Aug 30, 2020
Introducing Heptapod B, a typeface inspired by the monographic, alien written language created for and employed in the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve.
Acquire your own copy, HERE.
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
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seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
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seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from Türkiye
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from France
seen from United States
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seen from T1
seen from Malaysia
seen from Maldives
seen from Netherlands
seen from T1
seen from United States
Introducing Heptapod B, a typeface inspired by the monographic, alien written language created for and employed in the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve.
Acquire your own copy, HERE.
Twelve extraterrestrial spacecraft silently hover over disparate locations around the Earth. Affected nations send military and scientific experts to monitor and study them; in the United States, US Army Colonel G.T. Weber recruits linguist Dr. Louise Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly to study the craft above Montana. On board, Banks and Donnelly make contact with two seven-limbed aliens, whom they call heptapods; Donnelly nicknames them Abbott and Costello. Banks and Donnelly researching the complex written language of the aliens, made of palindrome phrases written with circular symbols, and share results with other nations. As Banks studies the language, she starts to have flashback-like visions of her daughter.
Arrival again, this time with heptapods.
Standard greeting in the language of hand-squids from The Arrival of the Great Cocoa Beans (2016)
The reason I'm uploading this again with the big ugly watermark in the middle is that a kind stranger let me know that my original artwork was stolen and sold in different shops. I feel deeply shocked, hurt and violated.
You can buy now this design on T-shirts, mugs, phone cases and more. From the artist this time. :)
Here: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/1235990-arrival?store_id=115074
From Ted Chiang's: "Stories of Your Life"
In university classes I noticed a difference in digestion of literature between creative writing students and english majors. Maybe it makes sense on paper, I would read texts with heightened interest in methodology and theory, I read for beauty and phrasing and thinking, and it was all in the mind of: how might I expand how I write, how might I learn from this work to better my own writing? (This, to me, sounds like pretension and delusion of grandeur. But this was and is an earnest thought, no matter how I sound, now.)
Arley gives me her copy of Exhalation when she moves to New York, and today I pull it from the shelf. Exhalation doesn't hold "Stories of Your Life," but it acts as the physical touch-stone today that leads me to borrowing "Stories of Your Life" on Libby. Or maybe I am listening to Arley on the phone, I am in the shower holding my speaker near my ear, as the audio-book plays I watch water droplets bounding out of small holes in black-painted steel. I'm a teenager in high school and I am going to Regal Downtown with my grandparents to see Arrival. I am sitting in the center of Ladd's Edition, with Jules, with my brother, talking about time rounding and rounding. And then It's Jules' brother instead talking about Chicago and woodworking inside Floyd's, or I'm at home doing laundry and my ear-pods are wired-in:
With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glottographic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech?
And I think about this as you read this, later, impossibly you are reading this now as I write and also much later, days, months, years, server history is forever and so these words are timeless. It already happened. I can't help but say to you, I think I'm in love, and my throat chokes. I'm in the kitchen cleaning dishes and for a moment I catch a cry in my chest, this is what it feels like to be alive, I smile, I'm smiling now, at my computer, I'm smiling now, over my sink, peeling rubberized paper from porcelain and cast iron and steel bushings. I think I'm in love and it's all contained in this moment, this is every moment:
...what my sequential mind had perceived as unnecessarily convoluted, I now recognized as an attempt to provide flexibility within the confines of sequential speech.
And this is a new feeling, that I am at the mercy of my feelings and not just stuck, an indulging, I see it all at once, the spiral tightens, I am in love with you and I think I am in love with this life. I am at the mercy, I am at the gift of constant touch, constant feeling in my body, it's estrogen, it's always been there, I feel it now, I let myself feel it now. In so many ways this weekly injection is my Heptapod B, it is the gift of looking inside, and being able to write without thinking, it's easier this way, just feeling something real and letting it always have been true. Asking why or applying one reason is not useful when writing this way.
Yes, this is the Book of Ages and I know who I am for the first time in my life, it's an overwhelming desire to lean in and just let it be okay to feel. I'm a little boy but I'm also a little girl, I'm laughing but I'm also crying, and I can't stop thinking I am in love with you. I am buckled over and it's not that I'm lost or afraid, or even excited, I just am, for once I can just be, I feel it all, I am flipping through the book and I know for the first time that it's okay, I'm okay, everything happens has happened will happen; it's a spiral, it gets close and I let the warmth travel from my throat into my heart and carry into the whole system. The spiral flows both ways and I let go.
I have always been in love with you right now.
