Chris the Fireman.

A leitmotif, a lodestone, a distillation of Frenchness: Angie, by – inevitably – Jean-François Porchez.

Have you seen my calling card? Perhaps, if you are especial, the red one?

I’ve covered this topic before: Joe Jervis is the grizzled writer of the unaccountably popular homosexualist Weblog Joe·My·God. You know our diverse gay communities are in a sorry state when this guy’s blog passes for a news source.

A few sharp edges have been filed off, but at a technical level it remains the worst blog in the world that isn’t intentionally created to cheat and harm you. This is a blog that can and will crash your browser.

Now, what else will it do? Serve as a honeypot for threats of violence against public figures. Jervis has admitted this before and does so again:

[P]lease E-mail me if you see comments calling for the physical harm of public figures. Anti-gay asshats have been trying to leave such comments here so that the media will see them and report that “the gays are just as bad!” As always, be advised that… comments have been harvested and published elsewhere in the past.

Here again we see not just the downside of comments but the harm they cause. Joe Jervis writes a blog that attracts comments calling for violence. Comments like those, but in fact all comments there, can and will be used by his opponents, who in the normal course of events will also be the opponents of the writers of the comments.

Again: Why does your site have comments?

Why does Joe·My·God have comments?

Why is Joe Jervis such a menace to society?

UPDATE (2010.09.30): And again he reiterates the threats and liabilities of his site as though they were strengths. “[F]eel free to run your filthy fucking mouths, shout down the asshats, and say whatever needs to be said. But you may absolutely not make threats of physical harm, however idle.”

Which is actually more dangerous to the general public: What’s in Joe Jervis’s bloodstream or what’s on his blog?

Amerikanski Psycho, ≈18:30 (and now with 2021 update):

— Is that a gram?

— New card. What do you think?

— Whoa. Very nice.

— Look at that.

— Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday.

— Good colouring.

— That’s bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.

— That’s very cool, Bateman. But that’s nothing. Look at this.

— That is really nice.

— Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?

— Nice.

— Jesus. That is really super. How’d a nitwit like you get so tasteful?

— I can’t believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten’s card to mine.

— But wait. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

— Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White.

— Impressive. Very nice.

— Mm.

— Let’s see Paul Allen’s card.

— Look at that subtle off-white colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God – it even has a watermark.

— Something wrong? Patrick? You’re sweating.

That last man is the quavering, foppish, bow-tied quisling of the picture, so of course his card would offer the gaucherie of colour.

Doesn’t a card like that scream “Watch your back in the washroom”?

Update

(2021.07.11) From a YouTube parody by Bup (no relation):

• 

  That’s Georgia and those are fake small caps. But the errant missing space after the ampersand is preserved.

• 

  Offset-printed, this Bodoni is much too brilliantly clear. The sizes are wrong. But the restored space after the ampersand is rendered.

• 

  The original wasn’t really trying (no one in that echelon would have dared use a sansserif, let alone Helvetica; small caps are, as ever, fake), but this Arial monstrosity is an insult to the intelligence.

• 

  Bup (still no relation) even managed to include this design in the reveal of the card. Overall most authentic typography – readily contrasted against the dog’s-breakfast layout and ideologies.

Here is an artist’s rendering of the proposed renovation of Women’s College Hospital, Toronto.

Which important feature has been completely bungled? Typography, of course. (Public typography in Toronto is a topic I gave myself a year to investigate – four years ago – and didn’t.)

In this drawing, architects, who insist they know everything about everything, very much including type and the written word, have banged out WOMEN'S COLLEGE HOSPITAL in Arial. With a neutral quotation mark. Splattered across the street-level windows, no less. I expect this sort of thing from a discount store (“GOING OUT FOR BUSINESS”), not a legitimate public institution.

There’s all sorts of time to fix this. Think it’ll actually get fixed?

James Lord, My Queer War, p. 333:

“Too bad. And we have nothing to remember him by. Christ, he was that handsome! Do you realize there’s no extant photograph of him?”

“Yes. I know that. I know it. But I don’t know why.”

“He had something to hide, Hanno had. Maybe it was only himself hiding from himself. We’ll never know. Even his parents. The only photo they have was taken when he was 11.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “Why is it like this?”

“It’s because we’re queer, my dear.”

With 130 hours clocked in on the ultimately godforsaken task of watching captioned and audio-described movies, last night I was superexecutively Yarissed out to Mississauga, home to the sole cinema still running Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with MoPix.

I loved it! Especially the movie. As soon as the lights went up, though, it became obvious my esteemed colleagues were baffled and overwhelmed by the experience. That happens like clockwork – the whole thing is a bit too much stimulation for the neophyte. (And everyone’s a critic.) As with captioning, where you have to sit there watching TV for two weeks straight just to develop the neurological ability to assimilate all that information at once, your first experience of cinema audio description will probably be your worst. It’s certainly happened with other writers I’ve brought to MoPix movies.

I don’t know of any writer who’s tried it more than once, so first experiences become last experiences, which makes grand pronouncements tempting. Journos can’t help noticing the established conventions of audio description. (They’re word people, and description is fundamentally literary.) The pitfall to avoid is going gotcha! and acting like you spotted a mistake. It probably wasn’t a mistake; we aren’t debugging software and you haven’t isolated a regression. It’s just that the whole thing is new.

We can’t rewind the movie to explain why things are done that way, or why something might be an outright mistake, a judgement call you happen to disagree with, or a practice that dearly needs to be tested. Yet almost all respondents in the only credible survey of audio-description users claim they get just the right amount of information. (That means we are arguing over edge cases.)

I speak for a lot of us when I say we have a great deal of battle fatigue after fighting a ground war for decades just to make things like movies basically accessible to blind or deaf people. Generally they aren’t. On the rare occasion it actually happens, people think the job is done. But can’t we improve anything? What needs to be improved? Why can’t we study that? After years of frustration, there’s only so much explaining I can manage. It is too much for me to be advocate, critic (everyone is), and ambassador all at once.

In whatever story comes out of this, I would anticipate a tone of general bafflement and worldly dismissal, the latter of which, at least, is also a pitfall to avoid. Still, if the resulting DVD contains the description track, which rare Universal Studios discs do, one could have a very special kind of viewing party. Send the same people.

The Web is old enough that history can repeat itself. What’s happening now with E-books parallels what happened with Web sites in the early Aughties.

Then vs. now

• Back then, multinational consulting startups like Razorfish and MarchFirst saw the real Web, made up of text and graphics, and tried to make it like television by shoving Flash down our throats. Most of us were using analogue modems at the time and browsers crashed every day.

  Today, publishers see the book, even more solidly constituted of text with occasional graphics, and try to make it like television by shoving “multimedia” down our throats in the guise of “enhanced” E-books. Most of us are using E-readers that can’t even display a photograph adequately, let alone a video.

  Nobody wanted Flash Web sites (a sentiment in resurgence today) and nobody wants enhanced electronic books.

• Back then, the consultants pushing Flash were the same ones so incompetent at the basic underpinning of the Web, namely HTML, that everything surrounding the Flash content barely worked.

  Today, the consultants pushing enhanced E-books cannot turn out a valid, semantic ePub document (XHTML 1.1 in a highly specific zip container with a set of table-of-contents and index files).

• In hindsight, there was a reason why early Web sites sucked. We only barely began to know what we were doing. The concept of Web standards was just coming into being. It took a few years to establish fundamentals like separation of content, style, and behaviour. This was no excuse for misreading the Web as a kind of TV station, but it offers an explanation.

  E-book developers have no excuse. Except in Canada, there are no professional developers who churn out Web sites with “FONT tags” and IE6-era presentational markup. (Your in-house sinecurist who couldn’t get a job on the open market is not a “professional developer.”) Outside Canada, everybody who claims to know anything about the Web knows the fundamentals, even if their ability to deliver varies.

  None of this knowledge has spread to E-book developers. Apart from two artisanal shops I know of, exactly nobody knows how to create a real ePub. There is no coding ability in the field of E-books. (It’s much worse than Web developers’ skill level circa 2001.)

• Razorfish and MarchFirst learned the hard way that consulting doesn’t scale. Those two artisanal shops are learning the same thing. But scale is a crushing issue given that tens of thousands of books have to be converted or created each year just in U.S. English.

Reasons

• Then as now, executives use Windows all day, not the Web or E-books. Who hired Razorfish? Who gives the order to OCR thousands of backlist titles in India and pass them off as E-books? Executives in their late 40s who don’t actually use the medium they manage. (Many wear bifocals, which make reading from any screen uncomfortable.)

  • In the early 2000s, managers didn’t use, let alone know or understand, the Web.

  • Today, they don’t use, know, or understand E-books.

  Executives refused and refuse to learn the rudimentary technical facts necessary to understand what a Web site or E-book is. (Fundamentally the same thing, as it turns out.)

  Working in Windows all day is, as I keep saying, a crucial factor. Lest you think “publishing” is a Macintosh bastion, note that only graphic designers use Macs in that field, with many book designers and nearly all front-office staff using Windows.

  • These systems cannot be said to be ugly anymore; Windows Vista and 7 may not be your personal taste, but they were thoroughly graphic-designed. But they are still user-hostile, they still train users to be afraid of their computers, and, via their default settings, they teach people the wrong way to do things: A “document” uses Times “New Roman” at “12” (really 14) point across a 6½″ measure with full justification and blank lines between paragraphs. (How do I put in page numbers again?)

    In a specific crippling detail, Microsoft Word perpetuates the notion that you write a document then “format” it, which fatally misrepresents what happens with the Web and with ePub books. Not a single one of the latter contains “formatting.” (Kindle E-books are also HTML and there is likewise no such thing as “Kindle formatting.”)

  • Windows systems have phenomenal Unicode support, but not one user in a million knows how to type an opening single quotation mark or a capital C with cedilla. You need a whole flowchart and a half-dozen keystrokes to manage that. (Then what do you do with the next “special” character? What if you’ve got a whole page of them, then 300 pages after that?)

  • Using Windows all day teaches you that not only can computers not be trusted, which you kind of suspected all along, they cannot be understood. Of course you aren’t going to bother taking eight minutes out of your life to learn what structured markup is. (That’s how long it takes me to teach Windows-using executives – or blind teenagers – the basics.)

• Related: Defaults are harmful. I have one example here and it remains make-or-break. If you don’t understand why full justification must never be turned on by default on any computer device, you aren’t qualified to call bingo at the old folks’ home, let alone manage electronic books.

• There is no culture of quality. At a conference I no longer talk about because people who initially claimed to love my presentation relentlessly attacked me later, I spent 45 minutes talking to Michael Tamblyn of Kobo (né Shortcovers). What we discussed isn’t for publication, but the fact we had a discussion is, and I can assure you they were well aware of my Shortcovers challenge. I surmise they have simply thrown up their hands at the task of producing legitimately coded (i.e., real) E-books. It is no coincidence that Kobo was founded in and is headquartered in Toronto, a city with three known qualified Web developers, the rest of them having long since left for Vancouver or been picked off by the Americans.

  I realize I have been fighting my entire life, even from childhood, against people who don’t give a shit. Apart from two artisanal developers, I see nobody who does. Hence I scoffed when I read that Random House will use agent Andrew Wylie’s “files,” but will begin “making changes… to have them soon mirror our… E-book standards.” What “standards”? These people think Track Changes in Word is mission-critical high tech.

• Tools let us down. There is no such thing as an automated process for producing or converting E-books that gets you even 80% of the way toward correct semantics. How much further you could ever get is open to dispute because a human being must decide, at one point or another, what’s a paragraph and what’s an H2, but let me tell you one thing right now: Not every single thing in your E-book is a DIV, as the Apple Pages export-to-ePub function claims.

  I posited the solution to this problem months ago – write everything in HTML. The fact that few authors will be able to do that remains unchanged. What also remains unchanged is the publishing industry’s refusal to hire and train editors who can mark up manuscripts properly.

  It gets worse: iBooks on iOS has access to a high-quality HTML-rendering engine but provably cannot lay out an E-book properly.

What happened in the early Aughties?

I diligently wrote the NUblog (for an audience of dozens) decrying the rank stupidity of management, executives, and Web consultancies, all of whom have made out famously from the Web. I was right all along, of course, but this is hardly news or the sort of thing that helps me at all.

The question is: Can publishing executives count on failing upward the way Web executives did? Is the fact that last decade’s Web executives failed to kill off the Web proof positive that today’s publishing executives won’t kill off publishing?

Clippy thinks you’re formatting an E-book. Would you like help?