David Lynch's Interview Project just killed about an hour and a half of my day. Sampling bias aside, it seems people around here are in rough shape.
I almost walked out of Avatar after a few moments when I realized the subtitles were set in Papyrus. I have to imagine that Avatar's digital imaging team was not thrilled about the selection either. Maybe they are the ghostwriters behind Papyrus's open letter to James Cameron thanking him for legitimizing a typeface that, until now, was relegated to "New Age spa owners, suburban party planners, and young couples looking to save money by making their own wedding invitations".
An interesting declaration over at SEED Magazine piqued my interest this afternoon. "Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's." As one who occasionally authors things, I thought I'd address some of the ideas put forth in the article.
In our analysis, we considered an author’s text “published” if 100 or more people read it. (Reaching 100 people may seem inconsequential, but new-media messages are often re-broadcast by recipients, and then by their recipients, and so on. In this way, a message can “go viral,” reaching millions.)
Somehow I feel like by Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow miss the point. First off, if 100 people read your tweet, you don't magically become a published author. By that rationale, bathroom graffitists and tattoo inkers are "authors." Only if you want to contort the meaning of the word might this be accurate. Authorship used to entail publishing work (usually written) produced through considerable intellectual effort and thought. Why? Because printing was costly and if your work was going to be disseminated through an expensive resource, it better be worth the read. Publishing today is obviously different, what with on-demand printing and the interwebs lowering the barriers to publishing.
But there's a much bigger difference. Traditional publishing generally went in one direction: from the author to the reader. Today's tweets and blog posts aren't necessarily one-way communication avenues; they're often just segments of a conversation. People engaged in the conversation can reply, re-tweet, comment on, retort or revise. Are they all authors? And look, I'm replying to the article on my blog! Am I an author or is this part of a conversation? Feel free to let me know.
If we've learned anything from the popularity of the Facebook and Twitter, it's that most people prefer to share small (often exceptionally mundane and trivial) pieces of information with people that they know. Grand terms like audience and authorship don't really apply quite as well if your updating your Facebook status to "my dog just pooped in the conference room while we had a client meeting" (true story).
The article continues:
Today, at 0.1 percent authorship, many people are trading privacy for influence. What will it mean when we hit nearly 1 percent next year and nearly 10 percent the year after as the current growth predicts? Governments, businesses, and organizations must adapt to a population that wields increasing individual power.
I love the idea of increasing individual power, but this implication is preposterous. If everyone is influential, no one is influential. Influence requires a disproportionate weight within a community and if everyone weighs the same, who's the influential one? What will happen has already happened -- talent separates, clumping of influence emerges, the conversation gets crowded with noise, it eventually fractures, and the party moves next door with less noise.
Nearly universal authorship won't shape tomorrow's civilization, but a marketplace of accessible conversations will. Having a conversation with a group of friends in a pub is great, but that conversation is ephemeral and largely invisible to the rest of the world. But with the internet serving as an instantaneous communication conduit and faithful stenographer, that conversation has a much greater opportunity to influence the future.
Or, your dog's tendency to embarrass its owner becomes public knowledge.
Sometimes clients provide photos. Often times those photos are in rough shape. Today we addressed a particularly rough-looking image. It appears to be a photograph taken around 1991 with a disposable camera and digitized in 1994 using a fax machine, then JPG compressed and converted to a TIF (it was sent to us as a TIF). Anyway, it was a tough case that we had little hope for.
After several marginally successful attempts to despeckle the photograph with blurs, unsharpen mask, and resizing, we experimented with Photoshop's noise reduction filter. Never had much success with it in the past but, this time it was like magic. Voilà:
It took a few minutes to dial in the right filter settings. Here's what I used in CS3 from my Vista PC (don't hate).
Additionally, the levels and hue/saturation were tweaked to make the image look less washed out. Aside from those layer adjustments, the Reduce Noise filter did a remarkable job interpolating and smoothing the surfaces--even around areas with fine details. Of note, the "remove JPG artifact" actually deteriorated the quality, so maybe this photo never was JPG-compressed and converted to a TIF. Here's another before/after set with the entire photograph.
Scaling down the full-scale photos hide some of the noise and speckling that was overcome, so for the full effect here's the actual sized side-by-side comparison image (at 1.4mb).
Someone in Greenville South Carolina's Craigslist is looking for an "application designer/programmer who can build a community site." This is not noteworthy. The rest of the classified ad is amazing though:
This site would be the size comparable to a Facebook, Myspace, etc...I have the whole idea, but not the capital to get this going. If you are interested in being a partner with your experience and my concept, we can be very successful. The projections are to have over 10 million members in our first year. This is a very serious concept, and a NON-Disclose agreement from my attorney will need to be signed.
If interested, please email me so we may discuss further. This position is a partner not a salary one.
ONLY SERIOUS PEOPLE APPLY, there is not time to waste..
It reminded me of the Safety Not Guaranteed YTMND.
via: Reddit, thanks to CritterM72800 for pointing this out.
After I get settled into the new house, I'm going to make authentic garum fish sauce and see what dishes it might complement.
Use fatty fish, for example, sardines, and a well-sealed (pitched) container with a 26-35 quart capacity. Add dried, aromatic herbs possessing a strong flavor, such as dill, coriander, fennel, celery, mint, oregano, and others, making a layer on the bottom of the container; then put down a layer of fish (if small, leave them whole, if large, use pieces) and over this, add a layer of salt two fingers high. Repeat these layers until the container is filled. Let it rest for seven days in the sun. Then mix the sauce daily for 20 days. After that, it becomes a liquid.
Gargilius Martialis, De medicina et de virtute herbarum
Ideas?
Please stop pretending that the phrase, "it is what it is," means something. Consider replacing with "c'est la vie." It represents a more complete thought and has an apostrophe.
I spent the past weekend in Charleston for a wedding and brief respite. While there, I couldn't help but notice the prevalence of Papyrus (the typeface) employed on many signs, restaurant menus, plaques, and brochures. This is not surprising. It's such a crappy typeface that people can't help but play a cruel joke on the typography geeks of the world by promoting its use.
My birthday was on Monday and, thankfully, no one gave me any birthday cards set in the Papyrus typeface. Don't get any ideas folks. You know how deep my well of hate for Papyrus is.
