#itcs

[girltirl]

[madseance]

Aldis Hodge is Alex Cross Cross (November 14, Amazon Prime)

[fontseeker]

90s adult paperback covers, part 2

(part 1)

Regular Joe (1995)

* * *

Eurostile Bold Condensed (1967?) + Randumhouse (1993)

* * *

ITC Anna (1991)

* * *

Funhouse (1993)

[ourladyofomega]

Only wrong answers, please.

[flyingfabio]

let it known that if yamaha brings out their stupid ass camo with grey streaks livery and leathers yet again it's on sight. it 1) is a glow down from the previous livery 2) was supposed to represent the "agressive comeback" (lin jarvis words... bro was onto nothing) of yamaha after they shat the bed in 2022 by not developping shit and well. look how that one turned out

[chiropteracupola]

time to make a deal with god.

[damnamour]

ICI TOUT COMMENCE ― E149

[thebarkpaladin]

Wow, the Iditarod is really doing a great job at shooting themselves in the foot this year.

[leksa-no-trikru]

"L'espoir qui joue, le feu, le froid

Un souffle au cou, baiser de roi

Pour nous reprendre, pour nous défendre

Pour se comprendre chaque fois."

Carla & Bérénice | Ici tout commence

[utaesthetics]

DM-OMC-(ITC)Poly_Grounds

[copepods]

what is the iterator lizard orb?

yellow lizard loves orb

[fontseeker]

The Infowars logo is in ITC Avant Garde Gothic (1970), mixing the bold and book weights.

[kiyooooo2]

[schibborasso]

Herb Lubalin: pages in U&lc In 1970 Herb Lubalin co-founded with Burns the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), the first virtual typographic library that also fought for fair pay for type designers, and the magazine U&lc (Up & lower case), which he illustrated and for which he was artistic director. The ITC offers 4x a year to the industrialists new typographic collections, and incidentally the typefaces of Lubalin, that they only have to photograph and manufacture. This is a considerable time saver. The new typefaces are distributed free of charge around the world to studios, agencies and designers in the magazine U&lc. Both set the tone for this new worldwide typographic impulse that breaks the codes of modernism, echoing the liberation and humanization of society in the face of rising criticism of mass consumption and standardization.

[wizardlyghost]

sometimes i remember the movie 300 and laugh a little at how it's a love letter to such an incredibly fragile form of hypermasculinity. we got SUPER RIPPED DUDES, WARRIOR DUDES KICKING ASS, HOT NAKED BABES etc etc etc, but despite all the shots of oiled up dudes with unhealthy muscle definition, the camera has a complete allergy to dicks. we got body builder bros running around in diapers, so many shots of naked women just 'cause, but everything is so carefully shot to never show a penis. i think there's even a post-sex scene that really highlights the juxtaposition, where the lady is shown full frontal but whatsisname's thingaling is carefully kept in shadow the entire time. it really makes me laugh to think about how much thought was put into not bruising the psyches of all the bros in the audience by forcing them to see another man's junk.

"there's nothing masculine about a penis" - zack snyder, on the making of 300 (2007)

[trainsinanime]

Another early internet meme that keeps being very distracting for me is Longcat. Not because the cat is so long, although it is.

That is in fact literally what she's known for, according to Wikipedia.

No, what keeps sending me on tangents is the poster in the background. The one with the race cars.

See, because I know that race car. I've seen it race. I've hated it. I've seen it up close.

Well, not quite the same one. This is number 8, Ellen Lohr's car, and the one in the poster is number 1 of Bernd Schneider. I took those pictures in 2017 (wait, that long ago!?) at the Essen Motor show, when it was already a very historic car.

For context that nobody needs but that I can't stop myself from sharing: This is a Mercedes Benz C-Class, type 202, the first car that got the name "C-Class" after the previous 190 E. But not any C-Class, this is the DTM version.

DTM is basically but also not at all German NASCAR. It's historically the racing series for the crowds, with cars that look like the ones you drive home from the race track. None of that weirdness with ovals and love for dirt tracks or anything, just normal racing with cars that look like normal family cars. It's had major ups and downs, but it was almost on par with Formula 1 at times, and it seems to be in a solid if weird spot these days. It was historically the playground of the big German car manufacturers, and it was very popular in the 1980s and very early 1990s.

In 1993, they introduced a new rule set for cars. Other similar series around that time adopted the class 2 or "Super 2000" rule set that was used across the world. It was very successful and very competitive and started a golden age for touring car sport in e.g. Britain or Italy. But Germany, rich and recently reunified, decided that wasn't good enough. They wanted the fastest, most amazing touring cars ever. The resulting specification was known as "Class 1". Incredible technical freedom, with computer-controlled suspension, traction control, all-wheel drive, engines similarly complex as Formula 1 at the time, carbon fibre bodyworks, everything you could think of.

It was loud. It was fast. It was glorious. It was a complete and utter commercial disaster. BMW pulled out almost immediately, Audi completed one prototype before pulling out as well, leaving only Mercedes-Benz, a very hesitant Opel, and new entrant Alfa Romeo from Italy.

My family drove an Alfa 33 at the time, and so I was an Alfa Romeo fan. Still am, actually.

Look at this! The Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI looks amazing, sounds amazing, it's red, it's unique rather than a race version of a car you see on every street corner. What's not to love!? Alfa 155 for the win.

Anyway, Alfa won the 1993 season, in part because Mercedes's C-Class (and Opel's Calibra) weren't done yet, and so Mercedes was still running the old 190 E race version, which is considered a legend in its own right. 1994 was still a successful year. Mercedes-Benz won back then, and I visited my first race, at the Avus! One of the last times that race track was used. Which makes sense, it's objectively a bad track. The DTM race that I watched from the grandstands was very much proof of that, ending in two successive massive start accidents. But still, I get a bit wistful when I see the old bleachers whenever I'm in the area to take pictures of new trains.

Anyway, in 1994 the trouble was already apparent: The series was just way, way too expensive for anyone. What to do?

Go international! In 1995, the series got split into two: The classic DTM in Germany, and the new International Touring Car Championship or ITC that ran elsewhere, with the hopes of attracting more fans and more manufacturers. In 1996, the series would only run as the ITC (even though everybody still called it the DTM).

In the end going international didn't save it; the class 1 specification was just way too expensive. If anything, going international doomed the series, because traveling to Brazil or Japan, countries where Alfa and Opel didn't even sell that many cars or at all, was expensive. Both of them pulled out at the end of 1996, and with only Mercedes-Benz, there was no point anymore, so the series ended.

It got revived in 2000, but without Alfa Romeo, so who cares. Originally they went with a simpler, cheaper solution, but over time they developed it more and more, until they developed the most ambitious spec yet, called "class 1", which was too expensive. They tried to offset this by going international, but that failed, so the series almost ended again in 2020. Who could have foreseen this?

Today it runs with GT3 cars, which are almost mass-produced race versions of expensive luxury cars that are designed to be easy to drive and all basically equally fast no matter which one you pick. That means the cars are no longer the visual equivalents of family saloons at all; last year, Mirko Bortolotti won in a Lamborghini, the first Italian brand to claim the title since Alfa Romeo in 1993.

Anyway, the weird combined DTM/ITC season of 1995 is long forgotten. Clearly not even the DTM officials remember it anymore, given that they repeated the exact same thing that sunk the series back then in 2020. And it's not like that's such a huge loss. Let's be real, car racing is difficult to justify at the best of times, and given global warming of today, we're absolutely not at the best of times. For me this is literally a throwback to the days when I was six, seven, eight years old or so, but it's not like you need to share this interest of mine.

But the memory of this weird time in the weird field of German touring car motorsports lives on, visible for all those in the know to see, in the background of a picture of a Japanese cat that became an internet meme. I don't know why that poster is there, it's a bit of an oddity especially since we know the picture was taken in Japan. The ITC did go to Suzuka there, but only in 1996, after the season this poster refers to. Who knows.

More people have seen the words DTM/ITC in the background of this cat picture (well, TM/ITC, the D is cut off) than have ever known what the race series was supposed to be. And that's kind of amazing to me, and me personally. Thanks longcat!