November 3, 2023

Subway type and MacBook Pros

Hey folks,

Here are a few things I've written about or shared recently:

1. Apple unveiled their new MacBook Pros (and the new iMac) during a big event on Monday night, and I had some thoughts. Now that I've sat with it for a few more days, I'm really looking forward to the reviews. It sounds like the M3 Max, the highest-performance chip they unveiled, really slaps.
2. I loved what Seth Godin had to say about pushing through writer's block in a short video he recently shared.
3. The new Spider-Man game for PS5 was incredible, and is my personal game of the year. Starfield and Zelda are both very much my sort of thing, but Spider-Man 2 is 🧑‍🍳's 💋 good. (I haven't played Super Mario Wonder or Alan Wake 2 yet though — what a year for video games!)
4. I wrote a blog post about Name Sans, a new subway-inspired typeface from ArrowType, and went way off the deep end about Toronto's custom typography in their subway lines. It's a wild story, but as I wrote: it "involves the aforementioned typeface of unknown origin, subways lined with washroom tiles, a billion-dollar New York subway design system clone, a new design system from a wayfinding expert that was installed, tested, and ignored, and ​'a billion-dollar corporation that uses as its main font a Helvetica clone that came free with Corel- Draw.'" Suffice it to say, I find the whole thing deeply fascinating and mildly upsetting.
5. This morning, I re-read Austin Kleon's posts on how to say no. My favourite example is something E.B. White once wrote: "Thank you for (your invitation)... I must decline, for secret reasons." Going to start using that one.
6. We haven't had much time at the Snelgrove household for movies recently, but we did manage to make it out to see Killers of the Flower Moon.

Thanks for reading, and catch you again in a week or two.

Nathan

PS. We're past Spooky Season, but Day of the Dead is here and Christmas is coming, which means this is the most appropriate time to watch (or re-watch) Coco, Nightmare Before Christmas, and The Shining.