No, I'm all right. Aaaarrgh!

William Hootkins passed away last weekend. RIP, Lieutenant Porkins.

MirrorMask

It's been a while since I posted. Sue me.

This evening Merujo and I went to see "MirrorMask." Big mistake. Not the hanging out with Merujo, but rather the movie.

I don't know how it ended, as we ended up walking out of it. If you want to hear the instantaneous review of the film, you can hear my audioblog entry at Merujo's blog here.

The film was beautiful, and displayed excellent production values, especially given the shoestring budget the filmmakers had. However, it would have been nice if there had been more than a shoestring's worth of plot to keep me engaged in it. There were some really interesting bits, especially when the Good Prime Minister gave his overview of the current political situation (I loved the little band in the red box), but moments like that were few and far between. The protagonist's drawings were fairly compelling, too. The funniest part of the entire film actually took place in the second row of the theater. A homeless guy had come in halfway through and began snoring. Very loudly. Philistines that we are, Merujo and I both found it hilarious, but our sense of humor was not shared by the other patrons (of whom there were maybe seven or eight).

I wanted to be able to recommend this film. Really. But I suppose I can't do that if I walked out of it early, can I?

The Queen of Darkness—My, what large pupils you have

Public lettering in London

I am a typography guy. As such, it is my self-appointed job to evangelize whenever possible on the beauty of typefaces and their various fonts. (For those of you who use those terms interchangeably, you ought to know that a typeface is a design for a set of characters, while a font is a combination of typeface, size, pitch, and spacing. For example, Helvetica is a typeface that defines the shape of each character. Within Helvetica, however, there are several fonts from which to choose—different sizes, bold, italic, small caps, etc.)

In 1997, an instructor named Phil Baines developed a city walk for his London-based graphic design students. This walk focuses mainly on larger examples of public lettering and doesn't really go in for what he called "incidentals," but it's still quite the project. If you've ever been to London and had a chance to walk around, you will recognize a few of the stops on the tour. If you haven't been there, I suggest you stop reading this and call your travel agent right now.