A vanity plate is a custom license plate where the owner pays an extra fee to choose their set of characters, generally spelling out a word or abbreviation. The most expensive vanity plate in the world costs $24.3 million and is a California plate containing “MM.”
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Dark Cousin is an ongoing column by artist/designer Amy Suo Wu offering insight into steganography, the clever linguistic practice of hiding messages in plain sight.
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Vanity Plate
Vanity Plate
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Phonewords
Phonewords
Phonewords are created by replacing the characters in a phone number with the letters assigned to them on a standard telephone keypad. Phonewords are often used as a marketing tool for 1-800 numbers such as 1-800-FLOWERS or 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
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<0/
<0/
The Deaf Power Symbol is a typographic representation of the Deaf Power Sign, communicated by placing an open palm over the ear, while the other hand forms a fist raised in the air. The symbol was created by Christine Sun Kim and Ravi Vasavan in 2020.
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Bluetooth
Bluetooth
Bluetooth technology is named after Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, the 10th century king of Denmark who was given the nickname from a dead tooth with a blueish hue. The technology hoped to unite devices in the way that Gormsson united the tribes of Denmark. The Bluetooth logo was made by combining the runic characters H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ).
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Drunk Tank Pink
Drunk Tank Pink
Drunk Tank Pink (255, 145, 175), also known as Baker Miller Pink, is a color proven to reduce hostility, aggression, and anger. In 1979, researcher Alexander Schauss tested the color in a Seattle correctional facility by painting certain cells Baker Miller Pink. His results found a reduced rate of unruly behavior after as little as 15 minutes of exposure. The nickname “Drunk Tank Pink” refers to a potential use of the color in jail holding cells to calm down incoming, inebriated individuals. In 1991, University of Hawaii coach George Lumkin painted the visiting team’s locker rooms Baker Miller Pink in an attempt to make the opposing teams more subdued.
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Bubble Porn
Bubble Porn
Bubble Porn is a photoshop technique in which images of clothed individuals are covered using circular patterns to conceal their outfits making them appear nude. The trend began in 2007 on the Japanese website 2channel and has been referred to by various other names such as “Marble Collage”, “Worm-eaten Collage”, “Perforated Collage”, and “Looking Like Naked Photos”.
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Me at the Zoo
Me at the Zoo
Me at the Zoo is the first ever YouTube video uploaded on April 23, 2005. The video features Jawed Karim, YouTube’s co-founder, commenting on elephants at the San Diego Zoo. According to a 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times the video “played a pivotal role in fundamentally altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video”.
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Stop Error
Stop Error
A stop error, more commonly known as the blue screen of death, occurs when a device has an unfixable error and must shut itself down. These screens are often associated with a color, for example when this error occurs on Xbox it will show a green screen and is referred to as the green screen of death.
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Worst Time of Day
Worst Time of Day
After a study of more than 2,500 participants scientists have declared that the official worst time of day is 5am. Conversely, the study found that the best time of day is 5PM. Sleep tight!
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Liminal Space
Liminal Space
Generally, liminal spaces denote zones of transition. However the term gained popularity on internet message boards as it became used to describe spaces that were empty or abandoned in an eerie way. One particularly well known example of a liminal space was posted on 4chan and is known as “the Backrooms” described as “an empty wasteland of corridors with nothing but ‘the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in’”.
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