dewline | Entries tagged with nostalgia

In the preparation for the next visit of the house repair contractors, I've again been weeding through the basement, trying to figure out what to cull from my 50+ years of life thus far. Last night, I found a hand-written letter from my paternal grandmother. I don't know how many notes I have from her, and she died of cancer back when I was still in grade school in the late 1970's. I am...recovering from reading this small note about my life at school.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: The Current on CBC Radio

Finding myself rediscovering entries involving

hawkward and

fajrdrako that I needed to re-add image files to. Both entries dating back to 2008!

Five years since I migrated "On the DEWLine" from Livejournal to Dreamwidth, and I still haven't fixed all the broken links. I fear and expect that I never will!

Current Mood: nerdy

So this got announced today:

https://apt613.ca/animation-festival-confirms-2021-will-be-online/

I suppose I'm not surprised. Less disappointed than I might've been in years past mainly because attending this particular festival has been a "nice to have if I can afford it" thing for me. When I went to Algonquin Animation, being able to attend as a volunteer was a perk of being a student in the programme, and to some extent a career-building tool as well, or so I'd hoped. For others in my class, that worked out reasonably well.

I wish that I'd better kept in touch with the rest of my graduating class, though, but diverting into other lines of work in order to pay off the student loan helped steer me away from such activities. So keeping in touch with classmates became a luxury first. The only person I keep in touch with these days from those times is Gerry Paquette, who ran the programme in those early years. Gerry's in game design these days, but still working at Algonquin.

I hope to partake of some part of whatever this year's festival offers. I am unsure of why I want that, though. More on that another time, perhaps.

More on other topics later today...

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Home-for-now
Current Music: "Killer" - Seal

Following up on a discussion begun in September 2020. This time around, the focus is Helvetica Ultra-Compressed and its knockoff, Swiss 911 Ultra Compressed.

Also, the commentary is going to wander a bit, because like the previous installment, TV space-adventure shows past and present are involved.

If you were a Star Trek fan back during the late 1980's and most of the 1990's, you knew this typeface almost on sight, because about halfway through The Next Generation's run, Starfleet had switched over from Compacta Bold + Compressed and at least one lesser-known font to this one for their LCARS user interface screens. Deep Space Nine and Voyager also made heavy use of it for the same reasons. Swiss 911 UC was probably easier to afford at the time. I haven't asked the question of graphic designer/tech advisor Mike Okuda, to be honest, of how the switch happened and why.

Both Compacta and Helvetica/Swiss are - to my eyes - legible, which is what you want in a font that Starfleet's decided to make part of its operational standards kit.

Other knockoffs have been made that were easier still to buy, or just download as freebies in some cases. I'd argue that the ease of that made entry for thousands of would-be graphic designers a trivial matter.

But it started with that particular weight and style of Helvetica.

This past year or so, the TNG/DS9/VOY timeframe has been revisited by way of Picard and more recently, Lower Decks. The latter enthusiastically dives back into that style choice. Whether the fact that Lower Decks was created as an animated series plays into the decision and to what degree, I don't know and don't care.

Picard, being set about twenty years after the start of Lower Decks, went a different way. I found out what the choice was via Twitter: Tungsten from Hoefler and Co.. This was a surprise. More recently, I got to see a video explaining the choice of Tungsten over returning to the classic font, which comes towards the end of this Trekzone interview:

Excerpting from this history of the Net's three most popular fonts' journey to that popularity...

Arial grew in popularity both because of its selection as a Microsoft core font and its design as a sans serif. It was, quite simply, the most accessible sans serif font available to most people with computers, and sans serif fonts were growing in popularity with the increase in computer usage. Although Helvetica is the superior sans serif font to many, Microsoft chose Arial in part because the licensing fee for Helvetica was too expensive.

I understand the need for the additional weights that Tungsten affords...and the price asked by Hoefler is...likely problematic - at the moment - for a lot of graphics-focused fans. Including myself right now. My complaint - is that the right word here? - is with Hoefler as a business concern, not with anyone else for any other reason. Not with Andrew Jarvis. He made the best choice possible for the job he had in front of him (and one I hope he keeps, especially since that will allow him to work with Geoffrey "Star Charts" Mandel himself next season).

It's not that I don't want designers to get paid for their work. I do. I'm just on a tighter budget at this point. If I were to win the LottoMax jackpot on, say, next Tuesday night, I'll likely pay the full US$199.00 for the basic eight-weights Tungsten kit and stop commenting on the subject altogether.

Also, I wonder if the foundry's management understands how large a potential customer base they can now reach out to. Trek fans are a big crowd. Multinational, also multilingual...

Oh.

Oh.

And now I'm starting to understand why they might want or need to keep the price tag as is for the time being. Because Starfleet also has to be multilingual. If you want to adapt a script to other orthographies...and Tungsten is still Latin-only for now, right?

Anyway, one further thought: Tungsten is now a cartography font, in part thanks to its usage in Picard. I am tempted to expect that the next revision of either Stellar Cartography or - my personal hope - Star Charts will include maps made with Tungsten. Hoefler will have to amend this promotional campaign accordingly.

Current Mood: nerdy
Current Location: Home-for-now
Current Music: Cross-Country Checkup on CBC Radio

On the twentieth anniversary of what was once a future disaster...that didn't happen...that disaster story is re-imagined and reinterpreted for modern audiences.

Well, it ought to be playing on a radio station, AM or FM, somewhere right about now...

Current Mood: nerdy

Somewhat disappointed that Ottawa didn't get the trophy this go-round. But anyway...a weird thought about comic book characters and music.

One of my favourite tunes from the 1980's was Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight", popularized by Miami Vice in its pilot episode. I make no apologies for that admission about my musical tastes. Likewise my enjoyment of Mike W. Barr, Alan Davis and Todd McFarlane's work on Batman: Year Two, continuity gaffes and all. I mean, really? Jim Gordon, just promoted to Captain at the end of Year One, getting that much further up the ladder off-camera in a matter of - at most - a handful of months? No.

But that was then, a couple of iterations of DCU continuity and a quarter-century ago.

Anyway.

Anyway...getting back to music. There was this episode of Justice League back in 2004 - the cartoon series - where Circe turned Wonder Woman into a pig. "This Little Piggy", written by

kingofbreakfast. And we got to hear Kevin Conroy, then the voice of the Batman belt out one of the better jazz standards in order to save the day.

Wondering - not for the first time - how a Conroy cover of "In the Air Tonight" would sound. It seems apropos for any number of reasons.

Current Mood: contemplative

Originally written for the Pen and Paper Workshop held on June 10th, 2015:

Recently, I hit a milestone.

On my MacBook Pro laptop computer, as recorded by the iPhoto software that came bundled with it when I bought that computer and faithfully updated until about three to five years ago, there were over forty-one thousand image files.

There’s been some culling of a lot of images from that pile over the twelve years since I first acquired my original digital camera. Near as I can figure, I started using it in May of 2003. Nonetheless, that accumulation continues unstopped.

This is not a cause for complaint, although it has almost certainly contributed to providing motives for such causes. I’ll get to that in a little while, as it has something to do with today’s business news.

I’ve recorded a lot of images. A lot of this is my own family’s history. Other chunks record that of the fandoms devoted to various works of popular culture, urban history, architecture, civic infrastructure, local and national politics…it’s an eclectic mixture to be sure.

One regret I have about it is not making hardcopy reproductions of those images as often as I might have. Some of the time, that was due to money issues. I only have access to a certain amount of cash at any given time, and that could be laid at my feet too. In part, at least. But we can save the political and economic arguments for another time.

Another reason for my reluctance…well, time and energy to make the decision to do the work. Again, I can take some of the blame for that.

What leads me to calling this a regret, though, was one particular item in today’s news.

On August 8th of 2015, Black’s Photography will be no more. It will join the ever-growing list of Dead Canadian Brands, as announced by Telus, its parent company. Its employees, Telus spokespeople say to us, will be found jobs within the larger Telus organization wherever possible.

The people running Telus may have every intention of delivering on that promise and of doing so in such a way as to leave none of the former Black’s staffers regretting holding Telus to its corporate word of honour. I do not know yet, one way or another, how skeptical I should be of that given word.

Some argue that this is an inevitable consequence of technological progress. I suppose in some respects it is, and that I’ve contributed to that fallout as much as anyone who’s ever bought and made steady use of a digital camera. So there’s another part of my share of collective guilt.

There’s still the matter of close to five hundred people losing their jobs. There’s still the sense of having reached out for convenience and causing harm to others. I can’t quite get around those facts.

As if I weren’t enough of a packrat as it is…

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Ontario Today - CBC Radio One

A Note on the News: I noticed that the Washington Post is getting ready to pull out of Canada. Considering the trend that this decision is part and parcel of re: US news services, I'm wondering if that's a good idea for any of the news services. I know a fair bit about bottom-lining and how it can undermine the real goals of any given organization, some of it from unwanted first-hand experience, so I worry a little.

I promise I'll keep those syndicated feeds from CBC, publicbroadcasting.ca and elsewhere linked to my friendlist. I can't claim training as a professional journalist/reporter, though, so there's a limit to what I can do to help out beyond that. Time amd objectivity, mostly.

Music: Bought the Arcade Fire album Funeral today. Not bad. I'd been hearing good things about this Montreal-based band for over a year, so I finally succumbed to the pressure. Glad I did.

News-Triggered Nostalgia: Now here's a name I rarely read about in the news: Selkirk, Manitoba. I spent a year or two there when I was way too young to remember most of it, but I've remembered what I can of the place fondly. Now, I read on CBC News that they're in a spot of trouble with flooding. Not good.