Alex Curro
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2013–2023
3:00 · 22M views · Mar 28, 2009
The business card scene from the film American Psycho, in which characters compare their business cards.
HN invokes it as a joke reference in threads about fonts, typefaces and one-upmanship.
4 comments from Hacker News
I think I just found my new favorite font. I'm absolutely addicted to grotesque sans-serif, I used to use Roboto everywhere, but now I'm currently using Cantarell (GNOME's default font, a humanist typeface) as my desktop font and as an overwrite font for every single website I open, but I might just start using Plex Sans and Plex Mono now. Thank god it's OFL. I still find it fascinating that there are so many different typefaces with such subtle differences in them, but since I'm looking at characters in the screen the entire day, these characters better be beautiful and pleasing. I'm not gonna lie, every time I swap fonts on my desktop I keep remembering that one scene from American Psycho [0]. Maybe I should touch some grass. [0]: this video
> Look at that molecular structure. Incredible. Two amide bonds, a completely unremarkable aryl ether and an unsubstituted naphthalene ring system. Something about this delivery reminds of the business-card scene from Psycho [0]. > Look at that subtle off-white coloring, the tasteful thickness of it--Oh my God, it even has a watermark..." [0] this video
> I do know that type designers spend a lot of time thinking about things like "appropriate size and scale" and other metrics. Can these really be automatically recalculated from scratch and how can this possibly lead to a better result? Do most people really see any difference? ( this video )
It's riffing on this video (I "got" what the post was about but took a minute to dig up the actual scene, I didn't know what the item was in the movie)