Omega Point

Blogathon 2009: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

So I’m work­ing on a single-serving site to finally make use of my other domain. Func­tion­ally, it’ll be a busi­ness card of sorts, fea­tur­ing a more coher­ent bio, with links to the var­i­ous ways I can be con­tacted online.

Ulti­mately, I sus­pect I’ll roll this site into it.

Any­way, while the art style I’m using is very, very dif­fer­ent than this, both use a nice slab serif type­face called Rock­well. While select­ing it, I came across this this video I liked from a cou­ple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fic­tion, in type form.

Blogathon 2009: The Typography of Idiocracy

So I’m a giant typog­ra­phy nerd, as any of my friends can attest:

Me: “Hey, a friend of a friend designed the font they’re using in that logo!“
Every sin­gle other per­son I know: “Yeah, that’s super, Catherine.”

As such, I enjoyed this analy­sis of the fonts and brand­ing fea­tured in Mike Judge’s 2007 eugeni­cist cult favourite Idiocracy.

“Haulin’ Ass, Get­ting Paid”: finally, the reli­gious right and “sep­a­ra­tion of church and state” peo­ple can agree on a slo­gan to print on currency.

A quick syn­op­sis of Idioc­racy: stu­pid peo­ple out­breed the yup­pies and nerds. Con­se­quently, the aver­age IQ drops steadily. 500 years later… FOX News employs sex­u­al­ized mod­els as anchors, all enter­tain­ment is lowest-common denom­i­na­tor, and cloth­ing is cov­ered with cor­po­rate logos. Er, wait a minute…

So the joke runs out pretty quickly, but it’s still an enter­tain­ing movie, if only for the sets and one-liners: “You went to law school at Costco!?”

Ahh, Star­bucks, home of Exotic Cof­fee for Men.

Any­way, I ref­er­enced Vancouver’s own typog­ra­pher Ray Lara­bie above because many of the design choices in Idioc­racy look like his 1990s free fonts. Which is kinda cool, actually.

You should read the review, Idio­cratic Design at Under­Con­sid­er­a­tion now!

LOLcat art show? I am definitely going to this.

Read­ers, I ask you: how many times have each of us stared wist­fully out into space, lost in thought, hop­ing against hope that one day, some­how, there would be a local exhi­bi­tion of pen-and-ink LOLcat-inspired art? I know that I myself have lost too many hours to count. Finally, just when things seemed at their bleak­est, with moral­ist crack­downs on LOL­cat macro images tak­ing place across the globe, the day has come at last!

Van­cou­verites, LOL­cat con­nois­seurs and art enthu­si­asts rejoice!

This Mon­day, July 21st, Clack­Clack Empire in Vancouver’s Chi­na­town hosts the open­ing recep­tion for I can’t believe we both got cats: LOL­cat art, fea­tur­ing works by Seattle-based artist Mar­i­anne Goldin! Sweet!

For details, check out the list­ing on Upcom­ing, or con­sult the artist’s state­ment. I liked this part:

LOL­cats can take on a mer­i­to­cratic tone, since not all cats are made equal — an ideal model oozes with pathos and pho­to­gene­ity. There are even Weber­ian “ideal types” to be found — styles and fam­i­lies of LOL­cat: the terse Zen koan, the Invis­i­ble (fill in the blank), and the var­i­ous motifs of Ceil­ing Cat. Many instances use cats to alle­go­rize human frus­tra­tions with technology.

You should def­i­nitely come. It’s free! Also, LOL­cat art.

I CAN HAS HYPOTHESIS?

Just recently, I was lament­ing the fact that there are likely orders of mag­ni­tude more peo­ple who under­stand the “turn it off and then on again” method of trou­bleshoot­ing than the sci­en­tific method.

To back up my the­ory, this month’s Wired Mag­a­zine sees edi­tor Chris Ander­son con­fi­dently stroll into Crazy­land with his essay The End of The­ory, assert­ing that the age of the sci­en­tific method is over, replac­ing hypoth­e­sis and test­ing with sta­tis­ti­cal number-crunching of mas­sive databases.

Need­less to say, there exist a vari­ety of reac­tions to this idea, most of which can be sum­ma­rized by “Wait, what now?”

The Daily Galaxy’s cri­tique of Anderson’s arti­cle was par­tic­u­larly effec­tive, point­ing out that recog­ni­tion of cor­re­la­tion is not the goal of sci­ence; rather, it pro­vides a start­ing point for sci­ence to begin from:

Notic­ing a cor­re­la­tion between fac­tors is the START of sci­ence, not the end.  When you see that two things affect each other and ask “Why?”, you’re a sci­en­tist.  When you just record a mil­lion tri­als you’re an accoun­tant.  When you say “It hap­pens because that’s the way things are” you’re either a mother answer­ing a five-year-old’s for­ti­eth ques­tion in a row, or unin­ter­ested, or pos­si­bly religious.

The “you are not qual­i­fied to make this asser­tion” style of crit­i­cism tends to bug me, but in this case, it seems par­tic­u­larly accurate:

This com­bines with his sec­ond error: Belief that the Inter­net is the entire world.  This is an easy mis­take for some­body like a Wired edi­tor to make, but the fact remains that if you walked down a street shout­ing “LOLCAT” most peo­ple wouldn’t know what the hell you were talk­ing about.  This is impor­tant.  In fact, a species where every­body knows about LOLCATS is one whose via­bil­ity needs severe re-evaluation.

Catherine is employed and blogging about Art Spiegelman

So I’m blog­ging for my employ­ers, the Mas­ters of Dig­i­tal Media Pro­gram. I scored tick­ets for the Van­cou­ver Art Gallery/Cen­tre for Dig­i­tal Media (that’s us!) joint speak­ers series, KRAZY! Talk Indus­try Giants, held in con­junc­tion with the KRAZY! comics + video games + anime + other stuff exhi­bi­tion at VAG, and so, I’ve been blog­ging my thoughts about each lecture.

By agree­ment with my boss, these posts will not con­sist of a giant sar­cas­tic rant about the use of excla­ma­tion marks in names of proper nouns, how to end a sen­tence with ‘KRAZY!’, nor the thir­teen dif­fer­ent fonts Tick­et­mas­ter used on the tick­ets to the events. This last one in par­tic­u­lar will be tough. One of them is Comic Sans.

The first post –fea­tur­ing my thoughts on what a gen­er­ally all-around swell guy Art Spiegel­man is– went up a few days ago. Com­ing up, Tim John­son, M/M Paris and Will Wright.

Do check it out, won’t you?

Jack Bauer wouldn’t have stood for that!

I thought this was kind of inter­est­ing: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Dou­glas”. I don’t just mean the cul­ture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepi­ness that would ulti­mately lead to the down­fall of the RCMP Secu­rity Ser­vice and the sub­se­quent cre­ation of CSIS, Canada’s mod­ern intel­li­gence agency. (For those of you out­side Canada, CSIS is known for such classy oper­a­tions as help­ing to form the white nation­al­ist Her­itage Front and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the USAUK ECHELON pro­gram. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actu­ally found inter­est­ing was that I’d never made the con­nec­tion that Don­ald Suther­land was Tommy Dou­glas’ son-in-law. I knew who they both were indi­vid­u­ally, and I knew Don­ald was father of Kiefer, but I never actu­ally asso­ci­ated the two.

When I men­tioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to under­stand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact impor­tant? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its impor­tance in the arti­cle or in our con­ver­sa­tion, but that got me think­ing — did it actu­ally mat­ter which he actu­ally meant? Why would some­one con­sider that sort of trivia impor­tant? More­over, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Dou­glas was. How­ever, sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple watch 24. By asso­ci­at­ing “Tommy Dou­glas”, a rel­a­tively unpop­u­lar brand, how­ever impor­tant a fig­ure he may have been, with a highly pop­u­lar, well-known brand like “Kiefer Suther­land”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audi­ence, see­ing the man’s grand­son hack­saw off ter­ror­ists’ heads every week, have formed an emo­tional famil­iar­ity with him. See­ing the vast num­ber of peo­ple: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a sin­gle day — causes us to become inter­ested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pur­sue pop­u­lar pop­ulist — placed in pop-cultural con­text for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Moun­ties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?”

Pre­dictably, Ze Frank already spent time think­ing about this stuff… pre­sum­ably so I didn’t have to.

(Orig­i­nal link via Rob Cot­ting­ham)