Early morning at Red Hill

Its a Typography Post.

Was working on a project for school where I had to design a masthead for a fictional magazine. So playing around with fonts and such, I discovered this!

How amazingly cool is it that Baskerville's brackets are so gorgeously thin and light, that it looks like it belongs with a san serif typeface? And yet, it still matches the serif letters so well, since Baskerville I feel, has a relatively light stroke as it is. So nice.

(Not that there's anything wrong with Caslon, of course.)

How about a closer look please! And you know I love italics, even more than how much I love san serifs in their thin/ultrathin versions.

Check out the even stroke of the ampersand (&) on Baskerville Regular compared to the Caslon. And the contrast on its comma is gorgeous. While I'm not to sure on the sharpness of its question mark, I really love the flourish on Baskerville Italic's ampersand and just look at the sharp tapered ends of the brackets!

Its quite an innovative solution too, I think, with regards to designing what the italicized form of the brackets should be. Ultrathin strokes on regular, and a slight belly in italics, to denote a really graceful shift in weight and angle.

Sigh.

Today, while covering lecture notes from my astronomy class that I have only attended once this entire half-semester, I learnt that the light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us!

I see my day by something that happened 8 minutes ago. Its a strange, strange tension between past and present.

And you know, since everything is formed and/or defined from light, colours (which are, I think, the reflection of different wavelengths of light) and light helps us define forms, I think its pretty crazy-ridiculous that our present is shaped by something that is past.

No? Anyone else see the craziness?

In any case, it'll help me feel less guilty if and when I start delving back into old sad stories, because hey, that seems to be the actual, physical condition of our lives on this planet! Hoho, nifty excuse.

This is why I wanted to take the astronomy class, I guess I see something romantic about the universe and all its systems and how they were formed. Its so massive, gorgeous but also distant.

Something humbling too, to know that Earth is part of our Solar System, which is part of a branch of one of the many lesser arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is part of the Local Group, smaller than another Local Group galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, which in itself, is minute against the unimaginable number of galaxies that probably exist in the universe.

To which I say: HOW CAN THERE NOT BE ALIENS.

I also like how my lecturer wrote in his slide:
Most of the atoms in our bodies were created in the core of a star! We are made of star stuff.

Am listening to the new Franz Ferdinand album and its a pretty different sound, some of it sounds a bit weird* to me but there are some IMMEDIATELY strong tracks (Ulysses, Turn It On, the electronic half of Lucid Dreams, Twillight Omens)! It took me awhile to realize that I was already mini-dancing in my seat on the first listen, and hey its been some time since any album has gotten me to do that. The sound is even more layered now, which is awesome. Sometimes I also wish they did more soft ballads because the vocals on Katherine Kiss Me is so emotive and coupled with the lyrics, its quite dirtily wistful.

CANNOT WAIT FOR THEM TO START THEIR ASIAN TOUR.

*not too worried about this either - i remember not feeling half of the second album in the beginning but now I love all the tracks.

I've been having increasingly traumatic nightmares three nights in a row man, which really sucks. Its quite emotionally exhausting to wake up in the morning carrying all the leftover fear, panic and anxiety from sleeptime encounters with Anonymous, Invsible, Malignant Forces giving chase and then having to find a place to hide. Or having a psycho stalker who is just so quietly sinister who makes you feel so scared to even leave the house by yourself because she WILL FIND YOU and then you find out that your mother's an impostor and it's actually the stalker AFTER FACIAL-RECONSTRUCTION SURGERY. Then you kill her.

The residual anxiety this morning was so bad I even didn't feel 'safe' leaving the house.

Oh god. I have issues.

Oh I am finally musically excited!

#1. Just found norwegian super awesome rockster, ida maria. She's like an angrier Feist and when she screams she sounds like bjork! very cool.
Stella
I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked
oh lol, did she happen to read my diary when she came up with this

#2. HELLO NEW FRANZ FERDINAND ALBUM COMING UP
And holy shit, "What She Came For" sounds so amazing played live, i need to hear them live again. NME's preview of the album says:

'Lucid Dreams' is the real curveball, though. Whereas the version released on Itunes earlier this year was angular Franz-by-numbers, here the song becomes an amorphous 8-minute epic that slowly coalesces into a hefty slab of brutal minimalist techno. It's properly mental.

See, the Lucid Dreams that I know is quite a sweet track, literally. Hummable and pleasant. But 'brutal minimalist techno'! Intriguing! Exciting! I can't wait!

Damn damn they're playing in London on 1 Dec at a cafe to preview their tracks. There you go, another point to add to my list of Why I Should Be in London & Why Can't My Ancestors Have Squatted Over Prime Real Estate That Would Make Us Obscenely Rich So That My Parents Can Send Me To Crazy Expensive London Art School.



*all links will bring you to youtube clips. yeah cos embedding videos suck and make things lag y/n?