Pink Slips

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One of my final farewells will be at this month’s WYSIWYG Talent Show next Wednesday night at the Bowery Poetry Club. (Yes, they’ve moved to Wednesday nights — make a note!) This month the blog kids will be talking about getting shitcanned at “Pink Slips: You’re Fired!” I’m performing at this one, too, so it really will be my last hurrah as I take the stage with Liam McEneany, Jon Friedman, Peter Hyman, Stolie the Funky Brown Chick, Chris Alonzo, and my fellow former Trusty Sidekick Drub. We will rock you.

No Word Shapes in Math

While griping about the hassles of typesetting math in this Typophile thread, I finally put my finger on what makes so many otherwise good typefaces fall apart in math or technical work: character-level legibility. A good text face works best when its letters work together to make good word shapes, right? When the individual glyphs don’t pull the reader outside of the flow of the text with too many quirks or spacing irregularities. The trouble with setting math or other technical material (chemical equations, charts of ID codes, etc.) is that the context for the individual letters is much less familiar than in typical text. If text is comprehended word by word with less need for the letters themselves to be individually distinguished, then math is read letter by letter in such a way that almost any character could be swapped out for another and change the meaning entirely.

Most of my problems setting math over the years have had to do with letters that just aren’t unique enough when you pull them outside of normal text and start mixing and matching them with Greek and symbols and numbers and lord knows what else. Especially once superiors and inferiors are used, it becomes absolutely critical to know if a glyph is an “l” or an “I” or a “1” or a vertical bar, for instance. (If you’re seeing the right CSS styles for this page, see how nicely Georgia distinguishes those from one another? Check out Arial: l I 1 | )

A good face for this environment needs to strike a balance between the ability of the letters to combine easily for typical reading comprehension, but still hang onto enough unique appearance to hold their own in the free-for-all world of tables and equations.

Countdown

Ack! OMG! Freaking out! It’s Friday and it’s my birthday and I’m at work and I hate work and I leave the country (for a year? forever?) in exactly two weeks and I have to put everything I’m keeping in storage tomorrow and I have to sell everything else (big sale/party next weekend!) and I have to finish two huge freelance projects and get a haircut and get touch-ups done on my new tattoo and have the dentist put in my new crown and school doesn’t seem to know about the huge sholarship I won and did I mention I’m leaving the country in two weeks and I’m freaking out?

Stranger in Stranger

Well, looky-looky at the cover of this week’s issue of The Stranger:

Cover of The Stranger

The photo, taken by a pseudo-pornographer I know, is in honor of Hump! 2, The Stranger‘s 2nd annual amateur porn contest. I’m sure that boy-toy model Jeffy up there would be first in line to submit something to the festival if he could. He’s got that wild exhibitionist streak in him. Can’t you tell?

Run, Buster, Run

Buster as a puppyMy pal Mark broke my heart last night, telling me that Buster had just passed away. Buster was Mark’s dog — his beautiful, lovable, extraordinary dog — who he adopted when we were living together in a vast, ramshackle loft in Bushwick when I first moved back to New York ten years ago. Buster was a surprise: Mark adopted him from the North Shore Animal League while we were each home for the holidays, taking a break from the months of cleaning and construction we’d been doing. Mark was a little worried that he’d picked up a pet without asking me first, but Buster had me under his spell from the moment I saw him.

Buster’s early days in Bushwick were a challenge, to put it mildly. He was a puppy and insufferably cute, though, so it was easy to forgive his misdeeds. Also, neither one of us was able to spend as much time at home with him as he really needed, so his early training went slowly. He ate all the upholstery off a 3-piece velvet couch I treasured. Every day we’d come home to discover a Family Circus trail of pee showing the circles he’d run when he’d hear the key turn in the lock of the front door. He also started out with an awful GI-tract infection that soon led us to the horrible sight of our deathly ill pup hooked up to an IV at the vet’s office.

After we left Bushwick, Mark and Buster were my neighbors in Fort Greene for a few years, and I had the pleasure of watching Buster grow up, learn his lessons well, and become the best damn dog I ever knew. I was pretty indifferent to animals before Buster, but I’ve been an avid dog-lover ever since. In many, ways he really embodied everything that I love in a dog, and I can’t help but hold the rest up to his high standard of affectionate, loyal, good temper.

Buddy, thanks for everything, and we’ll all miss the hell out of you.

Run, Buster, run

Farewell to the SparkyMobile

The latest offering in this Summer’s big clearance sale is the rarely used SparkyMobile:

SparkyMobile

I’ve been planning to have a big “Everything Must Go!” sale in September — and probably still will — but poverty is becoming a real issue at the moment, and I’ve been in a bit of a panic about how I’ll actually eat and pay bills and whatnot without liquidating a lot of stuff right away.

This Summer has been a nasty confluence of financial issues: the class I was supposed to teach was cancelled, my health insurance has gone up to a staggering amount of money per month, I’ve been getting a ton of dental work done, and so on and so on. Unless some of those overdue freelance paychecks start rolling in soon, things are going to get pretty bleak.

The maddening part is that I’ve cobbled together a decent plan for next year: loans, scholarships, a steady trickle of freelance income, and socialized medicine will keep me fed and housed will I go to school as long as I maintain modest habits. The unfortunate collapse of my summer budget scheme, though, has ensured that it’ll be a minor miracle if I can make it as far as the end of September, when my next chapter gets underway. For the moment I’m out of cash, out of credit, and devoting as much time as I can to finishing up a backlog of freelance work so I can get out the rest of those invoices.

after

All this could be yours! Cheap!

Although I splurged some on furniture when I fled from Astoria and settled back in Brooklyn, it’s been a pretty threadbare year. I’ve been pretty sure for most of it that I’d be leaving this Fall, with very little idea of when or where I’d settle down after school. With the future so cloudy, it’s pretty easy to unload so much stuff. Starting from scratch somewhere else seems slightly more appealing than picking up where I left off, or finding a way to haul an apartment full of stuff again. I’ve lugged an absurd amount of stuff from home to home ever since I left for college, and the effort of doing that over and over has made me a lot less sentimental about things than I once was. This will be the third time since coming back to New York that I’ve massively reduced the amount of treasures/crap that I own, and I have to admit that I really wish I could let go of all of it once and for all.

Letting go, though, has never been one of my skills, even though I’m a master of moving on.

Censorship in 17th-Century England

In Charles T. Jacobi’s Gesta Typographica (London, 1897, although I was only reading passages reprinted in 1964 at the Maidstone College of Art), there’s a mention of a decree made by the Star Chamber on July 11, 1637, that limited the number of master printers in in England to just twenty, and also limited the number of type-founders to just four.

It was a startling tidbit, which made slightly more sense after a little digging. The restriction of legally sanctioned printing to a handful of shops in London was intended as a way to make it as easy as possible for all publications in the kingdom to be monitored and censored by the court of Charles I, whose attempts to consolidate power led to the English Civil War. The 1637 decree was the most extreme of an escalating series of attempts to stifle dissent, often spread by means of pamphlets and books published by independent printers throughout the kingdom. Although small presses continued to produce seditious (in this case meaning anything not sanctioned by the crown) pamphlets and books, many unlicensed founders and printers were raided and arrested, and their equipment destroyed.

In terms of type history, I wonder how many punches, matrices, fonts, and examples were lost in all these purges. The literature I’ve seen so far only discusses the printers themselves, and doesn’t say much about the foundries, or doesn’t make clear if any of the printers had founders working with them under the same roof. It seems possible that entire strands of typographic development may have been snuffed out during this period.

(Note to self: Keep an eye out for other mentions of the censorship by the Star Chamber between 1632 and 1641, thereabouts.)