Mocha Mania
It’s that time of year again, time for Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2025. You may recall (we had to look it up) the COY for 2024 was Peach Fuzz, and didn’t we just see that everywhere all year? Well, peaches have become passé, and in 2025 it’s Mocha Mousse. Says Print magazine:
This year, much of the design world has been focused on themes of sustainability, simplicity, and connection. Mocha Mousse seeks to tap into those ideas, evoking warmth and stability. It’s a grounded shade that nods to nature and the pleasures of everyday life—a safe choice, perhaps, but also a versatile one.
Mocha Moose would be a great name for a cartoon character, a kind of anthropomorphic ungulate that hangs out at a Starbucks.
Pantone had made the announcement via a light show on the London Eye. (And don’t it make your brown Eye blue?) At any rate, designers, you have your marching orders: mousse us!
Meanwhile, if Mocha Mousse isn’t your thing, at least in terms of home décor, the BBC helpfully identifies currently trending paint colors. They identify nine colors to try, including avocado and olive green (in case it becomes the 70s again), burgundy and crimson, plum and grape tones (the Grape Tones opened for the Electric Prunes in 68), dusty rose pink and terracotta (Dusty Rose Pink and Terracotta were a country-folk duo that never quite took off), and more. If you’re looking to redo your home décor and need some ideas, see what to eliminate straight away.
When Things Were Rotten
In addition to Color of the Year, it’s also time for the word of the year. Oxford University Press, publisher of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, has determined that 2024’s word of the year was “brain rot.” That’s two words, but, hey, they’re the experts.
‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.
Like Around the Web… We continue.
After over 37,000 votes, worldwide public discussion, and analysis of our language data, we have named ‘brain rot’ as our Word of the Year for 2024.
Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.
They add that the first recorded use of “brain rot” was in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, which is interesting as we wouldn’t imagine he could get Internet access in that remote cabin.
Judging a Cover By Its Books
In addition to “…of the Year” awards, it’s also time for the umpteen million “Best of 2024” lists. To that end Print magazine has identified the “100 Best Book Covers of 2024.” They say:
Some of my personal favorites: Thomas Colligans’ beautiful cover for Beautyland, which has been stuck in my head for the better part of a year. Janet Hansen’s work on Ask Me Again, is equal parts electrifying and haunting. Pablo Delcan’s genius VanderMeer covers the best encapsulations of the Southern Reach series since his Spanish editions. Arsh Raziuddin’s jacket for Knife. Alex Merto and Seymour Chwast’s Tom Wolfe reissues. Pete Adlington’s utterly perfect Not Waving But Drowning. Grace Han’s take on God of the Woods, which disproves the theory that great covers are only the stuff of niche imprints and genres and not mainstream bestsellers.
Really? Anyway, click through to check out the whole list. (Frankly, we haven’t heard of most of them.)
Pint Catalogs
Do you still get printed catalogs? Do you have your favorites? If so, well, some bad news. The good news, we guess, is that they still exist in print, but the bad news is that they are getting smaller. Says the AP:
Many of the millions of catalogs getting sent to U.S. homes were indeed scaled down to save on postage and paper, resulting in pint-sized editions. Lands’ End, Duluth Trading Company and Hammacher Schlemmer are among gift purveyors using smaller editions. Some retailers are saving even more money with postcards.
…Catalogs have undergone a steady recalibration over the years in response to technological changes and consumer behavior. The thick, heavy Sears and J.C. Penney catalogs that brought store displays to American living rooms slimmed down and gave way to targeted mailings once websites could do the same thing. Recent postal rate increases accelerated the latest shift to compact formats.
We know intimately the demise of catalog publishing:
The number of catalogs mailed each year dropped about 40% between 2006 to 2018, when an estimated 11.5 billion were mailed to homes, according to the trade group formerly known as the American Catalog Mailers Association. In a sign of the times, the group based in Washington rebranded itself in May as the American Commerce Marketing Association, reflecting a broadened focus.
But even in the ecommerce era, retailers still find print catalogs useful.
Retail companies found that could treat catalogs with fewer pages as a marketing tool and include QR and promo codes to entice customers to browse online and complete a purchase.
Even Amazon and Wayfair have launched printed catalogs.
Pint-sized presentations still can work, though, because the purpose of catalogs these days is simply to get customers’ attention, Zhang said. Conserving paper also works better with younger consumers who are worried about the holiday shopping season’s impact on the planet, he said.
Don’t get us started on that.
The History of Written Language—Runed
What is the world’s oldest alphabet? Sumerian cuneiform? Egyptian hieroglyphics? It has long been believed by scholars that the first alphabet was invented somewhere in the vicinity of Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE. However, a recent find in western Syria uncovered an alphabet that dates from 500 years before that. The site is called Tell Umm el-Marra, and it was a major city in Syria. Archaeologists have been excavating it for 16 years. Via GoodNewsNetwork:
In one of the best-preserved tombs—remarkably unlooted—dating from the Early Bronze Age, 6 skeletons were found alongside grave goods and four, small, perforated clay cylinders.
Stamped on the cylinders seems to be some form of Semitic alphabet, but carbon dating revealed the clay to be around 500 years older than the previous oldest recorded alphabetic script.
…Said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders….“this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”
What is the artifact and what does it say? The nearest anyone can figure is that it’s a 4,500-year-old gift tag. Via Scientific American:
A clay cylinder found in a tomb holding six skeletons in northern Syria bears the word “silanu,” which may be a name.
… Small holes drilled into the cylinders could have been used to string them on thread. As such, the clay structures could have served as labels for goods; Silanu might have been either the recipient or sender of some of the jars of food and beverage placed in the tomb to accompany its occupants into the afterlife, Schwartz says.
Although the artifact was discovered in 2004, Schwartz was a bit too timid to announce his discovery straight away, as it upends what we know about the development of written language.
“It changes the entire narrative of how the alphabet was introduced,” Schwartz says. … Scientists previously thought that the first alphabet was created around 1900 B.C.E. by people speaking a Semitic language on the Sinai Peninsula in what is now Egypt. That alphabet, called Proto-Sinaitic, is based on hieroglyphic symbols repurposed as letters. The new finding suggests instead that people in farther-flung reaches of the Near East experimented with hieroglyph-derived letters much earlier.
Four Millennia of Shame
Think back to your schooldays. Like most of us, you probably flunked a test or two, or at the very least screwed up a homework assignment here and there. But happily, those academic blunders were not preserved in stone for several millennia. However, one poor ancient Babylonian kid had no such luck. Via LiveScience, in Tell Ingharra, Kish (Sumer), in modern-day Iraq, a round clay tablet was found in 1931, and it’s now at the University of Oxford in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum. It’s one of a number of examples of ancient Babylonian math homework (we’re not making that up). However, on this particular tablet, the student made a mistake.
the student who used this tablet as a "scratch pad" to calculate the area of a triangle made a key mistake, and their error has been preserved for nearly 4,000 years.
The tiny tablet is just 3.2 inches (8.2 centimeters) in diameter and depicts a right triangle with three sets of cuneiform style numbers — one set along each of the two sides representing the length and height of the triangle, and one in the middle for its area.
Image credit: © Ashmolean Museum/University of Oxford; Photo by Zunkir via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0
Along the top line (height) of the triangle, the student has written 3.75, while the vertical line (base) is indicated as 1.875. These values mean the area of the triangle should be 3.5156. The student, though, has incorrectly calculated it as 3.1468.
He shouldn’t have used AI. Word of advice to all the students out there: delete all your school assignments after you graduate, lest that math test you flunked end up in a museum in 4,000 years.
Inkjet Insight
Tattooing is all the rage these days, and, as it turns out, not just for fashion, self-expression, or, in The Omen, indicating the spawn of Satan, although there can be some overlap. It can also be used for brain monitoring. Via LiveScience:
Scientists have developed a new technology that can measure brain waves using electronic, temporary tattoos.
The researchers say the method could act as a quicker and more convenient way to monitor brain activity and diagnose neurological conditions, such as seizures, epilepsy and brain tumors, compared to traditional electroencephalogram (EEG) tests.
In a normal EEG test, technicians laboriously use rulers and pencils to mark up a patient’s scalp and then glue on electrodes, which are then connected to the machine that goes ping records brain activity. The whole thing can take a couple of hours to set up. (They can also use a cap with electrodes that can be worn on the head, but what fun is that?)
The new technology, on the other hand, uses a robot that is digitally programmed to jet ink made of conductive material onto specific positions on a person's scalp — saving both time and labor, say the researchers. Currently, this printing process still takes an hour as the team has to manually correct for a persons' head movements, Lu said. However, if future adaptive printing can be fully automated, the whole printing process can be done within 20 minutes, she added.
The ink then dries into a thin film, known as an electronic tattoo, that is 30 micrometers thick — approximately half the width of a human hair. Like regular EEG electrodes, these e-tattoos can then be used to detect changes in the electrical activity of the brain.
At some point, maybe they can get a bit more creative with the design than a black dot. An anchor, maybe? A heart that says “Mother”? Three 6s? They can put their, um, brains to it.
Strava for Flipping
Some years ago, in this space, we linked to some stories about how runners, bikers, etc., were using the route-mapping feature of their Strava app to send messages or even create artwork. Now, via Laughing Squid, filmmaker and jogger Duncan McCabe used Strava to plan and record his running patterns around Toronto, which he then turned into flipbook-style animations. These are pretty cool.
*%#$% YouTube won’t let us embed them, so check them out here and here.
Graphene: “I’m Liquid Metal”
Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! Researchers use graphene in a new technique for self-assembling electronics. From (who else?) Graphene-Info:
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Iowa State University have demonstrated a new technique for self-assembling electronic devices. The proof-of-concept work was used to create diodes and transistors, and could pave the way for self-assembling more complex electronic devices without relying on existing computer chip manufacturing techniques.
Now we’re getting into Terminator territory:
Thuo calls the new, self-assembling technique a directed metal-ligand (D-Met) reaction. He explained its methodology: You start with liquid metal particles. For their proof-of-concept work, the researchers used Field’s metal, which is an alloy of indium, bismuth and tin. The liquid metal particles are placed next to a mold, which can be made to any size or pattern. A solution is then poured onto the liquid metal. The solution contains molecules called ligands that are made up of carbon and oxygen. These ligands harvest ions from the surface of the liquid metal and hold those ions in a specific geometric pattern. The solution flows across the liquid metal particles and is drawn into the mold.
When it’s done, the mold is removed, and the “array” is heated, which breaks up the ligands and frees the carbon and oxygen atoms. While the metallic ions interact with oxygen to form semiconductor metal oxides, the carbon atoms form graphene sheets.
These ingredients assemble themselves into a well-ordered structure consisting of semiconductor metal oxide molecules wrapped in graphene sheets. The researchers used this technique to create nanoscale and microscale transistors and diodes.
And, soon, killer robots from the future.
One Ring to Time Them All
Do you like the traditional features of a watch (timekeeping—sometimes we have to be reminded what watches used to only do) but want something less bulky? Via Core77, Casio has introduced a functional ring watch.
The tiny, working watch module was made possible by “the adoption of advanced metal molding technology,” the company writes.
Graphene sheets and liquid metal? Probably not.
“The complex shape of the Casio watch is reproduced in detail in a full metal design in the size of a ring. In addition, glass bonding technology ensures airtightness.”
Imagine what Tolkien could have done with that.
“The battery can be replaced, but it is waterproof for everyday use. By [utilizing] a small button battery, a digital watch with 3 buttons has been realized in a ring size. In addition, it is equipped with a 7-segment LCD. It displays not only hours, minutes, and seconds, but also date, dual time, stopwatch, etc. It comes with an emotional flashing light function that faintly flashes the light on your hand when the set time arrives.”
Not sure we want an emotional flashing light; we’re looking for something a bit more stoic in a watch. It launches this month, and is a steal at ¥19,800 ($128).
Relayer
Are you a fan of classic album cover art? Are you going to be in East Sussex in England this month? If so, head on over to the Trading Boundaries venue in Fletching in East Sussex for a new Roger Dean exhibition. Says Prog magazine:
Horizon Line runs until December 31, and the all-new exhibition offers fans a rare glimpse into Dean’s creative genius, and features rare and seldom-seen pieces from his illustrious career working with the likes of Yes, Asia and more.
Visitors will have the chance to immerse themselves in the intricate landscapes, fantastical designs, and otherworldly visions that have made Dean a household name.
The exhibition is open to the public during normal business hours, Wednesday to Sunday, 10am - 5pm. Admission is free.
Frankly Disgusting
Tired of holiday houseguests? Looking for a way to drive them away? Sam’s Club can help you out, with its recently released “Holidogs,” a hot dog-based mashup that is described as “half Thanksgiving, half Christmas.” Well, it’s at least a third Halloween. Via (who else?) Food & Wine:
Guests can pick up one of the three curated holiday combos (or heck, get one of each), which include the "Club Mash Up," a hot dog topped with mashed Potatoes and Christmas cookies. Then there's the "Frankly Both," topped with pumpkin pie and candy canes, and "Season’s Meatings," topped with turkey and prime rib (which is also the only one that seems to, at least flavor-wise, make sense, but we aren't here to judge).
But we are…
Presumably you remove the peppermints and the cookies before consuming the hot dog.
They’re free (and we can see why), but there’s a catch.
You can't find it in the Sam's Club stores.
That’s a shame…
Instead, you'll have to visit the Holidog carts that the company is hosting in three cities across the U.S. in December. First up is New York City, where you'll find the cart on the corner of Water & Fulton Streets on Thursday, December 5, from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. (or until sold out). Next, the cart will be in Nashville at 315 Broadway on Monday, December 9, from 11 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. (or until sold out). And finally, in Dallas at Pegasus Plaza on Thursday, December 12, from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. (or until sold out).
If you happen to be any of these places at these times…run!
This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History
December 2
1939: New York City's LaGuardia Airport opens. Has not been upgraded since.
1971: The Soviet space program's Mars 3 orbiter releases a descent module. It lands successfully but loses contact. It is the first man-made object to land softly on the surface of Mars.
December 3
1857: Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (né Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) born.
1894: Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson dies (b. 1850).
1910: Modern neon lighting is first demonstrated by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show.
1994: The PlayStation developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment is released in Japan.
December 4
1732: English poet and playwright John Gay dies (b. 1685).
1791: The first edition of The Observer, the world’s first Sunday newspaper, is published in the U.K.
1875: Austrian-Swiss poet and author Rainer Maria Rilke born.
1881: The first edition of the Los Angeles Times is published.
1965: The Grateful Dead makes its first concert performance under that name (they had been founded as The Warlocks).
1993: American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer Frank Zappa dies (b. 1940).
December 5
1791: Austrian composer and musician Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies (b. 1756).
1901: American animator, director, producer, and screenwriter Walt Disney born.
1901: German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Werner Heisenberg born. Of that there is no uncertainty.
December 6
1877: The first edition of The Washington Post is published.
1953: Vladimir Nabokov completes his controversial novel Lolita.
1955: American actor, comedian, and screenwriter Steven Wright born.
December 7
43 BC: Roman philosopher, lawyer, and politician Cicero dies (b. 106 BC).
1902: German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast dies (b. 1840).
1923: American actor and comedian Ted Knight born.
1930: W1XAV in Boston, Massachusetts telecasts video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers. The telecast also includes the first television commercial in the United States, an advertisement for I.J. Fox Furriers, who sponsored the radio show.
December 8
65 BC: Roman soldier and poet Horace born.
1861: American businessman, and founder of General Motors and Chevrolet, William C. Durant born.
1894: American humorist and cartoonist James Thurber born.
1951: American essayist, travel and science writer Bill Bryson born.
1962: Workers at four New York City newspapers (this later increases to nine) go on strike for 114 days.
1980: John Lennon is murdered by Mark David Chapman in front of The Dakota in New York City.
2013: Metallica performs a show in Antarctica, making them the first band to perform on all seven continents. (Master of Penguins?)
2019: First confirmed case of COVID-19 in China.
December 9
1608: English poet and philosopher John Milton born. (“There goes paradise,” said his mother.)
1793: New York City’s first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, is established by Noah Webster.
1897: Activist Marguerite Durand founds the feminist daily newspaper La Fronde in Paris.
1906: American admiral, computer scientist, and designer of COBOL Grace Hopper born.
1960: The first episode of Coronation Street, the world’s longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the United Kingdom.
1965: A Charlie Brown Christmas, first in a series of Peanuts television specials, debuts on CBS.
1968: Douglas Engelbart gives what became known as “The Mother of All Demos,” publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS) at the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
1979: The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other). For now.
