thinmountain

Posted by John Gruber

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/msnbc_ms_now_rebranding#fn1-2025-08-20

Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”:

Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyphen in the logotype.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/msnbc_ms_now_rebranding#fn1-2025-08-20

Posted by John Gruber

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/msnbc_ms_now_rebranding

Sara Fischer, Axios:

MSNBC, the progressive cable network owned by NBCUniversal, is rebranding to MS NOW, an acronym that stands for My Source for News, Opinion and the World.

The rebrand is part of a wider effort by NBCU to create a distinction between the cable networks it plans to spin out and the remaining NBCU parent company. As part of the rebrand, select cable networks that will be spun out into Versant, including CNBC, Golf Channel, GolfNow, MSNBC and SportsEngine, will all drop the iconic peacock logo that has for decades served as NBCU’s logo.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, “Versant” itself is a pretty bad name (feels so vague — seems like the name of a fake company in a movie or TV show) so it’s no surprise that the same nitwits are botching Versant’s rebranded properties. But given that NBCUniversal is apparently forcing MSNBC to take the “NBC” out of its name, “MSNOW” isn’t a bad new name. But it’s not a good new name either. And they’re apparently using a space: “MS NOW”, yet also seem confused (or haven’t even decided yet) whether it’s supposed to be pronounced letter-by-letter (em ess en bee see) or as two letters and a word (em ess now). Saying the “NOW” as the word now makes sense for a 24/7 channel, but if it’s a word, the whole name should be styled “MS Now”. (Fox News styles their name as “FOX News” in some places, but never pretends the f-o-x is an acronym.)

The “My Source News Opinion World” backronym is so dumb it boggles the mind. I genuinely wonder if someone had ChatGPT do that. You can have a series of letters as a name — especially as a TV channel — without those letters really standing for anything. CNN is technically an acronym for “Cable News Network” but they’ve effectively just been “CNN” for decades now. The name “MSNBC” came from the fact that, at launch in the 1990s, it debuted as a collaboration between Microsoft’s MSN and NBC News. But Microsoft hasn’t been involved with the cable channel for 20 years — the “MS” in “MSNBC” hasn’t stood for anything since 2005. (In fact, MSN itself is another good example. It originally stood for “Microsoft Network”, even though Microsoft has never styled their name with a camel-cased S.¹ But it’s really just “MSN” now.)²

Tom Gara, writing on Threads:

The only real fuck up with the MSNBC rebrand is that they made up a dumb sounding fake acronym. It’s completely unnecessary! Just say “we’re changing our name to MS NOW to reflect the urgency of the moment.” Nobody has ever thought about what the old acronym stood for and nobody needed a new fake one.

There is another fuck up, though: the logo is atrocious. What is that flag? It looks like the Austrian flag (🇦🇹), not America’s. But are we sure it even is a flag? Maybe it’s a paper receipt and the red stripes are those marks when it’s time to replace the roll? Jonathan Hoefler, on Threads:

My personal benchmark for a logo is that it shouldn’t look like a pension fund.

The oddest part about the whole situation is that CNBC is being spun out into Versant, too, but while they’re losing the NBC peacock logo, they’re just keeping their name, unchanged. From CNBC’s own coverage of MSNBC’s rebranding:

While MSNBC and NBC News will have duplications in coverage, CNBC’s news organization is already separate enough from NBC News that executives decided it didn’t need a name change. Also, technically, the “NBC” in “CNBC” never stemmed from National Broadcasting Co. Rather, CNBC stands for “Consumer News and Business Channel.”

Lastly, shoutout to M.G. Siegler for coining the term peacockblocked to describe MSNBC’s branding plight.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/msnbc_ms_now_rebranding

Posted by John Gruber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEalzEnT70k

Five-minute short film from Apple, about people with severe hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease using the iPhone’s Action mode to shoot steady video — including filmmaker Brett Harvey, who was diagnosed at the way-too-young age of 37. There’s also a brief short with Harvey explaining the settings to shoot in Action mode by default, or to use voice controls to avoid needing to tap buttons.

Apple at its very best. If this doesn’t hit you, you’re not hooked up right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEalzEnT70k

Posted by John Gruber

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/06/28/american/

Kieran Healy on, just now — amidst all this — becoming an American citizen:

When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths — as you please — about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.

Beautiful.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/06/28/american/

Posted by John Gruber

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/joe_caroff_007_logo_designer

Mike Barnes, The Hollywood Reporter:

For his first movie job — he would work on more than 300 campaigns during his career — United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961), then asked him to come up with the letterhead for a publicity release tied to the first Bond film, Dr. No. (Chasman had designed the poster for the 1962 movie.)

“He said, ‘I need a little decorative thing on top,’” Caroff recalled in 2021. “I knew [Bond’s] designation was 007, and when I wrote the stem of the seven, I thought, ‘That looks like the handle of a gun to me.’ It was very spontaneous, no effort, it was an instant piece of creativity.”

Inspired by Ian Fleming’s favorite gun, a Walther PPK, Caroff attached a barrel and trigger to the 007 and for his work received $300, the going rate for such an assignment, he said. Even though the logo, though altered in subtle ways, has been featured on every Bond film and on millions of pieces of merchandise, he received no credit, no residuals, no royalties.

The logo did, however, bring him “a lot of business,” he said. “It was like a little publicity piece for me.”

It’s rare for a logomark to have such staying power. Just a perfect logo. Kind of wild that it was created, initially, only as letterhead for stationery. Perusing vintage movie posters, it seems like EON didn’t really lean into using the logo consistently until On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) — the sixth film, and the first without Sean Connery. EON had used the mark prior to that (including at least one excellent poster for Dr. No), but it didn’t appear on most of the posters for Connery’s initial run in the role: From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice (variations A and B). Amongst those, the logo only appears on the Goldfinger poster. They used to make multiple posters for every movie back then, so there might exist examples for all of them with the logo. But I think until On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, EON leaned on Connery’s face as the symbol of the franchise. From that point forward, though, Caroff’s 007-cum-gun logo was the symbol of the franchise.¹ I can’t seem to find an official movie poster after OHMSS that doesn’t feature it.

I will quibble with one detail from The Hollywood Reporter description above: the gun in Caroff’s original 007 mark clearly looked like a Luger, a rather distinctive German pistol with a long skinny barrel, not the more compact Walther PPK that Bond actually carried. Variations of the Luger-esque logo appear on the posters for all seven of the movies starring Roger Moore. EON updated the logomark to resemble a Walther PPK for The Living Daylights in 1987, the first (and better) of two Bond movies starring Timothy Dalton. As a kid it always bothered me — ever so slightly — that the logo resembled a gun that James Bond never actually used, but until today, researching this post, I never noticed that they addressed that in 1987. That said, I think the Luger-esque mark was a bit cooler. As a kid, that was my assumption: that “they” made it look like a Luger, not the sort of pistol Bond actually carried, because it looked cooler that way. I accepted that.

Caroff had a remarkably accomplished career. He created iconic posters for dozens of terrific films across a slew of genres. The fact that he created the 007 logo but only earned $300 from it is more like a curious footnote than anything.

From Jeré Longman’s excellent obituary for The New York Times (gift link), after observing that Caroff died just one day short of his 104th birthday:

Mr. Caroff’s designs were familiar, but his name was not. He did not sign much of his work and largely avoided self-promotion. He was not included among the more than 60 celebrated designers, among them like Saul Bass, Leo Lionni and Paul Rand, in the 2017 book The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design, written by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio.

“That he was unknown is shocking,” Mr. Heller, co-chairman emeritus of the Master of Fine Arts Design program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, said in a recent interview.

Still, Mr. Caroff’s abundant output became widely recognizable for an interpretive style that could be bold, elegant, theatrical, whimsical, sensual and deceptively simple in promoting a book or movie and conveying its essence with a single image.

No better example of that reduced-to-its-essence genius than his 007 logo:

“I knew that 007 meant license to kill; that, I think, at an unconscious level, was the reason I knew the gun had to be in the logo,” Mr. Caroff said in a 2022 documentary, By Design: The Joe Caroff Story.

Mark Cerulli, who directed the documentary, said in an interview that the logo was a “marvel of simplicity that telegraphs everything you would want to know about 007.”

By Design is streaming on HBO Max. I’ve added it to the top of my to-watch list.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/joe_caroff_007_logo_designer

Posted by John Gruber

https://www.theverge.com/news/695743/threads-dms-direct-messaging-launch

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added):

Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the ability to choose who can send you messages, including people who don’t follow you on Threads and Instagram. You’ll also be able to review a folder dedicated to message requests, similar to what’s offered on X. Threads is working on a group messaging feature and inbox filters, too.

Though the platform says its DMs are “protected by our robust privacy standards, account protections and safety infrastructure,” Threads spokesperson Alec Booker confirmed to The Verge that “Threads will not support end-to-end encryption for messaging.” Booker adds that Meta will “continue evolving DMs on Threads based on feedback from the community.”

The lack of E2EE for a new messaging platform in 2025 is unconscionable. Either don’t offer DMs at all or only offer them using E2EE. That would be for Meta’s benefit, not just its users. They shouldn’t even want the ability to look at private messages.

That said, I found myself chatting with an old friend on Threads last night, using the app on my phone. Somehow we’d never exchanged iMessage credentials. We more or less just used the Threads DM chat to exchange current phone numbers to move the chat to iMessage. Today, at my desk, I wanted to double-check that there was nothing in the Threads chat I’d want to save — and, I couldn’t figure out how to see DMs in Threads’s web app. I found a few articles, like the one above at The Verge, that said it was available on the web, but ... it isn’t. At least not for me, or most people. One never knows how many people are getting an A/B test or early rollout with Meta.

https://www.theverge.com/news/695743/threads-dms-direct-messaging-launch

Posted by John Gruber

https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23765914&cid=65583466

Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment for the ages:

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too. The two Steves were so very different in so many ways, yet at heart, both exemplified that intersection between technology and the liberal arts.

His little comment above describing his philosophy on life brought to mind one of my favorite Woz stories, from Michael Moritz’s long-out-of-print 1984 book The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, pp. 281–282:

Wozniak, who seemed determined to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice that it was better to live rich than to die rich, was always louder, splashier, and more cavalier about his fortune. As a student and an engineer he had always managed his financial affairs haphazardly and nothing changed as he grew wealthy. He could never keep track of receipts, for months didn’t bother to seek financial advice, and made a habit of filing his tax returns late. Wozniak turned into an approachable teddy bear and a soft touch. When friends, acquaintances, or strangers asked him for a loan he often wrote out a check on the spot.

Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie, The Warriors. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.

https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23765914&cid=65583466