Huber de Givenchy’s words to live by:
Life is like a book: one has to know when to turn the page.
By Hiếu Minh Nguyễn
Convinced she’s in hell
my mother wakes me & begs to be taken
to the lake. Wailing in prayer on the kitchen floor
her skin itching with heat, a flame seizing for god.
I believe her. One day, we will all know when suffering comes
to play the instrument of our bodies. Her song, a single note
a copper kettle whistling for mercy. From the blue-black sand
of McCarrons, I watch her disappear
under the night water. Moonlit rings
spill from her absence.
I have not checked my Analytics for a while; therefore, Google emailed me to let me know that I had 1.4K users visited Professional Web Typography in February. Based on the lack of support for the book, I did not realize that the site is still active. Although the book has published two years ago, the content is still relevant. Last week I made some minor changes to keep the information up-to-date. Last night, I published a new chapter on “Exploring Variable Fonts.” Go read it if you haven’t.
Google also notified me that I had 1.3K users visited Vietnamese Typography in February. Although the support is scarce—except for one big donation from a Vietnamese-American fellow—the book gives me the opportunity to do advising on supporting Vietnamese language. The experiences of working with type designers and foundries give me more insights on how they approach Vietnamese diacritics and how I can help them solve the issues that they have. I am looking forward to more advising opportunities.
Overall, I am still very proud of these two projects and will continue to work on them.
One of the oldest blogs that still updates everyday. Jason Kottke reflects:
On March 14, 1998, I was 24 years old and dumb as a brick. Oh sure, I’d had lots of book learning and was quick with ideas, but I knew shockingly little about actual real life. I was a cynical and cocky know-it-all. Some of my older posts are genuinely cringeworthy to read now: poorly written, cluelessly privileged, and even mean spirited. I’m ashamed to have written some of them.
But had I not written all those posts, good and bad, I wouldn’t be who I am today, which, hopefully, is a somewhat wiser person vectoring towards a better version of himself.
I visit Kottke.org once in a while, but I am glad that he still updates regularly. Congratulations, Jason! See you in 2028.
Kathryn Schulz describes these horrifying species:
Of the five-thousand-odd species of stinkbug in the world, the brown marmorated kind is the most destructive, the most annoying, and possibly the ugliest. It is roughly the size of a dime, although thicker, but its head is unusually small, even for an insect, which gives it an appropriately thuggish look. Its six legs prop its shield-shaped body up in the air, as if they were pallbearers at the funeral of a Knight Templar. Its antennae are striped with bands of dark and light, while its eyes, should you get close enough to gaze into them, are the vivid red of an alarm clock at night. The “marmorated” in its name means “marbled,” but “mottled” is closer to the truth. Entomologists, who have a color palette as elaborate as Benjamin Moore’s, describe the underside of its body as “distinctly pale luteous” and the topside as “generally brownish cinereous, but also greyish ochraceous, ochraceous, testaceous, or castaneous.” To everyone else, it looks as dull brown as its own frass, the technical term for insect excrement.
They could be anywhere in your house. Schulz writes:
One poor soul spooned up a stinkbug that had blended into her granola, putting her off fruit-and-nut cereals for life. Another discovered too late that a stinkbug had percolated in her coffeemaker, along with her morning brew. A third removed a turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving Day and discovered a cooked stinkbug at the bottom of the roasting pan. Other people have reported accidentally ingesting stinkbugs in, among other things, salads, berries, raisin bran, applesauce, and chili. By all accounts, the bugs release their stink upon being crunched, and taste pretty much the way they smell. (They are also occasionally eaten by household pets, though seldom twice. One of my cats recently ate two at once, and promptly vomited them up.)
Finally finished reading Rachel Aviv’s provoking, chilling piece on “What Does It Mean to Die?.” Aviv writes:
African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to ask that their lives be prolonged as much as possible, even in cases of irreversible coma—a preference that likely stems from fears of neglect. A large body of research has shown that black patients are less likely to get appropriate medications and surgeries than white ones are, regardless of their insurance or education level, and more likely to receive undesirable medical interventions, like amputations.
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
Critchlow makes a challenge:
So I challenge you to think clearly about the many disparate networks you’re part of and think about the ideas you might want to offer those networks that you don’t want to get lost in the feed. Ideas you might want to return to. Think about how writing with and for the network might enable you to start blogging. Forget the big B blogging model. Forget Medium’s promise of page views and claps. Forget the guest post on Inc, Forbes and Entrepreneur. Forget Fast Company. Forget fast content.
This blog is written mostly for myself these days. I don’t care about page views and popularity. I am thinking of pulling the plug on Google Analytics since I have not checked it for almost a year or so. I write like no one is reading and that could get me in trouble.
Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.
It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.
Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.
These days I turned off all of the notifications on my phone. I prefer to read printed books over digital devices. I still carry a book with me everywhere I go. I look more like a dork reading a book while most people around me stare at their screen, even in my own home. I deactivate Facebook until I need to use Messenger to communicate with my family in Vietnam. I still need some work with Twitter since I use it mainly related to web design and development. The online publications I read the most are The New Yorker and The New York Times and I usually go for the long essays rather than quick news.
The launching of Future Fonts is creating some buzz in the type community. The gist of it is that type designers offer their work in progress at a low price. Lizy Gershenzon explains its pricing model:
Future Fonts also makes financial sense for both type designers and buyers. Without devaluing the work, you can get typefaces at a cheaper price. This is because they are still in progress and don’t cost as much as their final releases. As more work is completed and new versions are added, the price goes up. Early buyers lock in at the cheapest rate and get free updates along the way. It’s a win, win, with extra incentive to buy typefaces early.
It’s a fascinating concept, but Future Fonts doesn’t work for me personally because the fonts do not have Vietnamese support. In a way, Future Fonts is similar to David Jonathan Ross’s Font of the Month Club, which I am a member, but David makes his fonts available in as many languages as possible and I really appreciate that.
Google has succeeded where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide. It processes trillions of queries each year, which works out to at least 5.5 billion a day, 63,000 a second. So odds are good that sometime in the last week, or last hour, or last 10 minutes, you’ve used Google to answer a nagging question or to look up a minor fact, and barely paused to consider how near-magical it is that almost any bit of knowledge can be delivered to you faster than you can type the request.
Duhigg points on ways Google uses its dominant power to kill its competitors. I wonder how long this article will stay in Google search.