Tanya Chen and Katie Notopoulos asked Tide about the "delicious laundry wine" that teens won't be drinking.

When asked if P&G was aware of the dark futility of the internet, and if they had any concerns, the spokesperson provided BuzzFeed News with the following statement:

"We all know laundry detergent is for cleaning clothes. To be sure people know this is detergent, we put a large picture of our Tide bottle on the side of the box. Whether your Tide comes in a box or a bottle, it should be stored up and away, out of the reach of children."

It's funny, and I will be buying one and reviewing the '18 vintage, but after the whole "eating Tide pods" imbroglio it's hard to avoid the suspicion that this can't be an accident. There's an entire marketing discplipline devoted to avoiding semiotic shelf disasters -- avoiding the packaging formats, colors and type design associated with edible goods -- and this blithely handwaves through a third of it. Read the rest

"I want to know exact details, hard information about everything!" J.G. Ballard told an interviewer, in the pre-Internet year of 1982. Read the rest

The typography and semiotics of Alien are fascinating, and now you can have them on your keyboard. The G20 Semiotic Keycap Set from Signature Plastics embodies almost all of Rob Cobb's design work for the movie, right down to the references to Hindu mysticism from the briefly-glimpsed self-destruction console keyboard. Read the rest

Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff demonstrated that in movies depicting computers in the future, the screens are mostly blue.

Some interesting exceptions: 1991's Terminator 2 made red popular, and the Matrix Trilogy made green the in thing for a while. But within a couple of years, we were back to blue. And it's been this way since the 60s.

I think that green usually signifies "old" computers, perhaps? The Matrix was clever in that way.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I'm struck by the thought that the first and third Alien movies (which were British haunted house movies, sort of) used green screens, whereas the second one, Aliens (an American action movie) used blue. Google Images isn't entirely helpful.

Guardians of the Galaxy (above) appears, of course, to be both. Read the rest