Jessica Hische has kicked off an amazing campaign to help elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The posters are inspiring. I couldn’t decide which one to place on my website; therefore, I made my own using David Jonathan Ross’s Fit. Feel free to use it to spread the message. Here’s the PNG version. If you are inspired to create your own, however, you can download the template to get started. Let’s rise up, show up, unite, and vote the motherfucker out.
The forth iteration of this blog returns to an ad-free design. The ad experiment was fun, but didn’t quite work out as I hope it would. I didn’t think it would work out because I always wanted to change up the design of this blog. With ads, I might be stuck with one design for a while. As a result, I wanted to get back to just making this site a personal blog like it always has been.
A few months ago, I also reduced the footer. I moved all the footer stuff to the info page. The bottom of the blog is now much lighter. I like that. Scrolling on a mobile device is less exhausting.
Of course, the redesign comes with new set of typefaces. Body copy is set in Harriet. UI elements are set in Alright. Both typefaces designed by Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh for Okay Type.
Il Cho’s #Alive dials up the pandemic to the horror level. The virus turns humans into violent, blood-sucking zombies. Once infected, the zombies would look for more humans to attack and spread. This virus makes COVID-19 seems much milder. With COVID-19, you can wear mask and stay home peacefully. It’s a comic relief for quarantining.
In Yoko Ogawa’s dark, dystopian island, objects disappeared one by one and having memory was a crime. Anyone who had any memory would be interrogated and arrested by the Memory Police and no one knew where they took them. Anything that brought memory must be destroyed. Books were burned. Calendars were vanished. Eventually anything that had form must be gone. It’s a remarkably bleak and chilling read. I often have a difficult time following a work of nonfiction, but I could read this book the whole way through without being lost thanks to Ogawa’s superb storytelling and Stephen Snyder’s outstanding translation. Like the only survival in the book, the story will remain in my memory for a long time.
Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties is a coming-of-age film that has been mistaken for underage sexualization due to Netflix’s botched promotion. It is uncomfortable to watch eleven-year-old girls dancing erotically in their skimpy outfit, but that is the point Doucouré tries to make.
Amy (Fathia Youssouf), an eleven-year-old Senegalese, has the responsibility of looking after her two younger brothers and she must obey the Muslim tradition. Her father is about to marry a second wife and his first wife and kids must welcome them back into their house with a wedding celebration. Amy rebels her family by joining the dance group. She befriends Angelica (Médina El Aidi-Azouni) who is the group’s leader with the resemblance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Because her parents always busy working at the restaurant, Angelica is left on her own and she is troublesome.
It is about immigrant children growing up in housing apartments. With lack of support from teachers and guidance from parents, they get their influence from the pop culture. It is an eye-opening film that reminds me of Larry Clark’s Kids in the 90s. I hope that Netfilx is not going to pull it.
Of course he knew about the seriousness of the pandemic. He is just too incompetent to do anything about it. He doesn’t give a fuck that people died from the coronavirus. It is what it is.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are too weak and too scared to hold him accountable. His supporters don’t see anything wrong with their God. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.
Four more years and he will have more control of the country. With his power, he can make the presses, the dissidents, and the scientists disappear. He can shoot somebody without losing his voters.
I don’t know how people can vote for him. Maybe they just want to see democracy burn down to the ground? Maybe they want to live under a totalitarian system of government?
An excellent piece from Ibram X. Kendi for The Atlantic. Kendi writes:
White male supremacy has granted the president the power to accost women and “grab ’em by the pussy”; the power to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters; the power to call the first female major-party nominee for president “such a nasty woman” on live television and still win more white women’s votes than she did; the power to say the first Black president was not born in the United States and still have Black men say at his convention that he is “not racist.” White male supremacy has allowed the president to have a foreign power intercede in a presidential election on his behalf, to call neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to urge his supporters to vote twice, to build a monument of lies, to obstruct justice while freeing friends and punishing foes, to describe Americans who died at war as “suckers” and “losers,” and to look away as hundreds of thousands of American COVID-19 victims’ bodies pile up at cemeteries—and not face any consequences.
Kendi concludes:
Those who embrace Trumpism demand, like police officers, qualified immunity for their racism and sexism. When they hear “Me too,” when they hear “Impeach him,” when they hear “Black lives matter,” when they hear “No justice, no peace”—they hear the sounds of violent attacks on their supremacy, they envision their property burning, they see their America under attack. In their minds, slavery did not end.
Scary time in America, particularly for Black Americans.
Americans who sacrifice their lives for our country are losers and suckers. Americans who sacrifice their lives for Trump are winners and patriots. Let’s face it. We are heading toward totalitarianism if we don’t vote him out.
Back in April, David Jonathan Ross sent me a demo version of Roslindale variable font upon my request. I hadn’t a chance to try it out until a couple of days ago when I had the idea of redesigning Trịnh Công Sơn’s lyrics sample page, which I had created to show off Vietnamese typography. In the previous version, I set each quote using various fonts from Font of the Month Club, which I am still a member. It was playful but distracting reading experience. Furthermore, the performance was terrible because of the amount of fonts. In this redesign, I wanted to take the opposite approach.
Although this version of Roslindale is still a work-in-progress, it demonstrates the power of the variable font technology. With just one file, I can use Roslindale for large display, body text, and everything in between. The level of control the designer placed in the typographer’s hand for setting text with variable fonts is unprecedented. As you can see on the page, the author’s name is set in ultra weight. Each song’s title is set in bold display. Each song’s lyric is set in text. Each song has highlighted quotes setting in thin italic display.
I am not sure who reads this page, but I read it all the time. Trịnh Công Sơn’s lyrics are filled with poetic prose. I love to read them when I have nothing else to read or if I need to kill time. It’s a great way to learn Vietnamese and to figure out Trịnh Công Sơn’s spellbinding lyrics. I have been using this page more than I had originally thought.
Many thanks to David for letting me experimenting with demo. I can’t wait to see the final release of Roslinsdale. I know it will be amazing.
Đạo, my twelve-year-old son, has been fascinated with guns. He reads about guns and observes all of their components. I asked him why he is interested in guns and he told me that he liked the history and the mechanism behind them.
He loved telling me his latest creations. He walked me through the features he had created based on various guns. From the magazine holder to the front sight, I was impressed with the way he translated what he saw from real guns into his LEGO creations.
Building LEGO guns is one of his favorite activities when he’s not on the computer. He used to build tanks, airplanes, and helicopters with LEGOs. I am sure gun is just what he is into right now before moving on to something else. I am glad that he finds his creative passion, but I can’t help being a bit concerned given the gun violence in America.
Đán, my eight-year-old son, on the other hand, has been fascinated with the Rubik’s Cube after watching Netflix’s documentary The Speed Cubers. Unlike his brother, he just spends time messing around instead of following instructions. He figured out how to solve one side, but showed no interest in solving all six.
I used to be able to solve all six sides when I was a kid. Now I can only solve one. In the past few days, I spent a bit of time reading instructions and watching YouTube videos trying to solve it. I got pretty close and messed up at the last step. I wanted to solve it so that I could teach him, but I got frustrated and gave up. He is just going to have to figure it out on his own.
