Dave Addey

I love it when skeets come in pairs.

This quote triggered me to subscribe. Keep paying those damned idiots.

It’s good telly. Would recommend. (The book series it’s based on is excellent too.)

The only exception I can think of in recent years is Murderbot on Apple TV+. It’s 10 episodes not 6, but the cliffhanger format and ~25min runtime is present and correct, and people love it.

It’s superb. I went and looked it up after Guy mentioned it in your comedy workshop, and promptly shared it with everyone I could think of. A wonderful subversion of the medium.

Heck yes it does! Not just for internal design consistency, but also for the mental transition into an alien environment. It has to feel familiarly otherworldly.

Thank you for confirming that their sci-fi typography is on point. Guess I’m going to Poland.

(Great write-up, as ever!)

Hey Gabriel! Only just seeing this. I’m so sorry I missed you. It’s been a busy WWDC 😅

YouTube video by Apple Developer WWDC25: Explore video experiences for visionOS | Apple

Stereo, spatial, immersive, oh my! visionOS 26 supports more immersive media types than ever before, including new support for 180°, 360°, and wide FOV video. Here’s me with an overview of all the options, and how to choose between them. youtu.be/Hh2TOTpzlHM

Well that was a DELIGHT.

👋

PreviewApplication opens a new, movable scene outside of your app’s process to present the photo or video.

And now i need to re-read @scottmccloud.bsky.social’s Understanding Comics.

Build compelling spatial photo and video experiences - WWDC24 - Videos - Apple Developer Learn how to adopt spatial photos and videos in your apps. Explore the different types of stereoscopic media and find out how to capture...

You can use the Quick Look PreviewApplication API to display spatial photos and videos with the same portal-like presentation seen in Photos. That’s described in this video from WWDC 2024. developer.apple.com/videos/play/...

WALL·E vs Idiocracy You may be surprised to discover that WALL·E and Idiocracy are, in fact, the same damn movie. I shall explain.

As I noted on samedamnmovie.com, WALL-E and Idiocracy are, in fact, the same damn movie. samedamnmovie.com/2020/03/15/w...

Yup! But at least consistently so 😊

It is at least consistent in being completely and utterly wrong for all of its As and Es.

A pair of signs for “Sun Design Center” in Cupertino. The capital letter “N”s are rotated 180 in one sign when compared to the other.

A sign for “Le Plante De Baton” in the French town of Val d’Isere. Several of the seriffed all-caps letters are upside down or back to front.

A road-side sign for “Franklin Truck Parts”. The sign is partially concealed by a tree, which makes the word “Truck” look like the word “Fuck” due to the choice of typeface.

You mean I’m not the only one who collects these?

Aha! I think all of the canonical ones are in that list, so I would not want to hold up a print schedule.

Thank you! If it makes you feel better, I also have one of those libraries 😄

I think that article contains every example I’d found as of a year ago. I am sure more sci-fi movies have used it since then, however! I’d be happy to go trawling for more examples, if it helps Eurostile make the book.

Oh, yes, I spotted that! I only didn’t mention it because of *course* it was in Eurostile.

(I’m saving Veil for an upcoming long drive with @clamhead.bsky.social. Couldn’t be more up our street.)

Fontspots: Eurostile In addition to the film-specific typographic deconstructions on this site, I’m keeping track of all the times I spot classic sci-fi fonts in movies. What better way to start than with perenni…

I started a running list of all the places I spotted Eurostile in sci-fi. It’s *everywhere*. typesetinthefuture.com/fontspots-eu...

The irony is, it was originally designed to be used at tiny sizes (“microgramma” is effectively “small weight”). And now we slap it on the side of spaceships.

Typography is an incredibly powerful way to visualize the future in sci-fi. Moviemakers regularly take advantage of this fact and set their calendars to "FUTURE" simply by slapping some Eurostile Bold Extended on the side of a passing spaceship. Indeed, Eurostile has become so effective at establishing a time frame in the future that whenever I see the typeface in real life - which happens a lot in my adopted home of California - I assume I've been transported to some futuristic dystopia in which a local nursing home is really a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation. Photo of Idylwood Care Center, in Sunnyvale, California. The existence of a secret underground cybernetics laboratory was unconfirmed at the time of printing.

And incredibly effective at making ANYTHING futuristic.

Always. (Except for when it’s Bank Gothic.)

The Book Exciting news: there’s a Typeset in the Future book! Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies, published by Abrams Books, is available to buy in all good booksto…

Definitely! Also, I can recommend an excellent book on the subject 😊 typesetinthefuture.com/book

This Betteridge in para 13 has strong “we didn’t bother to check” energy. (From what I’ve seen of the industry, it isn’t.)

Agreed. That article is very misleading, mind. It looks like they went click-baiting for “AI is taking our jobs 😱”, rather than boring answers like “oh, we call it something else now”, or “we outsourced all of that”, or “that’s not really how it works these days”.

Examples of visual and stylistic similarities between Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) and Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935).

Starship Troopers takes it a step further, into something that's actively propaganda. How did your experience as a documentary maker, particularly

working with the Dutch military, lead into that kind of propaganda filmmaking for Starship Troopers? Certainly that did. When I was young and drafted in the Navy, which was obligatory at that time, I made propa-ganda: a very tough, almost James Bond-like documentary [Het Korps Mariniers] about the Dutch Marines. And I think that experience, from before I made narrative movies, is certainly visible in some scenes in Starship Troopers. So yes, that contributed to my style, to have made documentaries that were already propaganda in the first place. In Starship Troopers, I also used a lot of elements and even images from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will [1935]. That was made in 1934, in the party congress of the Nazis. Hitler had come into power in 1933, and Leni

made Triumph of the Will in 1934, about the rallies in Nuremberg. Hitler appears out of the sky; it's very symbolic. Many images, many shots that you see in Leni's work, I used in the propaganda reels and newsreels in Starship Troopers. I was trying to tell the audience-but it didn't work so well-that these people were living in a fascist utopia. And then, of course, the movie itself was accused of being fascist. But what I tried to do, which at the time was not very well understood, was to say, "These people-[actors] Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer-these heroes and heroines are basically, by the way, also fascist. They live in a fascist utopia." And are seemingly unaware that they live in that kind of culture. Sure, that was the fun. I hoped that the audience would be aware, but the actors and actresses... like happens

in a lot of fascist countries, the people go with it-certainly the German people went with it. And so these people that are the main characters in the movie are not aware of their position in a fascist utopia. They think this is the norm. As I said, I had the feeling that it was not very well understood at the time. Even the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post accused Ed Neumeier, the writer, and me of being neo-Nazis. When the intent was to satirize that, rather than represent it? And nobody saw that. They saw it later; they saw it maybe more after 9/11 than before.

I’d forgotten all of this. More prescience from Paul Verhoeven in typesetinthefuture.com/book .