Web Excursions 2023-02-14
哪款字体代表了中华美食的刻板印象?
Chop Suey 并不是某一款字体的名字,而是一道美式中餐,由于总是与一种特定风格的字体一起出现,久而久之,也变成了一种特定字体风格的指代。
它代表了从 20 世纪 20 年代美国西海岸开始传播至世界其他地区对中餐,乃至东亚文化的某种视觉印象。
从旧金山到柏林,甚至回到北京,我们都能发现这种流行了超过一个世纪,对中国人来说怪诞与丑陋的字体。
Chop Suey 是从粤语“杂碎”的发音“Zaap Seoi”而来。
所以美式中餐里的“杂碎”,其实就是把各种菜炒在一起——主要以各种蔬菜为主,也有少量的肉丝、肉块。
一个意大利裔的美国人 Luigino Jeno Paulucchi。
在 20 世纪 40 年代末期开始了自己的生意,他成立了一家公司,取叫 Chun King(重庆)。
他的第一款产品是罐头炒面,他还给自己的产品注册了专利。
在美国其他族群的字体代表,我们可以很容易地发现,从原有文字的结构中提取元素、借用字母,并挪用到拉丁字母的设计中,就可以轻松创造出“伪 xx 风格”。
而杂碎字体的诞生思路却似乎不太一样。
如果说泰国、希腊、印度风格的字体直接参照了原有文种的字形结构,杂碎字体可以说完全是一种美国人创造性的设计,它模仿的是一种东方的视觉感受,而非真实的汉字结构或毛笔特征。
随着时空的变换,杂碎字体经历了一场从异国情调的新奇有趣,逐渐转变成了一种对华人族群的刻板印象与歧视隐喻。
来自中国的商户和华裔、亚裔建立的品牌已经不再使用杂碎字、幸运曲奇、熊猫、或者红绿配色来代表中国或者亚洲风格了,因为这些品牌的受众不再是单一的、没有接受过亚洲文化熏陶的人群,而是来自各种文化背景的群体,并且其中相当一部分是生长在亚洲文化环境中的一代或二代移民。
随着无数入驻欧美国家的中国品牌以及亚裔在欧美本土的发展,中国风格、日韩风格、或者亚洲风格不再是任何一种字体风格可以概括得到的。
The Different Kinds of Notes – Baldur Bjarnason
From A Guide for the Perplexed, page 126:
Divergent problems cannot be killed;
they cannot be solved in the sense of establishing a “correct formula”;
they can, however, be transcended.
A pair of opposites—like freedom and order—are opposites at the level of ordinary life, but they cease to be opposites at the higher level, the really human level, where self-awareness plays its proper role.
When I step back, squint a bit, and stare at my blackboard and my notes, it strikes me that most of the notetaking methods the interviewees described are trying to answer at least one of the three following questions:
How do I manage my creativity?
my knowledge?
my understanding?
The notetaking methods are a way for the writer to continuously ask themselves these questions and adjust their tactics as needed.
None of the methods are prescriptive or rigid;
they are all constantly being adapted.
The job of notes for creativity is to:
Generate ideas in a structured way through research and sketching.
Preserve those ideas.
Explore the ideas until they have gelled into a cohesive plan or solved a problem.
The job of notes for knowledge is to:
Extend your memory to help you keep track of useful information (client data, meeting notes, references).
Connect that information to your current tasks or projects so that you can find it when you need it.
The job of notes for understanding is to:
Break apart, reframe, and contextualise information and ideas so that they become a part of your own thought process.
Turn learning into something you can outline in your own words.
In terms of software, that means we have these three broad approaches:
Notes for creativity tend to favour loosely structured workspaces.
Scrivener and Ulysses probably come the closest, though, in practice, I have doubts that either of them is loosely structured enough.
Notes for knowledge favour databases, ‘everything-buckets’ (apps that expect you to store everything in them), and hypertextual ‘link-everything’ note apps.
Notes for understanding tend to favour tools that have powerful writing or drawing features (which you favour will depend on your skill set and comfort).
I don’t think you can make software that perfectly serves all three of these kinds of notetaking.
Knowledge bases become too rigid to serve as workspaces for creativity.
The creative spaces are too loosely structured to work well as knowledge bases.
You can integrate writing and drawing tools in either, but that serves notetaking for understanding only up to a point.
Most knowledge bases preserve too much detail and context, which gets in the way of reframing and contextualization.
And too fully featured writing or drawing tools could make the creativity tools too complex to use.
In the parlance of roleplaying games, these are the three character statistics of your notetaking app, and you only get to assign 15 points between them.
Julia Cameron’s words in The Artist’s Way:
There is no wrong way to do morning pages.
These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art.
Or even writing.
I stress that point to reassure the nonwriters working with this book.
Writing is simply one of the tools.
Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind.
Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.