Through Lines 245

I’m a big Wilco fan and Jeff Tweedy awkwardly nerding out about guitars (spoiler: he has a lot of them) is equal parts compelling and delightful. Mostly I enjoyed this because he’s so down to earth and self-deprecating about the whole thing. Also, trying to avoid everything turning into an orange buffoon political doom machine…

• With just 36 exposures per roll, each photo required intention, a slowing down to see the world around me. There was no instant gratification, no delete or edit button to fix mistakes. If a picture didn’t turn out as I had hoped, it didn’t matter. The imperfections became part of the story. That last bit is important. Analog things are alive — and signal something innately in us that digital cannot fulfill. Not a bad thing, but fulfilling more complex needs.
• The Typology of Venetian Entry Buzzers is a thing I didn’t know I needed to see this week, but here it is.
• This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender is the lesser-known companion to Woodie Guthrie’s famous This machine kills fascists slogan emblazoned on Pete Seeger's banjo. Brothers-in-arms indeed.
• Related: How to Stop Trump's Power Grab. It’s no too late yet but coordinated action is going to be needed to prevent things from sliding downhill any faster than they appear to be right now. If you’re looking for more suggestions, Choose Democracy has you covered.
• Blackletter type for me sits in an uncomfortable place in history, and more often than not is hard to use properly in a modern context, but I’ll admit to seeing something charming and a little weird in Ellis Carson Jones’ almost goopy interpretation dubbed Posthumous.
• 70% is the magic number, …expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.
• I’m not sure what to make of Friendship based on the trailer — “I can see the future. It’s full of pals,” and “I Love You Man but for sickos” — but I’m putting it on the to-watch list either way.
• Kottke linked to Gina Trapani’s My Life in Weeks site which is a fun and kind of fascinating idea. Splitting things into weeks allows for enough detail without perhaps feeling overwhelming. And certainly, doing something like this retroactively, at a certain point it would be tough to get much more granular anyway.
• There are not enough words for love to describe how much I love Love Hultén’s Retrofuturist Tech sculptures. So much knobs and switches and lights and those textures… ahhhhh, so good.
• I’m a big fan of the Colorplan line of papers, but I’m not keen on G.F. Smith's new identity.
• A humpback whale briefly swallows kayaker in Chilean Patagonia. Just another day at the office.
• My pal Andy is back with a new blog and did his bit with the Blog Questions Challenge too.
• Funnily enough, I was talking with someone about font licensing this week. Timely.
• Hard to argue with good satire (and Cookie Monster).
• Floor 796. Wild.