no excuse for this

Yes/No/No favourite character

this is so good this is SO good this is SO SO SO GOOD. languagehat you remain undefeated linksource. absolutely beautiful descriptions of arabic typography, calligraphy, etc, with technical details both scriptologically and in terms of the problems with the code. sorry for a long-ass pullquote that isn't even especially representative but this section made me SO happy

The first book printed in movable Arabic type was a book of hours, Kitāb Ṣalāt al-Sawāʿī, produced in 1514 in Fano, in the Papal States, by the Venetian printer Gregorio de' Gregori. It was set by craftsmen who could not read a word of what they were setting, and you can tell: letters detach at the joints, dots drift away from their letters, final forms turn up in the middle of words.

Two decades later the Paganini press in Venice printed the first Qurʾān in movable type, a commercial venture aimed at the Ottoman market, and it failed so completely (typographic errors compounded by textual ones, in the one book whose point is textual fidelity) that every copy vanished and scholars spent four centuries politely doubting the edition had ever existed. Then in 1987 a single copy surfaced in the library of a Venetian friary, where it had been sitting the whole time.

Carnelian crocodile pendant, Egypt, 20th-18th century BC

Anthropeum.com · Jun 12 2026

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I viewed Boyscout by Elmgreen and Dragset

This work references same sex attraction in an environment strictly structured around gender separation. (The boy scouts). Boys are supposed to be molded into strong, healthy men that are kept away from tempting girls.

I found the work interesting for several reasons.

1. The simplistic way the bunk beds have been turned around. Suddenly they symbolize something else. A longing for closeness. A symbol of being different where everyone is supposed to be the same.

2. And I always find it interesting how artists express LGBT ideas and feelings related to being queer.

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

Trick of the light