Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education. “We have a very focused and intense effort across the board to set America back a generation, at least, for education, health, research, climate policy.”
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Thing I did not know I was looking for (but totally was): a deep dive into ASCII rendering. Super interesting!
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The gang at Present & Correct found a cache of pre-war tourist maps of Japan while rummaging around in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō used book district. They photographed them for a new self-published book called Paper Trails.
Tags: books · design · Japan · maps · Paper Trails
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The Copyrightability of Fonts Revisited by Matthew Butterick, a type designer & copyright litigator. “If a court were asked to directly consider the copyrightability of an ordinary digital font, it would likely rule in the negative.”
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Clint Smith visits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. “The goal of the sites is to force visitors to confront the violence of the past without the counterweight of a more uplifting narrative to assuage their distress.”
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Bruce Springstein wrote & recorded a song about Minnesota’s battle against tyranny: Streets Of Minneapolis. “Our city’s heart and soul persists / Through broken glass and bloody tears / On the streets of Minneapolis.”
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In one of his final on-camera interviews, David Lynch recounts going to the very first Beatles concert in the US in 1964.
I ended up going to this concert. I didn’t really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it w...
Why do RSS readers look like email clients? “When we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.”
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For his project called Homo Mobilis, Martin Roemers travelled the globe and photographed people with their cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You can see a selection of the photos on Roemers’ website, at The Guardian, or in his forthcoming book, Homo Mobilis (Amazon). (via @steveportigal.bsky.social)
Tags: cars · Martin Roemers · photography
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Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others: Perception, pattern-seeking, and the role of neurodivergence in a failing civilisation. “Collapse awareness is fundamentally a pattern-recognition event. Some people are wired for that.”
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Kristen Radtke remembers Alex Pretti. “I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles…was my childhood best friend.”
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“Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage.” (via sidebar)
Tags: design
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An impressive isometric map of NYC,
built with AI agents. “I’m particularly interested in scaling up the grindy repetitive tasks that make many ideas practically impossible.”
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Sesame Street has uploaded a bunch of classic episodes to YouTube that are free to watch, including the very first episode from 1969, the one where Mister Rogers visits, and the episode where Mr. Snuffulupagus is finally revealed. The most recent one was uploaded just a ...
You Need A Kitchen Slide Rule. “Kitchen work is all about proportions, and nothing beats the slide rule for proportions.”
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Whoa, this is a fantastic archive of tangible media objects — like gramophone records, punch cards, 8-tracks, floppy disks, etc. (via unsung)
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The Comics Journal’s obituary for Scott Adams. “Dilbert’s tone shifted during the 2010s, punching down at targets, mocking and belittling societal shifts and perceived “political correctness,” with more cynical, even bitter humor…”
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This video from December is about a pair of teenaged ICE trackers. “Armed with phone and body cameras, Ben and Sam patrol the Chicago suburbs in hopes of tracking ICE agents and filming raids they see as unwarranted and unjustified.”
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This guy built an autonomous flying umbrella (powered by drones) that automagically follows you around in the rain. (A possible counter to a personal raincloud?)
For his Spurious Correlations project, Tyler Vigen compares data sets that are the very definition of “correlation is not causation”. For instance, the number of Walmart stores worldwide correlates very strongly with the current distance between the Earth & Saturn. Or Google searches for “avocado toast” closely tracks biomass power generated in the Philippines.
Tags: infoviz · Tyler Vigen
“There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.”
For a project called Tag Clouds, street artist Mathieu Tremblin paints over graffiti tags and makes them more legible.
The result looks like when Word says that the Hardkaze and Aerosol fonts are used in the document you’re trying to open but are missing from your computer and you click OK to replace them with whatever’s available. I think the font above is Arial, which is perfect. I also like this faux-watermark piece he did:
[This is a vintage post originally from Jul 2016.]
Tags: art · graffiti · Mathieu Tremblin · timeless posts
“AI skeptics need to update their priors: Plenty of cause for concern, plenty of room to hit these companies for unethical behavior, resource demands, etc, but we are so, so far past the era of ‘stochastic parrots’”.
Vimeo was recently acquired by a private equity firm and you know what comes next: Vimeo Lays Off ‘Most’ of Its Staff, Allegedly Includes ‘the Entire Video Team’.
Your Friends Are Still Acting Like Everything is Normal in America. What Do You Do? “The first obligation we all have is an epistemic one: It’s to know what kind of reality we are actually inhabiting.” (gift link)
Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education. “We have a very focused and intense effort across the board to set America back a generation, at least, for education, health, research, climate policy.”
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