Monthly Archives: September 2009

Here be dragons

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“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dan­ger­ous or unex­plored ter­rit­or­ies, in imit­a­tion of the medi­eval prac­tice of put­ting sea ser­pents and other myth­o­lo­gical creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wiki­pe­dia, Here be dragons)

As a reac­tion to the Uto­pian sci­ence fic­tion (fre­quently set into a dis­tant glor­i­ous future), cyber­punk pro­jec­ted all our fears into the uncharted ter­rit­ory of the very near future.

What sep­ar­ates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspe­cified, yet immin­ent apo­ca­lypse. Hence, most of the cyber­punk scenes are post-​apocalyptic ones, where the apo­ca­lypse is a given, part of a for­got­ten history:

“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if any­one, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep (Chapter 2)

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Anti-​heroes in Cyberpunk

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Tech­nic­ally an anti-​hero lacks the attrib­utes of the hero, of the “knight in the shin­ing armour” type. I believe that one par­tic­u­lar aspect of not being a (clas­sical) hero is the use decep­tion, liv­ing double lives, etc.

In The Mat­rix, Neo lives a double life: he works a dull cubicle job by day, helps his land­lady take out the garbage; by night he’s involved in illegal inform­a­tion trade. He is trapped into this double life and he looks for an exit: an answer and a saviour (Morpheus).

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Arial versus Helvetica, The Real Difference

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arial-helvetica

Well, as opposed to these typo­graph­ical dif­fer­ences, I believe that this illus­tra­tion gives you the feel of Arial versus Hel­vetica.