HOME |
RSS | 
With so many fonts out there, have you ever wanted to use something that’s just “normal?” Designer Mortiz Resl combined almost 1000 fonts on his computer and the average font is what he came up with.
This project shows what a font would look like if it consisted of all typefaces installed on my system. Every character from a to z is drawn using every single font with a low opacity. In total there are over 900 typefaces in my library. I didn’t exclude the ugly ones.
What do you think? It seems pretty average to me.
Link Via Mental Floss
Van Gogh / Genius
by Huy Lam
At a glance, the artwork of Toronto-based artist Huy Lam look like their original pictures and photos, but when you take a closer look, you'd be delighted to see that the details are made with text painstakingly colored and shaped into the images.
Here's what Lam said about his art:
Link - via Laughing Squid... From afar you see a portrait of Nelson Mandela which looks like it could be a pencil or charcoal drawing. But as you come closer and closer, you realize its created from a different media. After farther inspection, parts of words start to emerge on top of layers of other fragmented words until you finally come across the completed words, 'my hero'. Nelson Mandela is my hero and I created a portrait of him with only words. A portrait of Che Guevara is created from the words 'bought a T-shirt' because I've also bought the iconic T-shirt when I was young and rebellious. [...]
All the images are created with 4 point type.
Sam “No Nickname” Saxton makes vertical ambigrams with illustrations that read the same whether you hold them right side up or upside down. He’s given the treatment to presidents, pop culture figures, and even Star Wars characters! Link
Now this is strange. When you write on word processing software, online or not, you can justify, align left, align right, or center your text. But why center your text when you can centaur it? That’s exactly what this generator does. Paste in your block of text -you have to paste a lot of words, so you may have to repeat yourself to see how it works- and then his the centaur button at the bottom. Voila! Your text is then centaured correctly! Link -via The Daily What
AT&T produced this documentary about what happens when overconfident drivers think they can multitask -sending text messages while driving. It’s not worth it. -via Metafilter
Archaeologists find them; linguists try to read them, but even after years of study, some writings are indecipherable. Some are from unknown languages, others were written in code. All are baffling. An example is the Rohonc Codex.
This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation. This bamboozling manuscript was given to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Count Battyany in 1852, and is is believed to have been written in medieval times. Appearing to be hand-scripted, and illustrated with crude black and white sketches, the writing is simply not decipherable in any way. However, code-breakers have managed to at least ascertain that the language involved consists of 42 letters and over 200 different symbols, some non-alphabetic, as well as other symbols which see only occasional use.
The Rohonc Codex is just one of seven untranslated manuscripts in this list at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
What do your parents do after they want to become your Facebook friend? Why, send you a text, of course.
More at the Tumblr blog WHEN PARENTS TEXT (what’s next? When Parents Tweet?) – via MeFi
If you send text messages with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, you may have noticed the annoying autocorrect feature that guesses what word you are trying to say – and is sometimes hilariously wrong. Damn You Autocorrect is a site that collects screencaps of these often incomprehensible assumptions. Some text may be NSFW. Link -via Metafilter
I Write Like is a generator that proposes to analyze your writing and compare it to published authors. The above is the result I got when I entered some text from an article I wrote for mental_floss. However, the results do not tell me why my writing resembles James Joyce’s prose. Then I entered another sample, this time from an article I wrote for Neatorama.
Again, no explanation for why the results are different. They might even be random. Grab a few paragraphs of your writing and try it out for yourself! Link -via The Daily What
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project; Credit: NPR
If you think that your teen is spending a lot of time on his or her cell phone texting, that’s because it’s true. A new poll by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project reports that more than half of teens text daily and about a third of those send more than 100 text messages every day!
"There’s now an expectation that teens will contact each other via text, and they expect a kind of constant, frequent response," says the Pew Center’s Amanda Lenhart, one of the study’s authors.
The survey, which was conducted with scholars from the University of Michigan, finds the typical American teen sends 50 texts a day, and a sizable number send double that or more. Some teens text their parents, though most youngsters say they prefer to speak with them by phone.
This rapid rise in texting has led to confrontation as parents and schools try to control cell phone use. The report finds that parents are trying a variety of ways, from monitoring content to limiting the time of day or number of minutes children may talk or text. Many parents surveyed — 62 percent — say they’ve taken away their child’s cell phone as punishment, though Lenhart says this can backfire: Parents often give children cell phones to keep track of their whereabouts, and don’t like giving up that easy access.
At Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland last week, students were tapping away on their phones before they even reached the exit doors after classes let out. Sierra Koenick, 17, said she and her friends talk about "everything."
"What’s going on, or meet me here, or something," she said. Then she added, laughing, "Usually they’re dumb texts, not even worth it."
Jennifer Ludden of NPR has the story: Link
Here’s a dubious reason why Nigeria is such a hotbed for 419 scams (or better known as the Nigerian Letter scam): people there are astonishingly creative with the written words! Take, for instance, the Nigerian love letter – or in this case, love SMS or text as explained by Andrew Walker of BBC News:
Your mobile phone beeps, you have received a text message.
It begins: “I swear, I will make sure I give you HIV…”
But it’s not an abusive threat, it’s a “romantic” text message copied from a book on sale all over Nigeria that professes to give young people the words they need to court the woman or man of their dreams.
“H is for Happiness and joy forever with an I: Incomparable love that will never V: Vanish until death do us part. I love you,” the message concludes.
With a lot of cheesy “love text” examples: Link – via emtoast
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by randystott.
I know some people find text-based games (“Interactive Fiction”) a little dull, but I love them. I was seriously addicted to a certain text-based game back in the day, so I have a soft spot for them. This one is pretty fun – you’re an, um, not-so-smart guy named Grunk who works on a farm herding pigs. Except you’ve lost one. Naturally, you need to go find it if you want to keep your job, but you don’t have much direction as to how to go about that. Imagine you were actually looking for a lost pig and think about what you would do first. You’d listen for pig noises, wouldn’t you?
There, I’ve given you your first hint. Oh, and in case you’ve never played these types of games before, just type simple commands: “E” for go east, “get shovel” for, well, get shovel… that sort of thing. Have fun!
Link via Jayisgames (with a walkthrough in case you get stuck)
