I first encountered the scientific paper simply titled “Strapless Evening Gowns” four years ago, when I was flipping through a collection of magazines that once belonged to the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener.

Among his magazines was the May 1960 issue of Voo Doo magazine, which was MIT’s “only intentionally humorous campus publication” going all the way back to 1919.

I got a chuckle out of this article, which attempted to semi-seriously analyze what exactly keeps a strapless dress from falling down:

An excerpt:

Scientists have a long history of amusing themselves with humor. In addition to Voo Doo, other science humor magazines include the Annals of Improbable Research, the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and the Worm Runner’s Digest which included both satirical and serious scientific papers, much to the confusion of their readers – a problem eventually solved by printing the satirical articles upside down.

And then there are the quasi-serious scientific studies meant to be amusing, such as this study on the effectiveness of tin foil hats in protecting you from government surveillance (spoiler: tin foil hats can actually amplify certain radio frequencies, so the authors speculate that the government has been behind promotion of tin foil hats all along).

And back in 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper called “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment Of A Case Of Writer’s Block” which I am posting here in its entirety:

And lest you question the veracity of the author’s finding, I should note that the author’s failure to treat his writer’s block has been successfully replicated.

I bring all this up because a few weeks ago I thought I might write an April Fool’s Day post about something I first came across 30 years ago: an article from the April (as in Fools) 1971 issue of New Scientist magazine about “Neil Illusions,” a brand new category of optical illusions named for the man who discovered them, Allan Neil.

I ultimately decided not to write about Neil Illusions for two reasons. For one thing, I no longer had the full article, only this fuzzy low resolution copy of the illusions themselves:

I couldn’t get a higher resolution version because while the original article used to be available in Google Books, it isn’t anymore. So I searched for other places where Allan Neil may have written about his Illusions and I did find variations on the article reprinted in other journals.

But that brings me to the second reason I didn’t write about Neil Illusions: Now that I looked at them again 30 years after I first came across them, I just no longer found them that funny.

Anyway, as I searched through science comedy journals in search of the full Neil Illusions text, I came across a familiar article on the structural analysis of strapless evening gowns, but in an unfamiliar place.

It was in the April (as in Fools) 1964 issue of Perdue University’s monthly engineering magazine, Perdue Engineer. For this issue, they turned the magazine into a parody of Playboy.

The centerfold, “Miss Fire,” was a rocket ship.

But it also included a reprint of the strapless dress article, with the new longer title “The Stress Analysis of an Evening Gown” and new curvier illustrations.

Perdue Engineer had actually flirted with this topic before. In their April 1960 issue, they ran an article on the stresses of Maidenform strapless bras.

When I saw their reprint of the “strapless gowns” article, I remembered seeing it in Norbert Wiener’s Voo Doo magazine a few years back. So I wondered if it was a more well-known article than I’d realized.

I looked to see where else it may have been published and it turns out that this article has made the rounds amongst the science-humor-minded. It can even be found in an anthology of humorous scientific articles where it was reprinted with the even longer-still name “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown” and yet another version of the illustrations.

This version of the evening gown doesn’t look like it’s being held up quite as well by those structural forces

It turns out that none of these versions of the article is the original version, which first appeared in a publication called California Engineer in 1956, and was written by a civil engineering student named Charles Siem. He later went on to design bridges.

Given all we know about the history of sexism in the workplace, it’s not surprising that this Mad Men era attempt at humor used the language of science to ogle women under the guise of engineering analysis. I wondered how many of the people who read this may have actually been women. Well, according to a 1964 article in American Engineer titled “Why Don’t American Women Go Into Engineering?” women only made up “about 1% of the national total in the profession” at the time. So, probably not many.

Today, the numbers are slightly better, depending on what field of engineering you look at. The Society of Women Engineers put this graph together last year based on the latest census data. It shows that women make up between 9% (electrical engineers) and 32% (environmental engineers) of their fields. Here’s the full breakdown:

But what about the actual science in these articles? Is the structural analysis of strapless gowns all just meant to be funny? Or is there real engineering behind it?

Well, just a few years ago, the podcast Improbable Research, hosted by Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams, had an episode dedicated to this question. His guest in this episode is aerospace engineer Nicole Sharp (a woman engineer!) who went through the article and explained the forces that are actually described.

An excerpt:

But the cultural impact of the structural analysis of a strapless dress doesn’t end with a few articles and a podcast. It ends with a symphony orchestra.

Deborah Henson-Conant is a professional harpist who describes herself on her website as a “Grammy-Nominated electric harp virtuoso with a wicked sense of humor, a gutsy set of vocal chords [sic] and theatrical flair.”

Deborah Henson-Conant, still frame from “Invention & Alchemy”

That sense of humor was evident when Deborah opened the Burnt Food Museum, a showcase of all the food she has burned over the years, beginning with a piece called “Free-Standing Hot Apple Cider” from 1989. I know, a burnt food museum doesn’t seem at all related to being a professional harp player. But her museum actually has an official museum harpist so, ya know, it’s totally related.

Well, the Annals of Improbable Research heard about her museum and decided that it was worthy of a cover story in their magazine. Here’s what Deborah said happened next:

And so in February 2001, Deborah performed the full orchestral version of “Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Dress” with the 70-piece Springfield Symphony. She wore a strapless gown.

Here is the fourth movement, “Danger Zone,” from Deborah’s 2006 album “Invention & Alchemy.” Around three minutes in, you can hear how she uses a harp string to represent the zipper on a strapless dress.

If you listen to the full album, you’ll also hear a song inspired by her garbageman.

Wow, that rabbit hole took me to all sorts of great places I did not expect. But that’s the beauty of the internet. There are so many interconnected things that when you start pulling at a thread, you never know what you will unravel, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.

If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to show your appreciation, I could sure use a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, I’m off to go unravel the rest of the internet, so that’s it for another newsletter! Thank you as always for reading. See you next time!

David

Oh, look. Next week is April Fool’s Day, sometimes known as Stay Off The Internet Day because companies think it’s hilarious to make dumb fake announcements that are sure you clutter your feeds.

But it wasn’t always this way. April Fool’s Day has a history that goes back hundreds of years, but if you were a kid growing up in the mid-to-late 20th century, pranks could be good fun any day of the year. And I know that because comic books ran ads like this full of awesome junk that I wanted so badly:

Joy buzzer! Phony cast! Hot pepper gum! X-Ray Specs! Throw your voice (fool your friends, fun at parties)!

This stuff looked like enormous fun, but I never bought any of them. I did know one person who bought X-Ray Specs and we were disappointed by the illusion. It didn’t let us see through people’s clothing at all.

Somewhere in my online travels, I found someone who did buy these pranks. He bought a lot of them. Je didn’t get them when they were new, but he collects them now as one of his vintage ephemera interests. And then he sells them on his website called, appropriately enough, Old Jokes.

Here’s a sample of the hundreds of old jokes he has:

Stink bombs! A plastic teas biscuit! Joke Scissors! A retracting cigar!

A while back, I got on his mailing list where he sends occasional updates when he acquires new jokes. And every time I get an email, I wonder: Who is this guy? Is he an old-timer who collects these because he remembers playing with them when he was young? Or a younger person who just likes vintage jokes?

It turns out, he is Philip David Treece, a 35 year old professional conservator in Sheffield, England. Last year he did a restoration of grave of Polish war hero Stanisława Paleolog in Manchester. But as a side-project-that’s-turning-into-a-full-time-job, he collects and sells vintage jokes and magic books. In fact, he has a whole other site just dedicated to collectible magic books.

He has an amazing but sadly dormant blog about magic books, and wrote a book called Magic Papers that highlights the beautiful design and illustrations of vintage magic books and magazines.

Magic Papers is out of print, but you can find an excerpt at Design Observer.

With April Fool’s Day right around the corner, I thought I’d reach out to Philip and talk about pranks old and new:

What’s a little-known historical fact about old jokes (or magic books) that makes you think, ‘I can’t believe more people don’t know about this’?

I think for both it would be the scale at which both of these industries once operated. For the peak of the joke industry, companies like Ellisdons were employing many dozens of people. There were probably over five hundred people in this sector alone in the UK and thousands in Germany before WWII. Magic books-wise, it's been said that no other hobby/profession has had a higher number of independent books and magazines produced about it. I'm not sure I believe that, but it is up there. In the 1920s you could subscribe to dozens of different magic magazines at once and there would be new books out every week.

Why are practical jokes interesting to you?

I've always been interested in the history of magic shops and factories, and jokes go hand-in-hand with that. I think when I started collecting magic apparatus and catalogues from the early twentieth century I realised there was a whole world of jokes these same people were dealing in that just get ignored in most magic history books. The stories of who made them are fascinating too, which is why I wrote the books on Ellisdons. So often it was people from marginalised communities who became street hawkers and moved their way up.

What’s your favorite practical joke — either a vintage prop joke like the ones you sell, or a more modern or even elaborate one?

I have a beautiful 1920s German coat hook, sprung loaded so that it holds your coat for just a second and then dumps it on the floor. It springs right back after dumping the coat, so the victim usually thinks it was just them and tries again a few times! For me it's just perfect, causes confusion, but always makes the victim themself laugh once they figure out the prank.

My kids watch a lot of social media videos where people pull pranks that seem, to me, more obnoxious than funny. So what makes a practical joke fun rather than mean?

For me, the above is a perfect example of that. In the end, the person has to find it funny, they enjoy the weirdness and cleverness of the object, there's no cruelty. I think jump-scare-type jokes with exploding devices of electric shocks are just mean.

Are you a practical jokester yourself, or just someone who appreciates these vintage items for history and nostalgia?

I'm not, to be honest. I'm not sure my partner would hang around for long if I made regular use of my collection. I can imagine some of them will be good fun if I have kids though. It's very much the history of such an under-studied area that draws me to them. You can read dozens of books on the history of china dolls or tin cars, but there are just a few on the history of jokes. I'm currently writing one which will cover most of what I know about the British joke industry and the factories around the world which fed it.

There probably aren’t as many famous people known for being practical jokesters as there are famous magicians, but do you have a favorite practical jokester?

That's a tough one. I think most people who have a reputation for being a jokester I'd probably steer clear of. There was a dreadful show on when I was a kid called Beadle's About, hosted by Jeremy Beadle. It had some incredibly cruel jokes on it that were considered family fun in the 1990s. He'd rightly get sued into oblivion if he were doing that today. He was an obsessive collector of books though and had a dream to be the British Ripley.

Is there a particular era in magic or practical jokes that you think was the golden age, not just in terms of popularity, but in sheer creativity? What made it so special?

For both magic and jokes I would say it was the inter-war years. Magic and jokes were both simultaneously a craze around the world and the factories were putting out their best work. It's not widely talked about, or widely known, but many of the finest joke and magic factories were owned by Jewish families in Nuremberg and they were forcibly purchased and the families killed in the late 1930s (though a few managed to flee). Many of the most creative jokes that exist today were produced by firms which closed in such a tragic way. After the Second War there were trade embargos which stopped the surviving German and Japanese factories from exporting into the UK, so that's when the British companies were mostly formed (Ellisdons, BeePee, Novelties Unlimited, etc.) but none of these matched the quality of the German or Japanese firms of the inter-war years. 

April Fool’s Day is coming up. It’s earning a bad reputation as an obnoxious holiday when brands try to be clever or funny online and often fall flat. Do you have any feelings on corporate takes on April Fool’s Day?

It is a shame that it’s become part of the lazy marketers’ calendar, but at least it reminds people that the day exists. I don’t know how big it is across the pond, but it’s still a real thing here, particularly in schools, which is fun.

And that’s it for another newsletter. You have one week until April Fool’s Day to take a long look at yourself in the mirror and decide what kind of person you are. Are you the type of person who does elaborate pranks? Hides at home to avoid other people’s pranks? Do you avoid the internet? Or maybe you’re a corporate marketer at a bakery tasked with coming up with something awful to get some press for your cakes.

Or maybe you’re the type of person who might enjoy some vintage pranks, in which case I know where you can get some.

If you’re in New York, be sure to attend the New York City April Fool’s Day Parade, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year!

Thank you to Philip, and thank you as always for reading. See you next time!

David

We’re just a few days away from Pi Day, the unofficial holiday celebrating the mathematical constant π, representing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi is irrational. It goes on forever without repeating. And it begins with 3.14, which is why it’s celebrated on March 14th.

It’s a fun nerdy thing to celebrate. But for me, Pi Day has a much deeper meaning that changed the way I approach being creative on the internet. I think about it every year.

Let me take you back to February of 2006, when I started Ironic Sans as a blog, and the month leading up to Pi Day.

Before I even published my first post, I had begun keeping a journal of short ideas and observations I might write about, so I had plenty of material ready to flesh out. I figured I needed ten good posts up before I could share the blog with people, so they could see some history and get a sense of what Ironic Sans was all about.

The very first post was an idea for a new font I called “Ironic Sans” (it was a serif font, which makes it ironic). I posted it as an “Idea” post, which would eventually become a popular category for my blog. I also thought “Ironic Sans” made a good blog name.

Over the next few weeks, I wrote the rest of my first ten posts, and I’m kind of astonished that most of them I still think are pretty good.

For example, I kicked off a series of 60-second videos, long before short-form video was a popular thing on the internet. YouTube was only a year old at the time and I chose to post them on a competing platform (Revver) that later shut down, so the links are all dead now. But I also posted some of them on YouTube, like this 60 second video of landing gear that somehow has around 480,000 views:

In another post, I observed that a statue of George Bush at the Houston airport resembled Michelangelo’s David. If I were writing it today, I’d include more information about this type of pose, known as contrapposto, described in Wikipedia as “a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane.”

Elsewhere among my first 10 posts are a couple entries in what would become another ongoing series on the blog: a look at how New York City has been depicted in animation, which began with an entry about Fritz The Cat and eventually included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Critic, The Simpsons, MTV’s Downtown, and even Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Washington Square Park as depicted in “Fritz the Cat”

I wrote the first ten posts over a month, and eventually February turned into March. By the time I sat down to write my 11th post, the date was March 14. Pi Day.

Being a nerdy sort of fellow, I thought celebrating Pi Day on March 14 was a pretty clever idea. I had first heard about Pi Day a couple years earlier, and this seemed like exactly the sort of topic I might write about. So I wrote this:

I posted two other things that day, too — another 60 second video, and my reaction to the news that the original Wallace and Gromit figures had been lost in a fire and had a shockingly low insurance value — but I couldn’t stop thinking about my Pi Day post.

There was nothing even remotely offensive about it, but I felt bad about posting it. I had poster’s remorse, that feeling when you’ve put something online and then you wonder if you really should have.

And here’s why I had this lousy feeling about such an innocuous post: I added no value.

I had no unique take. I offered no interesting perspective. I didn’t create anything new or further an existing idea. I suppose I posted it to signal that I was the sort of person who found such things interesting, but surely I could have come up with a better way to do it than just tell you the holiday exists and quote a paragraph from Wikipedia.

I considered deleting it, but decided against it. Nobody was really reading my blog yet, and it was good to have some content. I decided it was fine as filler material and left it up.

One week later, I wrote the post that blew up and put my blog on the map. It was a silly “Idea” post about making pre-pixelated clothes for people who go on reality TV, to save a poor editor the trouble of having to pixelate your clothes in post.

I actually made shirts available on CafePress — not because I thought anyone would buy them, but because I thought it made things funnier. I set zero markup. I found out the post blew up because CafePress called me to say I was selling hundreds of shirts and making no profit because I had no markup from the base price. Oops.

I had shared the post with a few people who shared it with people, and suddenly my blog was flooded with traffic from all over the place. For whatever reason, it was the right post at the right time and people liked it. People were subscribing to my RSS feed. I was really glad that I had taken the time to populate my blog with content before I shared it with anyone so there was something people could actually look at to get a better understanding of what kind of blog it was.

But that damn Pi Day post was still there, bothering me. It was embarrassing. What if all these people see it? Of course there was nothing really wrong with it, but it just wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to be known for. I didn’t want to be someone who just repeats things other people say. I didn’t want to just be an aggregator or curator. I wanted to be someone who makes things that other people aggregate and curate.

But I chose to keep it up. I knew that it wouldn’t mean anything one way or another to anyone else, but I left it there as a reminder to myself.

To this day, I keep the lesson of Pi Day in mind whenever I create something for the internet, whether it’s a newsletter, video, etc. I don’t mind covering a topic that has been covered elsewhere, but I always ask myself:

• Is this something I can do differently than has been done before?

• Is this something I can do better than has been done before?

• Is there something new I have to add to the topic?

If the answer to all three questions is no, then I skip it.

Pi uses the same digits that every other number has to work with, but always comes up with something new. If you look at any part of it, you’re likely to find a unique sequence you wouldn’t find anywhere else.

And that’s the true meaning of Pi Day.

I know what you’re thinking: But David, there are some sequences of Pi that repeat things you can find elsewhere. It can’t be entirely original the whole time it extends to infinity. Okay, sure. The part about Pi always coming up with something new is a bit of an imperfect metaphor, but it seemed like a nice way to wrap up the story.

In truth, you might find any sequence of digits in Pi. There is even a 9.5% chance it contains your social security number in the first 100 million digits. (My newsletter, on the other hand, doesn’t contain your social security number at all).

And that’s it for another newsletter! Thanks as always for reading. Your support means the world to me in coming up with new ideas for things you won’t find in Pi or anywhere else, so if you’re inclined to pitch in, you can become a paid subscriber or make a one-time donation.

Happy Pi Day!

David

This week, I bring you a variety of Things To Look At.

So without further ado, look at these:

Look At An Episode of Bewitched That Was Written By A High School English Class

Think back. Do you remember that there was an episode of Bewitched that had Darren and Tabitha in blackface? It was a special episode about race, and was written by a class of Black students at a South Los Angeles high school where most kids were reading and writing below grade level — many at a third grade reading level.

Knowing how much kids like TV, their teacher was inspired to reach out to several TV producers to see if they could work together on a project to motivate the kids. Only Bewitched responded. The kids were invited to Hollywood to visit the set, and the new relationship eventually culminated in this episode written mainly by the students. They all got to see their names on TV with a “Story by” credit.

The episode received a special award at the 1971 Emmys, and was recently posted on YouTube by the official Bewitched channel. You can learn more about the story behind this episode on Wikipedia.

One of three “Story by” credit screens needed to fit all 26 names

Look At Strange Nicolas Cage Items You Can Buy On Etsy For Some Reason

Why is Etsy so obsessed with Nicolas Cage?

Sell enough of these and your 3D printer pays for itself

Can’t believe they didn’t go with Duckolas Cage

Okay, this one’s actually pretty good

Look At A Dance Competition Held In VR

I had no idea this was a thing.

Look At A Free Zen Driving Simulator

It’s called “Slow Roads” and you can play it in your browser for free!

You can even go for a drive on Mars:

Look At Every Advertisement in Times Square on January 20, 2007

One day in 2007, I found myself in Times Square with time to kill and camera in hand. For the purposes of this gallery, flashy store signs are also advertisements. You can see all these images in higher resolution on Flickr.

Look At Your Parents’ Pantry

I don’t have a picture of your parents’ pantry to post here. That would be creepy if I did. I’m just suggesting you go look at it. Before you do, try to guess what the oldest expiration date is that you’ll find. Then see if you can find something even older than that.

This should be a TikTok trend.

Wait, is it already a TikTok trend?

Look At Eefing and Hambone

I wish there were better quality clips of Riddle and Phelps on YouTube, but this is the best I could find. Still worth looking at.

Look At Ike & Tina Turner Album Covers

Tina Turner was awesome. Ike Turner was an asshole. Together they made great music. And they had some incredible album covers. It’s hard to praise the talent here without seeming like I’m also praising the work of an abusive prick, so this should be taken as recognition of Tina Turner specifically, and for the album designers, artists, and photographers who made these things awesome despite Ike.

Wikipedia says the artist is Mike Salisbury but I suspect he was just the art director and not the actual artist. Anyone know for sure who painted this?

Check out those fonts

Those last two provocative images are the front and back of the album Outta Season and here’s a little context from Wikipedia:

Wow, I didn’t mean to start and end this newsletter with topics about race. That turned out a bit heavier than I was going for. Still, those are definitely things you should look at, so they fit the theme.

And that’s it for another edition of the newsletter. I wouldn’t deign to remind you that you can upgrade to a paid membership to this newsletter. I’ll save such a plea for next time when I actually have a pretty important post planned.

Until then, thanks as always for reading!

David

This is the iconic cover of Bob Dylan’s 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan featuring Bob and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo:

These are some comic book illustrations that resemble the album cover:

Suicide Squad (2017)

Daredevil #235 (1986)

What If Karen Page Had Lived? (2005)

Dos Veces Breve #16 (2008)

Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4 (1975)

Daredevil #233 (1986)

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent (2011) — Although may just be referencing that image above. If an image is referencing a reference, can it be said to be referencing the original?

Mister No (2019)

Dylan Dog #402 (2020)

Martin Mystère Magazine #1 (2022)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #23 (1989)

I pulled these from the Facebook group Comics Swipes, where comics obsessives share instances of when a comic book artist references, makes homage, or sometimes just blatantly copies another artist’s work.

Here’s an example of a comic swipe:

Sometimes a swipe is just a single panel or pose.

The Avengers (left) and Dynamite Magazine (right)

Fantastic Four #149 (left) and Fantastic Four Annual #5 (right)

Sometimes they copy the layout of a whole page.

And sometimes an artist will even steal from himself! These two pages from different Spider-Man comics are both by Erik Larsen:

One person in the Facebook group commented, “Deadlines are a bitch” to which Erik Larsen himself replied, “It wasn't because of a deadline crunch. I just thought it'd be fun to do.”

Sometimes people share swipes that aren’t from other comics, like in the case of the Bob Dylan album cover, or this panel from Punisher #1 (2011) and the movie Se7en:

Punisher #1 (left) and Se7en (right)

Or these panels from Daredevil #501 and frames from, again, the movie Se7en:

That top panel almost looks traced from the movie

Sometimes the swiped material would come from magazines.

If you’ve never seen comparisons like these before, you might be wondering how they can get away with that. Artists have always used reference material for poses, expressions, etc, and it’s generally considered fine as long as it’s not to a plagiaristic degree. But it has not always gone very well. Depending on the degree of “copying,” sometimes it is seen as lazy, or as theft. And sometimes it has resulted in legal action.

Here’s an Amy Grant album cover alongside Dr. Strange Sorcerer Supreme #15, which features an obvious reproduction of her face from the cover.

The face here is not meant to be Amy Grant, but Doctor Strange’s girlfriend in the comic. But the album cover photo was clearly used as reference material to a degree that may have gone too far in recreating the original. Amy Grant sued Marvel. She didn’t own the copyright to the original photo, but she sued them for associating her image with Dr. Strange, being that he is a practitioner of the occult and she is a Christian Music artist. She claimed that this association was damaging to her image. They settled out of court.

And speaking of settling things, it’s time I settled this edition of the Ironic Sans newsletter. Thanks as always for reading and — what? You don’t think I should end just yet without plugging my daily online quote game Gisnep that thousands of people are enjoying already, and encouraging people to share it with their friends? I’m not sure I have space left here to do that. Maybe next time.

Until then, thanks as always for reading!

David

Back when blogs were still new enough that legacy media outlets covered them as something novel, somebody at the New York Times must have liked my blog. I was mentioned often in their “City Room” section, a sort of New-York-centric linkblog on their website that doesn’t exist anymore.

But of all the things they linked to, the one that tickles me still to this day is an absolutely ridiculous thing I posted back in 2010. Here’s how the link appeared on their site:

Yes, that’s right. I posted a photo on my blog of what I called “a standpipe disguised as a rooster,” and the New York Times considered this among all the news that was fit to print (on their website, anyway).

Pretty sneaky, standpipe. Pretty sneaky.

I mean, it does look like a rooster, right?

[Aside: I sometimes lament how within a few years, between the death of Google Reader and the rise of Twitter, this sort of “just one photo and a caption” post would become something I posted on Twitter instead of as a standalone post on a blog, and that Reader/Twitter confluence was a big reason my blog frequency diminished until I resurrected Ironic Sans as a longer-form newsletter in 2020.]

Anyway, I was reminded of this last week when I read a piece published in the “Metropolitan Diary” section of the Times. It was a letter from a woman who visits New York City occasionally and picks themes for things to photograph while she’s there:

Clearly, the New York Times agrees with that sentiment. And who knows? Maybe your standpipe photos will get mentioned by the Times, too!

Actually, the New York Times seem to love standpipe photos. Not only did they link to my photo of a standpipe disguised as a rooster, but in 2017 they published an entire gallery of standpipe photos by street photographer Clay Benskin called “Standpipes of New York.”

One of the standpipe photos by Clay Benskin

It’s almost like they are obsessed with standpipes.

So I dug into their archives further to see if that’s true. I looked at every article that prominently mentioned standpipes. And that’s how I found an article that explained why the standpipe I photographed looks like a rooster to begin with.

See, one year before I took the photo of the rooster standpipe, the city passed a law dictating a color code for how the caps on standpipes should be painted:

So that explains the yellow “beak” of the rooster. But what about the red comb on top of its head? Why is that there? The article has the answer: “To stop you from sitting on them or placing things on them, of course.”

Of course. It’s not a rooster comb, it’s spikes. And it turns out that there’s no standard standpipe spike. They come in a range of styles. As the article explains, “spikes are not sold with the connection itself; they have to be retrofitted, which is why you see such a variety of them.”

I wonder if the standpipe I photographed looks the same today, 15 years after I took it. So I examined the photo for clues to help remember where it was. There’s a sign in the distance that says “Empire State Building” and the edge of a curved awning visible at the top of the image. Comparing the sidewalk in my photo to the sidewalk beneath various awnings in Google Street View photos of the Empire State Building, I was able to pinpoint it as this siamese standpipe attached to the building. Sure enough it is still there in the same color scheme, at least as of four months ago when this Google Street View photo was taken:

It is a two-headed “Siamese” standpipe (they should probably change that name, right? Conjoined standpipe maybe?). I must have taken the photo from an angle where you could only see half of it because it looked more like a rooster that way. I guess if you want to see a two-headed rooster, go to Coney Island.

They’ve changed the little sign since I took my photo, but it confirms what we now know the yellow caps indicate: a combination standpipe and sprinkler.

I dug even further in the Times archives. Just how deep does their obsession with standpipes go? Well, it turns out it doesn’t actually go that much further. There are mostly stories of standpipes not working when they should, putting firefighters at risk, or violating building codes. Normal news stuff.

I did find out that in 1925, the city of Tarrytown wanted to put a standpipe on J.D. Rockefeller’s property, which he objected to and offered to give them some other property they could use to build a reservoir instead. But this wasn’t the same kind of standpipe. This was a large industrial-looking structure, more like a rural water tower than what you see around the city.

I wrote this piece thinking it was just about some urban oddities, but standpipes are firefighting tools, and as I wrote the end of this piece I began to think of the devastating fires in Los Angeles right now. I have family and friends in LA, and I know one person whose home has been totally destroyed. It’s an unthinkable tragedy.

There are various places online with lists of ways to help from wherever you are. Here is one such list from the Associated Press.

As always, thanks for reading. See you next time!

David

Well, It’s that time of year when every website and your dentist has put together a gift guide, often a sneaky way to use affiliate links under the guise of “content” to earn a little extra end-of-year money. Last year I had an idea to write a newsletter where every single word was an affiliate link to something somehow related to that word. But then I found out that Amazon actually forbids using Amazon affiliate links in an email. Oops.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m a little burnt out on gift guides anyway. So I came up with a better idea for this newsletter.

Instead of listing the same expensive stuff you can find listed elsewhere but with my own personal breadcrumb attached so I get a few pennies if you buy it, I decided to get you some presents this year.

Yep, that’s right. The rest of this email is things I picked out for you. No affiliate links. Just stuff I think you might like since you like this newsletter.

Before you get too excited, none of this is physical stuff. We’re talking bits, not atoms. And I didn’t so much pay for them as I did make links to them. So curb your expectations.

Also, um, none of it is wrapped. Sorry. As you scroll, just pretend that revealing an item on-screen is the same as unwrapping something. So are you ready to virtually unwrap some presents? Let’s do it!

Since I know you like antique shopping

I got you Guess Me If You Can, a game where you are in a museum where all the artwork is taken from real eBay listings, and you try to guess the prices. It can be played solo or multiplayer.

It was made last week by a two-person team as part of a GameJam with the theme “Everything has a cost.” It’s very impressive for such a small project!

It’s a downloadable game, and since it’s not a formally published app you need to give it permission to run if your OS says it hasn’t be checked for malicious software. I gave it permission, but if you’re concerned then just skip to the next gift. I won’t be offended.

Since I know you like music while you drive

I got you Isle of Tune, a web-based combination city-builder and music sequencer, where cars trigger different musical effects. Like this:

Since I know you like The X-Files

I got you two mini-seasons of The X-Files that you’ve never seen. And you still won’t see them, because they are audio dramas, so you’ll only hear them. But they star David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprising their roles as Mulder and Scully. These stories were released on Audible in 2017, adapted from stories that first appeared in comics.

They’ve since been removed from the Audible catalog so they are no longer available for purchase, but someone has preserved them on YouTube:

Since I know you like to solve crimes

I got you Murdle, featuring a new made-up murder mystery every day. You get all the clues, but can you solve the crime?

But that’s just a warmup for your real gift. I actually got you this real unsolved murder from 1910, the case of English actor Thomas Weldon Atherstone who was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in his ex-girlfriend’s backyard.

He had the bad fortune of being murdered the same week as a woman named Cora Crippen. Her case got more attention and was solved (spoiler: her husband did it). But poor Thomas Weldon’s murder remains a mystery.

Here is an article from 1910 with lots of information about the crime. Maybe you can solve it?

Since I know you like late night TV

I got you Conan Throwbrien, a weird dice-based game where you play a late night TV show host who has to get a high enough Nielson rating for a special guest to come on.

Since I know you sometimes need a confidence booster

I got you the subreddit /r/No_Small_Parts because sometimes it helps to see that future stars had tiny early roles before they got their big breaks.

Did he just always look forty?

Since I know you like writing

I got you Typatone. As you type, you make music. It’s kinda hard to explain. And I suppose there’s a chance it will make you enjoy writing even less. On second thought, maybe this is more of a white elephant kind of gift.

Since I know sometimes you just need to relax

I got you A Soft Murmur, my favorite online background noise generator. Sometimes when I’m stressed, I like to put on a mix of rain, thunder, and waves, but you can mix several other sounds together and create the background audio of your choice.

I once dreamed of putting a dishwasher in my bedroom because it had the most soothing sounds. Now that’s actually a thing. The White Noise app from tmsoft has a dishwasher sound that I actually listen to when I’m having trouble sleeping.

Since I know you like weird old movies

I got you Something Weird’s YouTube Channel where they’ve recently been posting full length exploitation films from the 1930s through 1970s. They use the movie title cards as the thumbnails, which makes just looking at the video page an interesting exploration of early movie typography.

Since I know you also like less-weird old movies

I got you Classic Cinema Online, a collection of more mainstream movies like Abbott and Costello Meet The Invisible Man, the Jerry Lewis comedy Hook, Line, and Sinker, and the James Stewart classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Videos are embedded mainly from the Internet Archive, with the occasional YouTube video.

Since I know you like to laugh

I got you this YouTube search for Norman Gunston. Norman Gunston was an awkward fictional reporter long before characters like Ali G were doing awkward interviews, but unless you’re Australian there’s a good chance you never heard of him. Many of his interviews can be found on YouTube uploaded by different accounts, so a YouTube search is a good way to find a lot of them.

I’ll get you started with this Sally Struthers interview and see if you’re not crying from laughter by the end:

Since I know you like classic sit-coms

I got you Fibber McGee and Molly. It’s an old time radio comedy about a married couple. I love old time radio and when I first discovered this one it became a favorite. That link goes to the Internet Archive’s collection of 1,248 episodes.

But I also got you this episode of NewsRadio in which the giving of Fibber McGee and Molly as a Christmas gift is actually part of the plot.

So this “class sit-coms” thing works on multiple levels.

Since I know you like vintage ephemera

I got you the David Rumsey Map Collection. It features incredible high resolution scans of maps and globes from around the world. Despite all the maps, I can get lost in this website for hours.

Since I know you like word puzzles

I got you Gisnep, the daily quote game I made that I have mentioned in the newsletter several times but I’ll bet this is the time that makes you say “Okay okay I’ll play it already!”

Gisnep has a good number of fans who come back to play every day. But to be completely transparent, the growth has really slowed down recently. So if you’re a person who loves Gisnep, let people know about it. Especially if you’re, I dunno, a huge celebrity with millions of followers and a podcast or something. The game could use that kind of boost.

Aaaaaand that’s it for another newsletter! The best thing about all these gifts is that you can feel free to re-gift them to others while still keeping them for yourself. It’s a holiday miracle.

This is probably the last newsletter for the year, so I wish you all a happy version of whatever particular thing you celebrate, and a great start to the new year.

See you on the other side. And thanks as always for reading!

David

Well, the holiday season is officially here and if you have kids, they probably have at least two days off school this week for Thanksgiving. Then winter break is coming up. With all that time off school, how can you, a responsible parent, sneak extra lessons into their day? By showing them scenes from movies that take place in classrooms, of course!

Okay maybe you don’t have kids. And kids deserve to relax during the holidays. But I needed an introduction to the newsletter. Just go with it.

I’ve rounded up 10 class lessons from movies, grouped by subject. See if you can identify what movie each lesson is from. Answers are at the end.

Stable Diffusion / Photoshop

SUBJECT: MATH

1) “Parenthesis means multiply. Every time you see this, you multiply. A negative times a negative equals a positive. A negative times a negative equals a positive. Say it. A negative times a negative equals a positive.”

SUBJECT: SCIENCE

2) “The parts of a flower are so constructed that very, very often the wind will cause pollination. If not, then a bee or any other nectar-gathering creature can create the same situation. Yes, anything that gets the pollen to the pistil’s right on the list. I’ll try to make it crystal clear. A flower’s insatiable passion turns its life into a circus of debauchery! Now you see just how the stamen gets its lusty dust on to the stigma and why this frenzied chlorophyllous orgy starts each spring is no enigma. We call this quest for satisfaction a what, class?”

3) “Archeology is the search for fact. Not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Doctor Tyree’s Philosophy class is right down the hall. So forget any ideas you’ve got about lost cities, exotic travel, and digging up the world. We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never, ever, marks the spot. Seventy percent of all archaeology is done in the library. Research. Reading.”

4) “For many days before the end of our Earth, people will look into the night sky and notice a star, increasingly bright and increasingly near. As this star approaches us, the weather will change. The great polar fields of the north and south will rot and divide, and the seas will turn warmer.”

SUBJECT: HISTORY

5) “You remember that thing we had about 30 years ago called the Korean conflict? And how we failed to achieve victory? How come we didn’t cross the 38th parallel and push those rice-eaters back to the Great Wall of China then take the fucking wall apart brick by brick and nuke them back into the fucking stone age forever? Tell me why! How come? Say it! Say it!”

6) “Three weeks we’ve been talking about the Platt Amendment. What are you people? On dope? A piece of legislation was introduced into Congress by Senator John Platt. It was passed in 1906. This amendment to our Constitution has a profound impact upon all of our daily lives.”

7) “In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?… Raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”

SUBJECT: MUSIC

8) “In this life, you can’t win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end you’re just gonna lose, big time, because the world is run by the Man. The Man, oh, you don’t know the Man. He’s everywhere. In the White House. Down the hall. Ms. Mullins, she’s the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, he’s burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to the Man. It was called rock ‘n roll, but guess what, oh no, the Man ruined that, too, with a little thing called MTV! So don’t waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome ‘cause the Man is just gonna call you a fat washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!”

9) “You can’t dance to Mr. Beethoven. Can you tell me why, Mr. Manfield? Because the Beethoven piece doesn’t use a constant rhythm or tempo. Madonna is 4/4 time all the way through. The melody changes but the rhythm is constant. So you can dance to it. The quartet changes both melodically and rhythmically. I’m going to play them again. Listen for this.”

SUBJECT: LITERATURE

10) “Excrement. That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. We’re not laying pipe, we’re talking about poetry. I mean, how can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? I like Byron, I give him a 42, but I can’t dance to it. Now I want you rip out that page. Go on, rip out the entire page. You heard me, rip it out. Rip it out!”

EXTRA CREDIT: PLAYTIME

11) “Now we’re going to do something extremely fun. We’re going to play a game called ‘Who is my daddy and what does he do?’”

Okay, pencils down. Trade answer sheets with your neighbor to correct each other. Here are the answers:

1) Stand and Deliver; 2) Grease 2; 3) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 4) Rebel Without A Cause; 5) Back to School; 6) Fast Times at Ridgemont High; 7) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; 8) School of Rock; 9) Running on Empty; 10) Dead Poets Society; 11) Kindergarten Cop

Okay, number four is a bit of a cheat because they were on a field trip and not in a classroom, so if you got that one right give yourself an extra point.

So how’d you do? This was actually a reprint of a post I wrote way back in 2008, which explains why there aren’t any more recent movies quoted, but I stumbled across it the other day and thought it was worth a reshare. It also seemed fitting to me that a few months ago I wrote about filmstrips in classrooms, so now I’d write about classrooms in films.

If you enjoyed that and you like games, have you played my daily puzzle Gisnep? The number of regular daily players went up a bit as people sought out alternative games to play during the recent NY Times puzzle strike. But I’m open to ideas on how to get even more people to discover it!

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned that you can support this newsletter with a paid subscription or a one-time donation. So I figure I should mention that.

Thanks as always for reading. See you next time!

David

For obvious reasons, we’re in the suckiest timeline now. If only things had gone a different way at some point in the past — if the hanging chads had hung differently, if Howard Dean hadn’t screamed so close to the mic, if someone hadn’t stepped on a particular butterfly — we would be in a totally different reality now.

Each of those events branched us off into a different timeline, and nobody could predict what would come next, just like you couldn’t predict that the rest of this newsletter is about to pivot to a totally unrelated topic. In another timeline, it continues on about the election, but in this timeline it takes a sudden shift to talk about television.

See, there’s a genre of videos that can be found online that always makes me think of alternate timelines: failed TV pilots.

Each time I see a pilot for a TV show that never got picked up, I wonder, but what if it had?

What if Jean Smart, Octavia Spencer and Christopher Lloyd were all in a sitcom about a family medical practice and it became a huge hit everyone talked about?

Or what if Marissa Tomei starred in a sitcom about a literary genius with writer’s block, and everyone loved it?

Maybe comedy’s not your thing. Okay, then. What if Natalie Dormer, Leslie Odum Jr., and Christopher Egan were in a period crime drama set in 1840 Boston where the only person who could possibly solve a series of murders is Edgar Alan Poe?

Or what if Spike Lee directed a show starring Amy Ryan and Bobby Cannavale about a public advocate who’s used to fighting City Hall but when the mayor falls into a coma he suddenly becomes the interim Mayor Of New York?

And how would history have changed if Brian Cox and Katee Sackhoff were in a hit show about a detective forced to work old John Doe cases? I mean, okay, it probably wouldn’t have changed that much, but what if it meant Brian Cox’s career went in a slightly different direction and we never got Succession?

And I have to wonder if Pedro Pascal would have been in the second Wonder Woman movie if the David E. Kelley Wonder Woman TV show pilot he was in had gone anywhere.

Every one of these shows that never got picked up is the start of a counterfactual for me where I try to imagine where the show would have gone, and how that would have changed things. Think of your favorite TV show that had a cultural impact. How would things be different if it had never gotten past the pilot episode?

Back in the 90s, people used to trade videotapes of pilot shows that achieved cult status. Most notable for me was Lookwell, a comedy written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel starring Adam West as a washed up actor who used to play a detective on TV and now imagines himself to be an actual detective. When he’s not teaching acting classes, he uses his terribly outdated skills to go undercover and help the police, who find him more annoying than anything else. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and I still quote it often to this day.

Lookwell finally did air on TV on the now-defunct cable network Trio. They had a series called Brilliant But Cancelled that showed programs that either never made it to air or were cancelled too soon and forgotten.

Another critically-acclaimed pilot that never got picked up but gained a cult following was Heat Vision and Jack, written by Dan Harmon and directed by Ben Stiller, starring Jack Black as an astronaut who develops powers after being bombarded by solar energy, and his sidekick, a talking motorcycle voiced by Owen Wilson. Yes, you read all of that right.

Unaired pilots are a mixed bag. A rare few, like Lookwell, are quite fun. But most of them are passed on for good reason. If you watched more than a minute of that Marisa Tomei example above, you understand why it wasn’t picked up. So watching old pilot episodes is rarely truly great entertainment and more often just a curiosity.

But if you are curious to explore what might have been, here are some places you can go to find a ton of pilot episodes:

/r/RIPilots — There are only about 1,000 members of this subreddit, but it’s always full of surprises, with people posting “unique unaired pilots, weird concepts, original pitches, and shows cancelled before they reached their full potential. Terrifying utter garbage that we are happy didn't make it to air is also allowed.”

TV Pilots Archive — This treasure trove on the Internet Archive has 346 pilot episodes you’ve never seen, from About A Boy based on the Nick Hornby novel, starring Patrick Dempsey, to Zero Effect starring Alan Cumming as detective Daryl Zero.

TV Tunnel Unaired Pilots — Another 72 pilot episodes on the Internet Archive

Media Garage is a YouTube channel that posts a lot of unaired pilots, but I’ve noticed that some of them are unlisted, with links shared on the above-linked subreddit and on their Patreon.

90sKid is another YouTube channel with a lot of unaired pilots, particularly from an era that may be of interest to, well, 90s kids.

Among all those pilot episodes, you’ll also find shows that did get picked up as a series but were retooled, sometimes with changes to the cast. And that brings me to the TV pilot alternate timeline I guess I most wish we were on.

See, the pilot episode of NewsRadio featured a character who was an electrician named Rick, played by Greg Lee.

After the pilot episode, his character was replaced by a handyman named Joe, played by Joe Rogan.

NewsRadio was a fantastic show. It still holds up. And Joe Rogan was pretty funny on it. But I can’t help but wonder what the timeline looks like where Greg Lee was kept in the role that made Rogan famous.

[It turns out that Cracked wondered the same thing and actually reached out to Greg to ask what he thinks would have happened in that alternate timeline.]

Well, I guess we’re stuck in the timeline we’re in. I have no words of wisdom to help get through it right now. I fluctuate between disbelief that Trump will actually do all the things he said he would (like, logistically, how could you even round up and deport 11 million people?) and concern that he’ll do so much worse things that we haven’t even thought of yet.

I’ll be here with you through it all. But if you need a brief escape, a way to imagine what would have been if things had gone just slightly differently, maybe one of the TV pilots can help you cope for just a little bit.

And if anyone has a copy of the original pilot for Game Of Thrones, let me know. I’m dying to see it.

As always, thanks for reading. See you next time.

David

If you were one of my very earliest subscribers, you may recall four years ago in the sixth edition of this newsletter, I wrote about a very real voter fraud case in which 1,697 people were convicted of selling their votes. It was a huge scandal a hundred years ago, but history has pretty much swept it under the rug.

Since voter fraud is once again a hot topic (even though it hardly ever happens today), I have revisited the story as a new video on my YouTube channel. It’s also available to watch on Nebula.

I’m going to let the video speak for itself, so the newsletter is a short one this time. Go watch and let me know what you think. Should this scandal be better remembered, or is it just a weird footnote in history that doesn’t really matter?

A Gisnep Update

Last week, I updated Gisnep with the most-requested feature: access to the puzzle archives. So if you missed any days, now you can go back and play the puzzles you missed. Or if you’re new to the game, you can play from the very beginning! There are 83 puzzles as of today.

Your game history is stored in your browser storage, not on the server, so it doesn’t sync across devices or different browsers. At some point I’ll work on a solution for that but at least now you can any play games you missed.

I’ve been keeping track of some of the nice things people have said about Gisnep, so if you still haven’t played, perhaps this sampling of unsolicited recommendations will persuade you:

If you have already played, thanks! And if you like it, tell your friends!

That’s it! Short and sweet this week. Unless you watch the video, in which case it’s less short. I guess it depends on whether you intrerpret “short” to mean physical size — the video doesn’t actually add much length to the newsletter — or duration, in which case a video can make even a very short piece into a very long piece. Really, the newsletter’s “length” doesn’t even change regardless of how “long” the video is. Whoa.

Thanks for reading as always. See you next time!

David

I worked for several years as a video producer for a large organization that focuses on issues around aging. I mostly produced short documentaries for them. But I once developed an idea for a weird scripted anthology series, like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, that touched on some key issues people face as they age. I never formally pitched it and so it never was even really considered. It would have been a huge undertaking and a big swing for an organization that doesn’t really do this sort of content. But I still think about it sometimes.

The best science fiction reflects society’s hopes and fears, so what better way to prompt people to think about the issues older people face than through science fiction?

I wrote short treatments for four possible episodes. One of them, called “The Company Company,” feels far closer to reality today than when I wrote it in 2018, years before Artificially Intelligent companionship was something people were actually playing around with. It’s also the most fleshed-out of the four treatments.

I present it here, along with the other treatments, for your enjoyment.

“The Company Company”

Will Barnes is a lonely 65 year old man. Divorced for several years, he still doesn’t know how to get “out there” again. His online dating hasn’t gone well. But he keeps seeing ads for something called The Company Company. Their slogan is “We make products that keep you company”. And they promise something new: incredibly realistic android companions.

Will knows it wouldn’t be a real relationship, but he’s curious enough. He visits The Company Company’s office park location where he learns how things work. Each customer can lease a lifelike android to become their companion. These aren’t sexbots. They don’t even have the necessary parts for that. And they don’t have feelings. They’re just programmed to be good company.

Will fills out a personal profile, and is introduced to a few androids who have different attributes. They are amazingly realistic and lifelike. He chooses an android named Nancy who is designed to look like a woman around his own age, maybe just a little younger, to take out to dinner. She explains that she doesn’t really eat, being an android and all, but if he wants to go to a restaurant, she’ll chat while he eats.

They have an amazing time. It’s the best conversation he’s had in ages. He feels like his old self again. She makes pop culture references and does a funny Cliff Clavin impression. This intrigues Will and prompts a conversation about how her programming works. Nancy explains that she’s never actually seen Cheers, she’s just programmed with certain high-level knowledge of general topics.

They continue to see each other over several weeks. Nancy tells Will that she doesn’t understand how, but even though she’s programmed to just be a good companion, she thinks she’s actually falling in love with him. Will is on cloud nine. He’s definitely falling for Nancy.

Then Nancy gets a glitch. She’s got something wrong with her shoulder motor that’s limiting her arm movement but she assures Will it’s not a big deal, it’s something easily fixable. The problem is that she’s afraid to tell the Company because they might deactivate her to fix her shoulder, and who knows if she would still love him once she’s reactivated? It’s too big a risk.

But it’s okay, because she knows of rogue roboticist in town that can fix her. It’s just going to cost a little money. Will gladly pays and Nancy gets her shoulder repaired. She is so thankful, she showers Will with kisses when she returns.

But gradually over time, Nancy’s problems get worse, and more expensive to fix. But Will keeps paying. How could he not?

One day Nancy calls Will in a panic. She says that The Company has found out that she’s operating outside her programming, thinks she’s in love, and visited an unauthorized repair shop, and they are going to deactivate her! But they see an opportunity to squeeze him for money, so they’re willing to leave his robot love alone if he pays them a ton of money. But what they’re demanding is more than he can afford.

Out of options, out of money, and madly in love, Will decides to rescue Nancy from The Company. He’s going to break in, get her out, and run away with her.

Will breaks into The Company’s office park location and searches for Nancy. But when he finally finds her, she’s hanging out in the company break room with the other Company employees he met — and they’re all eating take-out food together.

Will realizes that Nancy isn’t an android at all. She’s just a person. This whole time she and The Company Company were just using him for his money. He’d fallen for a high tech version of an old fashioned romance scam.

Age-related Message: Con artists are always updating their scams to take advantage of the latest trends and technology. Be aware of the signs of romance scams in modern dating.

“Young”

Gordon Douglas, 62 years old, is at the top of his career. The CEO of a large corporation, he has a happy marriage and a good life. But when he looks in the mirror, he misses his old physique and longs to be young again.

One day, while out to lunch with some other executives, he sees a young man in the restaurant who looks familiar. They catch each other’s eye but don’t speak. As Gordon is leaving the restaurant, the other man comes out, calls his name and catches up with him.

Gordon realizes who it is. This is the son of his old friend Wallace. He looks so much like his dad did at that age! But no, Gordon is wrong. The man explains that he isn’t Wallace’s son. He is Wallace. But that’s impossible. How could he look so young?

Wallace tells Gordon that he underwent a new experimental procedure, a sort of modern fountain of youth. It rolls back the years, leaving you physically as you were when you were younger. He gives Gordon the contact information for the company that does the procedure.

Gordon thinks is over and decides to do it. He goes through with the experimental procedure and comes out looking half his age. He is thrilled. His wife loves her husband’s new look. And his colleagues are impressed. He commands attention in meetings. He has renewed energy in bed. All is good.

But then things slowly start to go wrong. The procedure has a side effect. Along with losing all his wrinkles, Gordon begins to lose the wisdom of experience that came with them. First things begin to fall apart at work, as he makes poor decisions that he should have known better. Then his personal relationships are strained. He acts a lot more immature than his wife has been used to at this point in their marriage.

Gordon realizes what he’s lost and becomes desperate to revert the process and reclaim his true age.

Age-related Message: Age and experience are benefits to be embraced.

“When I’m 64”

The year is 2058. Tina Grant is a brilliant scientist with a major problem. 34 years ago, just before she turned 30 years old, she made a discovery that was hailed as the solution the world’s energy problem. But it didn’t turn out that way. What seemed like a panacea accidentally accelerated climate change and now the planet faces imminent doom and it’s largely her fault.

But Tina has a chance to solve this problem. Time travel has recently been discovered. All she has to do is go back in time to 2024 and prevent her younger self from implementing her discovery, and the planet will be saved.

But when she meets her younger self, she realizes that it’s not going to be so easy. Tina forgot that when she was younger, she was incredibly ageist.

Young Tina has no patience for this old woman who knows everything about her and claims to be from the future. Young Tina assumes this lady is crazy, out of touch, and knows nothing, even though she clearly has a lifetime of experience in the sciences.

The fate of the world rests on Old Tina convincing Young Tina to put her ageism aside and work together to save the planet.

Age-related Message: Ageism is the strangest prejudice because it’s against a group you hope to one day be a part of. In a sense, it’s discrimination against your future self — in this case quite literally. And ageism prevents people from learning from each other, collaborating, and benefiting from a multigenerational experience.

“Olivia Twist”

On the morning of Olivia Twist’s 60th birthday, she goes to her corner coffee shop like she always does. But even though she’s standing there in line like everyone else, the barista never takes her order.

A slightly older customer, Jackie, sees Olivia’s confusion and leads her over to the end of the counter where people pick up their coffee orders. They wait until the barista puts out a coffee for another customer, and before he can get it, Jackie steals the coffee and gives it to Olivia.

The other customer is confused, asks the barista what happened to his coffee.

Olivia is also confused. Jackie explains to Olivia that now that she’s an older woman, she’s invisible. Younger people don’t see her. It’s not that they can’t see her, but it’s like she’s always in their peripheral vision. They won’t notice her unless they have a reason to.

Jackie introduces Olivia to several of her friends, a group of older women who use their invisibility to commit crimes: a little pickpocketing here, a little shoplifting there.

They all share their loot with their ringleader, a woman named Megan who strategizes their thievery and refers to Jackie as the “Artful Codger.”

Megan is eager to bring Olivia into their group. Olivia is intrigued and caught up in the excitement. She joins the group on a big heist they’ve been planning, burglarizing the home of a young couple.

During the caper, someone drops a statuette on a glass coffee table. It makes a lot of noise, and a glass shard cuts into Olivia’s leg. She’s bleeding and unable to walk, and the rest of the group abandons her and gets out of there.

The young couple discovers Olivia bleeding on their floor. Instead of turning her in, they talk to her. They hear her story and together hatch a plan to catch Megan’s band of invisible bandits.

The plan works. Megan, Jackie, and the rest of the band of thieves are no longer invisible. And neither is Olivia, who is seen as a hero.

Age-related Message: Being treated as invisible is demoralizing. It can be prevented if we work towards an intergenerational world where people spend time with others outside their generation.

Okay. I’m no Rod Serling. But in the six years since I wrote these, I’ve seen elements of some of these stories pop up both in fiction and reality. The product called Friend seems to be trying to make their own version of an A.I. companion with a weirdly dystopian promotional video:

And when I saw the disturbing trailer for the movie Companion coming out next year, I immediately thought of The Company Company. They don’t say she’s an android in the trailer, but that’s my guess (is it a spoiler if it’s just speculation?):

Anyway, that’s it for another newsletter. I got my COVID booster a couple days ago and the side effects hit me harder than in the past, so I’m in a bit of a feverish stupor as I write this. So if you didn’t enjoy this edition of the newsletter, that’s totally why.

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

David

This weekend, Saturday Night Live kicked off its 50th season, so I thought I’d share with you an old interview I did with Louis Klein, the SNL superfan who saw nearly every episode in person as a member of the live studio audience, starting with the very first episode. Part of his weekly SNL routine included hanging out with people in the ticket standby line, which is where I met him in 1991. When I had the idea to do this interview with him in 2006, I was happy to see he was still there 15 years later. The last I heard, Louis moved to Colorado in 2016.

Here is the interview from 2006 on the evening of his 528th show.

Louis Klein outside 30 Rock

When Saturday Night Live started, nobody knew it was going to be a big hit. Why did you go to the first episode of a new show that nobody really knew?

Prior to SNL, I was going to a lot of game shows. Like, I watched the game show called Jackpot, which was done in Studio 8H prior to SNL. It ended its run in the summer of ‘75, hosted by Geoff Edwards. I was also going to the Pyramid. I went to all of them over at TV-15 which doesn’t exist anymore and any game shows that were done here, I went to them also. So I was notorious as far as NBC was concerned. They knew who I was because I went to all the shows.

Then in April of ‘75 I found out that the show SNL was coming up, so I went to the Guest Relations department and said I hear you’re doing this show. They said they want 500 people in 8H, they want to do a show that’s going to be a run-through for sound purposes, they’re going to have an audience for that, and you can float around the building and find somebody who’s going to give out standby tickets. So I come over here right after work, and I found the standby ticket and I got it and I went inside and I stood in line.

I got upstairs. I saw a full fledged comedy routine by George Carlin. I saw a full fledged comedy routine by Billy Crystal. I saw performances by Janis Ian and Billy Preston. I saw comedy by the Not Ready for Prime Time Players including Jon Belushi and Gilda Radner among others. Now that’s three and a quarter hours of pure entertainment for free. And I could come back tomorrow night. And I did. And I got in a second time. I came back the following week and I didn’t get into the second show but I wasn’t going to give up at this point. This is a great thing to do on a Saturday night. I went to the third show, I got in, and in the first 5 years I’ve seen 59 out of 106 [episodes].

At what point did you realize it was turning into something you were making a regular routine?

I never really thought of it that way at that particular time. It was just something to do on a Saturday night. I just came over. If I got in, I got in. If I didn’t, I went home.

My memory from meeting you 15 years ago was that you had seen every episode live except for a few. But I guess you’ve missed more than that.

In the first 5 years I’d seen 59 out of 106. So I missed 47 shows then. To date I’ve missed I think 83. That means in the last 27 years I’ve missed 36 shows.

How many have you seen?

This is my 528th show.

The original producer, Lorne Michaels, is still with SNL. But he left the show for a few years in the middle. So is there anyone who outnumbers you in the number of shows attended?

Don Pardo. He only missed one year. It was the ‘81 season.

How come after all this time you still have to wait in the Standby Line? Why don’t they just give you season tickets?

They do. I’ve had season tickets since 1990.

But you just enjoy the Standby?

When they gave that to me, they asked me to do Standby anyway, just in case the tickets didn’t come through. So I have the standby tickets to back it up. However I never needed them, and now I just walk in. But I still do standby because I’m helping NBC out watching this, make sure people don’t jump and things like that. It helps them out. If something goes wrong they know that I’ll take care of it. And then I give the details to them later in the evening. If they have to do something about it they’ll do something.

What’s the worst thing you’ve seen go wrong while on standby?

Jumping the line, and having people join the line. That’s a no-no, because basically the people who are joining are jumping the line. Once somebody tried to get me off the line. This was for the Soundgarden and Jim Carrey episode. We were all standing inside because there was nobody out here, and then all of a sudden somebody let me know that somebody was out here and so I came out, and he was standing over by the pole over here, two guys, and I said all the standbys are inside. He said, Oh, I’m sorry. This is where the line is and I’m going to be number one and two. Well I said, No, I’m number one. He says no, we’re going to be number one. And he argued with me all night at this pole. And I was a little perturbed about it because they weren’t really nice about the whole thing. Well when they didn’t take any standbys for the dress rehearsal, these two guys nearly blew their top to NBC. They said, A standby got upstairs! So NBC checked to see if any standby tickets were upstairs, but I went up on my regular ticket. Little did they realize, I went to the party that night!

Do you get to go the after-party often?

Only the season finale, if they ask. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

When I was here 15 years ago, the line was inside. When did they move it outside?

‘93. Letterman was still here at the time, and according to what I’ve heard, somebody did damage to the building inside in the mezzanine. So Rockefeller Center said no you can’t be up here anymore, because they have to protect their tenants. And as a result all the lines were put outside. The line started at that time on this side of the building. And then NBC put it on the 50th street side because the Rainbow Room was complaining that we look like homeless people. Now we’re back on this side. We’d love to be inside the building again. They’ve got plenty of room on hand. But that’s not going to happen.

I seem to remember that 15 years ago you told me Tim Kazurinsky mentioned your name during a Weekend Update segment.

No, no. Not Weekend Update. It was in a sketch that he did. The Guru sketch. His name was Havnagootiim Vishnuuerheer [pronounced “havin’-a-good-time wish-you-were-here”]. What he was doing was he was answering Unanswered Questions of the universe. So he invited everybody in the country to write in unanswered questions that they had, and he picked one of mine, and all of a sudden I’m at dress rehearsal and he says, “Louis Klein from Ridgewood New York wants to know, does God wear Pajamas when he sleeps?”

And what was the answer?

The Guru says, “No he doesn’t. All he wears is a t-shirt. and on the t-shirt it says I created the universe and all I got out of it was this lousy t-shirt.” That was a Flip Wilson show in December ‘83.

Did they mention your name on any other episodes?

Yes, they did. And [my wife] Jamie too. This was in April of 2004. Will Ferrel was the host. And he was doing the Pepper Sketch, where Will was putting pepper on Will Forte’s salad. And the character’s name was Dr. Louis something, and his wife Jamie. In honor of my 500th show.

Who was the writer that wrote you into the script?

Will Forte.

Have you seen “Studio 60” and Tina Fey’s new show “30 Rock”?

I have.

What do you think?

They’re both great.

Which do you like better?

Oh I don’t know. I love Tina. I love Tracy [Morgan], too. And I relate more to 30 Rock than I do Studio 60 because of that. But I definitely like both shows.

Do you get to know the SNL cast members?

They all know me. They all come and say Hi. I’ve met most everybody. I was invited to the 25th anniversary show, and I went to that. I had to ask for a ticket, and they said that they already have a ticket for me. I was fairly shocked.

Do you have a favorite season of SNL? Or a least favorite season?

That’s a hard question. A favorite season? You know, I don’t remember what all the hosts and musical guests are, and it’s hard. I love them all. I mean, yes, you’re going to have somebody that doesn’t do too well, especially sports figures. I mean, if you want a show that I thought the host was terrible, okay, um… uh… there was… uh… I can’t even say that. I mean, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

Thanks, Louis! As I packed up my notes and my recorder, Louis pointed out that he would be there for several more hours if I had any further questions. And if you have any questions, I’m sure you can find Louis exactly where I did, near the front of the Standby Line outside Rockefeller Center on Friday nights. [That closing line is no longer accurate in 2024, but I left it in because I don’t have a better one.]

And that’s it for another newsletter! This weekend, The Verge published a nice little blurb about Gisnep in their new newsletter Installer, which gives me another excuse to remind you to play it. The most-requested feature by far is a way to play archival games, and I’m happy to say that it’s in the works and should roll out in a few weeks so keep an eye out for that.

Thanks as always for reading. See you next time!

David

What do you mean you haven’t played Gisnep yet? Go play it!

Welcome to “Auction Folder,” a temporary pop-up museum of found art that exists only in this one edition of this newsletter.

Ever since Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal and called it art, the question of whether something can be art that was not created as such has intrigued critics and gallery-goers worldwide. Today’s exhibit showcases a selection of photographs that were taken specifically for eBay auctions — and the occasional Craigslist listing. Individually, these ephemeral images may not have aspired to the realm of art, but when viewed collectively, they transcend their origins, forming a cohesive narrative that elevates them into the artistic sphere.

Artist’s Statement

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of stuff via Craigslist or eBay over the years. When I list something on Craigslist, I usually take a quick snapshot just so people know what it looks like. But when I list something on eBay, it demands a more thoughtful approach to presentation: a nicer photo.

Maybe it’s because I used to actually work professionally as a photographer for an auction house, but it’s permanently ingrained in me to take a good clean photo for auction listings.

If you were a reader a couple years ago when I found eight of my old Ninja Turtle action figures still in their packaging and sold them on eBay for $1,898, you might remember that I wrote “I photographed [them] from every angle I imagined a potential buyer might want to see.” That’s my old auction house experience at work (and also I suppose a pretty obvious thing to do).

Detail from “Donatello-2.jpg”

eBay used to charge extra for having more than one photo on a listing, but they also let you use html in your description. So for a long time, whenever I sold something on eBay, I just put my photos in a folder on my own server and used html to embed them in my auction listing, a loophole to avoid paying eBay per image.

Over many years, that folder accumulated a lot of files and turned into a body of work. Some were individual images. Many were photo montages intended to reduce the amount of embedding I had to do. Individually, they may be just pictures. But seen together, these images transcend their individual purposes and coalesce into an unintended art project—a reflection on material culture, memory, and the fleeting nature of ownership.

Eventually, as eBay allowed multiple photos for free, this folder ceased to grow, its purpose fulfilled. But in its completion, it remains a metaphor for the impermanence of life itself—an unintended art project that, like all things, reached its inevitable conclusion.

The Exhibit: A Selection of Images From Auction Folder

Originally purchased at a yard sale in Rhode Island on a road trip

I seem to recall there was a hack that let you save raw files with this thing

The cat photobombed my shoot. I wrote “Cat not included” in the listing.

I thought the cat in the photos would draw even more people to the auction, but I don’t think it made a difference in the end

I got this when I worked on the auction at Christie’s. It was a nice catalog, but it was big and heavy and I never looked at it, which is probably why I got rid of it. I think I ended up getting around 60 bucks for it.

This was a much bigger auction catalog than was typical

I got this for free at an event in Union Square where Sirius was promoting the fact that that they just hired Howard Stern by giving away free Sirius stereos. Hearing Howard Stern announce the giveaway and then just walking two blocks from my apartment on a whim to see him in person giving these things away was one of those surreal only-in-New-York events.

I had all the games, too. That photo is not part of this exhibit.

I still find this stuff hard to look at all these years later. I still have the New York Times from 9/12. I’m not sure why I got rid of these but kept that.

It was a cookie jar in the shape of the house from Beetlejuice. I should have kept it. It’s maybe my only regret from this exhibit. But what is art without a little bit of pain?

I got the Dreamcast keyboard so I could play Typing Of The Dead

I can hear the sound effects when I look at this

I got this specifically for a project that I never actually got around to doing, and finally admitted that to myself by getting rid of the projector. It is the physical manifestation of unrealized aspirations. I should have mentioned that in the listing.

I’ve never been able to find much historical information about Solomon The Man Monkey. This poster and another showing him being arrested for drunken disorderly conduct are all I’ve ever found. Anybody know anything about him?

This one’s more of a snapshot than a proper setup, but it was in the folder so it’s part of the art exhibit, showing an evolution of the artist’s work over time, natch.

This ridiculous kids’ book about Q*bert did not sell. I still have it.

But this Q*bert game did

See, kids, there was a time when filters were actual filters. #nofilter

If you know, you know.

Okay, if you don’t know: These were 3D LCD games, kinda like a cross between ViewMaster and Game & Watch. They made seven different games. I think the ones I had were a racing game and some kind of space battle.

A scan counts as a photo, right? This was the program from an event recreating the concert from the movie A Mighty Wind, featuring all the stars of the movie. It was a lot of fun. I ended up getting $1 for it on eBay.

The actual equipment used for the Game Boy Color Photography Project

Detail photo from a rug listing. Not a slippers listing.

Thank you for visiting today’s exhibit. Please exit through the gift shop.

Wow, I sure got rid of a lot of old video games. At some point in the very early 2000s, I went through a phase buying all the old video games I wanted but never got to have as a kid. Then when I moved in with my now-wife and we had to consolidate all our stuff into a small New York City apartment, a lot of that had to go.

At some point I bought and eventually sold a PXL-2000, which was a toy video camera that used regular audiotapes to store the footage. It was a rare item in that I actually got more when I sold it than I spent to buy it. I’m surprised I don’t still have the photos from that listing. Weird. I wonder what else I’m missing.

Nowadays, most of what I get rid of just goes up on our local neighborhood ListServ. I take a snapshot with my phone and post it. Those photos surely still exist somewhere in my Camera Roll, but it would take a lot of work to go through and find them all. Maybe some day an AI curator will sort through it and put together a new exhibit.

Anyway, that’s it for another newsletter. Thanks as always for reading! And if you know anyone who likes online daily games, share Gisnep with them!

See you next time.

David

I’m so pleased that Gisnep is already up to thousands of people playing daily, and I’m seeing wonderful comments like “I’ve been hooked on it ever since I discovered it” and “I'm absolutely obsessed with this game.” If you haven’t played it yet, go play! Then come back to read the newsletter. Or maybe vice versa. But check it out!

It’s been a while since I’ve told you about an inventor from my old Inventor Portraits Project, so let me tell you today about Alan Adler. He invented two things that you have almost certainly seen even if you haven’t used them yourself, and you would never guess that they were invented by the same person.

I’m talking about the Aerobie Flying Ring and the AeroPress Coffee Maker.

I didn’t even realize that they were invented by the same person when I decided to reach out to Alan for my project. The AeroPress was very hot at the time and I kept seeing mentions of it all over the place. I knew that people liked to customize how they used it to the point that there were AeroPress coffee-making competitions to see who could make the best cup of coffee with an AeroPress.

I finally got one for myself after seeing a short video Adam Lisagor made about his AeroPress ritual.

I figured that if the coffee maker had so many fans, a video about the man behind the coffee maker would surely be a hit. When I looked into its inventor and discovered that he also invented the Aerobie toy that I played with when I was a kid, I was delighted to discover a broader story than I originally anticipated.

The Aerobie, if you don’t know, is a ring that’s thrown kind of like a Frisbee, but is aerodynamically designed to fly much further. In fact, the world record for the furthest distance an object has ever been thrown is 406 meters with an Aerobie!

So I sent Alan an email asking if he’d participate in my project, and he said yes, becoming the 46th inventor in the series.

We met at his office in Los Altos, California, near Stanford, for a video interview and photo shoot. I’d designed a coffee mug that featured a simplified rendering of the Aerobie — an object that sort of combined his two major inventions — and brought it as a prop for our photos and as a gift for him to keep. I think it looked pretty neat.

Since I was making a video, I needed some footage of the Aerobie in action. So we went to a school playground nearby to throw the Aerobie in an open field for b-roll. I learned that I had been throwing the Aerobie wrong my whole life. I tended to throw it with a slightly upward slant, like I would a Frisbee. But the Aerobie is designed to fly best when thrown flat and level.

Just look at this actual unedited shot, and keep your eye on the Aerobie:

It flies so straight! Not only does it not get any lower as it travels through that image, but I swear at the end it looks like it might be getting higher!

The lip of the Aerobie is designed like an airplane’s wing to give it a bit of lift as it travels. And being thin, it doesn’t encounter a lot of resistance like a Frisbee does, so it goes a lot further.

Cross-section of an Aerobie

Here’s how Popular Science explained the physics in 1986:

While we were at the playground, I took some photos of Alan with his invention:

And before we left the school grounds, Alan played me some music on an instrument he designed and built based on the Japanese shakuhachi.

Back at his office, we talked about the AeroPress.

He described what motivated him to find a better way of making coffee:

Early AeroPress prototypes

Eventually he settled on the design that people came to love, making a single cup of coffee in just about a minute.

We shot video where he elaborates on the process, explains why people prefer AeroPress coffee, and demonstrates how he uses his AeroPress.

You can watch the full finished video telling Alan’s story about both inventions here:

Another coffee man

A couple years later, I had an opportunity to make a video with another person important to the world of coffee: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. This was well before his disastrous Presidential bid.

I was only going to have access to him for about 10 minutes, so I came up with an idea for how to make the most of his time. I asked his team how he prefers to make coffee and learned that he likes to use a French press. So the structure of the piece would be: The Starbucks CEO demonstrates how he makes coffee and while it’s steeping he answers some questions printed on index cards.

We shot it at the then-new Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Seattle, which gave me some opportunities to capture some lovely b-roll.

I was really happy with how it turned out!

The opening shot with the barista putting down the cup that says “Howard” was filmed weeks later at a Starbucks near my office. The barista nailed the placement and angle of the cup in one take, and had perfect handwriting for this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen better barista handwriting.

Maybe one day I’ll have a reason to make a third video about someone important to the world of coffee, completing my coffee trilogy. I don’t know who that might be. Any suggestions?

In the meantime, thanks as always for reading. And if you aren’t already playing Gisnep, what are you waiting for?

Someone recently asked me if Gisnep is pronounced with a hard or soft G and I realized I may have inadvertently created a gif situation. For the record, I say Gisnep with a hard G (unlike gif, of course).

Your help spreading the word about this newsletter (and Gisnep) is always appreciated, as are any donations you might be inclined to give to keep my projects going.

See you next time!

David

Before we get to today’s topic, I want to remind everyone that I made a new daily word puzzle game called Gisnep! Hundreds of people are playing every day, and I especially thank those who have sent in ideas for improvements, or bugs you’ve run into. An update is in the works that’s going to bring a lot of nice new features. I want to turn those hundreds of daily players into thousands, so if you haven’t played yet, go try it out!

Depending on when you grew up, you may have had filmstrip presentations in school. These were rolls of 35mm film projected one frame at a time onto a screen, accompanied by audio played on a record or cassette. When you heard a beep, some student who was picked to run the projector turned a knob that advanced it to the next frame while the teacher got to take a little break.

Filmstrips were weird and wacky and often cringe-inducing. Some typical examples of the genre include:

“Joe Learns to Keep His Body Clean”

“Working in a Supermarket”

The Scooby Gang in “What is Acne”?

“OK To Say No: The Case For Waiting: Vicky’s Story”

I always wanted to be the kid who got to turn the knob. But eventually, my school got a machine that would advance to the next frame automatically. That wasn’t nearly as fun.

I hadn’t seen old filmstrips in decades, so I was delighted to stumble on a YouTube channel a few years ago called Uncommon Ephemera that was digitizing them and posting them online. The format itself is so nostalgic that it didn’t even matter that most of them were ones I’d never seen. They were all fascinating to look at.

The videos were lovingly done. The film scans were high-resolution and clean. The “advance to the next frame” animation felt just right and brought me back to the fifth grade classroom.

The channel was run by a guy named Mark O’Brien who, as far as he could tell, is the only person preserving these old educational filmstrips. And the work is truly arduous. A lot of old filmstrips are sadly faded and need a lot of restoration work. And the audio tracks need high quality digitization from cassette or records.

Scanning these filmstrips is a labor of love and clearly time consuming. Mark spends several days on each one. And he has thousands of filmstrips to go through.

Some of Mark’s thousands of filmstrip rolls

I enjoyed going through his archive. Then suddenly, all the videos on the channel disappeared.

Copyright vs Preservation

While most of the companies that created these filmstrips are long gone, it turned out that the assets from one company had been acquired by Scholastic, Inc. They complained to YouTube and the channel got a copyright strike.

A few days later, the channel got a second strike from another company that acquired some music that was heard on a cassette Mark digitized.

On YouTube, if you get three strikes then your channel gets taken down for good. So Mark voluntarily took everything down before YouTube could, and slowly re-uploaded everything to the Internet Archive, where you can find the complete collection today as he continues to scan more filmstrips.

Meanwhile, he has resumed uploading some filmstrips to YouTube to increase their visibility because people aren’t stumbling on them in the Internet Archive the same way people do on YouTube.

The Preservation Process

I got curious about how Mark does it, where he gets this old filmstrips, and how he got started. So I reached out to him with a few questions. Here are some of his answers, condensed and edited:

How did you get started?

Where do you get the filmstrips?

How do you scan them?

Wait, what? He cuts them to scan them? Oh no. That breaks my heart. It pains me to hear. But which is the better option? Let these old filmstrips fade away unpreserved where nobody will ever see them, or digitize them for the future while destroying them in the process? I’m honestly a bit torn.

In my personal life, I’m not precious about my physical things. I think in all those years living in tiny apartments in New York City with no storage space, I came to prefer bits over atoms. So I scanned all my childhood notebooks, papers, etc, that were taking up boxes and filing cabinets and recycled the originals. I’m much more likely to look at an old paper I wrote if I can just find it on my hard drive than if I have to find it in a box. But it’s my stuff and I’m free to make that decision. I’m not sure my grandkids or their kids will care enough to keep my digital archive preserved on future formats, but by then it won’t matter to me anyway.

But film is part of our cultural heritage, and I feel a bit differently about it. So many old movies have been lost to time. And yet in the absence of any other efforts to save the originals, maybe this actually is the best way to preserve them.

At least Mark does keep the originals, although cut up, in case better scanning or restoration methods come up in the future.

What are your favorite filmstrips?

The Art of Pantomime in Church

How to Get Gonorrhea

How to Get Syphilis

What Do You Do About Rules?

I Can’t Do It, Coach

Mark Needs Help

Preserving the film strips is a lengthy and expensive process. If you have the time and interest, Mark could use some help.

He also has a GoFundMe and Patreon for monetary donations to help continue the work. An he even has an Amazon Wish List with everything from batteries and hard drives all the way up to a high end $32,045 scanner that would speed up the process and negate the need to cut the filmstrips.

As part of his fundraising, Mark has put together this really good video showing the process of how he restores these film strips. If you appreciate anything you’ve seen, you’ll want to watch it:

If you do have the means, Mark’s fundraising home page is https://uncommonephemera.org/donate with links to all the ways you can contribute.

And that’s it for another newsletter! [Beep!]

I’m not asking for any donations this time. You can donate to Mark instead if you’re inclined to make a contribution. [Beep!]

But I am asking you to play Gisnep, and tell all your friends about it! [Beep!]

Today’s Gisnep is actually on the harder side, so if you get frustrated it’s not you, it’s me. [Beep!]

Until next time, thanks as always for reading. [Beep!]

David

I made a new daily puzzle thing! It’s called Gisnep! It’s probably still fairly buggy in ways I can’t find on my own, so I’m welcoming people to try it out and tell me what’s broken.

It’s my entry into the crowded world of daily online puzzles. Every day, you solve a puzzle to reveal a quote. As you do, you also reveal the source of the quote.

Here’s what it looks like at the time of this writing, but I’m still adjusting things:

Please play it in the way that you are inclined to play a game like this, and let me know what broke for you, what didn’t behave as you expected, what could be better, what you loved, and what you didn’t.

Note that it’s not really optimized for mobile, but it kinda works. Proper mobile optimization is on the roadmap.

How to Play

You start the game by clicking “Start.” The letters pour into place and the timer begins:

Each of those letters belongs somewhere in its column. You type the letters where you think they go, and gradually reveal a quote.

Here’s what a completed grid looks like, reading across. Notice that broken words wrap around to the next line:

A good strategy is to start with short words that are more obvious, and work your way up to longer words.

At any time you can click “Check” to see how many mistakes you’ve made that need correction. There’s no limit to how many times you can click “Check” but I know you can solve even the hardest puzzles without checking. I believe in you.

When you enter a letter in a cell that has a circle, the letter appears in a spot in the source section. This is a way of providing quote attribution but also gives you another clue. If the source doesn’t make sense, you’ve entered something wrong. PRIDKE AND PRMJUDECA is not a thing.

Some quotes won’t include every letter from the source. When that happens, you get those letters as freebies when the game begins. They show up in green.

Once you’ve solved the quote, you can share your results!

When you play, please report bugs. I know they’re there. In particular, look out for any letter doesn’t return to the right place when deleted, change properly when typed over, etc. and let me know what you were doing when it happened. I’ve squashed all the issues I’ve encountered but I’ve gotta catch ‘em all!

Why is it called Gisnep? And what’s with the moose?

I’ve long been aware that some people think the Disney logo looks like it says Gisnep. Personally, I don’t see it. I mean, kinda? But that looks clearly like a D and Y to me.

However, I’ve heard it mentioned often enough that now every time I see the Disney logo I still think the word “Gisnep” even though I don’t even see it that way.

One night a couple months ago, just as I was about to fall asleep, a thought suddenly popped into my head: I wonder if the domain gisnep.com is available. So I grabbed my phone and checked. It was! Without thinking too much about it, I spent the $10.28 to register it and then fell asleep.

I totally forgot about it until I noticed the receipt in my Inbox the next day. Okay, so now I owned this domain. What would I do with it?

I set it to just redirect to disney.com and though it would be a fun little joke for anyone who actually tried going to gisnep.com. Then I realized that’s probably not many people or someone else would have surely grabbed it before me.

So then I thought maybe I’d make some kind of Disney parody. And that would need a logo and a mascot. So I played around in Photoshop to make “Disney” actually say “Gisnep” and then tried to think of a proper mascot.

I came up with a name. Mickey Moose.

I had ChatGPT render a bunch of images, and then picked one and pulled it into Photoshop for further adjustment. The result is a sort of joint effort between DALL-E and me:

I eventually changed the logo because I don’t want to make Disney mad, but I kept the moose.

(I’d like to have a human draw a new moose rather than use an AI-generated moose. It’s on my to-do list and I’m open to nominees if you know someone good and not too terribly expensive for a hobby project.)

But beyond that, I had zero ideas for a Disney parody. For a moment I considered that, since Steamboat Willy is public domain, Gisnep could be some sort of homage to public domain characters?

And then I thought of all the daily word games I like to play. Maybe there’s a game I could make centered around public domain characters. Or books! Maybe I can make some kind of game based on public domain books.

Then I remembered these “hidden quote” puzzles I used to enjoy playing in GAMES Magazine. They would usually have three in each issue, like this:

GAMES Magazine is still around but hard to find. Sometimes I get the newest issue from Libby and print out some screenshots of puzzles for my kids.

I love those games. But what could I do that would make it a little more interesting?

I asked ChatGPT to be my sounding board. I explained the type of puzzle I wanted to make and asked:

It gave me a bunch of ideas. Most of them were bad. But this one intrigued me:

Hmm. What if I combine the hidden-quote type puzzle with a Jumble-style anagram puzzle to uncover the source of the quote?

Getting ahead of the story a little bit, the first version of the game actually had a second phase where the circled letters appeared as tiles in a bin, and you had to unscramble the tiles to reveal the source of the quote, and there were blank tiles you could assign as any letter for ones that don’t appear in the quote. It looked like this:

A few people were nice enough to play-test it for me, and it turned out that having a two-part game was not nearly as fun as a much simpler one-part game. And unscrambling the letters was way too hard, especially for long and obscure sources. If I give you the letters NCAIAERENROLEIFBLRMAGUT are you really going to figure out that it’s the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante? So I discarded that idea in favor of the simpler one where you just have to solve the quote.

So I had an idea for a game. Now came the biggest problem: I’m not a programmer and have no idea how to do any of this.

Luckily, I’m pretty good with ChatGPT.

Coding the game

Whie I don’t know much about programming languages specifically, I do have a decent understanding of programming concepts. So what followed was two months of having back-and-forth conversations with ChatGPT in my spare time where I explained the game very specifically, and it gave me code to try. And then once the basics were working, I explained various features I wanted to add, and ChatGPT gave me more code to try.

Nothing ever worked the first time, and often not even the tenth time. There were a lot of situations where it took me two steps back for every step forwards and I didn’t even notice something broke until later. I found myself saying things to ChatGPT like:

• Explain this function to me line-by-line like I’m an idiot. What’s it doing exactly and why are you suggesting changes?

• No no no we tried that already! You’re just making the same suggestion all over again!

• ITUAAMPGMIWO does not spell “PRIDE AND PREJUDICE”

Too often I would ask it how to fix something, and it would give me literally the same exact code that I just told it wasn’t working. So in those moments I would switch tools and go over to Claude AI. Their Sonnet model is supposed to be very good at coding. It didn’t always know the answer any better than ChatGPT, but it was much better at walking me through debugging so we could pinpoint where the problems were.

In the end, the actual code of this game was probably 98% written by ChatGPT and 1.5% written by Claude. I might have adjusted a line or two myself, so I claim the other half percent.

I have no doubt that it’s really sloppy code. I made so many changes along the way that I probably have redundant code, variables that I no longer need, functions I’m not using anymore, and so on. And I wouldn’t even know if I’ve introduced memory leaks or resource hogs or any other thing I don’t understand and have no idea how to identify. I don’t even know if those apply to web apps. So don’t look at my code, it’s embarrassing.

I kept thinking that someone who actually knows how to code would probably laugh at how hard this was for me. So many problems seemed like they should be easy to solve if only I knew how.

Last week The Pudding published an article about what happened when they asked AI to produce their style of data-driven visual story, and found it fell very flat. They wrote:

Is that what I’ve made? The IKEA version of a daily puzzle game? Or is it just the IKEA version of the code behind a daily puzzle game, like an IKEA table with artisanal veneer?

One interesting thing is that, having never made anything like this before, I found that I had to make a ton of decisions that gave me an appreciation for people who make much more complex games. Some of the things I had to consider even in a simple game like this:

• If someone navigates between cells with arrow keys, should their navigation stop at the borders or wrap around?

• If they wrap around, do they wrap on the same line or go to the next line?

• What are all the ways someone might try to close a pop-up message?

• How do I make sure things that need to be random are random in the exact same way for everyone so they experience the same version of each puzzle on the same day?

• Does a new puzzle appear at midnight in the user’s local time, or at the same time for everyone simultaneously? Should that be my time? Greenwich time?

• What should happen if someone types an invalid letter in the grid?

• How could the letters animate into the header cells at the beginning in a way that’s delightful but doesn’t take too long? (I had many variations on this)

• Should the game start with a cursor already in a cell ready for the user to type? If so, which one?

• Should letters in the header cells (I also call those cells the “hoppers”) leave an empty space as they’re used? Get crossed out as they’re used? Or should the other letters fall to fill in the gaps?

• If someone deletes a letter from the grid, does it go back in the hopper cell in the same place where it was, or does it go on top?

• Should the header cells shorten as letters are used up to consolidate space, or stay the same height the whole game? Does it look bad when they’re all empty?

• Does this game need sound effects?

• Should there be a way to check your progress? And what should that look like if so?

• How long a quote is too long? How short is too short?

• Should this be a game people can finish in two minutes? Or ten minutes?

• Would a two-sentence quote be confusing to solve or do they all need to be one-sentence quotes?

• If a quote is from a book, should I use the title or author as the source?

• Is “The Bible” a source? Or should it be more specific like “Genesis”?

• How many squares across should the grid be? GAMES Magazine uses 21 squares. How did they reach that decision?

• I found a good API for retrieving a huge variety of quotes but many of them are problematic. Like, a surprising number of quotes in the database are from politicians stating opposition to gay marriage. How can I make sure nothing like that slips through?

• A first-time visitor won’t notice that the game’s slogan changes daily. Will they just thing the game has a dumb slogan?

• Should I lose the moose?

• What else can I do to make this more fun or interesting than similar puzzles that surely exist already?

I know I may not have made the right decisions for everyone. Tell me what I got right and wrong from your perspective.

So is it really MY game?

When I see AI generated art, I cringe at the idea that someone wrote a prompt and then says that they “made” a picture. But I worked pretty hard on this. How do I describe what I’ve done?

I made every decision about interactivity, functionality, and so on. I just didn’t write the code.

Did I make this game? Did I design it? It’s a variation on similar games that came before it, just like Wordle and Connections are. So what’s my ownership of this game? The game was built up little by little in a plain text editor, but did I make it from scratch? Was the code all written bespoke by ChatGPT based on my prompts, or did ChatGPT give me existing snippets of code from places I don’t know about?

A federal court has ruled that AI generated art doesn’t get copyright protection. What about this, though? It was definitely a collaboration that involved a lot of creative direction and decision making from me. If I can’t copyright the actual code since AI wrote it, could I patent the game’s flow? What parts of this are protectable?

These are all things I wondered as I worked on this. I’m sure time will tell us the answers.

Whew, that was a lot. But now the newsletter is over and you should go play the game. Why are you still here?

Is it because you’re looking for the link to make a donation? Okay here it is.

See you next time. Now go play!

David

I had a whole thing written where I was going to tell you about a project I’ve been working on, but at the last minute I decided it needs a little more time in the oven before I can share it.

And now it’s too late to do a big article based on something thoroughly researched or anything like that, so instead I’m going to tell you an absolutely true moth story.

You may be familiar with The Moth, the live storytelling events that happen around the country. I’ve been to a couple and they are a lot of fun. But that’s not what I mean by a moth story. This is a story about actual moths. Except it starts with a bird.

When I was 13 years old, I got a cockatiel for my birthday. I really wanted a bird that could talk, and I heard that you could teach cockatiels to talk and my parents agreed to get me one if I promised to take good care of it.

We set up a birdcage in my bedroom and bought a cockatiel from a local bird breeder. I named it Coco because I heard that repetitive sounds are easier for birds to learn, and that was a good way to teach it to say its name. I think I spent the whole first day just saying “Coco” over and over to that bird. At night, I put the cover over the cage and went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, the bird was dead.

I was devastated. I cried ugly tears. My parents contacted the bird lady who said that the bird must have been sick and she didn’t know it. She gave us a refund.

A few months later, we got a new cockatiel. It looked just like the old one. I named this one “Tuco” because the name sounded like the number Two and two “Co” sounds is “Coco.” And this was the second bird. I hoped it wouldn’t die because Threeco is a terrible name.

Tuco did not die, at least not for a while. But my enthusiasm for having a bird was significantly lessened after my first experience. I didn’t play with Tuco as much as I probably should have. I didn’t change the papers in the bottom of his cage as much as I should have. My bedroom started to smell like dirty bird water.

But the strangest thing was that every time I walked into my bedroom, I’d see three or four little tiny moths flying around.

I’d kill them, or maybe not, but it didn’t matter because the next time I came into my bedroom there would be three or four little tiny moths flying around.

It was weird and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But whatever, three or four moths aren’t a big deal. We’d have the occasional housefly, so what’s a few moths?

One day, I lay on my back in bed, bored in that 13 year old pre-internet way where you have nothing to do but stare up at the ceiling. It was one of those popcorn ceilings that were so popular in the late 70s with a rough texture. Except I could have sworn that the texture was moving.

I stood on my bed for a closer look. My ceiling was covered with thousands of little tiny moths, crawling all over it.

I freaked out. I shut the door to my bedroom and vowed never to go in again. I told my parents about the moths. We went in quickly to move the birdcage to the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to go in there to feed the bird. I slept on the couch for the next week as we pondered how to deal with this. No way was I sleeping in there.

We came up with a plan: We would cover every surface in my bedroom with sheets. Then we would get one of those bug foggers that fill a room with insecticide, killing anything it reaches. The moths would die and fall onto the sheets. Then all we’d have to do is gather up the sheets and throw them away.

So we did it. We covered everything in the room. We set the bug fogger canister in the middle of the room, set it off, and ran out, closing the door. A couple hours later we went in, ready to see thousands of dead moths scattered around.

But there were no dead moths. The sheets were clean. How could this be? Were they some sort of supermoths?

So we got on a stepladder for a closer look. They were not supermoths. They were all dead. But they did not fall. I now had thousands of dead moths stuck to my ceiling.

This was not the outcome I hoped for. I was crestfallen that this ordeal wasn’t over. But at least it was progress.

Time for a new plan. It was clear what had to be done, and it was clear that it was gonna really suck.

I taped a nail to the end of a broomstick and meticulously picked each dead moth off my ceiling, one by one. I let them fall on the sheets. Then we gathered them up and threw them out.

Our best guess as to what happened was that the bag of birdseed I kept in my room must have had moth eggs in it which hatched and found a home in my ceiling. We kept the birdseed in a Tupperware container after that.

I was pretty traumatized by moths for a while. I don’t remember how long it was before I was willing to sleep in my room again. And my parents helped take care of Tuco going forward.

And that’s my Moth Story. Thank you for coming to my Moth Talk.

I’m having a bit of a post-traumatic flashback reliving this. Someone tell me a happy story as a chaser. Either that or tell me your own worse story so mine can feel tame in comparison. The comments are a great place for either.

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll consider donating if you liked this story, but not because you want to read more moth stories, since I think that’s really the only one I have.

See you next time!

David

Hi, everyone! I usually end my newsletter by reminding you that you can make a donation to help keep this newsletter going. But this time I’m putting it up top! Now that you’ve seen it, enjoy the newsletter!

Let me tell you about my favorite theoretical method of encoding and storing a large amount of data. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is good.

Illustrations from Aha! Gotcha

In his 1982 book Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight, mathematician Martin Gardner tells this story:

The book is full of interesting thought experiments like this, but this is the one that stuck with me the most for some reason. I loved the idea that you could store something so large with just a single notch! But of course, Gardner is quick to point out that this works better in theory than in practice:

I was reminded of this impractical method of storing and retrieving data recently when I came across a real-world storage technology from the 80s that never quite caught on: StripWare.

StripWhat?

Despite what its name sounds like, StripWare was not an early erotic video game. (I’m gonna check my analytics later but I’ll bet that link gets clicked the most). It was a form of software encoding that could be printed out on a strip of paper. It looked like this:

That strip of paper contains the game Checkers. It required special hardware to read the program, the Cauzin Softstrip System Reader. It was about the size of a large baguette and fit inconveniently on your desk.

Typical office worker for scale

This way, instead of buying software on disk, you could just scan it from a piece of paper. That paper could be in a computer magazine, or a special book of computer programs, or a brochure, or printed out on a laser printer.

Back then, computer magazines often had programs you could type into your own computer. It was tedious, manual work. Even MAD Magazine got into the fun with this intentionally-annoying-to-type-in program:

If you typed it all in like I did, this was your reward:

For these sorts of applications, printing a scannable strip alongside the program would be a real timesaver, at least for people with a Softstrip scanner.

Here’s a closer look at what one of those strips looks like, turned vertically:

Reading across, every pair of “blocks” on a line is either black-white or white-black, which the scanner reads as either a 1 or 0. Cauzin calls those block pairs “DiBits.” Then the reader software turns that binary code into text. There’s a little bit more to it, but that’s the gist of it. So that Checkers game above decodes to this BASIC program:

That’s… not a lot of data. Each strip could only hold around 5,500 bytes, and you could fit about 7 strips on a single piece of paper, for a total of 38.5 kb per page. That’s good enough to be an alternative to typing it in yourself, but not practical for larger software. For comparison, a low-density 5.25-inch floppy disk held about four times that per side.

The latest version of Microsoft Minesweeper is a bloated 235 megabytes, so to install the StripWare version of Minesweeper you’d just need to buy a 6,400 page book and scan 44,800 strips of code. Easy!

What was available

Obviously you couldn’t get the current version of Minesweeper back then. But there actually was a StripWare version of Minesweeper available in the Second Giant Book of Computer Games:

It was one of a handful of books with StipWare programs people could scan, including several available on the Internet Archive:

• Classic Games

• The Financial Advisor for Mac

• MacART for Business

• And More!

I really like the illustrations for these games. The actual games back then never looked very good, but the illustrations helped your imagination fill in the blanks.

Aside from the small amount of data that could be encoded, there were other problems with StripWare. It depended on good enough printing quality with enough contrast for the data to be readable, and if you ever wanted to scan it again you’d better keep it in good condition.

But while StripWare never really caught on, it has its place in history as the first commercial 2D barcode format. Today you may see data encoded in a similar way on the back of your driver’s license or work ID card. And it was a predecessor to the modern QR code.

Example of a QR Code

It’s a far less elegant data encoding method than simply putting a notch on a stick, which remains my favorite method. But until we can measure sticks on a subatomic scale, I guess it will do.

Thanks as always for reading! This is where I usually remind you that you can make a donation to help keep this kind of thing going. But today I did that up top so you already know that.

If you liked this edition of the newsletter, you’ll love the time I looked at The Strangest Computer Manual Ever Written.

See you next time!

David

Remember when society still had a shared culture? There was a time when, if a new movie or TV show was popular, it felt like everyone was watching it. Now things have changed, and we are all so splintered that there can be a huge hit show that nobody you know watches.

My memory is that the TV show Mad Men snuck in right before that great splintering. Of course, it was on cable, on a channel that hadn’t had a huge hit show before, and I was living in Manhattan where ads for each new season were plastered all over the place, so perhaps my memory is skewed but it felt to me like everybody was talking about Mad Men.

One thing that people loved to talk about: the animated opening credits sequence. Don Draper entered his office, put down his briefcase, and then his world falls away. He begins to fall past buildings with vintage ads, finally landing in his famous pose seated in a chair with arm stretched and cigarette in hand.

Here, watch it for old times’ sake:

One day in 2010, I noticed something about one of the very first shots:

Something struck me about the items on his desk.

That arrangement of items on his desk was obviously an abstraction of the lower Manhattan skyline. Right? You have tall buildings downtown, and then you have short buildings, and then you have tall buildings in midtown. How clever! How had I never noticed that before?

See, here’s an image from Google Earth that shows skyscrapers downtown on the left and midtown on the right, with just low buildings in between. This was obviously what the arrangement on the desk was inspired by.

My wife, however, disagreed. She thought it was just an arrangement of things on his desk and any resemblance to Manhattan was purely coincidental and all in my imagination.

Well, there was only one way to settle this: ask whoever made the opening credits.

So I did some research and I found out that the credits were designed by Steve Fuller. And his contact info was right there on his website. So I emailed him:

Later that same day, he wrote back!

Okay fine. My wife was right. I was seeing meaning where there wasn’t any.

But that wasn’t the end of his email! He added one more thing:

Whaaaa?! Sure enough, there it was as an attachment:

Madmen_ContactSheet_001.jpg

Whoa! I couldn’t believe he just sent this to me, a stranger, and asked me not to share it on the internet! Who just trusts someone like that?!

At the time, Ironic Sans was still a popular blog, and I was sitting on something that folks would love to see about a very popular show. I could have easily posted it. But he asked me not to, and I respected his request. I was just honored that he shared it with me and thrilled to see it.

So why am I okay showing it now?

Because a few years later he shared them with Art of the Title in a fascinating interview about the design process behind Mad Men’s titles, a much more appropriate place to let them out into the world. So they’re out there now already and I don’t think I’ve betrayed his trust by sharing them now.

It was a very nice thing for him to do, and it only happened because I took the time to write an email.

I had done this before

This wasn’t the first time I had emailed someone who made opening credits.

A few years earlier, back in 2003, there was a show on Showtime called Dead Like Me. It was essentially a workplace dramedy about a small team of coworkers played by Mandy Patinkin, Jasmine Guy, Laura Harris, Ellen Muth and Callum Blue who were Grim Reapers. Like, literally Grim Reapers. That was their job, guiding people through death.

It wasn’t the best show ever, but it was appealing and I enjoyed it. (I kinda miss it sometimes). And it had a simple but effective opening credits sequence:

It feels very much of its time, looking back at it. But I liked it. I liked how it set the tone of the show perfectly, and did it all in the most analogue way, just using people in costumes. No fancy graphics or animation. It was almost a little standalone comedic short film.

One day I noticed that the closing credits of the show credited the company that made the opening. They were called Digital Kitchen. So I decided to look them up and send them an email:

That’s it, nothing too long or fancy. The next morning, I received this response:

Oh, they also did the opening credits for Six Feet Under! Those were great credits. People talked about those almost as much as they would later talk about the Mad Men credits (and there’s an Art of the Title interview about the Six Feet Under credits, natch).

But what made me happy about his response was how happy he was to be recognized for something other than the thing he was mostly recognized for. He forwarded my email along to others on his team and I heard back from them that they too appreciated the recognition.

It was a short and simple email to send, and it made someone happy.

You know what you have to do now

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find someone this week who makes something that you like, and send them an email. (It doesn’t have to be an opening credits designer.) Tell them you like it, or ask how they did it, or find some little detail to ask a question about.

You never know what might happen.

And that’s it for another newsletter. Thanks as always for reading, sharing, donating, upgrading, emailing, commenting, and so on.

If you send someone an email this week, let me know how it turns out! (Not just any email, a complimentary email to someone who makes things. You know what I mean.)

See you next time.

David