Happy birthday to the World Wide Web, 32 years old today! And as it’s now middle aged* let’s ask the key question: what went wrong?
(* don’t @ me!)
The history of the web, like the history of indoor plumbing, is rather dull. But the idea of the internet is fascinating: what if we had a place with no rules and no authority, where communication could be global, instantaneous and free?
Well we know what happened next. Money arrived. Wearing a polo shirt and preaching freedom. Yeah baby!
But before we all get depressed let’s ask a key question: was the early Web any good?
People who have no voice can have a creative spark, born of suffering or solitude. Mostly it's hidden, but in the 20th century it began to be admired, celebrated, and even perhaps exploited.
For our #ThursdayMotivation today let's look at the world of 'Outsider Art'...
Outsider Art, Art Brut, Visionary Art, Naïve Art: nobody has really settled on a name for artworks made by non-traditional artists which express a raw, energetic experience of the world. It's art often hidden in the margins, calling to be heard.
Outsider Art began to be recognised in 1911 by Der Blaue Reiter group of artists in Munich. The group was short-lived but influential: it was fundamental to Expressionism and admiring of the art of those who lived with mental health issues.
Today in pulp... I search for the origins of life itself and the last universal common ancestor!
This is a highly complicated and scientific topic, so it is therefore best explored through the medium of gifs...
Now there's no universally agreed definition of life: even Erwin Schrödinger was uncertain what it was. But an ability to resist entropy, to reproduce, to mutate, to have a metabolism and to self-organise feature in most definitions.
And whatever life is we reliably assume it's all interlinked in some way. We still use the medieval idea of a 'tree of life' to map the connections, and currently scientists believe this tree has either two or three fundamental branches.
What font should be on your book cover? Well if you've had it with Helvetica and you're tired of Times New Roman why not revive a classic pulp typeface or two?
Here's a list of some pulpy fonts that are fruitier than Frutiger and louder than DIN 1931... #FontSunday
Any pulp sci-fi writer must give serious consideration to using Amelia as their book cover typeface. Designed by Stan Davis in 1964 it's the font used on the Moon Boot and reminds people we haven't actually been to the Moon since 1972, so we really should try again!
If your story is about computers then use Computer Monotone! David Moore created this in 1968 as an alphabetical extension of the E-13B font used on the bottom of cheques. It smells of Fortran and tastes of 4 bit processing, just like a real computer should.