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Moss & Fog Fog Signals Beautiful things, once a week. Issue 39 · The Ampersand Edition |
This week belongs to the smallest thing in our name. Around it: Portland rebuilt by hand at half size, a dying star with a lion’s face and 31 posters that sold fear on a single sheet of paper. Settle in!
● The Ampersand
The little mark that means us
It has been in our name since 2009. This fall it became our signature.
Before it was a symbol, the ampersand was a word. Roman scribes wrote et, Latin for “and,” so often that the two letters ran together into one shape, and early versions survive scratched into the walls of Pompeii. For centuries schoolchildren recited it as the last letter of the alphabet: x, y, z, and per se and. Say that fast enough and you get ampersand.
Type designers treat it as the one character where they are allowed to show off, which is why no two look alike. Ours is a single looping brushstroke, and it has always sat right where it belongs, between moss and fog, holding the two halves of what we love together.
So we have started letting it speak for the whole place. It now writes itself, in one stroke, at the end of every story and the moment you join Fog Signals. On our About page it fills with slow-moving paint. And it has started turning up on things you can hold!
● Take one home
● 01 · FILM
Inside Wildwood, the Stop-Motion Epic LAIKA Built Out of Portland
Wildwood is in theaters now, fifteen years after LAIKA first set out to make it. It is the longest stop-motion feature ever made, and the first time the Hillsboro studio has turned its cameras on its own hometown: the Pittock Mansion, Powell’s, and the waterfront with the cherry trees in bloom, all rebuilt by hand at half size.
Our favorite detail: the art department built exactly one of those cherry trees for real, petal by petal, then scanned it so the effects team could plant the rest of the row. One golden eagle wears 9,000 feathers. We went behind the scenes with photos from the sets, and we have rarely been prouder to live here!
Webb in 2026, then Hubble in 2000. Images: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
● 02 · SPACE
Webb Finds a Dying Star Wearing a Lion’s Face
Five thousand light-years away, in Gemini, a star that ran out of fuel is wearing a lion’s face. The bright button nose is a white dwarf, the leftover core, still so hot it is cooking the gas around it into a glowing bubble. The mane is dust, combed outward by knots that have survived the radiation so far.
On the site there is a slider that wipes from Hubble’s view to Webb’s, twenty-six years apart. Drag it slowly.
● 03 · DESIGN
The 31 Best Horror Movie Posters Ever Made
Before the trailer and before the reviews, there was a sheet of paper in a glass case outside the theater with one job: make you afraid of something you had not seen yet. We ranked 31 of the best and credited every artist we could find.
Somewhere near the top we noticed something. Only two of our top ten show you the monster. Everything else is a hand, a shadow, an egg, a pram. Start at 31 and work your way down to the poster that shows you nothing at all.
Halloween flash sale: about 30% off everything spooky in the shop, from PyroPet candles, whose black wax melts away to show the skeleton inside, to moth pins and a tarot candle. Through Halloween night, and most pieces are down to their last few!
Photo: Daisuke Shima
● 04 · DESIGN
A Japanese Island’s Colored Cliffs, Rebuilt as Painted Metal Furniture
On Sensuijima, a tiny island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, the cliffs come out striped in color: volcanic ash from eruptions 90 million years ago, banded by minerals and slowly rusting iron. Moriyuki Ochiai Architects turned them into a room of low metal blocks in Tokyo, each one washed in a gradient that won’t sit still.
The best part: the factory that painted the island’s portrait is in the same city as the island! There are no labels and no assigned seats. You just find the block that’s the right height.
● From the shop
Gifts, already figured out
Six sets we pack by hand in Portland. Several come with a little bag of Jacobsen sea salt caramels, on us.
Spend $60 and US shipping is free, with a tote on us. Gift wrap is $5, and a handwritten card is always free.
● Signals
Quick signals
The rest of the week, a few lines each.
01 Adam Fuhrer turns a lens flaw into glowing line art. He draws spheres, cubes and draped fabric from thousands of fine lines, then pulls every line apart into red, green and blue. Our favorite looks like a jellyfish that wandered into a math textbook!
02 Makerie Studio cuts dragonflies and jellyfish from paper. Copper lace wings, teal veins, specimens pinned like an old museum drawer. Every cell in those dragonfly wings is its own cut!
03 The robots are coming, and they’re adorable. Our new Friday series goes all the way into one obsession, starting with Voxel, a mustard-yellow robot butler who is afraid of water. If Friday’s email arrived a little scrambled, our apologies. The game plays beautifully on the site.
Free and fiercely independent since 2009, ampersand and all. Members keep it that way.
Become a member, from $3● Curiosities
Small wonders from around the world
Five things that made us look twice this week.
● Snakes that cartwheel. When danger comes, Pseudorabdion snakes curl into a wheel and roll away at up to about 8 mph, roughly four times faster than they slither. Every one of the 13 tested in the lab did it! SMITHSONIAN
● Birds trust men more. Nobody knows why. Across 37 species and 2,701 encounters in five European countries, birds took off sooner when a woman walked toward them. Men got about a meter closer, on average. SCIENCEDAILY
● Three new ghosts in Cassiopeia. A hundred hours of exposure and a special oxygen filter turned up three faint, never-before-seen nebulas glowing blue beside the famous red Ghosts of Cassiopeia. One may turn out to be the shell of a dying star. NASA
● Where the first photographed people stood. In Daguerre’s 1838 Paris street scene, only a man having his shoes shined stood still long enough to be captured. Three filmmakers spent two years pinning down the spot, and Paris just marked it with a bronze plaque. SMITHSONIAN
● Maybe we’ve been reading it out of order. The Voynich Manuscript has stumped scholars for over a century. A new study argues its pages were simply bound in the wrong order, which could explain why its handwriting keeps switching scribes. SMITHSONIAN
 Next time you spot the ampersand, at the end of a story or on a mug in someone’s kitchen, that’s us saying and: there is always one more thing worth seeing. Hit reply and tell us what you would put on either side of yours. We read every one! And if a friend would love this, forward it along. Forwarded this? Get Fog Signals free |
