site: reviews — Datatype, Ants on a Turntable, Submarine Safari (graduate from finds)

src/content/find/2026/07/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx

@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ date: 2026-07-28
 shortlist: true
 link: "https://youtu.be/PG6DG3UXZxY"
 linkText: "youtube.com"
+promotedTo: ants-phenakistoscope-turntable
 source: "The Awesomer"
 topics: [design-and-art]
 tags: [animation, illusion, drawing, video]

src/content/find/2026/07/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx

@@ -5,10 +5,11 @@ date: 2026-07-28
 shortlist: true
 link: "https://franktisellano.github.io/datatype/"
 linkText: "franktisellano.github.io"
+promotedTo: datatype-chart-font
 source: "Kottke.org"
 topics: [design-and-art, web-tools]
 tags: [typography, dataviz, open-source]
 description: "An OpenType variable font whose ligatures turn {b:15,45,80} into a bar chart — no JavaScript, no images, no charting library."
 ---
 
-Type `{b:15,45,80,30,60}` and ligature substitution turns it into a five-bar chart, inline, in the middle of the sentence. `{l:…}` gives a sparkline, `{p:62}` a pie. Because it is a font and not a library, the chart inherits colour, size and weight from whatever it sits inside, and two variable axes tune density and stroke. Frank Tisellano released it under the Open Font License.
+Type `{b:15,45,80,30,60}` and ligature substitution turns it into a five-bar chart, inline, in the middle of the sentence. `{l:…}` gives a sparkline, `{p:62}` a pie. Because it is a font and not a library, the chart inherits colour and size from whatever it sits inside, and the ordinary weight and width axes reshape it like any other type. Frank Tisellano released it under the Open Font License.

src/content/find/2026/07/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx

@@ -1,14 +1,15 @@
 ---
 name: "Submarine Safari"
-subtitle: "A Finnish-built submarine that takes 40 people under Tenerife"
+subtitle: "A submarine that takes 44 people under Tenerife"
 date: 2026-07-28
 shortlist: true
 link: "https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/submarine-safari"
 linkText: "atlasobscura.com"
+promotedTo: submarine-safari-tenerife
 source: "Atlas Obscura"
 topics: [travel-and-places, outdoors-and-nature]
 tags: [submarine, tenerife, underwater]
-description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: built in Finland in the 1990s, diving off Tenerife since 2007."
+description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: 44 seats behind 22 view ports, thirty metres down off Amarilla Marina in Tenerife since 2007."
 ---
 
-One of the few submarines anywhere open to the public: built in Finland in the 1990s, working off Tenerife since 2007, rated to 100 metres and held to 30 with passengers aboard. The route passes shipwrecks and a rock wall thick with life. The local manta rays come to meet it — they have worked out that divers make bubbles worth playing in, and will take a belly rub while they are there.
+One of the few submarines anywhere open to the public, working off Tenerife since 2007: *Sub Fun Cinco* seats 44 behind 22 view ports and drops thirty metres into the Atlantic. The route passes two wrecks on the seabed and a rock wall thick with fish, and it settles on the bottom partway through so you can go and photograph the pilots at the controls.

src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+name: "Ants on a Turntable"
+subtitle: "A phenakistoscope drawn one ant at a time"
+date: 2026-07-28
+category: design
+topics: [design-and-art]
+tags: [animation, illusion, drawing, video, phenakistoscope]
+link: "https://youtu.be/PG6DG3UXZxY"
+linkText: "youtube.com"
+description: "Yohei Kisanuki hand-draws 蟻人間 — a phenakistoscope disc of marching ant-men, each figure a few degrees further into its stride — then spins it on a record player."
+source: "The Awesomer"
+fromFind: "ants-phenakistoscope-turntable"
+---
+
+import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
+import hero from './hero.jpg';
+
+<Image src={hero} alt="A hand drawing small black ant figures in rings across a white paper disc mounted on a turntable, with a pen mid-stroke at the disc's edge." />
+
+> The phenakistoscope was obsolete by 1840, beaten by photography and then buried by film. Yohei Kisanuki draws one anyway, ant by ant, and it still works.
+
+The principle is nearly two centuries old and has not improved since: draw a sequence of figures in a ring, each a few degrees further into its stride than the last, spin the disc, and interrupt the view — with slots, a shutter, or a camera's frame rate — so the eye sees discrete positions instead of a smear. The brain fills the gaps. Kisanuki's disc, titled 蟻人間, holds rings of small black ant-men in mid-march. On the turntable they stop being drawings and start walking.
+
+What makes it worth watching is not the reveal but the labour behind it. The long video is the drawing: hours of hand, pen and paper, one figure at a time, each one placed by eye against the one before it. There is no software easing the motion, no onion-skinning, no way to preview whether the walk cycle reads until the disc is finished and turning. Every animator's decision has to be made in advance and drawn in ink. The illusion is assembled in front of you, and you can watch it fail to look like anything until, quite suddenly, it does.
+
+Kisanuki is a professional kalimba player by trade — LimbaTrip on YouTube, where most of the channel is thumb-piano performance — which makes the phenakistoscopes a sideline pursued at considerable cost in wrist. He has drawn others: climbers, dancers, walkers. The rhythm connection is not a stretch he makes himself, so we will not put words in his mouth, but a musician's tolerance for repeating a small figure with tiny variations is visible in every ring.
+
+The one caveat is practical. A phenakistoscope is a physical illusion and a video of one is a recording of it — you are watching the camera's shutter do the interrupting, not your own eye. The effect is real either way, but the actual object, seen in a room with a strobe or a mirror, is a different and better experience. Kisanuki is a long way away, and this is as close as most of us will get. It is close enough.

src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+---
+name: "Datatype"
+subtitle: "A font that draws the chart for you"
+date: 2026-07-28
+category: design
+topics: [design-and-art, web-tools]
+tags: [typography, dataviz, open-source, variable-font]
+link: "https://franktisellano.github.io/datatype/"
+linkText: "franktisellano.github.io"
+description: "An OpenType variable font whose ligatures turn {b:15,45,80} into a bar chart — bars, sparklines and pies rendered by the typeface itself, with no JavaScript, images or charting library. SIL Open Font License."
+source: "Kottke.org"
+fromFind: "datatype-chart-font"
+---
+
+import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
+import hero from './hero.png';
+
+<Image src={hero} alt="Four rows of pie glyphs from the Datatype font, each row stepping from empty through half to full, rendered at different weights and widths." />
+
+> Every charting library ever written answers the same question: how do I get a picture into this paragraph? Datatype answers a different one — what if the paragraph could just draw it.
+
+Type `{b:15,45,80,30,60}` into a text field set in Datatype and OpenType ligature substitution replaces the whole expression with a five-bar chart, sitting on the baseline where the characters were. `{l:2,5,3,8,1,6,4}` gives a sparkline. `{p:62}` gives a pie filled 62 per cent of the way round. Up to twenty values per chart, each between 0 and 100, and that is the entire API.
+
+The consequences are the good part. A chart made of glyphs is text: it inherits its colour from `color`, its size from `font-size`, and it selects, copies and pastes as the source expression. Set the ordinary variable axes — weight from 100 to 900, width from 50 to 150 — and the bars thicken and the pies gain a heavier stroke along with everything else on the line, because the renderer has no idea it is drawing data. Nothing to hydrate, nothing to resize on rotation, no second network request. It works in Word and Figma as readily as in a browser, which no JavaScript chart does.
+
+Frank Tisellano designed and built it, with guidance credited to Emma Marichal and Dave Lab6. It is released under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1 — install the TTFs to a system fonts folder, or link the WOFF2 with `@font-face`.
+
+The limits are real and worth stating before you plan around it. Twenty points is a sparkline, not a time series. Values must be normalised to 0–100 yourself, so the font will never draw an axis, a label, a legend or a tick — it has no idea what your numbers mean. And the whole thing rests on ligature support being switched on, which is default in browsers and in most design tools but is exactly the setting some applications quietly disable. When it fails, it fails visibly: you get `{b:15,45,80}` in the middle of your sentence.
+
+Which is the honest framing. This is not a replacement for a charting library; it is a replacement for the sentence "revenue grew slightly, then fell." Put the shape in the line and the reader gets it without a caption.

src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+name: "Submarine Safari"
+subtitle: "A Finnish-built submarine that takes 44 people under Tenerife"
+date: 2026-07-28
+category: places
+topics: [travel-and-places, outdoors-and-nature]
+tags: [submarine, tenerife, underwater, canary-islands]
+link: "https://www.submarinesafaris.com/"
+linkText: "submarinesafaris.com"
+description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: 44 seats behind 22 view ports, thirty metres down off Amarilla Marina in Tenerife, past two wrecks on the seabed."
+source: "Atlas Obscura"
+fromFind: "submarine-safari-tenerife"
+---
+
+import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
+import hero from './hero.jpg';
+
+<Image src={hero} alt="The yellow conning tower of the submarine Sub Fun Cinco at its mooring in Amarilla Marina, carrying the Submarine Safaris roundel and the registration ANTWERPEN O 6260, with a passenger stepping down the gangway beside it." />
+
+> Almost every "submarine tour" in the world is a boat with a glass floor. This one submerges, with you inside it, thirty metres down.
+
+The distinction matters more than the brochures let on. A semi-submersible keeps its hull at the surface and drops a viewing gallery a metre or two under; you are looking through a window at the top of the water column. Submarine Safaris operates an actual submarine — it dives, it sits on the seabed, and it comes back up. There are 44 seats and 22 view ports, one each side of every row, which is the detail that decides whether an hour underwater is worth the fare: nobody is looking over a shoulder.
+
+The boat is called *Sub Fun Cinco*, and it runs out of Amarilla Marina at San Miguel de Abona on Tenerife's southern coast, as it has since 2007; the company's other submarine works from Puerto Calero in Lanzarote, where these hulls first went into service. The registration painted under the name reads ANTWERPEN O 6260 — a Belgian port of registry on a Spanish tourist attraction, which is the sort of detail that tells you this is a classed vessel with paperwork rather than an attraction with a periscope. The account that surfaced it puts the build in Finland in the 1990s; the operator does not say, so take the yard as reported rather than confirmed.
+
+The dive itself takes in two wrecks lying on the bottom and the schools of fish that have made homes of them. Partway through, the submarine settles on the seabed and passengers are invited forward to photograph the pilots at the controls, which is a small piece of theatre and an entirely good one — the cockpit of a working submarine is not a thing most people will otherwise stand in. Commentary runs in several languages; you leave with a dive certificate.
+
+Two honest notes, both from checking the operator's own pages against the account that surfaced it. Thirty metres is the depth the company advertises, and it is the figure to plan on — the deeper hull ratings quoted secondhand are not something Submarine Safaris publishes. And the rays: a visitor's account describes them coming to the ports for the divers' bubbles, which is a lovely image and a plausible one, but the operator promises wrecks and fish, not a specific animal. Go for the descent and the seabed. If something with wings turns up at the glass, treat it as the day being generous.