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Ceci n'est pas un font.
But when it comes to font fashion, it's not enough to kvetch. This swanky Futura tee says it all, telling the world that you're down with the Bau-hizzy.
Putting the Sans in Comic Sans
This site says what we're all thinking about the vile "Comic Sans" typeface. But in the spirit of constructive criticism, they also provide several alternate comic fonts for those who still want that yard-sale directions / veterinary receptionist aphorisms. One criticism: Ditch the splash page, bancomicsans &em; that's as bad as the font.
A9 Yellow pages
Somehow Amazon's A9 people took pictures of every (?) street in Manhattan. So when you look up Burritoville on their search engine, you can See their storefront and actually walk up 9th avenue. Now I really don't have to get up off my ass.
As seen in rite-aid
This warning is wrong in so many ways. If you have to tell your 3-year-old not to play with your love-cuffs, maybe it's time to rethink your priorities. And really, your 5-year-old may not be emotionally mature enough to understand the concept of love-cuffs either. In fact, it's questionable whether he should even be dating.
How long things take:
9 years: Apollo Moon project, including Mercury and Gemini programs.
5 years: Estimated top bound of time required to repair switchbox, Chambers Street station.
4 years: American involvement in WWII
4 years: Construction of IRT (Harlem to Town Hall service)
3 years: Lower estimated bound of time required to repair switchbox, Chambers Street station.
9 months: Time to develop human being, from conception to birth.
6-9 months: Current estimated time to resume C train service.
Stop ordering those Nightline transcripts.
Now Google makes video searchable. The beauty is the how: They use closed captioning data. Sweet!
And why not pander?
Here's my list of 2005 predictions:
- XMLHTTPRequest will be the thing that makes applications work online. Google's killer apps Google Suggest and Gmail will make it so.
- bittorrent will become the sine qua non file sharing tool. Of the bittorrent sites that have been sued by the MPAA, a select few will fight and lose, but others will develop technology to encrypt and anonymize the process. In the legal world, Expect to see it take the place of traditional mirrors in the case of breaking video memes. (BoingBoing's been very good about this) A few of my non-webby friends have mentioned it off-the-cuff, so it's becoming household.
- Successful small website design will revolve around Google optimization and content management. See a continuing trend towards standards-based design, and an increasingly typographical (typophilic?) treatment of websites, favoring content over gaud.
- That said, the new sins of web design will be excesses of these features. Expect to see ridiculously unnecessary headers, catchy document titles, and a bit of pandering to would-be linkers. (overall this will still be good, but the Google-friendlier web might look a bit more like the New York Post than we'd like to imagine)
- The return of the diagonal stripe, in both web design and fashion. It starts within the hallowed confines of 8-bit isometric nostalgia but slowly becomes a non-ironic staple of design, much like the oversized belt buckle. I hate diagonal stripes and weep for the future.
- Designers go apeshit for Aqua-inspired buttons.
- Slow, tectonic shifting towards #ffffff. Desaturation of color schemes on portal sites. Yahoo seems to have done it over the last year or so -- others will follow. MSN will be last.
- The last powermac owner fails to become sufficiently indignant when he sees dithering, and the web-safe palette dies a quiet death.
- Normals finally get the message and install Firefox because their Nerd tells them to. And lo, the popups stop.
- Spyware and adware detection packages go mainstream because grandma's seen one too many dildo.
- At new price point, Mac Mini makes dent in PC market. PC users slowly realize they don't need Windows.
What mighty contests arise from bad cliches
Lazy writing and ambitious PR line up to give you the miracle of googling '2005 "year of the"'. Corporate blogs (ewww), DOM (well, yeah, gmail has deemed it so), the quadruple play, RSS, and of course hype.
This one's actually interesting.
Not your Big Brother's female eunuch.
Germaine Greer joined the cast of a reality TV show. Then she walked off.
Virgin Mary? That's Child's Play
I found out about Hantula's Museum of Food Anomalies when Bob posted his lucky duck-shaped peanut. Enjoy genetically mutated grapes and honey combs.
Getting Things Done, The Hipster Way
Creepy synchronicity: I just read this book on getting things done, and now Merlin of 5ives fame has created an ingenious, low-fi implementation of the system. The book itself remains tech-agnostic, allowing the readers to use whatever medium works for them. So Merlin's system is not so farfetched. (I have a feeling this link is propogating mostly because it's a cute name, but the system could work wonders for the right analogophile)
I highly recommend the book, by the way. It's given me the courage to alphabetize my filing cabinet.
2005 is Year of the Theme Blog
Doesn't that sound like the sort of gripping title that would get me a job in Wired or some such place? Well anyway, I just came across this great blog about sleeping called Circadiana. Enjoy.
If Geneva convention were really quaint...
And you just had to torture someone, what music would you use? Chunklet has the mixes.
Things I should be able to do with my Treo but can't.
- See iCal data on web server from Sunbird.
- Send contacts to some web file for sync with Thunderbird.
- Better to-do management, especially in palm desktop (or if sync ever happens, sunbird)
- Talk to gmail by having a Mail program that can pick a port.
- Have an AIM client that doesn't force a hard boot
But how do you really fucking feel?
I love a good rant, especially one about red state subsidies.
CCCP Has a Posse
So I just got spammed by rednews.org. Perhaps I should say I got Glorious People's Meat Producted by them. But they seem awfully sincere. And their message board is the wonderfully retro Soviet-empire.com, which contains such bon-mots as:
Red Dawn is so badass. Even a die hard Socialist like myself can appreciate quality 80's action flicks. Sure it's propaganda, but that's half the fun! When the Wolverines execute Darrell, the traitor, it is one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history.The look of the site screams tongue-and-cheek nostalgia, but then there are posts which attempt to positively revise Soviet history. That one, as far as I can tell, might be the communist version of holocaust denial. I'm really not sure what to make of it all. Thoughts?
MPAA-resistant nooks and crannies
Here's the list of which torrent sites have been removed, and which are still operational.
Wow!
Before the glorious Atkins Revolution, Susan Powter's reign of fat-free terror had Frito-lay and Clark W. Grizwold working 24/7 to come up with a fat substitute. They came up with "Wow," Olestra-filled chips which promised to grease the works and strip essential vitamins from one's chute. Now scientists, bless their hearts, have determined that the stuff might just be removing toxins too. Including Dioxin. And lest we forget, that's the stuff that uglified Yushenko. So clearly if you don't like Wow, you hate freedom.
Via the always-excellent Number One Hit Song.
In defense of shallowness:
Bookslut shows that it's actually quite easy to judge a book by its cover.
Etymology of Pants
One would not expect a word for a modern article of clothing to come ultimately from the name of a 4th-century Roman Catholic saint, but that is the case with the word pants. It can be traced back to Pantaleon, the patron saint of Venice. He became so closely associated with the inhabitants of that city that the Venetians were popularly known as Pantaloni. Consequently, among the commedia dell'arte's stock characters the representative Venetian (a stereotypically wealthy but miserly merchant) was called Pantalone, or Pantalon in French. In the mid-17th century the French came to identify him with one particular style of trousers, a style which became known as pantaloons in English. Pantaloons was later applied to another style that came into fashion in the late 18th century, tight-fitting garments that had begun to replace knee breeches. After that pantaloons was used to refer to trousers in general. The abbreviation of pantaloons to pants met with some resistance at first; it was considered vulgar and, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, ???a word not made for gentlemen, but ???gents.????? First found in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, pants has replaced the ???gentleman's word?? in English and has lost all obvious connection to Saint Pantaleon.
Via dictionary.com.
