i'm okeh—thanks, and you?

Although brief and near instantaneous correspondence is nothing new and certainly is not solely a legacy of today's generations, this multiple-choice example from the so-called series of correspondence cards from the Dizzy line of the Curt Teich Publishing House from 1921 are a pretty interesting phenomenon, especially in their original form.

Teich, who immigrated from Thüringen to Chicago at the turn of the century to found his company, was one of the architects of the post card industry, aligned with the growing mobility of the masses and the chance to take holiday in ports-of-call further a-field, and introduced picture postcards emblazoned with bold lettering, announcing “Greetings from ________.” Though it was not a fill-in-the-blank job, unlike with these correspondence cards that let one check off any vacation contingency. I suppose back then, however, there was always an invitation to friends and neighbour to come over for a slide-show presentation detailing one's adventures in full to follow-up on this short-shrift. What other forms of communication might be formula-writing—or at least begging a calculated response?

skynet

Gizmodo's Sploid shares this handy field-guide to identifying drones (UAVs—unmanned aerial vehicles) overhead by their silhouettes from below.

It sort of reminds me how they say sharks target surfers because paddling, they look like seals to the hunter, rather than just a human meal of opportunity. One can find further details at the link, but I am sure it's not comprehensive and not like a bird-watchers' guide by virtue that these breeds are highly-invasive and don't stick to their native range and are prone to evolve pretty quickly. One can print the chart oneself or order it printed on mirrored foil, I suppose, to wrap around oneself as a cloaking-device when out and about, under the friendly-skies.

ped x-ing or hand-jive

The X in X-mas comes from an initialism of the Greek name for Christ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, a shorthand employed by Biblical scholars and others to abbreviate things to do with Jesus or the Cross (writ both large and small—Celtic monks in Germany monasteries incidentally invented a lower-case script with punctuation for the Greeks to make reading easier) and these signs and signals are reflected in the iconography of Jesus and the saints in hand-gestures that amount to a sort of finger-spelling. These poses, each understood to audiences in a specific way, were in turn a traditional and long-established system of rhetorical gestures used by speech-makers in Antiquity to cue their listeners to something important or to mark a transition.

A parallel supplemental language is to be found in the mudrās of the Buddhist tradition, which while having symbolic significance in their portray are moreover a kind of digital yoga, each pose and arrangement having a specific mental and physical influence on the practitioner—not to say that these similar gestures, used as rites and sacraments, ingrained in Western depictions of religious figures do not necessarily have a more profound meaning and stimulus about them, as well, nor that Eastern orators and choreographers do not have a vocabulary for grandiloquence in speeches neither.

c'est ne trappe! or blue harvest

 

The Star Wars franchise is making an official foray into social media, as Laughing Squid reports, and in embracing and celebrating fan-art of all sorts, including memes and remixes.
For Star Wars' debut on Tumblr, here is R2-D2 projecting a holographic photo-stream (as opposed to Princess Leia's distress message) for Luke Skywalker, C-3PO and Obi Wan Kenobi back at the moisture ranch on Tatooine, and although the premiere is part of a promotional campaign for a new television spin-off and the cinematic continuation of the saga's middle chapters, this expanded universe is sure to be a lot of fun and have a lot of classic homages.

gazette or worth-1000

Here is a thoughtful essay from veteran blogger Jason Kottke that expands on the lingering and drawn-out obituary and eulogizing of blogging as a form of communication that have been steadily eroding the format for sometime.

It's really thought-provoking and Kottke is being a gad-fly in demonstrating how journals and journalism are being splintered into different presences and personae spread along a variety of specialised platforms that are very compart- mentalised and don't communicate very well with one another. Taking any usual type of sharage to task, one would probably not describe the activity or announcement as web-logging—or writing. Surely no one old school gets to gauge quality by virtue of formatting and window-dressing alone, since expression is a plastic and ever-evolving thing and means are just media. It seems to me however, there is an important distinction with a blog that lies in the difference between what one might list as a hobby, a project (or a passion or a living), and what one might list as a habit, an interest.

haus am see or sugarcubes

This isolated structure located on the Icelandic island of Elliðaey is actually a lodge established in the 1953 just as the last permanent residents were leaving for the mainland.  

As the sustained isolation made it not an ideal place for ranchers and fisherman, a group of hunters had the lodge built, though called the Bjork Hús it has nothing to do with a grace-and-favour residence being granted to the singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir for being a national treasure or for making Iceland famous, as a place to gather for annual puffin-hunting expeditions—which would not be an activity that I would like to have my name connected with. The pictures of the place are really breath-taking, however.

narrative-arch or denouement

Fast Company presents an interesting study in the grammar of comic strips and finds that the human mind interprets the funnies, according to their established conventions, as a distinct lingual system.
The brain probably makes its own ways of making sense or following a story or a message presented in any venue or format and comics offer a good test subject as there are measurable elements of predictability from the set-up to the punch-line and when presented with irregular panels the departure was registered as jarring, like a linguistically value but non-nonsensical construction. I suppose there are too many variables within the plastic arts, a meme for example, to understand how it might be comprehended—or got.