In further news about things I’m not getting paid for, the deadline for the TTC Web RFP was today at 1400 hours. After the winner is signed up, I’ll be requesting all the bid documents, whose contents I will duly report. (Yeah, I can do that.)

Yesterday (2007.09.27), I attended a design charrette (“design workshop”) held at the Design Exchange, a perennially underwhelming and borderline pointless organization housed in a beautiful old building. The purpose was to mock up ideas for TTC subway entrances. I had previously covered this issue, saying, among other things, that it was a joke to offer A-list architects five grand each for a drawing. (As you’ll see, Zeidler Partnership and – inevitably – Diamond Schmitt did provide drawings and were presumably paid.)

Holding a charrette at the DX was always the idea. Though the TTC budgeted $10,000 for internal staff time, and for all I know paid the DX something, of course none of the participants was paid.

The original issue was to improve the appearance of downtown subway entrances. Shrill Scarborough city councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker did his usual squawking that things are worse in Scarborough and that “my peeps” (he always uses this phrase) have shitty subway entrances too. For some reason the TTC voted to expand the design exercise to include many neighbourhoods, vitiating the original purpose.

This is the design acumen of your hero Adam Giambrone at work. I wonder how many more mistakes it will take before you accept that he’s blowing this aspect of his portfolio. [continue with: TTC design charrette →]

One has finally received from the library Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff Prucher. Boy, has Oxford really loosened up lately. They’ve got the adorable Erin McKean running the show in the States, they look online for citations, and, impressively, they canvassed openly for terms for this dictionary (via a confusing page at Jesse Sheidlower’s site).

It never ceased to be surprising how many science-fiction words date back to the 19th century (time travel[l]er, antigravity, dystopia) and how many to the early 20th (extraterrestrial, homeworld, humanoid).

But the thing that gets me – and let me speak as a linguist here – is how many “sci-fi” terms you hear once and instantly and perfectly understand. The biggie is terraforming. The first time you ever heard that word you immediately knew what it meant. And you never, ever had cause to use it in conversation. (But quick: Infer vs. imply? Lay vs. lie?) I suppose bionic. Maybe stasis. (It’s given here in its invariant singular form; “stases field” was a source of an argument between me and WGBH over Star Trek captioning.) Alien means “foreigner” only in the context of a U.S. green card.

There are, however, too many words having to do with fans (or faans or faaans, but don’t trust the listed pronunciation). Let’s not pretend this dictionary is strictly descriptivist and he’s just writing down what’s out there. Servo isn’t in the book, but a dozen words with three to five citations having to do with being some kind of superfan (or whatever) are all listed. Edit, please. These words are insufferable, like the fans themselves. (But where is the word fanboy?)

I would have expected more terms from The X-Files. (X-Phile is in there.) Bibliographies of one form or another take up more than 60 pages, rather badly typeset at that. I think the Whole Earth Catalog (early editions) would be a good citation source.

More annoying is the typography. It’s about as bad as you can get without actually using Arial, or while actually telling yourself you know what you’re doing with typography.

• Body copy in Utopia, citation text in Bell Gothic (oddly). The tracking is erratic (look at first citation for mutant). There isn’t enough lead. The measure is too wide. (Two sides of the same coin.)
• They use fake small caps, sometimes with true caps.
• The term ’bot is continually written as ‘bot, a smart-quotes aberration anyone could have caught at any time in the production process. (Shoot ‘Em Up?)
• Speaking of which, this is yet another book with the Microsoft Word/Web-page deviancy of a blank line between paragraphs and no paragraph indention. It works onscreen and in business letters; it’s ignorant and second-rate in a printed book. (However, a useful transplantation from online text is the book’s practice of differentiating ellipses used in the original … from ellipses added editorially […]. Prucher also keeps track of ambiguous line-break hyphens in original sources.)
• Chapter-break pages giving cute little synopses of different themes (time travel, weapons, Star Trek) use Utopia Italic when necessary, but with additional fake italic sloping. I don’t know how you manage that apart from defining a style to use an italic typeface and also “adding italic.”
• Font sizes changes randomly, as in the two spellings of relaxicon. Character sizes in IPA text are variable.

To mention a few lexemes:

• Isn’t a flash crowd really a flash mob?
• The infix -h- is pleasingly listed as indicating the word “is being used humorously or in a fannish context.” Hence the currently popular ghey (it’s two syllables with an epenthesized vowel), which I adore.
• Homo superior: No citation from Pete Shelley? It’s clearly the same sense.
• A few of the definitions simply aren’t that great. Look at science fiction: “[A] genre (of literature, film, etc.) in which the setting differs from our own world (e.g. by the invention of new technology, through contact with aliens, by having a different history, etc.), and in which the difference is based on extrapolations made from one or more changes or suppositions; hence, such a genre in which the difference is explained (explicitly or implicitly) in scientific or rational, as opposed to supernatural, terms.” Is that long enough for you? (“Hence”?) Time paradox: “An event or condition, caused by something a time travel[l]er does while in the past, that is logically impossible based on the state of the universe in their original time.”
• I remember being a schoolboy and actually believing that real people referred to the sun as Sol. Can’t you just imagine Isaac Asimov uttering that word in some kind of CBC Radio interview? And nobody else saying it out loud, ever?

Now, what is the most agreeable term in the dictionary?

sense of wonder

[A] feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time, as brought on by reading science fiction.

In the immortal words of Martin Prince, keep watching the skies.

Shouldn’t-throw-stones version (pace Billy Joel album cover).

Pristine version.

When travelling, there’s what objectively happens to you and there is how you feel about it. There’s the emotional travelogue. One day in Iceland I suddenly and without warning immediately and thoroughly understood at the deepest level why people defend the place to the death. New York is so familiar it isn’t fun anymore, a statement that even I find appalling. Australia, the inverse Canada. London, filled to the walls with ugly paupers and skinheads who make every trip along the high street an exercise in fear.

ATypI Brighton 2007, an expensive gambit in loneliness.

I don’t like to travel. I like having travelled. I’ve done enough of it to be able to hack all sorts of systems, from airplane seating to hotels to surviving as a veganist even in a country where they eat whales. I have no right to complain. But when I go away, my routine is disrupted. It is not a question of feeling homesick, but how much and when. Usually 1½ days into a trip is when it happens. On more than one occasion I’ve barely been able to concentrate, and sometimes that will mate up with an unusual or unique event, as during an open-captioned movie in London.

I missed my dog even though he’s my friend’s dog, not my dog. I missed my friend less. In fairness, the dog did not send a daily E-mail and was not on instant messaging.

I saw all sorts of acquaintances at ATypI, many of whom remembered me even from the distant past. I was staying with hospitable friends – although, based on the public record, all we managed to do was play Wii. I know Brighton, the Acceptable Face of England, well enough to walk around unaided. I know which bus to take. The upstairs of a double-decker isn’t novel or fun anymore. [continue with: Atomization of typographers →]

They’re walking right up to you unannounced, addressing you by name, and demanding that you not type so loud. In fact, they’re passing on complaints from other people who, apparently unlike the women in typography, do not have the balls to complain to your face. (Except one of the husbands, it would later turn out.)

I’ve only been to ATypI twice and I’m not going back in the foreseeable future. You want people to know your conference even existed? Then let the journalist take his notes. No Joe typing, no record of conference.

Don’t pull that shit again.

Concise reviews of presentations from ATypI. This is about all you get from other sites (Le Typographe, Roger Black). [continue with: Capsule reviews of ATypI sessions →]