Eccentric Flower:200911/Sublimely Ridiculous
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Sublimely Ridiculous
Every week lately, Go Fug Yourself has been taking a particularly scary photo and asking their readers to make poetic observations on it, then picking the winners. This week's batch is especially good, unless you're Robert, in which case you get a pass as a conscientous objector.
Leopard seal says to photographer, "Dude, if you don't learn how to hunt you are never going to survive out here," and tries to show him how to catch penguins.
Other people who are crazy like my wife. She sent me the URL of this article this morning exactly seven milliseconds before I could send it to her. We each found it in a different place and the telepathy kicked right in.
This guy's weblog is fabulous, but I'm still not convinced. Some typography mistakes are glaring. Others are not. In general, the public doesn't know and doesn't care and anyone who does care that much needs to go find another hobby. Nonelvis: "What bothers me is that shows that try to get all the other details right still often get the typography wrong." Well, that's because laymen notice when the clothes and the cars are wrong, but only typographers notice when the type is wrong - unless it's really blatant.
I think there's an important distinction to be made here between a font that is merely anachronistic - i.e. hadn't been invented, or wasn't used that way, at the time the show is set - and one which is actually inappropriate for its context. Arial and Chicago, for example, are inappropriate anywhere but on a screen (and some of us think Chicago is inappropriate anywhere and is the worst design decision the Macintosh team ever made). Lucida Handwriting is also very obviously a modern screen font, and a fairly unattractive one. In his "Mad Men" article, the use of Lucida Handwriting in a mockup advertisement the opening titles would, in fact, be something glaring enough that I'd notice - it would bother me, but because of inappropriateness, not anachronism. Everything else in his article is veriest nitpicking that no one but a typographer would notice.
Slumped pizza. Sometimes geeky science jokes are appreciably funny even if you're not especially well-versed in that science. In this case, geology.
Ten geeky laws that should exist but don't. I disagree with numbers 5 and 9, but I recognize that other people are susceptible to them (sadly). As for #10, if it's true, then it's kind of a Pyrrhic victory, innit?
Iain:
So ... how is that Pyrrhic, exactly? (I would also love to know why Montana and Tennessee, of all places, trust Charlie Gibson so much, but that's nothing you could answer.) And I think #9 needs refinement -- to wit, nobody ever said that anyone but the person who raises the issue has to find it interesting.
Seriously, the guy who was complaining about Gill Sans, which existed and could have been used that way at the time, is being excessively picayune. After all, in theory, the people in Mad Men are trying to be a little fashion-forward, as it were.
and used an old Compugraphic with the spinning drum with the film carrying the font mounted on it (and the 8" floppies and optional paper tape)
I'd completely forgotten that I had a job that made me use something like that for a while. Not quite like that -- no floppies or paper tape (that came later, on an entirely different machine). I don't even remember what the job actually was; I just remember the machine itself. (I vaguely remember that it seemed really peculiar that a clerical job would involve this sort of thing. Something about having to be incredibly careful with the film and ink -- I think maybe it had been donated, so we used what we had.)
-- 00:22, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
I've no idea what particular job you were playing with that would have had devices like that, but in high school I helped a friend of mine get an old AB Dick 300 press running: This was a full-on single plate offset press for office-use. Sat on a desk, although you'd also have to have space for a plate burner and processor, and then probably a stat camera and a light table for stripping.
I later worked in a print shop and for one short-run job used paper plates which were shot directly from the original, so there may have been an integrated device to take an original and turn out a plate that could do a few hundred copies.
Back in the days of mimeograph, pre Xerox, if you wanted to distribute your documents you'd run 'em off on an offset press, stinky fumes and mess and all. I could totally imagine something that had maybe a line buffer for corrections, and ran out text to be pasted up.
-- 01:46, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
My god, I thought ProfRobert and I were the only people posting here who'd ever used one of those old CG machines! We had one with the drum, but used it only for headlines; there were two newer models driven by ATEX machines we used to typeset the paper 99% of the time.
Man, I feel old now.
-- 02:11, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
Just curious... Does Rule 34 apply to all of these the same way "in bed" does with fortune cookies?
-- 14:44, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
Well, let's see ... for #2, I'm sure I've read porn that tramples all over fond memories of a book/film; for #10, see all the political RPS online (still trying to scrub my brain of all memories of Cheney/Rumsfeld); and for #6, I think I've written that story, though it wasn't about Mythbusters.
-- 15:15, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
Nonelvis, did you actually work on the Pacesetters? They had optical glass discs for each font. I had the distinction, such as it was, of night editing the last issue we put out on them. We had the Atex front-end system in place and an RDII box (with a "Flush After Use" sign from the headliner taped to it) as the interface with the pacesetters. (The RDII box simulated the information on paper tape, which is how we used to typeset the paper before the Atex system. Back then, you'd hand the copy to Lillian the 90-word-per-minute typist, who'd generate a roll of paper tape for each story.) The aforementioned headliner ran on belts about a yard long that you'd affix to the round drum inside the machine.
And that was the last time in my life that I could speak technical-geek about anything.
-- 17:18, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
Nah, the Pacesetters were gone by the time I got there. We had the 8400, the 8600 no one had ever been able to get ATEX to talk to, and the old 7200 for headlines in wacky display fonts.
-- 18:27, 17 November 2009 (GMT)
Iain, perhaps Pyrrhic was not quite the right word. What I was getting at was, "Oh, the geeks may have won, sure, but look what that's accomplished."
-- 17:51, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
DanLyke:
As someone who's set type out of a California job case, and used an old Compugraphic with the spinning drum with the film carrying the font mounted on it (and the 8" floppies and optional paper tape), I don't care. You could replace most fonts with 10pt Courier and I'd not blink.
Not only that, but I don't care that explosions don't go "boom" in space, parsecs are a measure of distance not time, I may not give a damn about the rest of the movie but I'll cheer at "this is a Unix system, I know this!", and I'm willing to suspend belief for any number of other details where I know the reality and the film-makers have glossed over or ignored it as long as they're telling a good story.
-- 23:55, 16 November 2009 (GMT)