On the Tarmac

alerante links to things on the Internet

[alerante]

alerante explores Han character simplifications, #1.

This is one of the more fascinating specimens, not least because of Simplified Chinese's collapsing of two common characters into a single novel one that doesn't really resemble either of its antecedents. (Not to mention that funky L-shaped first stroke.) The Japanese simplifications take a more straightforward route, though the lower half of 発 is still, as far as I know, peculiar to that character and others that include it such as 廃.

Also note the subtle difference of a single line between the older variants of the character for "hair" on the right in Chinese and Japanese. The shinjitai version trades it for the dot at the top of the lower radical. Japanese has a pattern of occasionally dropping dot strokes that are present in Chinese; another example is with the character 逸.

[alerante]

The Social Network’s sound was one of melancholic anxiety; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s, one of lonely desolation. Now, for their third collaboration with film director David Fincher on Gone Girl, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have constructed a haunting picture of hideous moral corruption underneath apparent suburban tranquility, juxtaposing mellow sections played on more traditional instruments with the warped drones of what sound like organomechanical beasts. The score is available for preorder or instant digital download in all your favorite formats, while the film hit theaters this past weekend. Enjoy.

[alerante]

The single version of Shinsei Kamattechan's “Front Memory”, featuring Makoto Kawamoto. Did you know Kawamoto turned 40 this year? It’s been a whole 17 years since “1/2” came out. Good to see she’s still very much alive and kicking.

The arrangement, of course, is classic Shinsei Kamattechan.

[alerante]

Ling Tosite Sigure’s “Telecastic fake show”, from their 2009 album just A moment, shows off the band’s trademark vocal and dynamic contrasts. The fast-paced cinematography on this video is right in tune with the song it features. Whoosh.

[alerante]

What a name for a [White House] Press Secretary: Josh Earnest. His name literally means ‘just kidding, but seriously.’

Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, 19 June 2014

[alerante]

Jason Fagone writes for New York magazine about the rise and fall of Hoefler & Frere-Jones:

Hoefler and Frere-Jones “spent a lot of time discussing projects and just hanging out,” says Jesse Ragan, a type designer who worked at the company between 2001 and 2005. “Definitely they had their own typefaces, their own babies, their own creations, but they would get feedback from each other.” In 2002, when they moved to a new office in the Cable Building, they combined their personal collections of type books into a majestic double-sided set of bookcases. Says Ragan, “They’d constantly call out references: ‘Oh, this could be more of a Clarendon a, or a Bodoni a.’ They would pull books down from the library and say, ‘No, this is more what I mean, something more like this, something that has this personality.’” From time to time they’d take a break to play a first-person-shooter video game called Marathon, blasting each other to bits over the network. One afternoon, Hoefler sent Frere-Jones an email: “are you around later for a game of Immolate-Your-Business-Partner?” Frere-Jones replied, “YES.”

[alerante]

Introducing Source Serif

Adobe's popular Source typeface family has gotten a serif to go along with its existing sans-serif and monospaced faces. Like the other two, it's also open source. As the specimens show, the design bears more than a passing resemblance to Charter. No italics yet, but they're on the way soon.

[alerante]

As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price

NPR’s Joseph Shapiro presents the results of a year-long investigation into how the increasing prevalence of court fees has affected those least able to pay them:

Jared Thornburg was ticketed for making an illegal left turn. He went to court and the offense was dropped to driving a “defective vehicle,” a ticket with $165 worth of fines and fees. At the time, he was homeless and unemployed. He had recently lost a job at an oil field after a serious workplace injury. So he couldn't pay the ticket.

The day before he was to start a job at Taco Bell, he says, he was arrested for not paying the fines, which had increased to $306. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail.

“I cried a lot being in jail because I was scared,” Thornburg says.

It cost the city of Westminster about $70 a day to jail Thornburg, according to the ACLU of Colorado.

“How is that humanely right?” he asks. “It cost the taxpayers more than what my fine was for and it just wasted 10 days of my life.”

[alerante]

Spirit Summoning

A six-part fiction serial by Sakumi Tayama, as translated by Mark Gibeau and published in Words Without Borders:

My job was to lend the spirits my body and to convey their words. Yoko played the part of the go-between. It was her job to draw out the information the client wanted. When we got everything we needed we’d send the spirit back to where it came from. It was all an act. If we were real mediums we would do all we could to bring the spirit closer to achieving nirvana, but we didn’t try any of that. Even for a fake spirit we’d have to invoke the names of real gods and real Buddhas as we tried to help it on its way to enlightenment. Being fakes, we didn’t have any gods or Buddhas watching over us. Yoko said it was a dangerous business using actual gods and Buddhas to fool people and not something to be done lightly. I really don’t get Yoko. For a fraud, she’s very religious, or, if not that, very superstitious.

And here are parts II, III, IV, V, and VI.

[alerante]

There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us — we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt. How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures — even the elevator buttons! — are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them — they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves.

Olga Tokarczuk, Runners (Bieguni), as translated by Jennifer Croft

[alerante]

My Life and Times in Chinese TV

Moira Weigel recounts her internship at one of Shanghai’s largest media conglomerates for n+1:

I had gone to volunteer my services to the International Channel Shanghai expecting to find the place strange, Orwellian and slightly dangerous. I had naively hoped to ferret out a few state secrets. What I found was not propaganda in the grim midcentury sense. Rather than apparatchiks, we had presenters in miniskirts, faces dewy with an aerosol spray that held their makeup and made them all smell like flour. The scripts I read were not injunctions to follow Mao Zedong Thought but ejaculations of positivity about new products.

[alerante]

The opening track of Clint Mansell’s fantastic score for the 2009 film Moon, directed by Duncan Jones and starring Sam Rockwell. The overall tense, minimalistic approach echoes the movie’s themes of distance and isolation, while the primary piano refrain during the climax provides a driven, human contrast.

[alerante]

How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

Kevin Poulsen, for Wired:

For McKinlay’s plan to work, he’d have to find a pattern in the survey data — a way to roughly group the women according to their similarities. The breakthrough came when he coded up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes. First used in 1998 to analyze diseased soybean crops, it takes categorical data and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava Lamp. With some fine-tuning he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a single, solid glob.

He played with the dial and found a natural resting point where the 20,000 women clumped into seven statistically distinct clusters based on their questions and answers. “I was ecstatic,” he says. “That was the high point of June.”

[alerante]

You may know Koeda from her work as the current vocalist of Japanese pop band supercell, but did you know she also records acoustic songs in her spare time and posts them to SoundCloud? The way she constricts her voice in the higher registers of this track (whose title translates to something like “scrap” as in “scrap paper”) is more than a bit reminiscent of Ringo Sheena, I’ll admit. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.

[alerante]

Tokyo shoegaze band Mushroom Empire’s “Sea and Bouquet,” from their recently-released EP Long Goodbye.

[alerante]

Pitchfork’s Andy Beta Interviews Four Tet

Kieran Hebden on recording his seminal 2003 album Rounds:

[...] I definitely had no aspirations to go to a studio or anything. It felt more important to me that there was a possibility that I could work on a piece of music while I ate my cereal in the morning because I was more likely to make something intimate and personal doing that than if I was going into a studio.

I was thinking that if I managed to just sit on my own at two in the morning after a night out with my friends, I might come out with something, because all the best things I was making were coming out at the weirdest times. I was living on my own and I’d had a relationship end at the beginning of Rounds. And then there was a big relationship -- with my future wife -- that commenced towards the end of making it. Loads of stuff was happening to me and I was very conscious of it all and really got into the idea that making this music was all part of that. When I listen to the record, I’m never gonna listen to it like anybody else listens to it. I listen to it more like reading an old diary; it’s tied up with a million memories of things that happened.

[alerante]

Google’€™s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary

Ron Amadeo for Ars Technica:

It's easy to give something away when you're in last place with zero marketshare, precisely where Android started. When you're in first place though, it's a little harder to be so open and welcoming. Android has gone from being the thing that protects Google to being something worth protecting in its own right. Mobile is the future of the Internet, and controlling the world's largest mobile platform has tons of benefits. At this point, it's too difficult to stuff the open source genie back into the bottle, which begs the question: how do you control an open source project?

Google has always given itself some protection against alternative versions of Android. What many people think of as "Android" actually falls into two categories: the open parts from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which are the foundation of Android, and the closed source parts, which are all the Google-branded apps. While Google will never go the entire way and completely close Android, the company seems to be doing everything it can to give itself leverage over the existing open source project. And the company's main method here is to bring more and more apps under the closed source "Google" umbrella.