Sunday 25 November 2012
uncanny valley or listening-post
As if the bad economy, crowds and the potential for violence were not reason enough to keep one out of the stores, a business magazine reports on a development that may well become standard for traditional retail outlets—retrofitting mannequins, which are always creepy even when not cursed or endowed with a positronic brain, with bionic eyes and ears to spy and eavesdrop on customers and conduct market research in the field. Trade spokespeople were predictably ebullient about the cyborg mannequins’ ability to collect shopper demographics and find new prospects, brick-and-mortar establishments feeling at a disadvantage to on-line sales for not having customers’ hearts (buying habits) worn on their sleeves and hope the silent sentinels can gather new insights about effective displays and the influences that ultimately wins over one purchase over another at the rack or in the dressing room.
Saturday 24 November 2012
ninjutsu
A few days ago, the BBC featured a sad, disenchanting but informative little article covering yet another position made redundant by modern times: the ninja.
ink trap
A very talented and prolific letter-smith crafted a typeface called DK-Viareggio, an Italianate Art Deco font that perfectly captures the lettering style on this classic poster for Carnival time. I was looking for something like this for quite some time, because although there is a good range of period fonts, it’s hard to match or contrast designs for their width, weight and slope with standard issue scripts to create something approaching authentic. Most signage and graphic arts was a unique, hand-rendered production with geometry peculiar to the artist, and it’s pretty neat that someone took the time to extrapolate a whole alphabet out of this one occasion.
What other vanity writing would you like to see turned into a font? I wonder how well a computer routine alone could handle scanning and fleshing out a whole character set from a few letters on a particular billboard or book cover and what that might mean in terms of classification and finding ones font when each is pulled from an individual source. Of course, typesetting, casting a certain flow, is another challenge and achievement entirely.
What other vanity writing would you like to see turned into a font? I wonder how well a computer routine alone could handle scanning and fleshing out a whole character set from a few letters on a particular billboard or book cover and what that might mean in terms of classification and finding ones font when each is pulled from an individual source. Of course, typesetting, casting a certain flow, is another challenge and achievement entirely.
bankster or the man who sold the world
I heard the song The Complete Banker for the first time just the other day as an interstitial piece during a radio interview with no less than a former World Bank employee, turned charitable advisor and gadfly to neo-colonialists. I had initially pegged it as a much older tune, somewhat reminiscent of a David Bowie song, for its bouncy rhythm and Thatcher references. Having not had the benefit of growing up exposed to quite few classic English ballads, the occasional, surprising work does pop up from time to time. The song, however, is part of a larger legacy of more recent songwriting by a band called The Divine Comedy and is from their 2010 album. It remains quite a good hymn for our times.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ถ, economic policy
Friday 23 November 2012
power-vacuum and powderkeg
Intrepid reporter for Mental Floss Magazine, Eric Sass, has undertaken the absorbing and challenging task of documenting the upcoming centennial of the Great War, day-by-day as events unfolded a hundred years past.
catagories: ๐จ๐ฟ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ท๐บ, ๐น๐ท, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ก, foreign policy, holidays and observances, revolution
leftovers or turkey in the straw
Not realising that the birds were distinct species (albeit, they do look very much alike, like mistaking a pheasant for a quail or crocodile for an alligator), they named it with standing convention for the guinea fowl—a so-called turkey since the birds came to Europe through the ports of Ottoman Turkey. Similarly, in the Turkish language, the American turkey is called Hindi, based on the idea that the exotic poultry comes from the Hindu Kush mountains, sticking to Christopher Columbus’ original mission to reach India by sailing westward but not knowing there were unexpected lands in between. Also, in French, the bird is called Dinde—that is, a contraction of poule d'Inde.
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐น๐ท, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, food and drink, holidays and observances, language, Wikipedia
Thursday 22 November 2012
the abiding place or ััะตะดะธะทะต́ะผัะต
Some months ago, I remembered, a contributing curator for the panoply of pasts real and imagined, the Retronaut, re-discovered and introduced a wonderful illustrated Russian edition of The Hobbit (ะฅะพะฑะฑะธั) from 1976. It is interesting how despite the difference in the way the characters are interpreted (I suppose all readers had their own formative images on how the figures ought to look), they are instantly recognizable and impart the same exciting scenes without having to puzzle anything out, like the lands depicted on this map of Middle Earth that don’t require a legend.