This is great! Back in the 60s & 70s, before the digitization of all life on earth, there were a huge number of very ornamental, very hard-to-read fonts that were sold, generally, on sheets of Letraset press-on type (at least for those of us too poor to have our own Linotype machines)
This is very much like that, but turned up to 11. Very slick presentation and a nice, simple website as well. Nice work!
p.s I realize that there are a ton of hard-to-read digital fonts available as well, but I grew up in the pre-"desktop publishing" times for better or worse
Hehe, being a Java dev since the late 90’s meant seeing a lot of bad code. My favorite was when I was working for a large life insurance company.
The company’s customer-facing website was servlet based. The main servlet was performing horribly, time outs, spinners, errors etc. Our team looked at the code and found that the original team implementing the logic had a problem they couldn’t figure out how to solve, so they decided to apply the big hammer: they synchronized the doService() method… oh dear…
For those not familiar with servlets, this means serializing every single request to the server that hits that servlet. And a single servlet can serve many different pages. In fact, in the early days, servlet filters didn't exist, so you would often implement cross-cutting functionality like authentication using a servlet.
TBF, I don't think a lot of developers at the time (90's) were used to the idea of having to write MT-safe callback code. Nowadays thousands of object allocations per second is nothing to sweat over, so a framework might make a different decision to instantiate callbacks per request by default.
It really depends on the type of environment and work you are looking to do.
At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.
I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.
Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.
That's interesting, are you based in Asia? I've found companies similar to what you're mentioning but they're all based in America while I wanna stay in Asia.
That's pretty cool. I guess the tough part in Asia are the languages, so there's a language barrier between say Tokyo vs Malaysia vs Singapore.
I think the hardest part sometimes of my situation is not really having any seniors/mentor figures I can bounce ideas off. The safest bets from my peer groups all involved just moving to US/Canada which I'm not really particularly interested in.
Mainly remote, even though I am about a mile from the office lol. They fully bought into the remote first idea. We have team get togethers generally about once a month. Very nice to spend time with the team, but I prefer my home office with my own stuff for daily work.
Usually one at a time, but sometimes they combine. Also, parts of the same task can be one or the other, so you may have to switch from fun (coding something new) to boring/annoying (writing unit tests) in a single day.
Lovely excerpt that gives a good general overview of Mad history and highlights!
I was an avid reader as a child in the late 60s to early 70s. I eventually moved on to National Lampoon as a teen, but Mad will always glow in my childhood memory heart.
I still have a decent-sized collection of Mad paperbacks. Many (most, all?) were written by a single Mad artist/writer. My favorites of these were ones written by Don Martin and Al Jaffee.
I learned to read by sitting on my dad's lap and sounding out the effects from "Don Martin Drops 13 Stories". Thought I didn't understand what I was looking at, the sounds were the funniest thing ever to little me. I had to track down a copy of my own to show my kids when they were little, and they felt the same way.
I (dis)credit Mad for developing a lifelong mix of sarcasm with sincerity, skepticism with optimism. It was exactly the right food for my young brain.
I still have my original copy of "The MAD Adventures of Captain Klutz", probably bought around 1970ish. Such a singular talent. Died pretty young (68), which is sad.
Sorry to pile on to the doom and gloom around this, but I have been at a bunch of companies that tried this and have never seen it work out well.
The problem is that building generalized, actually-in-the-real-world reusable UI components is really, really hard! Generalizing other people's use cases is very tricky without walking in their shoes.
Usually what happens is that a glorious, well-intentioned group within the company puts together a few very short-sighted, yet kind-of-good-looking components for a very specific use case and management sees it and says: "hey, why can't we use this in other projects?" The answer, of course, is that they weren't meant for that! They don't handle about 100 different things that would allow for expanded use in the company. One would need a dedicated team to make it so, which management really doesn't want to pay for.
Trust me, it only gets worse from there...
My advice is to build domain-specific LOB components for your business area and use a real 3rd-party solution for the underlying GUI lib. This actually has a chance of working out. Even doing this is way harder than it sounds lol.
I mean starting a component library by building your own from the ground up is an absurd thing to even attempt.
IMO the only really sane approach is to start with a facade around an existing library. This way you get your single interface and your consistent visual style, but you are free to swap out implementations as necessary.
I think that both viewpoints are correct. I would add that, importantly, the invention of photography changed the economics of picture ownership. No longer was it necessary to sit long hours and pay a ton of money to get a family portrait! Photographs were far cheaper, and to the untrained eye, "better" than the work of a mediocre portraitist. Of course, I would personally much rather have Ingres (for one) paint my portrait, but only the very wealthy could afford such a thing.
Just wanted to pop in to say I think she is a terribly underrated actor. Truly a gem. For my money, the only reason that The Shining has any stakes at all is because of her incredible performance! RIP, Shelley.
The Shining has so many reasons why it "has stakes". While Duvall was definitely an amazing part of that, it seems unfair to deprecate the rest of the creative folks involved in the film.
I never read the book, but I saw the TV mini-series remake that King was personally involved with and approved, and it was awful.
Personally, I think King's stories just don't translate very well to movies, unless (as with Kubrick's "The Shining") huge liberties are taken with the source material. Most adaptations I've seen of his stories were just bad.
When I heard they were making a movie of Doctor Sleep, knowing that the final 20% of the book is absolutely untranslatable to coherent movie content, I could not understand how they could close it. In the end, they more or less worked around the finale, which is basically a series of psychic battles fought remotely. It's a tolerable movie.
One example of a truly unfilmable King/Bachman novel is Thinner, though maybe it could now be done, at great expense, with AI (there was a ridiculous TV version, though).
I interviewed him, when I was aged 16, in 1983, and asked him about The Shining. He was in a conciliatory mood on the topic that day, but re-emphasized how little he thought of Kubrick's shot choices for the scene where Danny discovers Wendy reading his manuscript.
To that criticism, Kubrick responded over the years that if we had just been jump-scared by Jack suddenly appearing over Wendy's shoulder as she read, we would have felt relief and even started laughing to blow it off, which would have undermined the tension Kubrick was looking to build past this point in the scene.
> The Shawshank Redemption was fantastic for instance.
Eh it comes off as a corny and flat depiction of people who might otherwise be interesting. Romantic, but not a depiction of believable humans. And the problem certainly ain't the actors.
My criticism of Shawshank redemption is indeed particularly in response to it being placed number one on the IMDB list of greatest movies of all time. I believe people ranked it there as a result of emotional catharsis rather than ranking based on whether a movie best realized its potential, and I think my response is validated: the script for Shawshank redemption could have portrayed the characters as more three-dimensional than as recorded.
I've never read the book, but perhaps this criticism applies to the book as well. King certainly has a tendency to push fetishized characteristics that take the place of earnest characterization. This is certainly true of the Stand, the Dark Tower series, the Shining, Insomnia, Green Mile, and probably many others of his works. This is not an original take. See one popular opinion here: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/stephen-king...
Of course, many of King's stories do seem to push "fetishized characteristics" as you call them: in The Shining, Danny had the power to "shine". In Green Mile, the protagonist had a magical healing ability. But what characteristics did the characters in Shawshank have? Both seemed fairly well-rounded to me, and certainly didn't have any supernatural abilities (which is one thing that set Shawshank apart from many King stories).
I do not need to read an opinion to know what to think about The Shawshank Redemption. I can think for myself.
I like the movie, it's one of my favourite films of all time, and I am sorry you feel I and a large contingent of people are misguided because they have a different opinion than yours or your favourite critic's.
Keep in mind that performance was controversial and possibly contributed to her mental decline, in particular because of the subject matter and Kubrick's penchant for perfectionism. She had clumps of hair coming out of her head from the stress.
The baseball scene alone is famous for taking 127 takes.
There's a documentary that gives the lie to the rumor that Kubrick was abusive to SD. I believe that she recalls fondly that the project was challenging but ultimately rewarding.
It's caution using words "rumor" and "lie" as if a viewpoint espoused by some documentary is fact. What I noted above did in fact happen. Someone can decide for themself if that is abusive. I did not use that word. My take on Kubrick is he did what he felt was necessary to achieve his vision and little more. It didn't come from malice or poor character. He wasn't an Aronofsky.
The life of an actor on a challenging shoot can definitely have an impact on their physical and mental health and Kubrick was notably one of the most demanding and meticulous directors. It's just a thing, similar to Elon Musk in business. The results are wildly successful and most involved were likely aware of what they were signing up for, the sacrifices that had to be made to work with one of the most revered in the business and to create high and lasting art. Unfortunately for Shelley I don't believe she had the mental constitution for it.
Also keep in mind that people in the public eye are going to want to craft a narrative when it comes to their own legacy. At the end of the day most would want to be remembered more for their accomplishments than the difficulties that went into achieving them, esp. when it comes to their most culturally significant work.
As others have mentioned, a centrifugal casting machine would have really helped here. I took quite a bit of jewelry making in college and all the lost wax casting we did was done this way. The force of the metal filling the mold at extremely high speeds gets rid of most, if not all, of the impurities/inconsistencies.
Wind up the machine, melt the metal in a small crucible, drop the pin and duck (lol). I was once sprayed by a small stream of molten brass at +/- 1700 degrees (poor mold with thin wall, later fixed and recast) and still have a scar 40 years later to prove it.
If you can find a dental lab, the sort that makes crowns and bridges, they'll have this infrastructure, or at least they used to in the 2000s and before. My father worked at such a lab, and occasionally the dentists who owned it would ask him to cast wedding rings (no doubt made from the scrap gold leftover from regular work).
