open source (12. 491)

Echoing today’s previous posting, we very much enjoyed making the acquaintance of an omnipresence and prolific graphic design artist and illustrator called Takashi Mifune—whose work, anonymous for its ubiquity and described as unpinning “social infrastructure,” has influenced Japan’s public aesthetic and visual vernacular. Though not unique in offering clip-art, the website maintained by Mifune Irasutoya (いらすとや, illustration shop) makes his cast of iconic characters and symbols freely available to for personal and commercial applications, with the large range covering every conceivable situation and occupation—from the everyday to the niche—and consistency of style (see previously) has garnered the artist’s momentum and reputation as the standard for signage. Featuring highly specialised jobs, current events, cultural neologisms, maladies, warnings, restrictions and artefacts with far more briskness and particularity than other catalogues of stock images, inspiring contests to recreate works of art with Mifune’s drawings, subject matter easily summoned up from the commonplace to centrifuges, Prototaxites (an extinct plant life-form between fungi and trees), traditional dress of La Sape subculture, wisdom teeth, both bipedal and quadrupedal versions of chupacabras and the Antikythera mechanism. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link up top.

you may need rendering support (12. 490)

Despite being last updated in 2012, the announcement from Japanese wireless carrier Docomo (a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) that it is officially discontinuing support for its emoji set marks the end of an era that spanned decades and played a foundational role in emoji communication and native texting environments. Beginning in 1995 with the simple inclusion of a ❤︎ icon that could be displayed on pagers (see previously)—and the user outcry when the option was quietly removed in a subsequent update demonstrated to the concern public interest not only in symbolic shorthand but also a way to accent missives when not communicating face-to-face, the reaction informing the glyph collection to come. In 1999, Docomo introduced a set of one hundred seventy-six character syllabary of supplemental monochrome, twelve-by-twelve pixel icons designed by Shigetaka Kurita (栗田 穣崇), which inspired by universal street signage, pictograms and the mood and emotional cues employed for manga protagonists called manpu (漫符, a bead of sweat to signal accomplishment or apprehension), created the base lexicon and grammar that Unicode adopted later. Although limited to the network, the emoji set, growing colourised and more articulated, saw its legacy enlivened by platforms with greater interoperability and customisation and is honoured as a linguistic fossil and the emoji equivalent of Latin.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more adventures in the Thüringer Forest (with synchronoptica) plus a notable Shiba Inu passes away 

seven years ago: between distraction and anxiety, Dune product tie-ins plus digitising the Munch Museum

eight years ago: Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Trump calls NATO partners deadbeats plus preparing for a short sabbatical 

nine years ago: shooting stars on demand,  Wundarr the Aquarian plus rabbits doing violence in medieval manuscripts

ten years ago: a visit to the Neckar valley plus assorted links to revisit

threat model (12. 489)

Not content with being partially lionised over the yet unproven claim that the COVID pandemic might have been caused by a lab leak from a facility studying corona viruses in Wuhan, the new head of the US National Institutes of Health is not only suggesting that the NIH itself created the novel virus, triggering a mass walkout during his first all-hands meeting, like-minded cohorts in the US Food and Drug Administration have severely restricted access to vaccines for the vast majority of Americans, as if we needed another reason not to travel—or to erect a cordon sanitaire to stop the spread of vectors for measles, bird flu and any number of preventable maladies, quitting the WHO and the media blackout when it comes to monitoring emerging outbreaks—insisting on amplifying warnings of side effects, despite the efficacy of treatment and the low incidence. Having missed crucial windows to ramp up production for the next season, many major pharmaceutical companies gave up altogether. Click through for important reminders on how Long COVID is the retronym of the polio generations endured—and yet another reemergent illness that had been eradicated—and one’s first line of defence.

in a word (12. 488)

Courtesy of Futility Closet, we enjoyed this moment of logophilia with an selection of obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, frequent contributor to Butler University’s journal of recreational linguistics, Word Ways, specialising in research and demonstrations on palindromes, tautonyms (reduplication like aye-aye or namby-pamby), anagrams, pangrams and lipograms. We especially liked supermuscan defined as having the qualities greater than which is typical of a fly; alkahest, a universal solvent—chiefly in the alchemical sense; titivil—a demon who collects dropped or mumbled parts of the mass and bears them off to hell as evidence against the offender—see previously; brotus, any extra measure given without charge, as in a baker’s dozen; ecdysiast, one who rhythmically disrobes as in a strip-tease artist; holmgang, a duel fought on an island; velleity—the lowest degree of desire, a slight wish; microlipet, one bothered by trifles; palinode, retracting or recanting something formerly praised; supellectile, pertaining to furniture; and poliad, a nymph that lives in the city. Some in the catalogue were familiar to us but there’s a surplus of choice news terms to be found clicking through. Let us know your new favourites.

new territories (12. 487)

Being for a long time fascinated by the idea of the crowded, lawless and ungoverned exclave within an enclave called Kowloon Walled City (see previously), we were astonished to be referred this recorded walk-through captured in the space of an afternoon (no daylight reaching the lowest storeys) by University of Hong Kong architecture student Suenn Ho, having no idea that such footage and interviews existed, taken in 1991, a couple years prior to its demolition, evicting the some thirty-five thousand who lived and worked within the confines of less than three hectares—translating to an incredible population density of over one and a quarter million residents per square kilometre. The former footprint now a park and its reputation sanitised, Hong Kongers, formerly condemned Kowloon as a dangerous slum when mass-urbanisation started in the 1960s, are now romanticising this dystopian neighbourhood and we are happy this documentary has been preserved for posterity. The Japanese film crew mentioned early on also produced a short piece, available here.

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synchronoptica

one year ago: exploring the Vesser valley (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: photographer Zofia Rydet plus potentially eliminating the deadliest disease vector

eight years ago: a poem for Manchester, Trump to visit the Pope, micro-mastery, diplomatic indiscretions  plus America’s designs on its southern neighbours during the US civil war

nine years ago: Kraftwerk animated plus that proposal for an elevated bus

twelve years ago: a day-by-day account of World War I

 

sigils and signs (12. 486)

Having previously looked at other visual language compliers expressed through artistic elements and other than the usual strings of functions and conditions of coding, and very much reenforces overdue acknowledgement that the jargon of computing can act as a gatekeeper and that unnatural language can create an out-group (see also) for whom these incantations seem like wizardry, and given our preoccupation with secret signs, we were very much
intrigued by this mystical platform of magic circles, via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest (a lot more to explore there) under development by Denis M Moskowitz. The sampled, quicksort spell is a rendering of the Euclidean algorithm for calculating the greatest common divisor of two numbers—that which divides them both without a remainder—a benchmark test for the logic of a new programming language with an intuitively visual component. Moskowitz has also created a character set of glyphs or monograms after the chaos magic of Austin Osman Spare (previously here and here) whose seals unlock the basic grammar of coding. Much more at the links above.

sara-la-kâli (12. 485)

Venerated on this day in folk Catholic traditions, sharing it with her companion and co-worker St Joanna though not officially recognised by the Church, as the patron protectress of the Romani people, particularly in the Camargue region of southern France with her shrine in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer considered a place of pilgrimage, St Sarah, according to legend, was a servant of the Three Marys, a maid of Mary of Clopas (sister-in-law of Joseph) from descendants from the coastal area of Malabar and brought to Egypt through Indo-Roman trade, where they landed after the Resurrection fleeing persecution and to work as missionaries to the continent. “Sarah the Black”—Romani Sara e Kali, she shares her name with the Hindu goddess worshipped in the northern part of India where the Romani originate. This religious syncretism is unique in Europe, though many pagan customs were adopted by Christianity, and on her feast, her statue is taken to the sea for a ritual bath with the ceremony paralleling worship of Kali and solemn ablutions.

⁓ (12. 484)

Although also slightly peeved that the em-dash has become the signature punctuation of artificial intelligence chatbots (see also, scroll down for an act of malicious non-compliance with an agent) and sad to see the way I write coopted—though maybe leaning too heavily on a brittle linkage and perhaps should rely more on brackets or the semicolon, I was naturally intrigued by this proposal for a separator available exclusively for human use to signal that it was not penned by machine, the am-dash, via Web Curios and as in cogito ergo sum. Superficially like the title swung dash (used primarily, however, to set apart a list of alternatives or approximates or in dictionary entries to avoid reprinting the term being defined), the am-dash would be but of a restricted character set—see also.
First widely used in the Nicholas Okes’ publication of Shakespeare’s plays to capture pauses, interruption and epiphany of the staged performances in the early seventeenth century, Jonathan Swift’s 1733 verse On Poetry later encapsulated the style as:

Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when Invention fails;
To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

Your poem finish’d, next your Care
Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
Set off with num’rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—

Much more at the links above.