all-terrain

This amphibious caravan from the German company Sealander really caught our attention. Not only is it a sleek and stylish trailer to be pulled on a hitch with a complete camping kitchen, bedding and storage, but when the opportunity presents itself, converts to a personal yacht with an outboard motor to punt around a lake. We’ve stayed a quite a few campsites where such a flexible arrangement would have been ideal.  Check out the links above for more details and a full demonstration.

beautifish

From the creator of Sad Dog Diary, Ze Frank (pronounced Zay) takes us to the magical undersea kingdom of the Angler Fish. Watch the whole fascinating nature narration at the link here.

grapheme or no tofu

“Tofu” refers to the frustration that can come up in correspondence when the message—instead of reaching the recipient as intended is rendered as random ASCII characters or blank boxes (or emojis that emote something entirely different) and what prompted the UK’s assault on punctuation in street signage.
We get it often with the umlaut and it nearly raises in me a moral conundrum that I can’t use our proper address, the right sort of quotation marks, etc. as those characters aren’t allowed. In order to virtually eliminate this problem, an internet giant has partnered with the largest type foundry to create a universal font (Noto—it’s called for “no tofu”) that supports over three-hundred thousand unique glyphs, ten times larger than the nearest thing that historians and linguists have presently to a universal typeface. Even as interest drives the underlying architecture to realise the gaps in our orthographic families, without a font that’s visible across different platforms and systems, there’s still no way to portray it and work in that language—like the warnings one sometimes sees, though more rarely, that this article contains Berber or Babylonian script which all browsers may not display. Noto hopes to deliver a font-kingdom that’s not only functional but also capable of coexisting with other scripts and layouts. Of course, what can in the end be typed—no matter how obscure and esoteric, can also be indexed in a search engine and be made more accessible.

ciudad gótica

Capitalising on the enormous popularity of Adam West’s Batman television series in the US and the native appetite for lucha libre films, in 1966 a Mexican producer rather boldly made a cinematic adaptation of the caped crusader as a female wrestler. La Mujer Murciélago was a wealthy socialite, much like Bruce Wayne, who turned to social justice and crime-fighting when a mad scientist infiltrates the luchadores scene. You can watch the entirety of the strange but captivating movie at the link above.