I make things on the internet
The text of a Pony Express job poster (copy):
Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.
Seems unlikely that you’d see that on a recruitment poster today. Have to admit that I’m tempted to write “willing to risk death daily” on a resumé and see where it gets me.
A map of North American English dialects by Rick Aschmann. You can zoom in on areas of the map to hear audio samples.
A holiday endeavour from the folks at Google, send your parents a tech support care package.
I recently saw a link to The Big Lebowski Kit somewhere, clicked through and was expecting something entirely different. I was thinking it would be The Dude’s kit; everything that one needed to get their dude on. Nope, it’s just a bunch of useless crap… “Ooooh, a mousepad, a fake toe and a coffee cup!” We can do a little better than that.
Here’s what I think should be in The Dude’s survival kit.
We could probably include some sort of bowling paraphernalia: a ball, a shirt, something bowlingish. And we would need something to hold it all, possibly a battered suitcase or a bowling bag.
The most obvious reason to decant is that the wine has thrown a deposit, and that’s really only likely with vintage or crusted ports and aged unfiltered reds. For the process to work effectively the bottle needs to have been upright for several hours, then be carefully poured into the decanter in front of a light (traditionally a candle) so you can see as the sediment inches towards the neck. You need to do this in a single movement so that it doesn’t fall back and get mixed up with the wine again.
From Umberto Eco’s article about Wikileaks.
I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the wireless telegraph revolutionised communications, the Internet has re-established a telegraph that runs on (telephone) wires. (Analog) video cassettes enabled film buffs to peruse a movie frame by frame, by fast-forwarding and rewinding to lay bare all the secrets of the editing process, but (digital) CDs now only allow us quantum leaps from one chapter to another. High-speed trains take us from Rome to Milan in three hours, but flying there, if you include transfers to and from the airports, takes three and a half hours. So it wouldn’t be extraordinary if politics and communications technologies were to revert to the horse-drawn carriage.
An interesting analogy. Political communications probably won’t slide back to horses, but sneakernets are looking good.
The world’s first commercial Christmas card was commissioned by Henry Cole in 1843. Three of the remaining cards were recently sold at auction, with one of them fetching over £8000. The cards originally came with an illustrated envelope.
These Christmas cards are interesting pieces of ephemera, but I have to admit that David Mitchell’s take on them is more in keeping with my opinions.
It’s natural to think of Sir Henry as an admirable fellow for having established this most respectable of Christmas customs. It’s natural but it’s a mistake. Bear in mind that, before printed Christmas cards existed, seasonal messages were written individually and in longhand. Before Sir Henry’s brain started to gestate, that was the tradition. His idea was to industrialise it.
He mechanised the exchange of greetings so that more greetings could be exchanged more quickly between more people. He considered the previous rate of greeting-exchange to be tediously slow and resolved to speed it up. This way, he presumably reasoned, people can show how much they care with much less effort. It’s carefree caring: now your heartfelt solicitude can reach dozens of people at once. The man must have thought he was actually manufacturing love.
From an NYT article on having bartenders at your party, even in tiny little flats.
In my opinion, if you don’t have a bartender at your party, you’re a loser, said Dustin Terry, who lives a floor below Ms. Argiro and said his job was to get models and Saudi royalty into hot clubs. The bartender brings class and sophistication.
If you can’t afford to hire a bartender,he added, you shouldn’t be having a party.
Ugh. What a bunch of pretentious twats. That said, credit to the bartenders for putting up with them and taking their money.
Presenting a wonderful new typeface from Alice Savoie, entitled Capucine, available exclusively from Process Type Foundry. The typeface is available in both traditional format and for use on the web.
Capucine defies traditional categorization, it sits in a genre we are drawn to as users of type: a face with distinct personality able to straddle the worlds of both text and display with ease.
I had the honour of knowing both Alice and Nicole Dotin (from Process Type) in my year at Reading and love that Capucine has finally reached a publication point. Capucine looked beautiful three years ago, but I imagine the perfectionist in Alice wanted everything to be just right. Congrats to both Alice and Process Type on the release. I look forward to using the typeface at some point in the near future.
Titillium is an open typographic font and the subject of a didactic course project at Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino.
The aim of the project is the creation of a collective fonts released under OFL to be promoted and shared through a web platform. Each academic year, a dozen of students are working on the project developing and solving problems. The type designers interested in the amendment or revision of Titillium are invited to cooperate or develop their own variants.
