Two British designers put together an interesting project to show which fonts require the most ink to print. Their method was to write and fill in a sample word (“Sample”) on the wall with a ballpoint pen and then use the pen’s remaining ink to show each font’s mileage.
Of the eight fonts tested they found Garamond to be the most efficient, and Impact to be the most wasteful.
Ink-guzzling Impact has been our chosen font for videos since Day 1 and we’ve also rocked it for our name on bootleg business cards and website headers. Now I feel some sort of remorse having learned that we’ve been recklessly promoting the most ink-wasting-est font in the universe.
Then I remember we make stuff for the post-literate Internets, not the printer-nets.
Besides I prefer to look at the ink-cartridge as being half full. Given our preference for white text on a black background, we’re actually using the font that creates the most white space. So please, let’s think of Impact as the most responsible and least wasteful font to use – when you’re already printing a big blob of black ink.
We met Queensbridge rapper Killa Sha a few years back at the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival. He was talking about being down with Marley Marl and Tragedy and instead of giving him his due respect for years in the game, I heard myself asking him if he carried their weed.
At that point, 40 Diesel who’d brought Sha over to talk with us basically erupted in disbelief which was fantastic. Sha himself took the jab in stride and even closed his time with us with an answer: “And I don’t just hold the weed!”
You can catch our minute with Sha starting around 3:35 in the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival Lost Tapes video below.
After the video came out, Robbie kept vouching for Sha’s talent so I checked out his album and some other tracks and had to admit the guy we had picked on had skills. Robbie did his part to be our counter-balance and gave Sha a ton of respect at Unkut, culminating in an interview a few months ago.
Today the news hit twitter that Sha passed away of complications from diabetes. I just wanted to say Rest in Peace to a dope and dedicated artist, wish his family strength during their loss, and thank Sha for not smacking me silly that day.
In a strange coincidence, there’s an OkayPlayer event in New York this Wednesday to raise awareness for diabetes. Phife Dawg who suffers from the disease himself is hosting and Ghostface, Jay Electronica and Talib Kweli are on the bill. More info at OKP.
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I thought we’d run some of our past attempts to get the Internets to stop being racist. Or chickenist. Or hip-hop separatists.
Only Chickenheadz R Racist
On this solo run, Dallas tried to debunk the notion that fried chicken was just for black people.
Rock the Bells
At Rock the Bells we found a high degree of musical miscegenation going on. Most of the white kids were there to see Wu-Tang. The black kids – okay there were hardly any black kids. But the few we found were there for Rage Against the Machine.
MLK may not have gotten there with us – but seeing Dallas get free hits of that white-boy weed would surely have made him proud. Maybe.
I just finished giving InternetsCelebrities.com an extreme makeover with a customization of the Thesis Wordpress Theme (damn straight that’s an affiliate link). Thesis is getting pretty ubiquitous these days but if you’re not already familiar, it’s a premium theme created by uber-web-designer Chris Pearson. This is a homecoming of sorts for us because Pearson also created the free Copyblogger theme that we used when we first launched this site two designs ago.
I’ve been using Thesis at Oh Word since relaunching last year and I’m still impressed by its flexibility and power. Thesis is my proverbial exosuit cargo-loader in the life-or-death battle with an alien that to me best represents website design.
So I was very excited when DIYThemes – the partnership behind Thesis – joined our Stadium Status Kickstarter drive to sponsor the upcoming video. They’re fans of ours, we’re fans of theirs – you couldn’t ask for a better sponsor situation.
Some of the goodness in this site upgrade won’t even be visible to most viewers — the Thesis admin options are incredible, the blog’s source code is clean and honed for search-engine goodness. But we also stepped up the interface and are providing more ways for you to connect with the IC’s.
Best of all, the site has that new blog smell and that should lead to a lot more blogging.
We decided to make our first visit to the famous Di Fara’s for lunch since we were already shooting a video in that Brooklyn neighborhood.
Every pie at Di Fara is made with love by Dom DeMarco and the quality draws a big crowd of pizza tourists even with the long waits and $5 slices. We spent nearly two hours in Di Fara’s, the bulk of that time watching Dom at work on one beautiful looking pie after another.
Finally we got our pie and found out if it was worth the wait.
I love when people make their own Ghetto Big Mac videos.
Canadian Ghetto Big Mac
There’s a German version on YouTube as well but for some reason it’s gone private. But it’s good to know that Ghetto Big Macs are a viable option worldwide.
Ninja Napkins
A group of teens redo the ghetto big mac. Unfortunately the audio has been stripped out of the video for copyright violations.
James Zhou version
Eduardo Carillo
Carillo and friends made a pilgrimage to McDonald’s for his 100th video. This may be the most excessive, grotesque (and wonderful?) of all the Ghetto Big Mac tribute videos. The boys get sloppy while eating, play in the indoor kiddy playground, and faux kiss in the McDonald’s bathroom. You can skip to 7:02 for the McDonald’s stuff.
Waffle House Ghetto Big Mac
This one tries to approximate a ghetto big mac without going into a McDonald’s. It was posted to YouTube just last week. The GBM remake tradition lives!
We’re going to try and get to the bottom of a billion dollar question in our next video. In this hellish economy, should the public be spending billions of dollar to make new sports stadiums, geared to a wealthier audience and benefiting private sports teams? It seems like the only socially acceptable form of welfare is corporate welfare. What part of the game is that?
Here in New York City, two new baseball stadiums launched this year at a cost to the public of over 2 billion dollars. Next year there’ll be a new Giants stadium. The New Jersey Nets may be moving to Brooklyn a few years after that.
With all this development going on and all this money disappearing, who better than us to investigate what these sports teams have been doing. No one else seems to be talking about it. And besides we know a thing or two about getting over and getting freeshit.
We’re using a new service called Kickstarter to raise the money to make this project a reality. Check our Kickstarter page out to learn more about it, including how you can help this video get made while at the same time getting cool and unique rewards for your contribution.
Bonus to the Bonus:Emergency Exit is a piece by Chinese artist Chen Wenling, depicting the Wall Street Bull ass-ramming a horned Bernie Madoff and pinning him up against a wall. Some really weird shit going on in this one. Literally.
Internets Celebrities Secret Handshake
Bonus to the Bonus: In the old days, some rappers were accused of freebasin’. Now they’re accused of being freemasons. This Youtube video claims to have found some secret in the grips of rap royalty.
We jumped at the chance to attend New York’s annual celebration of street vendor food – the Vendy Awards – this weekend. Thanks to Amy and the Street Vendor Project for the hookup. And the wafel truck in particular for rocking our world.
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