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Velvetyne is a French libre type foundry designing and releasing cutting edge typefaces. We design libre / open source fonts. That means that you can use, modify and redistribute them freely! Learn more and contribute to the adventure of Velvetyne Type Foundry by reading our “about” page!

The landlord-renter relationship is inherently unjust and part of our completely broken housing situation, but—judgments aside—this is what they’re dealing with. Property owners juggle a widespread struggle to pay rent with their own mortgage responsibilities.

People from different walks of life tell us how the crisis is (or isn’t) affecting them financially, from staying at a resort to filing for unemployment.

A collection of 200 photos on Flickr that you can use as Zoom green-screen backgrounds.

Cheaper than Netflix and Prime! Dozens of free public domain movies plus our Voleflix Originals.

Around the world, in countries afflicted with the coronavirus, stores are sold out of toilet paper. There have been shortages in Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. […] In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75 percent of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports. […] Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of 6 or 12. […] In theory, some of the mills that make commercial toilet paper could try to redirect some of that supply to the consumer market. People desperate for toilet paper probably wouldn’t turn up their noses at it. But the industry can’t just flip a switch. Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins. […] Even a modest, reasonable amount of stocking up by millions of people in preparation for stay-at-home orders would have been enough to deplete many store shelves. From there, the ripple effects of availability concerns, coupled with a genuine increase in demand due to people staying in, are sufficient to explain the ongoing supply problems.

Dan Deacon discusses how meditation inspired his new album, Mystic Familiar, the music of Philip Glass and John Cage, and what happens before you’re born. --- I realized I wasn’t even relaxing enough to know why I was meditating. I was meditating with an end goal in mind, but I didn’t know what that end goal was. I thought the sheer act of meditating would bring it on, if that makes any sense. Then, I started realizing that it wasn’t a capitalist exchange of meditation for inspiration.

Child care options, internet access and extra living space leave a gulf between rich and poor in coping with disruptions to school and work. --- Still, a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.

I can't stop thinking about a sci-fi novel where a woman has to choose between personal and global ruin. --- What if I, like Patricia, was at some point unwittingly asked to choose between my own contentment and global peace? If that happened, it’s clear which one I went for, and it’s ultimately no surprise; personal comfort over the greater good is a calculation I make again and again. If the question were posed again explicitly, I don’t even trust myself to choose a different way. I want all this to be over, to be better, for everyone; I want wrongs righted that I didn’t even realize were wrong six years ago, or that I understood were wrong but didn’t really think about because I didn’t have to. But would I give up everything good in my own life? Would I give up my partner, our home together, whatever I’ve made of my career? I want to say yes, but no. In reality, of course, that question is purely academic. I couldn’t fix everything with one grand sacrifice, even if I wanted to. I couldn’t even fix it with a lifetime of smaller ones. Most of the world’s ills are created from the top down, and can only be truly addressed from the top down. We tend to overestimate the role that individual choices can play, partly because that overestimation gives us an opportunity to be self-important or scoldy, but mostly because people like to feel as if it matters what they do. Tip well, call your senators, eat less meat, buy reusable replacements for your single-use papers and plastics; these efforts make us feel helpful, and they are helpful, to a point. At the same time, though, they will always be eclipsed by the inaction of the people who could really make a difference: the policymakers protecting the corporations and the corporations protecting themselves. You can’t flatten that curve on your own. […] I’m not cruel, but I’m privileged and weak, and that’s enough to add up. And so when I think “this is all my fault,” I am wrong in every reasonable way except the one that matters. It would be such a comfort to fully dismiss this self-blame as self-delusion. I obviously did not directly and single-handedly cause a pandemic, or global warming, or Fox News. Trump didn’t get elected because I didn’t knock on enough doors. But he might have gotten elected because everybody didn’t knock on enough doors, and one of those people was me. I stayed home when I should have been canvassing, emailed when I should have been calling, donated $25 when I could have afforded $50, said I would look for a volunteer gig and did not. And I’ve been given chance after chance to reconsider, disaster after disaster that could have shocked me from complacency into sacrifice, and every time I have chosen the easy way, and every time it gets worse. […] The fantasy of being wholly to blame for everything is also a fantasy about being able to make it stop. Most of us will never get that chance—to choose the peaceful timeline or the content one, to make the brave sacrifice that saves the world, to warn the public in time or make a million bucks on insider trading. This is the purview of protagonists and villains. My purview is sitting inside, being more scared than I have a right to be, sending Venmos that will never be enough, watching people die anyway and not ever knowing whether it might otherwise have been just a tiny bit worse.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy. --- Anticipatory grief is the mind going to the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you want to come into the present. […] Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

Collletttivo is an expanding group of designers working on type-based projects and occasionally releasing Open Source typefaces through the platform. Goal of the collective is to create a network of people that challenge themselves to improve though practice and mutual exchange in the very competitive fields of graphics and type design.

Crucially, the available research and mask advocates stress the importance of wearing masks properly and responsibly.

Test matching your answers to the crowd-sourced profiles of fictional characters.

Here you can explore my work, learn more about minimalism photography, and purchase your favorite from my print vendors.

Xavi Bou focuses on birds, his great passion, in order to capture in a single time frame, the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible. […] Technology, science and creativity combine to create evocative images which show the sensuality and beauty of the bird’s movements and which are, at the same time, clues for those wishing to identify or recognize them.

Our world became one of isolation, round-the-clock care, panic and uncertainty — even as society carried on around us with all too few changes.

Media has focused on the top-down, authoritarian response in Wuhan. But the way ordinary citizens handled the crisis should be replicated across the world. --- Federal and state responses to coronavirus are becoming more organized, but the magnitude of this crisis requires massively sustained bottom-up efforts too. This is why mutual-aid networks, caremongering, local delivery for at-risk populations, and neighborhood slack groups are being activated like wildfire across the US.

The Republicans are confronting the coronavirus with nihilism—and the Democrats are responding with impotence. --- Metaphors fail daily: Trump really would sooner risk the lives of a million strangers than do his job, and his party is quite willing to go along with it. In the absence of an opposition party willing and able to point any of that out or call it what it is, the nation is more or less left to take him at his word. Where and when the media takes up the challenge of doing the basic civic work that Democrats can’t or won’t, it lets Trump spin a once-in-a-generation crisis as Another Media Thing. And that renders the whole episode as just another argument to have on television. […] At this moment, erring on the side of saying or doing too little instead of too much would be not just infuriating in the typical Democratic ways but devastating and damning in essential ones: The crystalized threat presented by this crisis and this moment requires a clear and commensurate response in both words and deeds. Strategically lying low or working the angles—such as gaming the outcomes within the denser stretches of mundane appropriations bills—doesn’t work terribly well in comparatively normal circumstances. But the Democrats’ usual tactics are terrifyingly insufficient when they’re deployed in response to business interests and reactionary politicians opting into a holocaust in the best interests of a market. It is ghoulish in the most contemporary of ways that this sort of thing is even up for debate, but it’s most important to see the effort to counter it as what it is: not a political campaign but an existential one, and so not the sort of thing that you get to do twice.

Calls to reopen America have disturbing intellectual roots. And the millions of deaths that could ensue would fuel a depression beyond our imagination. --- Economism is a belief system that leads people to believe that everything can be simplified to models and curves, and that it’s possible to count and maximize utility in every circumstance. What economism misses includes complexity, historical contingency and the profound, uncountable power of human emotion. […] Anywhere in the world, positing this problem as a tradeoff between the economic interests of the young and the lifespan of the old is a terrible error. As the US Centers for Disease Control explains, those vulnerable to serious or fatal cases of the infection include not just the elderly, but anyone who is obese, diabetic, has high blood pressure, is HIV-positive, has undergone cancer treatment, suffers from asthma or smokes. Those factors are more common among poorer Americans as well as older Americans. And poor Americans occupy all age ranges.

The coronavirus outbreak may last for a year or two, but some elements of pre-pandemic life will likely be won back in the meantime. --- Come summer, Americans might get restaurants but no music festivals, offices but no crowded beaches, bars with spaced-out seating. Projecting when each facet of daily life will be restored would be easier if public-health authorities had an omniscient view of who is infected, who has recovered and become immune, and who is still susceptible—this is the information that would emerge from widespread testing, which the United States is terribly behind on deploying. […] “Once the [current] wave is dealt with, then some things might relax—a little,” Hanage said. More out-of-the-house working and socializing might take place, but this would still be a world with rigorous hand-washing, well-smothered sneezing, and generous amounts of hand sanitizer (and suspicion of anyone who disregards these public-health norms). In all likelihood, people who can work remotely or order food via delivery would still do so instead of leaving the house.

Yay, there we go! We have a performant static site that takes its data from Google Sheets and deploys automatically when updates are made to the sheet.

An interview with musician Siavash Amini. Following U.S. sanctions, widespread protests, internet blackouts, and government crackdowns, COVID-19 is the latest calamity to befall Iran’s avant-garde.

Ehhhh we’ll see. As Democrats fret about their own prospects, many fail to recognize the president’s fundamental weakness.

We're a playlist platform that directly supports independent music, built on our streaming integrations and powerful curation tools. The closest analogy for what we are would be Patreon for music or Substack for playlists. We enable artists to create a space to elevate the music and artists that they enjoy for their fans and accept tips from supporters. You can think of it as a newsletter of music, featuring thoughts alongside selections for fans to listen to. We enable fans to have a closer connection to their favorite artists via curated playlists, personal thoughts, and early previews of their work.

JQBX lets you play & listen to music in sync with friends or public groups. We believe music is better with friends. JQBX lets you be a DJ, join a party, or just kick back and listen to music with friends or strangers from all over the world in real time. JQBX hooks into your Spotify account and is 100% free to use. Give it a try and start listening. Together.

COVID-19 tracker generates summary visualizations of COVID-19 testing results in the US to help inform and communicate the current situation. All testing data are retrieved in real time from the COVID Tracking Project. Their database is updated daily by 5 PM EST, and so are the plots on this page. Resident population of the US in 2019 by state was obtained from Statista.

Use these instructions to get up and running with helping your community! Kick off your city's relief efforts as we all learn to cope with COVID-19 with this starter powered by Gatsby, Airtable, and community efforts. This project is aims to make it as easy as possible to launch and manage an index of resources in your city during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How Japanese-Americans helped launch the California tuna-canning industry—and one of America’s most beloved sandwiches.

An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19. --- A few interesting bits I found interesting to explore: In nearly every country in the world, when the virus reaches 100 people the number of cases begins to increase by 35% daily. • At that rate, a country would reach 1,000,000 cases just 31 days after reaching 100 cases. • The curve flattens with social distancing -- check out Japan, South Korea, and China over time. There are two different ways to view the exact same data: • The logarithmic scale shows a great comparison of the magnitude of growth between countries, but less of the human impact. • The linear scale shows the real human impact -- a growth twice the size is twice the number of real people infected.

Stay up to date on tools, resources, and supports made necessary during this time. #WhileAtHome is a clearinghouse for credible information and action steps.