DamienG:
With the 8-bit system fonts post being so popular I just had to jump right in and look at the system fonts available on the 16-bit machines!
DamienG:
My love of typography originated in the 80′s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts on low-resolution displays.
Beautiful stuff.
We’ve done some cursory checks on the data to ensure its sanity but, since we ourselves are not sane, we cannot make any guarantees.
Safari Icon, etched in glass.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the principles behind iOS 7’s new aesthetic. What are we left with after stripping away all the fake textures? Only two legitimate materials, Glass and Light.
So I attempted to translate that idea into an etched glass interpretation of Safari’s icon. The effect would require iOS 7 to support transparency in its icons though. I hope they do. I think it would mesh well with the overall look and feel, and I think we’d see some impressive icon designs.
As I lay awake in bed last night (and by “late” I mean almost three in the morning) my mind decided to reconcile my disdain for iOS 7 by peering beneath the veneer to the structural foundations.
After eliminating all the fakes, iOR 7 is comprised of only two legitimate textures, Glass and Light.
Information is organized in a clear hierarchy against an abstract backdrop. This is expressed through the property of depth.
Interactions with that information are express through the property of physics at the appropriate depth in the hierarchy.
It’s about making a digital experience visceral.
All previous attempts were through disingenuous visual tricks, rather than legitimacy.
Ultimately iOS 7 is an attempt to elevate a digital world beyond cheap mimicry of ours to a place where it stands on its own.”
An iOS 7 review in five tweets.
I tried, I really tried, but I can’t stand iOS7. It’s sterile and boring and bland. What once was a design playground has died. ★
I’ve watched some videos and I understand the choices Apple made. I get it. It’s still terrible.
They killed the fun that iOS used to be. ★
They preach clarity yet WTF is that box supposed to mean? I’m trying to download my songs. Did it work? Did it fail? ★
Yeah, yeah, “beta”, I know. I’m talking fundamentals here. This is the language they’re using to convey information, yet it’s inscrutable. ★
My hope is that they’re aware and working to fix the language. But Apple is infamous for ignoring outside voices.
Integrity is good. Pride? ★
It’s my understanding that the Universe is ordered according to two fundamental principles: Chaos, and Entropy.
Chaos these days is often considered to be the lack of Order, or even Order’s antagonist. Though originally, the Ancient Greeks who coined the term considered it a dark formlessness from which all life originated.
Entropy, taken to it’s logical conclusion, is also formlessness. Though the grey, bland, everything is perfectly mixed and homogenized kind of formlessness.
Life as we’re experiencing it right now exists between these two extremes of formlessness, in what I consider a paradoxical third extreme. There’s no word for it other than Life itself.
There’s no balance to be obtained here, except in how you experience it, if you even want it, sometimes it’s more fun to embrace the extremities. There’s no order to be found except what you impose upon it, and the laws of physics, but even those are questionable at the right levels, under the right circumstances. And there’s only as much entropy as what you allow to seep in.
As a living, sentient, experiencing being, you’re free, allowed, ENCOURAGED to live. That’s why there’s no meaning to life. That’s because you have to infuse Life with that Meaning yourself. Otherwise you’re not living, you’re barely surviving—you’re formless yourself.
Throughout my life I’d always been encouraged to go away. “Shut up! Go away!”
I dealt with a horrible home life by never being at home unless I needed to or was too exhausted to fight it. I’d often go for a two hour walk around the town because it’s all I could do. During one of those excursions, which I recall was clouded by a particularly dark mood, I saw my grade’s popular girl walking down the sidewalk towards me. Unlike most guys, I wasn’t interested. Even though she lived a block away from me, and we rode the same bus home, I don’t recall if we’d spoken previously to that. But as she passed me by she smiled and said “Hi.” I was struck dumb by her acknowledgement of my existence. Most guys wished they could get that girl to pay attention to them. I wanted nothing more than to shrink farther into oblivion.
I had attempted suicide on a handful of occasions but never went all the way. I didn’t have enough self esteem to do it. I became a ghost instead.
During high school I worked not to merely fit in, but to disappear entirely. Towards the end of my high school career, I once found myself hanging out in the kitchen of a guy I didn’t like with a girl I did and they both remarked that I looked like every other guy out there. Nothing noteworthy whatsoever. I was happy—that’s exactly what I was going for.
In my opinion, parts I-IV of this piece from The Last Psychiatrist are an appetizer to the main course in V, which gets to the heart of the issue.
The most important— her words— advice Sandberg has to offer women is… to choose your husband carefully.
…
Keep in mind, her message is not for future COOs, her message is for the rest of you organ donors who need to be transitioned from 9 to 5 to 8 to 6.
The single greatest obstacle to turning women into fully productive members of the workforce, i.e. batteries, is not men obstructing them but their persistent belief in metaphysics. If the thing that is keeping women out of the underpaid labor force is “family”, then family must go, and if what pulls them towards family is love then love has to be a fantasy.
That. FUCK THAT.
I happen to deeply love my wife and kids. I’ve collapsed in the hallway with them in my arms and cried because they mean the world to me. My family is literally why I’m alive.
To, instead, get in line with a system that wants me to believe that my job is more important than love and family would result in me having nothing better than a mental disorder.
Women aren’t the only ones who are coerced into sacrificing love and family and real meaning in life for a fucking paycheck. And if your job is where you get real meaning out of your life then the best I can do is pity you.
While I have a good job, I’m not married to it. I enjoy the type of work that I do, and I have pride in what I’ve accomplished and where I am professionally, but at the end of the day (which is 5pm) I go where I really belong.
Because there will always be more work to do, and there will not always be more life to live.
