Backdrifts

Anser, 29, Pakistani-Canadian. Lover of dumb jokes, cool art, and learning how to be a better human.

[sick-jan]

[sunsetbuddie]

we used to get christmas episodes of television. halloween episodes. valentines. we used to get television that felt like part of your life. like it was happening alongside your life. now we mostly get 8 episodes dropping all at once every two years and they don't have time for any of that. i miss characters living alongside us

[victusinveritas]

Peter Brookes, London Times.

[baseballcardvandals]

What are the odds you'll let me watch the game without ruining my family's financial future?

Own this BCV original.

[coldasyou]

[elbiotipo]

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

[elbiotipo]

If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There's a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.

[elbiotipo]

[epicsause-official]

"comparing apples and oranges" has always been funny to me as an expression because people's go to exampe of two things so radically different that they defy any useful comparison are apples. and oranges. like you would struggle to find a more comparable pair of objects than that. theyre literally sold right next to each other in most stores.

[epicsause-official]

wikipedia has a whole ass section dedicated to international variants of the idiom so let me quickly run through them

see this is even worse than oranges. pears and apples are like the most comparable things ever. france takes another L

ok so this is what i mean. these are measures of temperature and texture and are in fact not very comparable. молодцы ребята продолжаем в том же духе.

colombia wins most vivid image invoked hands down. would not want that to happen to me.

and i think we can all agree romania wins this hands down. everyone give a big round of applause to romania

[agnesmontague]

i love the word jumbotron. the most american word, beating out any sad contender the likes of “burger”. immediately you get “jumbo”, the most american size; land of the Big Gulp. “tron”, like the movie, implying some vague cybernetic concept that hints at its purpose. then you find out, oh, it’s the giant screen at football games. the thing that sometimes puts you on blast for the most mortifying 45 seconds of your life, if you are so lucky. feel like (or become) a star, however briefly. get your affair blasted on national tv. everything about the word speaks to such an american way of living. huge fan

[hagiomoto]

Yeah, it’s incredibly annoying that the average American only seems to care about ICE now that it’s finally affecting white Americans. But we, non-Americans still have to pay attention, because the reality is that governments around the world are rolling out harsh, more reactionary policies against immigrants and refugees. They're watching this, taking notes and placing orders (with Israeli-linked firms) too. It is happening right now.

How your countries treat refugees? Did you know? You should know.

[queenfreakhudsonwilliams]

i keep seeing canadians say shit like "the only ice my government supports is hockey" not true! there are five ICE headquarters in canada. we are bringing in harsher anti trans and immigration laws. edmonton police killed someone this month. Starlight tours are still happening. 50% of kids in foster care are Indigenous. and im not even going to touch Danielle Smith and Doug Ford. we are on the same path, we just do it quieter. call your MP and tell them to stop bill c-15, divest from guardaworld and hootsuite, and fund aish and healthcare!

[queeranarchism]

Europe has been deliberately drowning refugees and 'pushing them back' to regimes paid to imprison refugees so they don't reach the EU for DECADES now and it's only getting worse. Our cops murder and face no consequences. Our refugee centers serve moldy food and don't provide basic hygiene, beds and blankets. We imprison kids. What you're seeing in the US is all here, just better hidden.

[enki2]

[nothing-suspicious-at-all]

[bluefire-axolotl]

[yohandere]

what if there was swearing in pokemon

[miss-froggish-deactivated202202]

[yohandere]

that’s not a swear, marill

[miss-froggish-deactivated202202]

[pokemonheritageposts]

Pokemon Heritage Post

[depsidase]

[thepumpkin-queenn]

[fontseeker]

ITC Benguiat (pronounced "ben-gat") was created in 1977 by Ed Benguiat, presumably while chainsmoking.

Reddit user ChunkArcade said of Benguiat:

I had Ed Benguiat as a teacher in college. Absolute legend. He used to smoke in class (looonggg past when smoking indoors was illegal in NY), tell us stories for 75% of the class, then randomly drop gems of typographic genius that I still use on a daily basis at work. Such a good soul and a fucking REBEL.

Originally the letters were intended to form part of a logo for a friend's business, but when the logo was rejected, Benguiat decided to continue working on it and turned it into a font. It was one of approximately ten billion fonts Benguiat designed.

ITC Benguiat is often described as an "Art Nouveau" font, but Benguiat denied this:

When I designed this font I was not thinking “Art Nouveau” style. My thought was just to create a beautiful font that would fit the need for a highly readable serifed font.

The font includes a number of ligatures, like AR, LA, SS, and TT, which are rarely used in practice.

One of the many places ITC Benguiat ended up being used was on book covers in the late 70s and 80s:

A well-known recent use of ITC Benguiat is in the Stranger Things logo, which is widely claimed to be based on the covers of Stephen King novels.

But... I can't actually find any Stephen King novels with ITC Benguiat on the cover? Classic Stephen King novels actually used a modified version of Pacella Latina for his name and the title, and Korinna for smaller text. (Image below from avperth on Flickr.)

Korinna and ITC Benguiat do look kind of similar, but Korinna was never used for titles. The only real similarity between Stranger Things and (some of) these covers is the way that the first and last letters of "StepheN" and "StrangeR" are bigger than the others.

I mean look at this shit:

Are people blind? That's not the same font! Look at the E, look at the G! Look how thin the verticals of the N are! Just because they're both red doesn't mean they're the same font.

"It graced the cover of countless Stephen King novels", but they couldn't find a single example because none of these covers actually used ITC Benguiat (nor do they all use the same fonts as each other). They are right about Choose Your Own Adventure books using it, though:

Fonts In Use has more examples of ITC Benguiat, as well as higher standards than slop factories like Screen Rant and Collider.

[3liza]

quora is one of the most terrifying social networks on earth which i think is why all the most powerful posters can be found there

[3liza]

bless this woman Bonnie Wingate. this little piece of short nonfiction brings tears to my eyes every time i stop to read it through

[pragnificent]

Just in case anyone hasn't caught on -

The reason AI programs like Gemini are programmed to encourage you to let it make basic life choices for you like what restaurant you should eat at is because they intend to monetize your patronage.

It's just a matter of time before the AI stops offering you the most highly rated option in the area or whatever aligns most closely to what you requested (If it's even doing that now) and instead only recommends restaurants that have paid the company for that privilege.

Restaurants that won't pay Google to recommend them to AI users are going to become functionally invisible, whereas those who are willing to purchase what amounts to targeted advertisements laundered through an AI "friend" will get new customers regardless of their quality.

Basic rule: If you aren't paying for something, that means you're the product.

[lailah-tov]

Google Maps already does this, preferring more distant sponsored results over closer non-sponsored ones. All the claims that these algorithms make the same choices you would make if you just had the time and energy to research them are totally false. They make the choices that lead to profitable results for the companies that program them, with a user interface that gaslights you into thinking it was your idea all along.

[ktae]

also somwtimes when you dont understand a piece of art it's not bc ur dumb it's bc you havent had the very particular emotional experience that it's trying to invoke in you and you just cant relate. which is also why sometimes you will hear a mountain goats song and say Meh and then you go through some shit and you listen to it again and lose your fucking mind at how real and raw it is. art is how we communicate with each other about experiences that cannot be adequately represented straightforwardly with language. sometimes you have to abstract your representation of the experience in order to truly communicate how big and insane it felt

[parkerposey]

Feel good inc is the craziest thing that can happen to a fourteen year old