On the Tarmac

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.

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.

The arrangement, of course, is classic Shinsei Kamattechan.

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.

Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, 19 June 2014

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.”

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.

“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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.