Dave Addey
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Dave Addey
@addey.com
450 followers 390 following 110 posts
Spatial photos and videos at 🍏. Curator of Typeset In The Future. Author of http://typesetinthefuture.com/book, from Abrams Books. 'Terrifyingly, wonderfully geeky' – Gizmodo.
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Things that happen when you watch Alien: Earth with @clamhead.bsky.social.
A still of a grinning Xenomorph from an episode of Alien: Earth, with two thumbs up from a person in front of it.
September 8, 2025 at 2:54 AM
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I love it when skeets come in pairs.
July 27, 2025 at 10:42 PM
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You mean I’m not the only one who collects these?
A pair of signs for “Sun Design Center” in Cupertino. The capital letter “N”s are rotated 180 in one sign when compared to the other. A sign for “Le Plante De Baton” in the French town of Val d’Isere. Several of the seriffed all-caps letters are upside down or back to front. A road-side sign for “Franklin Truck Parts”. The sign is partially concealed by a tree, which makes the word “Truck” look like the word “Fuck” due to the choice of typeface.
April 25, 2025 at 12:14 AM
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The irony is, it was originally designed to be used at tiny sizes (“microgramma” is effectively “small weight”). And now we slap it on the side of spaceships.
March 26, 2025 at 1:32 AM
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And incredibly effective at making ANYTHING futuristic.
Typography is an incredibly powerful way to visualize the future in sci-fi. Moviemakers regularly take advantage of this fact and set their calendars to "FUTURE" simply by slapping some Eurostile Bold Extended on the side of a passing spaceship. Indeed, Eurostile has become so effective at establishing a time frame in the future that whenever I see the typeface in real life - which happens a lot in my adopted home of California - I assume I've been transported to some futuristic dystopia in which a local nursing home is really a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation. Photo of Idylwood Care Center, in Sunnyvale, California. The existence of a secret underground cybernetics laboratory was unconfirmed at the time of printing.
March 26, 2025 at 1:28 AM
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This Betteridge in para 13 has strong “we didn’t bother to check” energy. (From what I’ve seen of the industry, it isn’t.)
March 24, 2025 at 2:13 PM
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Examples of visual and stylistic similarities between Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) and Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935).
March 21, 2025 at 3:15 AM
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I’d forgotten all of this. More prescience from Paul Verhoeven in typesetinthefuture.com/book .
Starship Troopers takes it a step further, into something that's actively propaganda. How did your experience as a documentary maker, particularly working with the Dutch military, lead into that kind of propaganda filmmaking for Starship Troopers? Certainly that did. When I was young and drafted in the Navy, which was obligatory at that time, I made propa-ganda: a very tough, almost James Bond-like documentary [Het Korps Mariniers] about the Dutch Marines. And I think that experience, from before I made narrative movies, is certainly visible in some scenes in Starship Troopers. So yes, that contributed to my style, to have made documentaries that were already propaganda in the first place. In Starship Troopers, I also used a lot of elements and even images from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will [1935]. That was made in 1934, in the party congress of the Nazis. Hitler had come into power in 1933, and Leni made Triumph of the Will in 1934, about the rallies in Nuremberg. Hitler appears out of the sky; it's very symbolic. Many images, many shots that you see in Leni's work, I used in the propaganda reels and newsreels in Starship Troopers. I was trying to tell the audience-but it didn't work so well-that these people were living in a fascist utopia. And then, of course, the movie itself was accused of being fascist. But what I tried to do, which at the time was not very well understood, was to say, "These people-[actors] Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer-these heroes and heroines are basically, by the way, also fascist. They live in a fascist utopia." And are seemingly unaware that they live in that kind of culture. Sure, that was the fun. I hoped that the audience would be aware, but the actors and actresses... like happens in a lot of fascist countries, the people go with it-certainly the German people went with it. And so these people that are the main characters in the movie are not aware of their position in a fascist utopia. They think this is the norm. As I said, I had the feeling that it was not very well understood at the time. Even the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post accused Ed Neumeier, the writer, and me of being neo-Nazis. When the intent was to satirize that, rather than represent it? And nobody saw that. They saw it later; they saw it maybe more after 9/11 than before.
March 21, 2025 at 3:11 AM
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The main difference with Starship Troopers, in terms of how it tells the story, is that both RoboCop and Total Recall have a protagonist who is actively fighting against the evil federation or corporation. Yes. And in Starship Troopers that's not the case. In Starship Troopers, we went more the other way - we were saying, "People who are sympathetic to you could be fascist." I don't have to compare it to what happened with the neo-Nazis a couple of weeks ago (in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017), after which the president said, "Both sides were not nice guys," but it's a little bit in that direction, isn't it?
March 21, 2025 at 3:03 AM
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Even more presciently, from Starship Troopers:
There's a line in Starship Troopers, in the schoolroom, where Rasczak says, "We explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos." Yeah. You could say it's prophetic, but l really feel that it is based on events we saw already in American society, that were already there. Notably, we took some stuff from Texas, where [George W.] Bush was at that time the governor. When Ed Neumeier and I wrote it, it's not that we really thought this would happen; it was more that this could happen. I was amazed this year that it seems to be happening much more precisely than I had anticipated. You take elements out of the now and extrapolate them in a hyperbolic, over-the-top way, and then you find out that these tendencies that you noticed after a certain amount of time became a reality.
March 21, 2025 at 2:59 AM
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From my interview with Verhoeven in typesetinthefuture.com/book :
In Total Recall, and also in RoboCop, there seems to be a blurring of lines between corporations and governments, with OCP contracted to run the police force, and Federal Colonies running Mars. And privatized presidents and all that stuff. Yes. A lot of that thinking came from the original writers; it was already in the script. When I came to RoboCop, coming from Europe and not knowing much about American politics, I'm certainly not the one that invented that. Although I understood it when I read it. I think I was much more informed about the United States when I was doing Starship Troopers than when I was doing RoboCop. In RoboCop, I think all these political things were based on Reagan's development of Reaganomics, which I had only read about, living in Holland. And if you see the connections between government and politics, with Jones saying, "We are the military," it's the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about at the end of his presidency. This connection of interwoven goals of government and military ... that was not something that I brought to the movie; that was already there.
March 21, 2025 at 2:54 AM
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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage, by Sydney Padua! (Not quite a biography; they didn’t *really* fight crime with the Difference Engine.)
Front cover of the US edition of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua.
January 12, 2025 at 6:21 PM
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Can confirm.
A photo of a TV showing a freeze-frame from Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. The photo shows Wallace zooming through a transparent water pipe on the outside of his house, with his little plasticine bum pressed up against the glass. In the bottom left corner is some text saying “Executive Producers Sarah Cox, Peter Lord, Carla Shelley”.
January 6, 2025 at 2:59 AM
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While I’m recommending things from @gralefrit.bsky.social: his book, “Be Funny Or Die”, is *wonderful*. If you’ve ever wondered how and why comedy works, this is the book for you. www.gralefrit.co.uk/books.html
The front cover of “Be Funny Or Die”, by Joel Morris.
January 2, 2025 at 6:49 PM
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Is the voice instruction “THROW YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR LIKE YOU JUST DON’T CARE”?
A sign from the back of a hotel room door that reads: You are in Room 0249 Fire Department: 911 Alarm sounds like: WHOOP-WHOOP followed by voice-instruction. Fire Alarm looks like: STROBE LIGHT.
December 17, 2024 at 7:23 PM
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Belatedly sharing scans from typesetinthefuture.com/book, #4:

An ad from "Vogue" magazine, Nov 1966, for "The Watch Of The Future", designed by Hamilton Watches for "2001: A Space Odyssey". The watch is worn in the movie by a pilot on Dr Floyd's flight to the Clavius moon base.
An ad from "Vogue" magazine, Nov 1966, for "The Watch Of The Future". This watch was designed by Hamilton Watches for the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". The ad shows a close-up of a model wearing the watch, with their arm bent and their hand by their shoulder. The model is wearing a shiny metallic long-sleeved top. The ad's text reads: 2001 – THE WATCH OF THE FUTURE …and, in a way, the watch of the present. Small way – just three in the world. But if it happened thrice, it could happen again, in time. Watch for it; it's called the 2001 and it was designed especially for Stanley Kubrick's new film, "2001: A Space Odyssey." A big, bold, way-out-in-orbit watch with about 2001 things going for it. Good looks: a circular dial in a case of satin-finished chromium 1½ inches wide, with black plastic band, Velcro closing. Good works: at one end of the case are three small windows which show the month, day, and Greenwich mean time. The movable bezel is marked in twelve hour divisions – this can be set to indicate time elapsed or future time to elapse. And at one corner of the case is a small red button that controls the alarm system. Watch of the future – for men, for women, by Hamilton. Silver ski pullover by White Stag. A screenshot from "2001: A Space Odyssey", showing Dr Floyd chatting with a spacecraft pilot during his flight to the Clavius moon base. The pilot's sleeve is conveniently hoisted to reveal that he is wearing Hamilton Watch's "watch of the future".
November 17, 2024 at 1:10 PM
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Belated scans from typesetinthefuture.com/book, #3:

An ad from “Seventeen” Magazine, August 1968, for a selection of jewelry inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey". The selection includes a rectangular silver necklace dubbed, simply, "The Monolith".
A scan of an advert from the August 1968 issue of "Seventeen" magazine. The ad is for Wells jewelry, showing a selection of items of jewelry inspired by the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", by Stanley Kubrick. The ad reads: "Now and forever… Wells in real silver and gold. Galaxies of brilliance from the world of Wells… inspired by "2001: A Space Odyssey". Real cultured pearls, carved ivory, genuine jade, tiger eyes, clusters of charms, all in real silver and gold. Scintillating. Discover the galaxy for you."
November 17, 2024 at 12:40 PM
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A Magic Eight-Ball, showing the message "SIGNS POINT TO YES".
November 15, 2024 at 10:09 PM
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Scans from typesetinthefuture.com/book, #2:

An ad from “Seventeen” Magazine, August 1968. "Earthly beauty. A total concept in leather as exciting as the beyond… inspired by the imagination and beauty of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Tomorrow’s look today, crafted for you by the inimitable John Romain.”
A full-page ad from the August 1968 issue of “Seventeen” magazine. The ad is for a leather handbag designed by John Romain, as a tie-in for the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick. The ad shows a female model wearing brown leather pants and a brown leather sleeveless waistcoat over a mustard long-sleeve top and purple opaque tights, with red leather loafers. She has a beige tight-fitting hat on her head over short hair, with a few curls of hair sticking out. She is floating in space over an unknown planet with her arms and legs outstretched, with the sun to her right in the distance. She is holding a red John Romain handbag in her left hand. In the bottom right hand corner of the ad is the text “A total look to the future”, followed by the signature “John Romain”. Below the signature is the text “Earthly beauty. A total concept in leather as exciting as the beyond… inspired by the imagination and beauty of “2001: a space odyssey”. Tomorrow’s look today, crafted for you by the inimitable John Romain.”
November 15, 2024 at 10:07 PM
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To celebrate having a decent place on the Internet to post things again, I'm belatedly sharing a bunch of research scans from typesetinthefuture.com/book 👍

Scan #1: a clothing ad for "out of this world knits… inspired by 2001: a space odyssey", from the August 1968 edition of Seventeen Magazine.
A scan of a double-page ad from the August 1968 issue of "Seventeen" magazine. The ad is titled "out of this world knits… inspired by 2001: a space odyssey". The ad is for a range of clothing by US clothing company JP's, as a promotional tie-in for the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick. The ad shows four female models wearing 1960s shift dresses in red and white, paired with white tights and colored shoes. Some of the models are wearing hats. In the background is a large photo of the Moon. The models’ limbs are bent in unusual angles, as if they are floating in space above the Moon. Down the side of the ad is a list of American retail stores that stock the JP's clothing range.
November 15, 2024 at 9:39 PM
addey.com
To celebrate having a decent place on the Internet to post things again, I'm belatedly sharing a bunch of research scans from typesetinthefuture.com/book 👍

Scan #1: a clothing ad for "out of this world knits… inspired by 2001: a space odyssey", from the August 1968 edition of "Seventeen" Magazine.
A scan of a double-page advertising spread from the August 1968 issue of Seventeen Magazine. The ad reads "out of this world knits… inspired by 2001: a space odyssey". The ad is for fashion dresses by JP's, a clothing company. The ad features photos of four models floating in space above the Moon. The models are wearing 1960s shift dresses in red and white, with hats, white tights and shiny shoes. The models have their limbs bent in unusual shapes, as if they are floating in space. Down the right hand side of the ad is a list of US stores where 'Out of this world' knits could be purchased.
November 15, 2024 at 9:32 PM
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Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” is quite the trip; think “Barbie Carrie Shining The Fly Thing”. Recommended if you’re okay with body horror and incredible female lead performances.

Also: let’s normalize crediting type designers in movie closing titles 👍
Photo of a closing title card from the movie “The Substance” (2024), showing the text “Substance font design: Gilles Pointeau”, in all caps. The text is set in the narrow, condensed sans-serif typeface that Pointeau designed for the movie’s eponymous black-market drug, known in the movie as “The Substance”.
November 14, 2024 at 2:43 AM