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.

grand cru(ise)

Intoxicatingly, French motorists are being cautioned along the motorways of some wine-producing communities during this year’s harvesting time to drive with care due to the risk of spillage onto the lanes from lorries transporting grapes from the vineyards to processing centres. The warning signs are temporary and will be taken down after the season is over.
Viniculture in much of western Europe was bookended with a pair of Roman festivals called the Vinalia—one in Spring and dedicated to Venus to break open the casts of the previous year’s vintage and prayer for a good growing season, and the second held in the early Autumn, dedicated to Jupiter (who controls the weather) as a pre-harvest celebration and selecting of the finest grapes that would be reserved for sacramental wine. I believe that this year was the first time authorities were prompted to install traffic signs but surely there must have been some overflow since ancient times.

dovetail and dowel

Distressingly, we might be witnessing the slow demise of an art form passed down for generations, but perhaps the efforts of a one curious pupil—not born into the guarded tradition of Japanese joinery, carpentry without nails, who struggled to penetrate the instructions of handbooks (a recent relaxing of the way families, now dying off, formerly jealously protected their methods for centuries). Despite the best intentions, the guide remained inscrutable and so the pupil dismantled and reverse-engineered the art from outside in and created beautiful animations to illustrate his progress, which can hopefully impart this age-old practise to a new generation of makers (and three-dimensional presses).

choosy moms choose jif

On the fifth of November, 1999 an auto-de-fé was proclaimed in order to rid the emerging on-line environment of an image file format (.gif) that most considered to be clunky and unsuited for facilitating the quick transfer of information.
First invented in 1987, this lossless (uncompromised, except for richness of colour) yet compressible image extension was the industry standard yet showed no potential that it would ever be the rendering for anything but static pictures and was being pressed aside by one lobby or another—even the idea of a “GIF tax” was being proposed to banish the Graphic Interchange Format, the bailiwick of Compuserve and Netscape. The cinemagraph, the parlour-trick that’s best suited for what we think of as GIFs nowadays in conjunction with browser protocols and later the looping video clip, was not perfected until 2011 but would have probably never materialised unless it had been allowed to incubate, maybe selfishly, during the intervening decades. Read all about the history and development of the GIF and get a primer on how image compression algorithms work in Popular Mechanics article at the link up top.

palimpsest

I’ve found myself obsessed too with the concept of ghostly signage and the forgotten, former incarnations of buildings for quite some time, and so was really excited to learn about this hybrid of projection mapping, light show and augmented reality experience on the streets of London to reveal the past superimposed upon the present. One can even take tours of selected districts in the city and follow a historic narrative that says volumes. Be sure to visit Fast Company at the link above to learn more about this project and its plans to expand.