Đán flexed his arms and said, “Đán cay quá.” I didn’t quite understand what he meant until I translated back into English, “Đán is too hot.” I keep telling him. He’ll be a great comedian.

This morning he asked his mom for a dollar. She told him that he has to work hard to earn it. His response was, “Daddy cleaned the house all the time, but you gave him nothing.” I just have to give him a hug and kiss for recognizing it.

Đán can be so charming yet he can also be extremely annoying. He finds your weaknesses and keeps attacking them. He makes Đạo mad all the time. He makes Xuân cries. He makes me and my wife furious. When I ask him nicely not to do something, he does it more. Is it wrong to love your child and to be annoyed by his behavior at the same time? It’s a damn dilemma.

The Vietnamese government proposed a 99-year lease to Chinese investors in the three economic zones in the north-east, south-east, and south-west of the country. A 99-year lease is a beginning of a takeover. No wonder the people opposed to this crazy-ass proposal.

It took the Vietnamese people a thousand years to get rid of the Chinese. Now the Vietnamese leaders are inviting them back for 99 years. Let’s not allow history to repeat itself. Stay strong, Vietnam.

“Tình ái như con diều bay tuột dây / Giữa mây trời buông lả lướt”,  Nguyên Hà tự sự qua “Tình Ngoan”. Đây là một bài blues buồn diễn rõ nét hát của Nguyên Hà. Nhạc sĩ Quốc Bảo nhận ra được bản chất bụi, lười, và bất cần của Nguyên Hà nên anh đi tiếp với ý niệm kể chuyện của cô. Đặt biệt với Địa đàng 3, Quốc Bảo cho vào những tác phẩm có giai điệu dân ca rất dễ thương. “Thương nhau chúc đi” thì vui tươi trẻ trung. Còn “Vần trăng rỗng” thì nhẹ nhàng và huyền diệu. Nhưng thấm thía nhất là “Chiều thanh”. Tiếng hát Nguyên Hà với tiếng đàn tranh Vũ Kim Yến thật tuyệt vời.

Cả tuần căn thẳng và thiếu ngủ. Công việc làm bù đầu. Server phải nâng cấp. Trang web thì đưa lên mây. Phải kiểm tra đủ thứ.

Về nhà đêm khuya không ngủ lại thức viết lại quyển sách Nghệ thuật chữ Việt. Đang có cảm hứng nên phải làm ngay. Tính tôi là thế. Một khi tập trung là lúc nào cũng nghĩ đến cả.

Hai hôm nay mệt đừ cả người. Ngủ bù nhưng cũng chưa lấy sức lại. Hôm nay được thảnh thơi chút xíu.

Biết rằng mình đã già rồi và không nên phí sức nữa nhưng căn thẳng và mệt nhọc cho thấy tôi còn sức sống. An nhàng quá đầu óc lại đưa tôi đến những nơi tôi không muốn đến.

Bệnh thất vọng (depression) thật ghê quá. Nó có thể khiến người ta tự kết liễu cuộc đời mình. Tôi thì chắc chắn không bị vì tôi còn có quá nhiều trách nhiệm với con cái. Cho dù cuộc sống tôi thất bại hoặc thất vọng đến đâu tôi cũng sẽ sống đến hơi thở cuối cùng.

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.

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.

Man, I was cajoled by my own two-year-old son. Here’s how he did it:

Xuân: Daddy, I want candy.
Daddy: You just had a donut.
Xuân: But I want candy daddy.
Daddy: OK, but you can only hold it.
Xuân: OK daddy, I’ll hold it.
Daddy: OK here, just hold it.
Xuân: Daddy, can I open it?
Daddy: No, you just hold it.
Xuân: But I want to open it.
Daddy: OK, only open, but hold it OK.
Xuân: OK, but daddy it is too hard. Can you open?
Daddy: OK, here you go.
Xuân: Daddy, can I eat it?
Daddy: No, you just hold it.
Xuân: Daddy, can I eat it? (voice raising).
Daddy: No, just hold it.
Xuân: Daddy, can I eat it? (screaming).

He was so adorable and polite at first until near the end. I also need to clarify my previous post on Xuân. Đạo told me that Xuân didn’t say “stupid, dad.” He said, “Stop it, dad.” I guess he is not as bad as I thought.

Rebecca Mead on Ali Wong’s latest Neflix special:

Perhaps the most radical thing about “Hard Knock Wife” is that nowhere in her routine does Wong mention the obvious fact that, once again, she is pregnant. One way of interpreting her silence is as a bold gesture of liberation—the freedom not to mention her condition, as if it necessarily modified her words. But another way to look at the omission would be that Wong ignores her pregnancy and its implications because, in so many ways, the structure of our society, in its scandalous lack of support for new mothers, persists in doing exactly the same.

Read her comment on The New Yorker.

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.

My goal for the first edition of this book was to expand and enrich the quality of Vietnamese typography. In the last two years since the book published, I am thrilled every time a new typeface released with the Vietnamese language.

Many type designers have used this book to help them understand Vietnamese’s unique typographic features. Even though most of them do not speak or write the language, they have gained insights into subtle details and nuances of the Vietnamese writing system through this book. As a result, they have more confidence in designing diacritics, which play a crucial role in legibility and readability of the Vietnamese language.

They understand that the design of the diacritics is as important as the letters. If the marks are too small, readers will have a difficult time distinguishing each word. If the marks are too large, the flow of text can be interfered. Without clear, proper diacritical marks, the reading experience can be disjointed and disrupted. When the marks are missing, readers have to slow down or stop to guess at words, which can distort, or obscure entirely, the original meaning of the text.

Since the release of this book in 2016, I have been fortunate to play a small role in advising type designers all over the world to make their typefaces appear natural and comfortable for Vietnamese readers. In interacting with them, I have gained more understanding of the issues and the confusions they faced when designing diacritics for Vietnamese. I have nothing but positive and supportive experiences working with type designers. I appreciate the caring and the attention they devoted into crafting Vietnamese diacritics. To show my appreciation to the type community, I have revised this book and expanded the illustrations to showcase new typefaces with the Vietnamese language.