copies sold, it is considered the quintessential American cookbook, its popularity sustained by Julia Child, and is a snowclone for many topical overviews.

v 16.0β (11. 572)

The Unicode Consortium is proposing the inclusion of seven emoji for the standardised catalogues referenced by operating systems and will be under review through the beginning of July, when expected to be officially adopted. Though uniform and universal (with some exceptions), it will be some time before we can use a leafless tree to convey climate change and drought or the exhausted eyebag expression in general as platforms add their own vernacular in a process that can lag for several months. In addition to these pictograms, scripts from west Africa, India and Nepal are being added as well as new Japanese ideographs plus some four thousand Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and a historic Albanian set of characters and symbols from legacy computing.

i am disappoint (11. 569)

The always interesting Language Log introduces us to a class of typos with two-subsets that we can find very relatable and gets the onus of the blame when conducting a bit of post-publication proofreading: completion errors, when typing or writing (there is both a motor-mechanical and muscle inertia in effect) starting out with one intention and an intrusive ending inserts itself, and capture errors, an action slip when a reflex behaviour creates an unwanted parallelism. What’s a sticky key you’re vexed by? Surely beyond spoonerisms such slippage happens in speech with frequency and I wonder how too such intrusions are compounded—or not—by auto-complete.

10x10 (11. 562)

crimes of atrocity: a long, dense episode of -ologies with Alie Ward on the hugely fraught and difficult subject of genocide with a powerful and circumspect post-script 

airoboros: artificial intelligence trained on AI made content is becoming highly problematic and only compounded—see previously  

the city on the edge of forever: public portal linking Dublin and New York City suspended after inappropriate behaviour  

palmerston’s follies: two maritime forts off Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight that have been converted into boutique accommodations go up for auction  

the deuce: the Greek grandmother who built an adult entertainment empire in Times Square before its Disneyfication 

foot on the gas: the inevitability of the climate collapse and humanity’s capacity for adjustment  

⌘ |: the lost history of pre-internet emoji and rendering software—via Waxy—see previously 

flashing headlights: the giant Dana squid’s photophores in attack-mode  

eternal return: cosmic cycles and time’s resurgence  

first-day agenda: how Trump is framing his vision for a second-term

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit plus a visit to Arnstadt

two years ago: St Brendan, more links to enjoy plus the Electrotechnical Exhibition of 1891

three years ago: a classic from Kim Carnes, a language quiz, more links worth the revisit plus an ancient action figure

four years ago: more Trump’s Space Force, birdhouses, the stress of social media moderation, a medieval manuscript game plus a musical typing tutor

five years ago: GenX, consular services at McDonalds, soliciting grievances, Japanese mascots plus office equipment

asemic writing (11. 560)

The above describing wordless or meaningless text intended to invite the reader to divine a message through the symbolisms rather than to convey a message—though these carefully recorded compositions that suggest mathematical and chemical formulae certainly encoded a meaning that was perhaps only known to the artist—and could be certainly applied to the verisimilitude (see also) of the collected works of outsider artist Melvin May, a bassist who returned to New York City to study informatics but his career path was sidelined by a schizophrenia diagnosis and subsequent drug use, landing him in a men’s shelter on Randall’s Island whilst seeking treatment. Way’s discipline was discovered through art workshops sponsored by the shelter, dense and intricate sketches with ballpoint pens committed to found scraps of paper, often carrying around works-in-progress on his person, protected with a layer of scotch tape. More on this retrospective—and sadly posthumous by only months—and Way’s life at Hyperallergic at the link above.

graphical symbols for use on equipment (11. 512)

Via Present /&/ Correct, we are directed to the International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO, see also) Online Browsing Platform (OBP) that publishes an annual catalogue of pictograms and other deliverables (coordinates, vocabulary, terminology, industry norms) for manufacturers and municipalities to license (most, however, have been made freely available to the public) commercially for a nominal fee. The annex of ISO 7000 is a registry of systematised and universal icons appearing on machine parts, cables and consoles with different subcategories covering building construction, surgical instruments and implants, woodworking, fishmeal and identification documents.

🆖 (11. 502)

Having previously looked at the linguistic phenomenon of boomerang terms, we were intrigued by this post on Japanese borrowings and re-borrowings inspired by the recent addition of a couple dozen loanwords by the OED, whose lexicographer nominated them partially due to their propensity for being reincorporated with nuance. We found it especially fascinating that “no good” is in usage on par with OK in Japan—even appearing adjacent in emoji sorting, collation (see also) as its antonym—despite not being in common parlance or even recognisable in its source language. Many of the new inclusions are cuisine- and cultural-related, like kintsugi and omotenashi, the fusion of hospitality and circumspection that become more widely known by the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. The whole list and more discussion from Language Log at the link above. How many are you acquainted with, hontōni?

10x10 (11. 496)

the cloud under the seas: the fleet of secret submarine cable repair ships 

sarbox: US Supreme Court appears skeptical about charging January Sixth rioters with obstruction of justice as defined by a law made in the aftermath of the Enron accounting scandal  

mix-and-match orthography: how Japanese writers navigate a choice between four writing systems (see also)—via Cardhouse  

walled gardens have deep roots: the imperative of rewilding (previously) the internet lest the duopolies take over—via Waxy 

bongo bash: Wild Stereo Drums (1961)  

embroidered surveillance: cross-stitch works of closed-circuit security camera footage  

the questor tapes: a 1974 television sci-fi drama about an android with incomplete programming by Star Trek alumni Gene L Coon, D C Fontana and Gene Roddenberry—via r/Obscure Media  

tegelwippen: Dutch towns compete to remove garden paving and embrace weeds—via Miss Cellania  

voir dire: jury selection continues for the criminal trial of Donald J Trump—with some potential jurors being unintentionally doxed by the media 

 atlas 2.0: Boston Dynamics’ new humanoid robot

synchronoptica

one year ago: Atelier Elvira, an unwoke chatbot plus assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: more gachapons plus an introduction to risography

three years ago: the launch of the Disney Channel (1983), an experimental light house plus Wham in China (1985)

four years ago: more links to enjoy, the International Amateur Radio Union plus The Spirits Book (1897)

five years ago: concrete monoliths moved by hand plus Mueller Report redactions

11x11 (11. 448)

inauspicious beginnings: a rift opens up in a group of official astrologers employed by the Sri Lankan government to pick ideal dates for new years rituals  

disco arabesquo: record label Habibi Funk aims to introduce Middle Eastern vintage music to wider audiences 

typecraft: a transformative font foundry in India 

the allegory of the cave: on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the film’s premiere, we may be still trapped in the Matrix 

banjaxed and bockety: two curious Irish terms 

der buch der hasengeschichten: Tom Seidmann-Freud’s 1924 collection of hare fables 

working for tips: bizarrely robot baristas will accept gratuities, in a service sector landscape already fraught with insecurity and precarity—via tmn  

the juice is on the loose: a sequel thirty-six years in the making, reuniting the original cast—via Miss Cellania  

international system of typographic picture education: an archive of the pictograms of Gerd Arntz—see previously  

pocket full of kryptonite: the preponderance of alternative rock songs about Superman in the 1990s, 2000s 

prosopometamorphopsia: a new study on generalised social anxiety disorder tries to see from the perspective of those with a rare condition that causes faces to appear distorted, demonic—via the New Shelton wet/dry

7x7 (11. 421)

triple word score: the undisputed champion of competitive Scrabble  

boyard cigarettes: unused geisha footage for an Offworld advertising campaign

statutory interpretation: a forthcoming book on the ideology of originalism and its malleability 

the apprehension engine: custom suspenseful sounds for horror movie incidental music—via Things Magazine  

penmanship: the resurgence of cursive—see previously  

raktajino: a supercut of Klingon coffee in Star Trek: DS-9  

game theory: selfishness and enlightened self-interest through the lens of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch

8x8 (11. 411)

🚫: the origins of the circle-and-slash prohibition symbol, its adoption as an ISO standard coinciding with 1984’s Ghost Busters  

return to sender: as part of the Prize Papers Project, a pristine Faroese hand-knitted sweater was discovered in an impounded parcel from 1807 

electronic labyrinth: the 1967 student film from George Lucas that would be later reworked into the feature  

snowdrops: Robert Marsham’s Indications of Spring (1789)  

clairaudient: more on Rosemary Brown with other classical compositions from beyond the grave  

if it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist: as of the beginning of the year, the venerable repository, the Ubuweb whose founder Kenneth Goldsmith is famous for the axiom, of the avant-garde has gone into archive-mode—via Web Curios 

sella rotalis: Paul de Livron crafts beautiful wooden wheelchairs, including one for the Pope

belinda new: exploring the typography of Oscar nominated films