Gay Kids, Be Careful Online

Jack Turban:

It’s common for gay, bisexual or questioning minors to go online to meet other gay people. It’s normal for these kids to want to explore intimacy. But most online social networks for gay men are geared toward adults and focused on sex. They have failed to protect minors, who simply have to subtract a few years from their birth date to create a profile.

Read the article at The New York Times.

Pretend to be a Perfect Couple

David Sedaris:

Guests usually take the train from London, and before we pick them up at the station, I remind Hugh that for the duration of their visit, he and I will be playing the role of a perfect couple. This means no bickering and no contradicting each other. If I am seated at the kitchen table and he is standing behind me, he is to place a hand on my shoulder right on the spot where a parrot would perch if I were a pirate instead of the ideal boyfriend. When I tell a story he has heard so often he could lip sync it, he is to pretend to be hearing it for the first time and to be appreciating it as much or more than our guests are. I’m to do the same and to feign delight when he serves something I hate, like fish with little bones in it. I really blew this a few years back when his friend Sue (ph) came for the night, and he poached what might as well have been a hairbrush.

It is humiliating when a couple bickers around other people. It just shows how bad a relationship is. I guess at some point we don’t need to hide anymore. Just start yelling and throwing things around. No relationship is perfect.

The Dangers of Belly Fat

Jane E. Brody writes in The New York Times:

In general, if your waist measures 35 or more inches for women or 40 or more inches for men, chances are you’re harboring a potentially dangerous amount of abdominal fat.

Subcutaneous fat that lurks beneath the skin as “love handles” or padding on the thighs, buttocks or upper arms may be cosmetically challenging, but it is otherwise harmless. However, the deeper belly fat — the visceral fat that accumulates around abdominal organs — is metabolically active and has been strongly linked to a host of serious disease risks, including heart disease, cancer and dementia.

I measured my belly right after dinner and it is at 37 inches. Last week, I went to bed with a stomach ache almost every night from eating too much. I am now cutting back my portion and getting back to walking and jogging. Last week, I also stayed up late to revise my book. I need to get at least seven hours of sleep again.

The Danger of Data Collection

Louis Menand:

As we are learning, the danger of data collection by online companies is not that they will use it to try to sell you stuff. The danger is that that information can so easily fall into the hands of parties whose motives are much less benign. A government, for example. A typical reaction to worries about the police listening to your phone conversations is the one Gary Hart had when it was suggested that reporters might tail him to see if he was having affairs: “You’d be bored.” They were not, as it turned out. We all may underestimate our susceptibility to persecution. “We were just talking about hardwood floors!” we say. But authorities who feel emboldened by the promise of a Presidential pardon or by a Justice Department that looks the other way may feel less inhibited about invading the spaces of people who belong to groups that the government has singled out as unpatriotic or undesirable. And we now have a government that does that.

Read the article at The New Yorker.

Goodbye Kate and Anthony

Only three days apart, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two successful individuals, took their own lives.

Patrick Radden Keefe recalls:

Looking back over my notebooks this morning, I recognized dark threads running through our conversations. Bourdain freely acknowledged that part of the reason he continued to work at such a frantic pace might have been a fear about where his mind might go if he ever sat still.

Daphne Merkin writes about depression:

I didn’t know Kate Spade, who hanged herself with a red scarf in her bedroom on Tuesday at the age of 55, other than through the prism of her insistently cheerful and whimsical accessories. But everything about Ms. Spade and her designs suggested a sunny temperament, from her candy-colored aesthetic to the perky image she projected. We have a hard time squaring a seemingly successful woman — one with a highflying career, a family and heaps of money — with a despondency so insinuating that it led her to end it all. All this helps explain why Fern Mallis, the former director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and a friend of Ms. Spade’s, called her death “so out of character.” In fact, it turned out that the bubbly girl from Kansas City “suffered from depression and anxiety for many years,” as her husband, Andy, said.

Mental health is serious and depression is deadly.

On Balding

Amos Barshad writes in The New Yorker

In the nineteen-forties, a Brooklyn anatomist named James Hamilton studied prisoners in Oklahoma who, having been convicted of sexual assault, were castrated. Hamilton identified testosterone as the root of hair loss, and showed that men castrated before or during puberty did not go bald. He then injected groups of castrated adult men with testosterone and—duly, cruelly—watched their hair fall out.

In the following decades, researchers learned that testosterone does not work alone. An enzyme converts testosterone into a substance called dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, which causes hair follicles to shrink. DHT attacks the dermal papilla, the “brain” of the hair follicle, and is the main cause of male-pattern baldness, which affects more than fifty million men in the United States and also—largely unremarked upon, but true—more than thirty million women.

Barshad has a funny paragraph about Trump:

I’d come to think that the simplest answer was the right one: this was regular male-pattern baldness, elaborately covered up. But the Air Force One incident only deepened the mystery. What kind of hair afflicted by male-pattern baldness rises in the back? I suddenly had no idea which parts of his head contained which hairs. Watching the flaps on the back of his head shoot up again and again, I became unmoored in my beliefs.

When I was young and full of hair, I never thought that I would loose my hair. Now I am bald as fuck. Comparing to all the flaws on my appearance, being bald is not the worst. Other then shaving my head every two or three weeks, I wake up every morning and do nothing to my hair. I don’t even need to go a barbershop. I just don’t care about hair.

Support Vietnamese Typography

Haven’t blogged in the last several days because I have been focusing on the second edition of Vietnamese Typography. I have thought about this project for a while. Should I leave the book as it or revise it? Doing a major update will require a chunk of my time to devote to the project. I tempted to leave the website as it, but I know I can make it better. I have lots of ideas on how to improve it. I love to be able to just work on it, but I have a family with three young boys and another one coming soon. As a result, my time is limited.

I love this project even though it does not make me any money. It brought me some consultant gigs, but they aren’t much either. My real joy is seeing new typefaces with Vietnamese. From my interaction with designers and what I have found online, this book has been useful. I came across several mentions of the book.

James Puckett writes for I Love Typography:

I also added support for Vietnamese, using Donny Trương’s book Vietnamese Typography as my guide. Vietnamese uses stacked diacritical marks on some vowels, so I had to carefully balance the weight of each mark to work in single mark letters and Vietnamese…. Designing the Vietnamese marks improved my skills designing marks, making this the best collection of diacritical marks I’ve ever produced.

Florian Hardwig writes for Font In Use:

For those interested in proper Vietnamese typography, Donny Trương provides a good introduction, including an overview of the letters with diacritics that are actually used for marking tonal distinctions in this language.

TypeTogether writes about the extension of Adelle Sans:

A good starting point to better understand the history and the typographic challenges of Vietnamese is Donny Trương’s online book Vietnamese Typography.

Tyrus tweets:

I stumbled into this really interesting and informative site about Vietnamese typography while researching localization and character support for a project. So well done, I wish there was a guide like this for all languages and character sets.

If you find this book is useful, please consider supporting my efforts to make it an even better resource for the type community. You can contribute $10, $5, or $1. Any amount will help.

GDPR Compliance

To comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I removed tracking scripts on all of my websites: visualgui.com, donnytruong.com, Vietnamese Typography, Professional Web Typography, and Simplexpression.

On April 14, 2018, I gutted Google Analytics on all of my websites. On May 16, 2018, I deleted all data and properties in my Google Analytics account. None of my sites sets any cookies in your browser, nor does it track you.

I do not collect, use, or share any personal data. I do not know your internet activity. I respect your privacy.

The Rage of the Incels

Jia Tolentino:

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

What do they want? Tolentino writes:

What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.

Read the entire essay at The New Yorker.

What Can’t Jeremy Keith Live Without?

In an interview with A Book Apart, Jeremy Keith responds:

I find it hard to imagine life without my website. Even though it’s a not tangible, physical thing, I think it might be my most prized possession (well, either my website or my bouzouki). I use it every day. Sometimes I just post little notes, sometimes I link to something interesting, sometimes I write something a bit longer. But every little piece I put on my site feels like another little pebble added to an ever-growing structure.

I share this sentiment with Jeremy. I have poured my heart and soul into this intangible place of mine. It has become part of my life. I can’t imagine not having it.