Been teaching on-and-off (typography with NID-V, mentoring final-year students from NID-K on a brand-identity project) and neglecting most other important things including Exif. I have also been referencing some architecture bits for some potential architecture-ing; I’ve always loved that discipline and consider dropping everything to enroll into a full-fledged program, often. Been reading through 30by40 (I love the LongStudio) and *faircompanies while keeping things local with AtticLab.

What I haven’t been neglecting is feeding Kamal(a) in his habitat (now sans-the-plant thanks to filterlessness). The betta is intelligent and quite angry-slash-excited to see people. I’m extrapolating; he is probably happy seeing other people and is just temporarily pissed off having to deal with me all the time. We got him from one of those shops where bettas are in tiny blue-tinted cups and look space-starved. The tank is large and sits on the other end of our shared work-table, facing the road and its election-related-brouhaha. It looks like there will be more tanks-on-tables soon. Kamal(a) is impossible to photograph; I’ll have to invest in some sports-photography-level gear to catch him sans all the blur.

The past month has been painfully slow and it looks like I would have read far fewer books than the last year by the end of December. It is a depressing thought and the whole working-alone-staring-at-angry-Kamal(a) isn’t helping. Podcasts and non-serious RSS-feeding has helped deal with it. So has a lot of calligraphy practice. I’m loaded with new pens, nibs and inks and cheap-and-perfect-for-fountain-ink papers from Kanakam PaperMart in town. The copperplate practice has helped mitigate some stress (good-joke; copperplate and stress), with random flourishes for extra effect.

Ten (…ish) rules for students and teachers. Half-way through the Typography-1 course. Good kids, unforgiving weather, too many holidays, not enough LAN cable, too many exercises in the spreadsheet, not enough hours in the day. Better chocolate-tarts at Baker’s Inn (no apostrophe in the original and I do have a problem with that) this time around. Number six reads:

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

Link

No-fluff guide to digital typography. Great books too. Link.

Ha!

I don’t know how I feel about design education—I honestly don’t know very much about it. The one thing I do know though, is that kids matriculating through undergraduate design programs need to be better prepared intellectually. Not nearly enough attention has been brought to the question of the basic literacy of our young designers. It is vital, especially if a designer wants to work in publishing, but also vital in general, that students be taught the fundamentals of reading and writing. Not to mention that designers should be able to express themselves verbally. If I were in charge of an undergraduate design program, there would be literature classes, science classes, logic and rhetoric classes…it would be a much less fun school to attend, granted.

— Peter Mendelsund, on BBIC

Part of the trouble with setting the blog in monospaced type and letting the browser decide what is best (the CSS reads ‘font-family: “Courier New”, courier, monospace;’) is that there is no guarantee the em dashes will be distinct enough to not have them mistaken for their shorter, less fancy cousins. There is an advanced typography course I’m tutoring soon and I was rereading Bringhurst this time with intent. I realise it is odd and all kinds of unprofessional to have left it run this way—without distinction—for four years. There are spaces around the em dashes now (see last sentence) for making sense’s sake and I don’t recommend it used this way otherwise. (A little piece of javascript runs at the end of each page to replace all instances of the dash with a space-dash-space string. So the ‘actual’ text in its editable form stays the right way, for when the monospace phase passes.) Bringhurst recommends an en dash flanked by two spaces over the em dash without spaces around (which [the actual em] is what the Chicago Manual prefers). The Practical Typography website has this to say on the matter. There is a beautiful bit of prose on the absence of an ebook version of the site, elsewhere.

I shouldn’t have used the word “content” to describe what writers make. Writers make writing. So let’s call it that. Because “content” isn’t a neutral word. It’s anesthetizing jargon that encourages us to see the best (and worst) parts of the web as fungible commodities, like soybeans. Writers are not content farmers. Recognizing that fact is a prerequisite to improving the economics of writing.

— Matthew Butterick

And somehow, we as a culture may have stopped or are afraid to teach ourselves that pleasure is dangerous and that some kinds of pleasure are better than others and that part of being a human being means deciding how much of active participation do we want to have in our own lives. … It is a really (sort of) exciting opportunity to decide whether our relationship to the world is going to be fundamentally passive and infantile or one that is (sort of) active and hard and takes more work.

— DFW, in conversation with Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To The Best Of Our Knowledge” program, 1996.

As Duane Elgin has famously defined it, voluntary simplicity is ‘a manner of living that is outwardly simple and inwardly rich,… a deliberate choice to live with less in the belief that more life will be returned to us in the process.’ According to the most prominent historian of the Simplicity Movement, David Shi, the primary attributes of the simple life include: thoughtful frugality; a suspicion of luxuries; a reverence and respect for nature; a desire for self-sufficiency; a commitment to conscientious rather than conspicuous consumption; a privileging of creativity and contemplation over possessions; an aesthetic preference for minimalism and functionality; and a sense of responsibility for the just uses of the world’s resources. More concisely, Shi defines voluntary simplicity as ‘enlightened material restraint.’

Voluntary simplicity , furthermore, does not mean indiscriminately renouncing all the advantages of science and technology. It does not mean living in a cave, giving up all the benefits of electricity, or rejecting modern medicine. But it does question the assumption that science and technology are always the most reliable paths to health, happiness, and sustainability. […] Voluntary simplicity, then, involves taking a thoughtfully sceptical stance in relation to technology and science, rejecting those aspects which seem to cost more than they come to, all things considered.

— Samuel Alexander: Reimagining the Good Life Beyond Consumer Culture (Paper, link)

Citing David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture and Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich

The way we represent ourselves online has devolved from the quirky, personalised, HTML webpage-homepage of the 90s to the somewhat modular but still strange presence of a MySpace page, to the completely formatted and market-friendly presence of a Facebook page… What we’ve done is [we have] moved from personal, human, open-ended self-expression to completely market and computer-friendly, regimented and conformist expression. And that is because we have turned the net from a venue for self-expression to a way to render ourselves up onto the market.

Douglas Rushkoff, from Stare Into The Lights My Pretties

Also, zverina.com, the quirky, HTML home to an email newsletter I willingly receive and look forward to.

First, it aims our focus at the root cause of Anthropocenic climate change – an accelerated mode of existence that is impossible without fossil fuels. Indeed, I might amend Aldo Leopold’s land ethic of 1949: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.’ It is wrong, Illich and I would argue, when it moves faster than the speed of a bicycle. If we found ways to eliminate inefficient acceleration, we would lessen the snarged victims of the world, but there would also be some obvious beneficial cascading effects.

Gary Coll writes on the ethics of roadkill and our need for speed. (Aeon, Link)

Jef Mallett’s Frazz (like Calvin and Hobbes, all grown up and riding bikes to work) at GoComics. Many gems in there.