question
If a guy wanted to read the Strunk & White of Typography, then what would he read?
I like that
You know the shadows that form under the little bubbles on water?
Fear and Gaming: Being and Nothingness and “Minecraft”
From The Bygone Bureau:
It is a powerful experience to be cast into Minecraft‘s blocky paradise without direction or preparation. On my first day, I thought the game was about punching pigs. So I punched pigs. Then night fell and a demon, kind of like a Hong-Kong hopping vampire, crept toward me in my loneliest loneliness and exploded, saying (at least in my narrative): “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.” In other words: respawn or quit to title.
(thanks, walt)
quote out of context
In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular “lad” magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.
just enough is more
A few months ago, Deron and I chatted about our philosophies on structuring clusterflock posts. I don’t remember all the specifics, but the phrase “just enough is more” stuck with me. The quote, itself, comes from a longer essay by Milton Glaser:
LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
I have zero formal training in design and until two years ago couldn’t tell you the difference between a typeface and font, but I’ve stared at enough websites in my time to understand just how true that statement is. My persistent frustration with most web design is that it doesn’t give me what I want or, for that matter, what the site seems to want to give.
Google ads, tag clouds, and excessive hyperlinks litter the page, forcing type smaller and smaller just so it can “fit above the fold.” Or, worse, the tl;dr Tumblr crowd who present us with nothing but acontextual photos and clever sentences from the first paragraphs of The New Yorker articles in large, bold, sans-serif type.
Fuck the fold. And fuck tl;dr. I like scrolling, I like long reads, and I like large (enough) type.
Thankfully, there are a number of fantastic websites that help the long reader’s cause. Long Reads, Longform, and The Browser rank among my favorites. (They do ethically what HuffPo et al. haven’t, incidentally.) But time and time again these sites send me (and it’s not their fault) to noisy pages, littered with ads and “useful” secondary content or an unstyled, printer-friendly page. So, I am forced to use an app like Readability, a very elegant side-step to the problem of unreadibility on the web, instead of reading the website itself.
This is systemically broken and needs to be fixed.
Unfortunately, since the web is a democracy in the most etymological sense (demos, “common people” + kratos, “rule, strength” ), a systemic solution to design woes becomes a systemic solution to common people. History, methinks, shows the obvious problem with that perspective and, consequently, forces us to use an exceedingly common, counterintuitive, and more inelegant method: make more noise.
You can find my first protestation here.
Lovecraft in Brooklyn
The back stories behind John Darnielle’s songs are often as interesting as the music itself….
American horror icon H.P. Lovecraft moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn to be with the woman he loved. He had never really seen any people who were not white folks from Massachusetts. Immigrants were spilling into Brooklyn from the four corners of the globe. Lovecraft’s xenophobia during his time in Brooklyn resulted in some of the weirdest, darkest images in all American literature. One must condemn Lovecraft’s ugly racism, of course, but his not-unrelated inclination toward a general suspicion of anything that’s alive is pretty fertile ground.
As seen in these fantastic cartoon liner notes.
Fluid scale effects are time and viscosity!? Sped up ripples!
A day in the life of New York City, in miniature.
Ted Serios: Paranormal Photographs
On exhibition through March 27 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County: “Psychic Projections/Photographic Impressions: Paranormal Photographs from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios.”
Ted Serios was an alcoholic Chicago bellhop said to have possessed an uncanny gift. Holding a Polaroid camera and focusing on the lens, he produced what he called thoughtographs: images of his thoughts transferred directly to the film.
In connection with the UMBC exhibition, the Chronicle Review features a fascinating article titled Ted Serios and Psychic Projections.
Anna Nicole — The Opera
In an effective framing device, the two-act, swiftly paced opera is presented as a series of interviews with Anna Nicole and her circle by a crowd of reporters, here the chorus, costumed to look like tacky correspondents for local television stations. The men wear light gray three-piece suits; the women, blue, uniformlike skirts and jackets. Crucial events from Ms. Smith’s life are enacted in flashbacks. But when people enter the scene prematurely, like her lawyer and, later, lover Stern (based on Howard K. Stern, here the classy baritone Gerald Finley), they are pushed by the chorus into the wings.
(via marginal revolution)
from the comments
You probably don’t want to know this, but I have worked at Whole Foods for over four months and never eaten anything sitting out as an unattended sample or even a morsel from the hot/cold bar. It started as a way to stick to the lunches and dinners I packed for myself but it’s become entirely wrapped around the idea that there are people my coworkers cannot defend us from. The Man Who Sipped From the Soup Ladle. The Woman Who Licked the Cheese Sample Knife. The Street Kid Who Stole Handfuls of Tabbouleh. The Loony Who Grabbed a Fork and Ate Right Out of the Indian Bar. There are things you just can’t unsee.
Deadbeat Diary, 1
It was 2006 when we sold the townhouse my step-father had bought with us, splitting the proceeds with him and walking away with just enough money for a down-payment on a new place. Even then, the market was starting to soften and we felt lucky that our home sold as quickly as it did – it had only been on the market for hours when we had our first offer. The townhouse sold for just under $300,000.
Almost immediately, we went into contract on a house, new construction, half a mile from my office in a suburban business park outside of Sacramento. It would be another nine months before we moved in. Construction was delayed and the market began to show more signs of weakness. We pushed ahead. At 26 we’d own, without help from anyone, our first house. We made plans to sell a car. We picked out furniture. We took the buckets of free upgrades the builder offered us for “sticking in there.” If we considered leaving our deposit behind and getting out of our now overpriced investment it wasn’t for very long.
We moved in April 2, 2007. The house was already worth less than the $360,000 we’d paid for it, but it was ours. And, really, in California? A $360,000, 1600 square foot, three bedroom house, still seemed like a good deal. We sold a car and paid off the other. We didn’t have a lot of expendable income, but we had some. Our house was our only debt.
At 26 we were living the American dream. Next up, babies. And Babies change everything.
I Am Here — dot dot dot dot — Now
Many of Cinefamily’s HFS connisseurers have crashed up on the rocks trying to describe Las Vegas real estate agent cum visionary independent filmmaker Neil Breen. Inevitably, words and high-concept references fail, and one is reduced to just pressing a copy of actor/director/writer/producer/caterer Breen’s first feature Double Down into the confused hands of a future Breen-iac. The only way to understand Breen’s work is to just see it. Here…now…he’s graced us with another full-length excursion into his completely unique universe. This time around, Breen plays a messianic alien Being angered at the greed and corruption of the human species, particularly our lack of renewable energy and environmental consciousness — oh, and business-man crucifixions and time-stopped gang wars…and…well, as Neil put it himself, “This thought-provoking supernatural film is filled with surprising mystical metaphors, exciting twists….and a stunning dramatic conclusion.”
The official site for the movie is equally stunning and dramatic.
(via the daily dish)
from the comments
I hate to say it, but I have pondered the fact that certain kinds of sudden and complete destruction can occur at a rate that is faster than one’s synaptic ability to register its occurrence. Isn’t it odd that we usually assume we will see it coming? Ali once said, “I’m so fast, I turn out the light and I’m under the covers before it gets dark.” Sometimes it’s not quite dark, and the trip from switch to bed lasts forever.
from the comments
charcoal toast; squid ink pasta; licorice; blood sausage; corn smut; and gummy bats
In Hell. Pinky Diablo (Tom Sale).
In hell your love runs right through me.
when your love for goatkind exceeds love for mankind
Hello, Gumbo?
Whole Foods–after work rush for prepared foods. Guy in a suit trying to talk on his phone and dip–dropped his phone in the seafood soup. Got it out with the ladle.
Last Night I Dreamed…
Before bed, Danny and I purposely measured our vodka. We went to bed early. I didn’t fall asleep as easily as usual. I slept the night fitfully. Between brief dreams, I was awake with eyes closed, thoughts came and went. I dreamed I was in a car with people. It seemed I was on a highway in North Central Arkansas. I was driving ahead of, or into a thunderstorm. I took the car off the highway into a little town of quaint neighborhoods. I stopped.
Suddenly, crazy, amazing lightning lit the town, then thunder. People came out of houses around the car looking up to the sky. I looked out the car window as lightning bolted and hit a man standing just outside the car, lifting him into the sky and letting him go to fall somewhere nearby. Enormous thunder boomed. “Oh, God! Did you see that?” I called to folks in the car, “He was electrified, enlightened.” A girl-child was at my side. She asked, “What happened to him?”
“Oh, honey,” I said. “He was lifted into the sky. It’s time to move!” I put the car in “drive” and squealed around. I woke up. I don’t know if I was headed away from or into the eye of the storm.
Vertigo. Reprise.
You’ll spend your life believing yourself to be deathly afraid of high places when, in fact, your real issue is with falling or even jumping and is therefore only tangentially attached to the notion of the high place that you’ve set in your mind as so cripplingly off-putting.
Eventually you’ll come to know that it’s not even the falling or the jumping that should frighten you but rather the nauseatingly abrupt landing that accelerates toward you at a rate of 9.8 meters per second squared. The tragedy is that you’ll soak in this wisdom for a second or two at most before it goes back to being a secret again.
And so that’s one of the ways that each of us guards a world’s greatest secret.
My Wicked Wicked Ways
I actually laughed out loud when I came to this passage in a New York Times article about the four Americans killed on their yacht by Somali pirates:
The Adams had been sailing the world on the Quest, a Davidson 58 Pilot House Sloop, that they had custom built for $1.5 million in New Zealand in 2001, using money they earned from selling their homes.
“When designing the yacht, we had to make sure that the yacht trimmed well when hundreds of Bibles were stored at the beginning of each adventure: It amounted to tons of weight,” said Kevin Dibley, the owner of Dibley Marine Ltd., who was brought on to assist the project.
Well, anyone who has moved as many times as I have could have seen it coming: If they hadn’t loaded down their vessel with four tons of Bibles, they might not have been dragging along at ten knots or whatever and might have outrun the pirates!
(Whom I expect were damned disappointed on discovering the yacht’s cargo.)
Historic Property for Sale
Old Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas.
Ten-plus bedrooms. Seven-plus bathrooms. Twenty-five thousand square feet.Three-plus acres.
Kinda pricey for the likes of us, though. Listed at $975K.
But maybe we could bargain ‘em down. The seller is described as “very motivated.”
Oh, and there’s this: “The fort sits on the banks of the Rio Grande River across from Ciudad Juarez.”
Spelled Cuidad Juarez in the listing. Indeed.
Today at the hospital cafeteria
The woman next to me ate a baked potato with butter, cottage fries, and banana pudding (from which she carefully removed the wafers). I couldn’t tell what she was drinking, but my money’s on lemonade. Her entire meal was cream-colored.
Save celluloid, for art’s sake
When Tacita Dean went to make a 16mm film for Tate Modern she was shocked to find the lab had stopped using it. Why can’t digital and celluloid coexist?, she asks.
The case is Bond v. United States
It stems from a crime of passion in the small town of Lansdale, Pa., some 30 miles north of Philadelphia, where, in 2006, microbiologist Carol Bond discovered that her best friend was pregnant — with Bond’s husband’s child.
Using highly toxic chemicals — some stolen from the chemical lab where she worked, some purchased online — Bond attempted to poison her former friend, Myrlinda Hayes. On 24 separate occasions, she spread the chemicals on Hayes’ car, doorknob, and mailbox. (Hayes emerged from the experience uninjured, with the exception of a burned thumb.)
“Domestic disputes resulting from marital infidelities and culminating in a thumb burn are appropriately handled by local law enforcement authorities.”
A decision in Bond v. United States is expected by June.
Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a $150K Slo-Mo Video Camera
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you combined the eerie, delicate beauty of liquid sculpture photography with the hotel-room-trashing excess of Las Vegas, sports videographer Tom Guilmette is your hero. He locked himself in his room at the Palms Casino with an ultra high-speed Phantom Flex camera and stayed up all night splashing, spitting, spraying and breaking things at 2,564 frames per second.
I want one of those.
(via @gary_hustwit)
