My dad worked at Gatwick Airport as a cleaner in the 70s when he was a teenager. His first week there, a woman drops a duty free bag with a bottle of booze in it and he rushes over to clean it up. He’s just about to put the bag, full of liquid booze and broken glass, in the bin when one of the senior porters stops him and tells him to bring it in the back. Turns out they had a filtration system in the break room for this exact scenario. They’d pour the booze out of the plastic bag and through a sieve that would collect all the broken glass, it would all go into a big container at the bottom and voila, free booze! They offered my dad some, but he declined. Anyway, I guess if you were working at Gatwick in the 70s you could have had a chance to drink some airport jungle juice, you’d just need to be brave enough.

The experiences trans men and women have with misogyny will never not be fascinating to me. Like, for the first time ever we have this huge sample size of people who have experienced how their gender presentation affects how people interact with them, giving tangible proof of misogyny in action. And it can’t just be swept aside with ‘MaYbE tHe wOmEn JuSt miSuNDerStOoD’ or ‘mAYbe tHe mAN diDN’t MeAn iT LiKE tHaT’. I mean idiots will still make idiot arguments but at least it chips away at them a little bit.

Honestly, from a design perspective I do think the one on the right is actually better in some respects. Yes, it wouldn’t scale well, there’s too many colours, it’s too busy, but it has some good points. The font choice draws you in more, with less space between the letters making it easier to read at a glance and the ‘f’ creating interest. And the house is actually united with the text, whereas in the left image it feels completely disconnected.

I would be pretty disappointed if I’d paid for a logo and I got the left image tbh, it’s not very interesting or memorable. Yes, fuck AI, but I’m not sure this is the best comparison because both logos suck in different ways.

This made me think of an article I read today about the Nazi occupation of Rome during WWII:

Marjorie Scaretti, my great-aunt, lived in Rome for much of her life. She was in the Apennines after the armistice talks of July 1943 and returned to Rome on 20 October, two days after the remaining Jews of the Roman ghetto were sent by train to Auschwitz. Her husband, Enrico, was a banker, some of whose property and businesses were appropriated by Mussolini after he refused to join the Fascist Party. Aunt Marjorie kept a diary, and in its pages she writes about the furtive lives Romans led during the occupation: the ceaseless speculation about where the Allies were; whether the Nazis would destroy Rome by defending it from an Allied attack, turning it into another Stalingrad; at which prison or police station someone was being held and how to get them out – many arrests in the months of the occupation were entirely arbitrary.

[…] She wrote of ‘the hair’s-breadth escapes, the adventures, the amazing and often fantastic existence of thousands of fugitives, coupled with the fear, the secret anxiety, the danger and the want, the heroic, the ludicrous and the vile – all packed into the daily life of the harassed citizen’. Josette Bruccoleri, an interviewee in Trevelyan’s book, spoke of the same unease: ‘Everyone seemed to be in possession of some great secret which they did not dare reveal. People hardly spoke to each other and if they did it was only for a moment. I myself felt like a time bomb ready to explode, but like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’

Not exactly the same, but every day it feels like there are more and more echoes of the past.