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- Hacker News
- Blade Runner is absolute perfection in every aspect. It’s crazy how deep Ridley Scott has fallen sinceby iammjm
- Eh. Good movie but that’s about how far it goes. Perfection, though? Please. A movie that has about 700 different cuts and nobody can agree on which is the good one is as far as you can probably get from absolute perfection.by iudjwidjwjdj
- lights Molotov Yes, but which cut?by tclancy
- I still enjoy some of his later works. James Cameron on the other hand - boggles my mind that he wants to waste his remaining years on that Avatar dreck.
- Ridley Scott has made several amazing movies after Blade Runner. The latest film from him that I really liked was The Last Duel.by tuna74
- I love typefaces where the italics look very different from the non-italicized font. The combination of that and the brownish red color used for the word "Replicant" does such a great job of leaping out and cutting through.
Incidentally, I just went through a "what font should I use in my terminal" journey for the first time in a long time recently and took a long wandering trip back home to Source Code Pro. There's something about how round and open the letters are that's very readable to me. Compared to a more typewritery tech-y fixed width typeface, it just parses really easily to my eyes.
by CoolestBeans - > Like when you buy a car, and all you see is your new car on the road.
Fun fact: the reason all car commercials sound the same, and distinctly different from other types, is that people tend to pay attention to them, but only when they're in the market for a car.
--source: ex worked as copywriter for ad agency
- > Here are the six that have made my cut [...] The question is: how do they make you feel?
Feel, schmeel, I'd have vetoed Berkeley Mono right away for the very practical offense of making 0 resemble O. Even in my pre-coding youth, I already had an inordinate fondness for the disambiguations of OCR-A [0]...
> HARRISON FORD
Hold up... Why is that one twisted!? Is it an optical illusion? Am I going nuts?
Nope. I opened it up in GIMP and I'm not (that type of) crazy: The H is ~4 pixels higher than the D, as if the whole thing was rotated by 1° clockwise. However the same rotation isn't present on the which appear cards immediately before and after.
I assume this is subtle quirk introduced the video-editing process, but if it happened today (instead of back in 1982) I could entertain the idea that it's One Weird Trick intended to attract viewer attention via subtle wrongness.
> we obsess over the details.
"I'm doing my part!" <Starship-Troopers salute>
by Terr_ - Whoa, great catch! I can't unsee it.by staticshock
- > I'd have vetoed Berkeley Mono right away
this is bait. berkeley mono out of the box sure doesn't do O0 separation but their "compiler"[0] lets you get a dashed one _very_ easily.
[0] https://usgraphics.com/products/berkeley-mono#:~:text=Custom...
by thewisenerd - I mean back in the day, those kinds of titles involved film editing, not video editing. As in, physically filming title cards with a camera (and then maybe optically compositing them on top of other elements). It's easy to see how things could get slightly misaligned.
Looks like the misalignment is less than 1 degree. It's the kind of thing that stands out very noticeably in an image on a web page, when there are lots of perfectly horizontal edges to compare it against (e.g. the edge of the viewport). But I think it would be much harder to notice if projected onto a movie screen in a dark theater.
by teraflop - The skyline was inspired by north east England, Middlesbrough Teesside. ICI was one of the largest chemical sites in the world. Ridley Scott had studied at Teesside Polytechnic and took inspiration from the Imperial Chemical Industries that over looked Middlesbrough. One side of the skyline in the area you see towers and smoke billows and roaring flames, the other picturesque north Yorkshire moors and Odins Mount. Quite a contrast.by wsintra2022
- Small Caps were a thing when I was a typography fan. They aren't just smaller versions of caps, they were specifically designed for in-text use as opposed to display use.
Fyi.
by mannyv - Love small caps. Rarely used and encountered, I really enjoy seeing them in the wild.by bhasi
- Normal caps are for in-text use too. A really good typeface will have different versions for all kinds of different display conditions. Sometimes several levels of display for headings and above, like posters and signs. There will also be different weights which are important, for example if you are setting light on dark as opposed to dark on light (e.g. on UK road signs a medium font is used for light on dark and heavy for dark on light). It's all about giving the desired optical effect.
In computer science literature it's common to typeset the names of problems in caps (e.g. 3-SAT), but I find doing it with normal caps so ugly. It's much more pleasing to use small caps, and some works do (including my own PhD thesis). What I find even nicer is that you can still capitalise proper nouns and the beginning of sentences when using small caps.
- Yeah, I was gonna say that. The proportions are pretty different. Though I rarely use them inline… I’ve used them in a few logos when the uniformity of the letterforms just clicked in-context.by DrewADesign
- > I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.
Tangential but I've been enjoying GNU Unifont for this purpose. I like the look of it and it does a good job supporting a huge range of characters. Terminals warn me that it's not technically monospace, but for all intents and purposes in a terminal windows it is. I have it as the default bundled font with a project that renders custom glyphs on the fly for display on real VT320 hardware as DRCS.
by jimmaswell - > Chances are, you never think about typography.
Probably not true for most of the people reading a blog post about typography
- This is interesting for me as the author mentions in the opening line that he basically is a slave to the machine theirself and the only freedom they got is in choosing the font space of their user interface.
And then they go on about the intricate details of some artistic choice 40 years ago. How the human touch and deliberate decisions were made..it all eclipsing in it being about a movie where the machine rebelled.
by burnoutdv - Also touched on at https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ (and the book)by kodablah
- Came here to say the same thing.
I think the Alien one is even better: https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
by alexpotato - I Wish the author would write more articles, I enjoyed these when they came out immensely.by riffraff
- With the em dashes and the conclusion "This was not called execution. It was called retirement." I expect a lot of people would believe today that these title cards were written by an LLM.by schoen
- Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.by EarlKing
- I would expect the LLM-ese to not repeat "called" like that.by hcs
- Pretty much anything professionally typeset will use the appropriate dashes.by warmjets222
- Thematically appropriate for it to be difficult to tell something human-created from something generated by a computer.
Almost a bit too on the nose.
by jameshart - Can we get off with "the em dashes" – I've been using them for years (checks post history:), decades.
- Will just been seen as one of those things that just happen be to accurate to the future by mere chance.
The other was in Terminator 2 with how agreeable LLM's will be regarding new information.
Terminator/T-800 tests his foster mother's identity with a phone call.
Terminator impersonating John - "Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie?" (using a fake name instead of the dog's real name, Max).
T-1000 "Wolfie's fine," the Terminator hangs up and tells John "Your foster parents are dead."
by ColdStream - What’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner.
Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.
by roughly