Hello from the end of April. Last week, I mentioned an upcoming visit to the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, and I’m happy to report that it was everything I hoped for and more. If you schedule a research visit, a member of their staff will pull a big pile of materials from their vault (that’s exactly what they call it) to explore any dimension of any question about type that might be on your mind. We asked for an exploration of 20th-century monograms and in particular the letters B, C, D, and E (the initials of our family’s set of first names) and I was in heaven. If you like type at all, go!
In other news, don’t miss Lemon Slice’s latest launch—it’s like FaceTiming with a photo brought to life.
And now, here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
I talk to this group of clones of myself all the time on Telegram. I have 14 years of journals, about 30,000 pages, and I put all that writing into a system that ideates with me.
…
This is two of my identities in one chat, and I mostly talk to myself about research ideas. One is my creative copy, and the other my abstractive representational copy, based on the books I’ve written on creativity and abstraction.
– An anonymous AI researcher in conversation with Jasmine Sun in “rational agents: an anonymous conversation about AI,” April 26, 2025. Reading this sparked a new thought for me: the idea of fine-tuning different “versions” of oneself so that they can hash things out together. Sent to me by Robin Sloan as a candidate for a Diagonal fragment before I started seeing it quoted everywhere. I will say that one of the best things to come out of putting this newsletter together has been adding a handful of treasured penpalships to my inbox.
It’s about ancient forms of communication that are deeper than words. Quest for Fire is where our primate motion choreographer, Peter Elliott, got his start. As a young man he was one of the great ape suits, and he tells an incredible story where they had some elephants from the London Zoo dressed up as wooly mammoths. And he and other apes are supposed to get out of the way and scatter as there’s a mammoth stampede, and there’s a take in the film in which these elephants, who are not very direct-able, they start running, and the apes are supposed to scatter on all fours, of course––they’re quadrupedal––and you just see all the performers in ape suits go upright and start to run, including him.
– Isaiah Saxon in conversation with Dan Mecca, “‘There’s No Nostalgia for Me in This Film’: The Legend of Ochi Director Isaiah Saxon on Making His $10 Million Debut Look Bigger Than Life,” April 22, 2025. I started following Isaiah back in the diy.org days (over 10 years ago!) so it was a big surprise to see him pop up in my feeds as the writer & director of a new film from A24, The Legend of Ochi. (Turns out it’s not as surprising as it seems: before he was a startup founder, he made music videos for acts like Grizzly Bear and Björk.) We took the kids yesterday and while I’d say the movie was on the scary end for a 6yo and a nearly-5yo, they survived and the beauty was worth it. This interview is full of golden details about puppetry, budget VFX, and filming on-location in Romania.
let the robots have robot mannerisms
they don’t have to sound exactly like us
they could be something entirely new
– Carmen Gutierrez on X, April 24, 2025. Let the robots have robot mannerisms!
BMW have made an intentional shift toward companionship with the agent being inside the car.
Consider the average American commuter: 60 minutes a day, mostly alone, in the car. The vehicle as liminal space. Neither home nor work. Private and intimate. I’m 100% positive people are going to talk to their cars. First for fun. Then for directions. Then about their lives. Their feelings. Their grief, their divorce.
– Jay Springett, “AI UX: Pixel Agents, Talking Cars, and Moving Eyes,” April 16, 2025. Sent to me by Chris Xu, another pen pal for life. It’s a piece in three parts, each representing a different pattern for AI companions—“little guys” or “little computer people,” as Jay calls them. This part is about the a new Mercedes vehicle that integrates ChatGPT directly, and what that hints at about how companionship could take hold. It makes sense! When driving alone (or riding in a Waymo), a car can feel like a room of one’s own—a safe spot to speak aloud without fear.
Came home from a video shoot where I had to be The Client — incredibly challenging for me.
I’m telling my wife about this and without even looking up she says “that’s because you’re not spiritually Client, you’re spiritually Crew.”
– Kevin Twohy on X, April 23, 2025. Will be placing everything along this axis for a while.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com