I watched an animated movie with my 4-year-old daughter tonight and, as it started, I noticed the MPAA rating as it flashed by: RATED ‘G’ FOR MILD PERIL. For some reason the phrase MILD PERIL got stuck in a kind of processing loop in my head. Maybe because I’ve always thought of peril as a binary state: either I’m in peril or I’m, you know, okay. I never really thought of it as something that needed to be quantified.

So what does it mean to find oneself in 'mild' peril? As I considered this question, I realized that I would be helpless to stop myself from spending the rest of this movie devising Peril Scales. Like this:

• Mild peril: We’re out of coffee.
• Moderate peril: We’re out of water.
• Severe peril: We’re out of air.

Or maybe:

• Mild peril: Angry badger.
• Moderate peril: Angry wolverine.
• Severe peril: Angry elephant.

Or maybe:

• Mild peril: Sir Robin.
• Moderate peril: Sir Lancelot.
• Severe peril: The Black Knight. (Alright, we’ll call it a draw.)

You get the idea.

By the end of our movie, the main characters had been close enough to an exploding car to lose eyebrows and/or hearing, nearly run over by a delivery truck and then a train, and were nearly killed in a burning building. If the MPAA calls that 'mild' peril, then I'd say best not to find yourself in a bar fight with any of their voting members.

But whatever. My daughter loved the movie, and now we have something to watch that isn't Frozen.

Really nice to see more and more strong fonts being released under open-source licenses. This one is particularly lovely - I have a soft spot for these chunky humanist typefaces and I love the little details in this one, like the angle-cut terminals and the treatment of the lowercase "t".

I hope the community keeps developing it; I'd especially love to see where they might go with additional weights and styles.

Found via Typewolf's excellent newsletter.

I'm really blown away by these maps and diagrams created by Levi Walter Yaggy, and published in 1887 in his folio book Geographical Portfolio - Comprising Physical, Political, Geological, and Astronomical Geography. Each page was 2 by 3 feet and the large graphics were intended to be used in the classroom as a teaching aid.

Life has been busy lately and it's been awhile since I've been able to work on a new drawing. This week I finally had a few free nights to work on something, and it felt so good to pick up a brush again.

This drawing will be used in a new print edition, inspired by a "science experiment" my wife Jackie did for Evelyn, our 4-year-old daughter. She put some white flowers in water, added food coloring, and left them for a week or so until the the petals began to turn the same color as they water.