Stuff Chris thinks about
Saw this sticker on the back of a car when I was out and about today. The design I saw was a little different; dark blue symbols instead of colored. I recreated it and made it more colorful, but it’s not my idea. I don’t know who came up with this design. I like it, though.
Cryptic brevity is the soul of wit.
One of the podcasts I listen to is The Journal, from the Wall Street Journal. Today: Trapped in the Strait of Hormuz, regarding the 20,000 sailors stuck, for months, unable to pass through the strait.
Frustrating and deeply boring is just the beginning. Often without cell service, most of them rely on journalists for news of what’s actually going on with their situation. Some are facing a shortage of food and basic supplies. And worse, smaller carriers are starting to go bankrupt, abandoning the ships entirely—and the people on them.
The most haunting line is at the end:
We were talking to officials about, like, do you consider these people hostages, right? Because in some ways, they are stuck in the Persian Gulf. Iran is not letting them go home. Aren’t they kind of like hostages in a way?
And the way one [government official] pushed back was to say, no, hostages are valuable. Governments want to get hostages back.
Horrifying.
Nobody is really putting a priority on these people. We talk a lot about the oil. Like when is the oil going to start flowing through the Strait again, so that we can go back to paying lower gas prices?
…the people who make our modern way of life possible, these seafarers who bring us our oil and our goods, they are forgotten…they’re not even as important as the oil or whatever other commodity we’re hoping to get out of the Strait of Hormuz.
Random #Wikipedia browsing brought me to this: wild horses.
Wild horses live in herds with a social hierarchy, formed by a dominant adult male or sometimes multiple males (harem stallions), as well as several mares and their offspring. The harem stallion aggressively defends his herd/harem against rival males.
Sure, that’s about what you’d expect.
Upon reaching adulthood, both male and female horses disperse to other herds to avoid inbreeding, with young adult males also forming bachelor groups when they are around 3 years of age. In bachelor groups male horses engage in play and ritual behavior, with the group forming a hierarchy.
…apparently wild horses have frats.
(To be fair, the frat bros I knew in college behaved pretty much like wild horses, so this may not be the revelation I think it is.)
Hi all. I’ve set up a politics-free RSS feed that does not include any posts from the Politics category or Politics tag. I don’t plan to talk about politics a lot on Shortform, since like most of us, I don’t want to think about it any more than I have to. That said, current issues affect all of us and are unavoidable, so I will be posting thoughts on them from time to time.
Worth noting: the politics-free feed doesn’t guarantee a totally politics-free experience, since those topics may come up in the context of other categories, such as podcasts. Generally, though, I’ll restrict political commentary to the aforementioned tag/category.
Today’s #podcast explores the saga of how a prominent Western democracy found itself headed by a buffoon with bizarre yellow hair, a morally bankrupt lifestyle, a reputation for chaos, and such an ability to escape consequences for his many screwups that nicknames for him included the word “teflon”. He was also given to schoolyard insults: crude epithets such as “arrogant self-aggrandizing swankpot epiphyte” and “sniveling disloyal invertebrate”.
No, not that guy. The other guy.
British Scandal delves into the life and times of Boris Johnson. It’s a ride.
You have been on this page for 60 seconds. You scrolled 77% of the way down. You never left this tab. We would have noticed if you had. Your cursor moved 69 times. You paused once for 10 seconds — longer than anywhere else. We were not counting. We were always counting.
sinceyouarrived.world is an eerie, Black-Mirror-esque…zine, I guess? based on data. The latest issue, Taken, is about what the sites you visit know about you.
I have a pretty good understanding of what websites know about me, and I was still taken aback by this:
Battery: 52% · not charging
Your battery is at 52%. It is not charging. In 2015, researchers demonstrated that battery level — combined with discharge time — was unique enough to track users across websites for up to thirty minutes. Your exact percentage, right now, is a fingerprint. Firefox removed this API in 2016. Your browser still exposes it.
Very proud to be featured in this month’s Fresh Fonts newsletter. As I’ve mentioned before, the typefaces on Shortform—MD Lórien and MD Nichrome—both came from Fresh Fonts; Noemi recommended them as a specific pairing.
I was building Shortform at the time and trying to settle on the typography. I’d tried a couple of different typefaces, and while they were nice, I didn’t feel like they worked. The moment I tested the Mass-Driver ones in the inspector, I knew I was looking at the right combination. Something about it just clicked.
I don’t even know how long I’ve been a member of Fresh Fonts. It’s a great resource—monthly free font, highlights of new releases, and links to free and open-source fonts that I didn’t know about. Highly recommend it.
Just noticed that #Apple refreshed the alphanumeric symbols in its Unicode character set. I’m seeing the new characters on iOS 17 and macOS 13 (Sonoma). The following examples are from yaytext.com (colored backgrounds removed for legibility):
Looks like they also updated the cursive and blackletter characters as well.
That’s a pretty subtle change. I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere. Apple has a history of paying attention to small refinements, so it wouldn’t be out of character for them to just do this because the new letters look better.
I wonder, though, if Apple was also considering how people commonly use these characters for bold and italic text in situations where text formatting isn’t supported, like social media posts. The earlier alphanumeric symbols often don’t look great when used in sentences—they’re choppy and irregular. Apple’s new symbols look a lot smoother.
That’s not necessarily a good thing. If the earlier Unicode characters looked rough, it’s because they were never meant to be applied to language at all; they’re intended to be mathematical symbols, used mainly in equations. Note in the images, for example, how the kerning is off on the lowercase italic serif f. That’s not really an f—it’s U+1D453: Mathematical Italic Small F, used for functions. (Ab)using these characters to apply styles to regular text is bad for accessibility and you should not do that.
Still, I’m impressed. I particularly love the redesigned #monospace. I wish that was its own typeface. Good classic typewriter faces are hard to find; I’ve tried. Most of the ones I’ve found are either (1) based on grungy scans of actual typewriter lettering—fine for novelty designs and attempts at period-specific documents, not good for longform content—or (2) variations of Courier. Classic #typewriter faces—the ones that use ball terminals and look like they came from an Underwood Number 5, not a Selectric—are pretty rare.
The nice ones I’m aware of:
It’s true that the Selectric did offer some classic faces, like Pica and Elite. Most of the Selectric’s typefaces look pretty modern though.
Any video that’s about somebody seeing something weird on Google Maps and digging into it fascinates me. Christophe Haubursin’s show Tunnel Vision investigates the purpose behind some odd patterns in the Iranian desert.
Something about the style of the video felt strangely familiar to me, so I looked over the other videos Haubursin—a senior producer for #Vox’s video team—created for Vox. Sure enough, he did What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?, which is also highly worth watching.
I think the satellite and street-view imagery provided by Google Maps is one of the most under-appreciated resources on the internet. Similar to #Wikipedia, most of us probably use it primarily when we need to look up something specific, but you really could—and I do—spend hours just browsing it. It’s a view of the world—the entire planet!—that even just forty years ago would have seemed near-godlike in scope and power.
Apple Music has a surprisingly wide selection of Wallace and Gromit theme song covers, and today I’m listening to all of them:
And of course there’s this one-hour version of the original main theme. (Not sure if this is consistent enough to be a rule, but it does appear to be the case that for a lot of popular songs/themes, someone has done a one-hour version of them: see X-Files, Star Trek, etc.)