Tag: humour

Best foot forward

It’s good to see Doc Martens taking fast fashion at a walking pace.

Dr Martens to get foot in the door of resale market with help from Depop – The Guardian
Under Dr Martens’ ReSouled scheme with Depop, ageing DMs can be repolished, given new laces, soles, heel loops and insoles before being put back on the market. The footwear is priced at about 80% that of a new pair. The lower price is likely have wider appeal after Dr Martens raises the price of its classic 1460 eight-hole boots in the UK by £10 a pair to £159 in July.

Others are taking a somewhat different approach.

‘Rubbish bin’ Balenciaga trainers that cost US$1,850 slammed by Chinese consumers who question value of luxury brands – South China Morning Post
Luxury fashion brand Balenciaga was panned by Chinese consumers after it launched a 12,000 yuan (US$1,850) trainers line that looks like they have been fished out from the rubbish dump to promote environmental protection. […]

The shoes went viral on Weibo this week and were widely criticised as being too ugly to be an effective awareness tool but more as an example of tone-deafness from wealthy people. “I can find a pair of these shoes in the bin for free,” one person wrote. Another asked: “Wouldn’t it be more eco-friendly not to sell these shoes?”

From the sublime to the ridiculous ridiculous to the even more ridiculous.

The Mullet Shoe is here! – Sad And Useless
The Mullet Shoe is a high-top with silky smooth set of light brown locks cascading down the back. It’s a mullet… for a shoe… ready to swish all sultry when you walk, and blow romantically in the breeze. And also get muddy, matted, and rank when you drag it through the dirt, and possibly make you trip and fall on your face if you don’t mind its flowing length, which appears to be couple inches longer than the shoe itself.

Finally, here are some shoes making a more artistic spectacle of themselves.

Assembled sculptures by artist Willie Cole cluster high hHeels into expressive masks – Colossal
Artist Willie Cole juxtaposes readymade footwear and African tradition in his series of sculptural masks. The figurative assemblages stack women’s heels into clusters that are expressive and distinctly unique, an effect Cole derives from the shoes’ material, color, and pattern rather than a preconceived plan or sketch. Depicting exaggerated toothy grins, pointed brows, and outstretched tongues, the sculptures span more than a decade of the artist’s career.

The game is on #2

If you’re at a loose end, try sorting this little game out.

Curvy
Each Curvy puzzle consists of a grid of hexagonal tiles. On each tile appears a single or double set of lines, and each set of lines has its own color. These tiles must be rotated to find a solution in which lines of the same color connect, with no loose ends.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to actually win the game:

Dead trees – Unit 520
Dead Trees is a game prototype / destructible physics experiment that is totally not inspired by the popular block laying game™ of unknown origin that takes the initial concept ad absurdum.

I like how it describes itself: “Desaturated colors, no way to win anything. Just stacking and breaking blocks until you lose.”

Royale with cheese

I’m not a fan of soap operas and schmaltzy dramas, but it’s been hard to escape reaction to The Crown’s latest spin-off.

‘I didn’t want to be alive anymore’: Meghan Markle-Prince Harry’s revelations during Oprah interview leave internet shocked – The Indian Express
Post the broadcast of the interview, social media is abuzz with netizens reacting to the various revelations made during the interview. The hashtag #OprahMeghanHarry soon began trending on Twitter with many drawing parallels between the situation and what Princess Diana went through during her time.

This write-up from across the Irish Sea really nailed it though.

Harry and Meghan: The union of two great houses, the Windsors and the Celebrities, is complete – Irish Times
Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

Shouldn’t really be too flippant about all this, institutional bigotry is no laughing matter, but this image of the Queen caught my eye shortly after reading that.

Artist brings everyday objects to life with smartphone and no editing – Design You Trust
“I think it’s a fun way to make an ordinary situation extraordinary, to make magic by combining two different things into a whole new story. A smartphone is something we all carry all day and it allows me to take this kind of photo spontaneously on the spot whenever an idea comes. I always carry two phones to do this.”

Quite a few are from the movies …

… including Pulp Fiction …

… which brings us back to where we started — Americans and royalty.

Royale with Cheese (dialogue) – Genius
As Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) drive along they discuss trivial matters regarding the little differences between Europe and America.

What’s in a name? #10

I was reading about the changing popularity of boys’ and girls’ names in Minnesota — the rise of Emersyn, Remi, and Saylor, for instance; the decline of Stanley — and within the comments were links to these crazy videos showcasing some of the more unusual names for people in Utah.

Mormon Girls Say: Utah Names – YouTube
100% authentic Utah names. We searched far and wide for the latest and greatest in Utah’s naming trends, and we were not disappointed…

Favourite comments:

But wait, there’s more.

Mormon Girls Say: Utah Names Part 2: Boy Names – YouTube
100% Authentic Utah names. You asked, we delivered.

Perhaps these are the loopy opposites of Deborah Roberts’s artwork.

Photo by Ben Stiefel on Unsplash

Jigsaw’s “Jigsaw” jigsaw

What used to be seen as quite a dull, old-fashioned way to pass the time has swung back round again and become very Instagrammable.

Everyone wants a puzzle – Vox
Puzzles have become increasingly popular — especially for millennials — in a way that outweighs what I thought might be the white noise of my personal preference for them. On Instagram, hashtags like #jigsawpuzzles and #puzzlesofinstagram yield tens of thousands of posts. TikTokers and YouTubers often post time lapses of themselves assembling beautiful, difficult jigsaws.

You don’t have to limit yourself to completing just one jigsaw at a time, though.

Surreal jigsaw puzzle montages – The Guardian
“A jigsaw puzzle manufacturer typically uses the same cut pattern for different puzzles,” Klein explains. “This makes the pieces of their puzzles interchangeable and I find that I can combine two or more to make a surreal image that the manufacturer never imagined.” … For his work, Klein uses vintage puzzles from the 1970s-90s, the selection of which can take years: “It’s an obsessive but enjoyable treasure hunt,” he says.

Jigsaws are certainly no longer what they used to be.

Someone creates a transparent jigsaw puzzle and it’s evil – DeMilked
Jigsaw puzzles are a great way to pass time while you’re stuck in quarantine. However, someone came up with a way to make this fun and relaxing activity into a nightmare. We present to you – transparent jigsaw puzzles.

Assemble the jagged pieces of this shattered puzzle and fix ‘The Accident’ – Colossal
While most shattered glass heads straight to the trash, Yelldesign’s panes actually can be reassembled into a single sheet, turning a groan-inducing mistake into a delightfully tedious activity. Comically titled “The Accident,” the acrylic puzzle is comprised of 215 jagged and cracked pieces resembling a broken window. Yelldesign warns, though, that although you don’t have to worry about getting cut or scratched by the pointed edges, assembly isn’t an easy feat.

A 224 piece jigsaw puzzle featuring 43 different cat shaped pieces that need to be herded together – Laughing Squid
The Herding Cats Puzzle by Nervous System (previously) is an aptly named wooden jigsaw puzzle made up of 224 pieces in 43 different feline shapes. When all the cats are herded together, the result is a brilliantly colored giant blue-eyed fluffy kitty designed by Anne Sullivan.

An ‘infinite’ galaxy puzzle that can be built in any direction – Colossal
The team over at Nervous System recently designed this fun Infinite Galaxy Puzzle that tiles continuously in any direction. Pieces from the top can be removed and added to the bottom, and likewise from side to side. So regardless of where you start the puzzle can continue in a seemingly infinite series of patterns.

I love the idea of a seemingly infinite jigsaw. Here’s another, and my favourite. From Darren Cullen, whose Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives project is more used to producing hard-edged, satirical advertising campaigns than dizzying Christmas gifts.

Descend into the endlessly repetitive loop of ‘Jigsaw Jigsaw’ – Colossal
If 2020 were packaged in a box, it would be Darren Cullen’s “Jigsaw Jigsaw.” Just like our repetitive days and seemingly endless fascination with simple pastimes, the 1,000-piece game relies on the Droste effect and features a recursive image that spirals into the same black-and-white puzzle over and over.

I was happy to help crowdfund this when plans were first announced to make this a real puzzle. It arrived earlier this month, but I gotta say, it’s not easy. This is as far as we got.

Please rewind — and stay behind

You can now stay over at the world’s last Blockbuster video store – Moss and Fog
This final store in Bend, Oregon has been operating for years, and has a pretty loyal following. The Coronavirus, however, has put a major dent in their business. Now they’ve opened up the store as a rentable Airbnb, outfitted with a little living room, and all the nostalgia you’d want out of a video store.

Laughing at him, not with him

It’s hard to understand the guy’s appeal.

British writer pens the best description of Trump I’ve read – London Daily
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

That’s not to say he’s not a rich source of humour. He is funny, in a if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry/I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-that/thank-god-he’s-over-there-not-over-here kind of way.

Hilarious video edit poses Trump bickering with himself about the virus – Boing Boing
Justin T. Brown’s Donald Trump is the Dumbest Man in America² cleverly edits Trump’s catastrophic interview with Jonathan Swan so that Trump is arguing with himself.

He would do well to read this succinct summary.

Coronavirus epidemiology in a nutshell – TYWKIWDBI
The spread of Corona virus is based on two factors.

1. How dense the population is.
2. How dense the population is.

Featured image Reddit

Where’s the harm?

Lots of talk about masks and where we should be wearing them. David McCandless and the Information is Beautiful team have updated their set of coronavirus infographics (previously) with this presentation of the risks involved with certain activities.

COVID-19 CoronaVirus infographic datapack – Information is Beautiful
Created by David McCandless, Omid Kashan, Fabio Bergamaschi, Dr Stephanie Starling, Univers Labs, Tom Evans.

It doesn’t quite line up with this infographic from the Texas Medical Association, but I’d say it’s close enough, you get the point.

How risky is visiting a museum? This graphic about COVID-19 transmission provides come answers – Hyperallergic
TexMed characterizes things like getting restaurant takeout, getting gas, and even playing tennis as low-risk activities (two on a scale of one to 10). Grocery shopping, going on a walk with others, visiting a library or museum, and playing golf all fall in the moderate-low range (three to four) — that last is of course great news for the president! Highest-risk activities (eight or more) include, unsurprisingly, sports stadium events and concerts, going to a movie theater, attending religious services with 500+ worshippers, and going to a bar — which was a major cause of outbreak in Michigan last week. Texans shouldn’t despair, though! Based on this graphic, it is still safe to shoot guns in the air (at least with respect to COVID-19 complications), do outdoor line dances in rigid six-feet distance grids, and ride the open range.

Here are some other ways of looking at.

COVID Risk Chart – xkcd
First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

Handy chart – The New Yorker Cartoons on Instagram
A cartoon by @rozchast.

Lots of reasons to wear a mask. But then again…

Why You Don’t Need A Mask – COVID-19
You don’t need a mask because…

Something funny

Something old (not really).

Beer mats of the 1970s – Scarfolk Council
The pubs have reopened. Here is a selection of 1970s beer mats from the Scarfolk council archives. Collect them all!

Something new (not really).

New work by Gary Larson – TheFarSide.com
So here goes. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got this cool gizmo, and I’ve got no deadlines. And—to borrow from Sherlock Holmes—the game is afoot.

How to get back to normal

A lot of thought is going into what happens next.

Social distancing: how we overcome fear of one another to embrace a new normal – The Conversation
We mustn’t overlook how we make sense – physically and emotionally – of a world affected by a global virus. My research has examined how our embodied use of space – our proximity, our distance, and the boundaries we create between one another, affects us socially, culturally, economically and even politically. Now we are witnessing how our bodies learn to cope in a new world shaped by a pandemic.

But this isn’t serious, right?

Transition from videocall to real life conversation with the ‘see yourself window’ – designboom
If throughout the many videocalls during lockdown you’ve been looking more at the little rectangle of yourself than the faces of your friends and family, then perhaps this device created by rana rmeily is for you. The ‘see yourself window’ is a small, lightweight and 3D printed gadget that hooks onto your ear and aims to ease people back into real, physical interaction.

Images Rana Rmeily

The quick brown fox has retired

Via The Browser, a look into a font design process I hadn’t really considered before. If “typography is about the spaces between the letters as much as it is about the letters”, then a popular way of evaluating how well those letters and spaces work together is through the use of ‘pangrams’, sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once. But perhaps the quick brown fox has had its day.

Text for proofing fonts – Fonts by Hoefler&Co.
The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.

In 2015, I dumped the pangrams we’d accumulated and rewrote our proofs from scratch, trading their wacky and self-satisfied cleverness for lists of words that are actually illustrative.

These lists of words, whilst not being as easy to memorise, are far more useful—to the professional typeface designer, at least. Here’s just a part of them.

[…] Linden linden loads for the ulna monolog of the consul menthol and shallot. Milliner milliner modal for the alumna solomon of the album custom and summon. Number number nodule for the unmade economic of the shotgun bison and tunnel. […]

It reminds me a little of lorem ipsum. I wonder if these new typefaces went through a similar process.

Times New Arial is a new experiment utilising the latest technology of variable fonts – It’s Nice That
With Times New Arial, the collaborators combine the visual extremes of both Times and Arial into one interpolated typeface. With new technological possibilities, the hybrid represents a new era of font usage, challenging the role of variable fonts in the present cultural scape. As well as being poster children for web typography, Times and Arial also represent progress and proxies within digital design. “We wanted to combine this conventional aesthetic with new technical possibility in order to revive and refine them, so in turn, we could experiment with them in our projects,” continues David.

Scunthorpe Sans 🗯🚫 profanity-blocking font – Vole.wtf
A s*** font that f***ing censors bad language automatically. It’s able to detect the words f***, s***, p***, t***, w***, c*** and dozens more, but with a special exemption for “Scunthorpe”; that town has suffered enough.

Font Books – Turn your next font into your next read
Font Books is a collection of original typefaces designed to help people read and understand classic literature better.

Logofonts – Behance
Often when we see a logo, a question arises: “which font was used?” In this project I did some research on the logos of some of the most famous brands, trying to understand which font they use or which have been modified to get to the final result. Follow Logofonts on Instagram.

Mischievous rats and toothy spuds

I see Banksy’s been working from home recently.

rats-potatoes

It’s good to see that strangely creative people are continuing to be strangely creative during the lockdown. And they don’t come much stranger than James O’Brien.

Meet the artist spending his quarantine making potato prints of celebrity dentures – It’s Nice That
Beginning the project a few weeks ago as countries around the world began to head into lockdown, “like most people at this time, I was feeling a bit lost and longed to hear or see something familiar,” says James. “My dad loved listening to Terry Wogan, so I made a set of Wogan’s dentures. I don’t quite know why dentures,” he says, “but I found it oddly comforting.”

Posting the results on his Instagram, James then decided he’d offer up his services to anyone in need of a free set of celebrity dentures on a postcard (everyone). “It went berserk: Freddie Mercury, Jurgen Klopp, Joanna Lumley, Elton John, Madonna, Bowie (original set), Ken Dodd, the list goes on.”

rats-potatoes-3

We all need a hobby, I guess. You must check out his Dictator potato printed calendar, Dictatoes, for a glimpse into the hobbies of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin and friends.

rats-potatoes-1

Fun with colour

I thought these two went together well.

colors.lol – Overly descriptive color palettes
Created as a fun way to discover interesting color combinations. Palettes are hand-selected from the Twitter bot @colorschemez. The feed randomly generates color combinations as well as their descriptions, with each color being matched with an adjective from a list of over 20,000 words.

fun-with-colour

A painting and photography duo poking fun at fine art – It’s Nice That
The idea behind the project is for the pair to travel to locations any arts aficionado may recognise. Environments painted by Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet or Vincent Van Gogh are all visited, but rather than replicating their celebrated works, Hank chooses to paint the pattern of his shirt instead.

fun-with-colour-3

Viral responses

I’m happy to discover that plenty of people are meeting these “tests of severe circumstances” with humour.

Empty toilet paper rolls and a ‘closed’ sign: Emoji get redesigned for COVID-19 – Fast Company
“I believe what the world is going through right now is a big moment in history which will have a profound impact on the way people behave, communicate, and perceive their reality,” Lee says. “With this in mind, I thought we needed a new set of emojis which reflected our new reality.” The work is funny in some instances, though also quietly sad.

viral-responses-1

Human figures removed from classic paintings by artist José Manuel Ballester – Colossal
Despite being a couple of years old, José Manuel Ballester’s artworks feel eerily familiar in the time of COVID-19. The Spanish artist recreates classic paintings like Goya’s “The Third of May 1808,” Vermeer’s “The Allegory of Painting,” and Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” except he leaves out one central aspect: humans.

viral-responses-2

See famous logos get reimagined for the coronavirus age – Fast Company
“I tried to find something in every brand that communicates perfectly in normal circumstances, but is wrong in these difficult times—mermaid without a mask, Nike telling us to simply do it, Mastercard circles overlapping,” Tovrljan explains over email. “If you turn it completely around, it becomes even more powerful.”

viral-responses-3