Extraordinary illustrated essay by Marcin Wichary, documenting a typeface — and its long, fascinating, splintered history — that exemplifies the difference between beautiful and pretty. The beauty in Gorton isn’t just in its plainness and hardworking mechanical roots — it’s in the history of the 20th century itself. Gorton became such a part of the world that the bygone world of the previous century imbues how this font makes me feel.

Do yourself a favor and read this one in a comfortable chair, with a tasty slow-sipping beverage, on a screen bigger than a phone. Everything about this piece is exemplary and astounding — the writing, the photography, the depths of research. But most of all, Wichary’s clear passion and appreciation. It’s a love letter.

This presentation can be viewed below, or downloaded via PDF. As this presentation is still being updated, please recheck the PDF URL (and its date) before reading an offline copy.

Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew)

Last Thursday night, I got to attend The Game Awards privately knowing that we had a surprise announcement up our sleeves. As the “one more thing” before the show wrapped up, we dropped our first trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, a new sci-fi adventure from Naughty Dog. The live reaction in the theatre was incredible, and I’m thrilled that I could be there for it.

I’m excited to share my role as co-game director on Intergalactic. My counterpart is Kurt Margenau, a veteran designer at Naughty Dog who I’ve worked closely with for over a decade (since Uncharted 4). We’ve got a terrific team working on this game, and I’m honoured to be creating this incredible new world with them.

While we’re letting the trailer speak for itself for now, director Neil Druckmann revealed a few more details on the Naughty Dog blog:

“Intergalactic stars our newest protagonist, Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up stranded on Sempiria – a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe went dark hundreds of years ago. In fact, anyone who’s flown to it hoping to unravel its mysterious past was never heard from again. Jordan will have to use all her skills and wits if she hopes to be the first person in over 600 years to leave its orbit.”

In an interview with the NY Times, Neil revealed that “it takes inspiration […] from classic anime like the 1988 movie Akira and the 1990s series Cowboy Bebop”. The game is also scored by legendary composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Seeing the reactions from fans online has been a real treat, and I’m grateful for all the excitement and support for our team. Until we have more to share… see you on the other side.

Sumit Chandel and Eldhose Mathokkil Babu, writing for the Google Developers blog:

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.

Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this will impact you if you’re using Google URL Shortener.

Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025.

How much money could it possible cost to just keep this service running in perpetuity? Tim Berners-Lee wrote his seminal essay, “Cool URIs Don’t Change” back in 1998. It’s bad enough when companies go out of business, taking their web servers down with them. But Google isn’t struggling financially. In fact, they’re thriving.