Building Tribute Boards: the art of imitation
“Anne Marie? Do the interns get Glocks?” asks Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) in Wes Anderson’s classic The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. “No” she replies without pausing from looking up from sunbathing… “they all share one.” If you’re new to director Wes Anderson and his collection of artsy, charming, and sometimes problematic but otherwise entertaining films, The Life Aquatic is a good place to start. Not because it’s his best work (The Royal Tenenbaums) or even his most approachable (The Fantastic Mr. Fox) … but because it is all of the things I described above and is a perfect example of what a Wes Anderson movie is. The actors, who make up his all-star casts are reduced (if that term can be used this way) into extensions of Anderson’s creative mind and play their parts to perfection. The plot is funny and also tragic, the music in the movie is completely unique and also instantly recognizable (Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs) and the movie blends dialogue and...
May 15, 2024
For anyone who doesn't know, stenography allows you to press multiple keys simultaneously that correspond to syllables, words, or phrases. The keypress combos are in mnemonic patterns so that the more patterns you learn, the faster you learn more. The end result is that you can type blazingly fast with a relatively relaxed typing pace. The strange keycaps are designed to make it easier to type the combinations of keys required by stenography: one finger often has to press two rows simultaneously.
The tooling for the custom keycaps was expensive due to such low volume production, so I'm looking to see if anyone else knows about or is interested in learning stenography. Spreading out the tooling costs over multiple keyboards can make these boards very cheap very quickly relative to their original price.