Some of these renderings resemble organic life so much it hurts. The fact that it comes from AT&T research just lends more absurdity ~ it's images like this that make me think Project Natal and fractal/matrices mathematics are approaching the same stupendous truth.
There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans. -Vincent Connare
So why did he do it? When Connare was still a font designer for Microsoft way-back-when, he designed Comic Sans for a program called Microsoft Bob. From the still of MS Bob on Connare's website, the program looks like some kind of creepy tour-de-stuff led by a dog presumably named Bob (the character calls to mind the dog that offered, without solicitation, help formatting your greetings in MS Word). The scorn held toward Comic Sans by the design community is matched only by the adoration held by the bake-sale community - and the latter, unfortunately, has more say in whether or not the font will persist in our visual culture. That is, unless programmers step in and remove it as an option from MS Word, Publisher, Movie Maker, etc, the idea of which being very exciting for two reasons: first, Comic Sans would be gone for good, and secondly, it would be fascinating to watch how the community of its users would handle the absence. What font would they find to take its place? Papyrus does come to mind (though its most frequent home is the covers of New Age literature). Probably not Connare's other big-name font, Trebuchet, which is certainly not whimsical and built-for-children enough to advertise Bunko night. On the other side, if they began using, say, Helvetica or Univers or Bodoni ~ any sacred typeface ~ the design community would simply have a new focus of impotent outrage. There doesn't seem to be a way through, and certainly not around this, ahem, comical dilemma.
The poetic part of all this is that the admirers of Comic Sans blissfully have no idea about the vast, lonely, Sisyphean world of designers that hold them in so much contempt. Point: admirers. But in the meantime, feel free to join the cause...
It's a good and interesting experience, drawing eyes...the business of it is implicitly emotional because of everything we associate with eyes ~ ie, the window to the soul, the first thing many of us notice about someone, the struggle to open the mind's eye, etc. Well-drawn eyes seem, more than any other feature, to bring life to whatever creature they belong to. Likewise, the absence of eyes is one of the more discomforting concepts to most folk, associated with ghosts, monsters, machines and creatures generally unwelcome. I still find them difficult to draw from imagination. But practice makes better, and better and better still.
Death to the demoness Allegra Gellar! Death to Lionhead Studios!
Before railing into this 'thing', it ought to be noted that, yesh, the technology is rather incredible, and several genuinely positive usages could be distilled from this software (most that come to mind involve use as companions for those with mental struggles). That said, not only is this unnecessary in the general way that all entertainment is unnecessary, but it's also unnecessary because there are actual twelve-year-old boys, some of them even named Milo, that will gladly look at our drawings of fish if only we hand it to them.
Why do real people need to be replaced with these...these carefully crafted creations? Well, I guess real people aren't as "fascinated" by our lives as they could be. But Milo is the true captive audience. That long anecdote from your 2002 family vacation to Colorado - the one that everyone else drifts off during and starts texting? Milo will probably listen wide-eyed to the whole thing and then ask to hear it again. Skynet becoming self-aware is really just humans becoming immersed in tech-dependence.
Anyways, science fiction certainly has thought of this stuff, and it's rarely been happy about it. I mean, 'Natal' is to 'Natal' as 'Existenz' is to 'Existence'...
Well, quite a bit of time has passed since the last post here. I suppose there's a lot to say, but perhaps I'll cover most of that in the next post. This post is just intended to explain, in some way, the three images above.
They are the first images of a project that's been sitting around for a while (and was originally conceived to be a book, of sorts, with a narrative strung from random Craigslist posts. But the idea of stitching them together seemed to undermine the deeply personal nature of some of these posts - all of which are taken from the Missed Connections listings - so I decided to let them sit alone. Another important part of that decision was to include the actual contact information. I felt it was appropriate that these images still function as postings, but nonetheless abstracted to highlight their earnesty [which is not a word, apparently, for some worthless reason]). So if anyone replies to one of these ads, please don't tell them you found it through me, that will just get me involved and turn this whole shmeboble into a messs. But please, if you think one of these is a Connection you may have Missed, please, be encouraged to respond. And there will be more to come.
All the postings above are w4m, but that'll change. I'm looking through the whole spectrum of MCs, these just happened to be the first to stick out to me. This kind of thing has been done before, but it seemed like a good idea to get in on the fun...
