Cardhouse (a fellow veteran) has forgotten about permanent links but retains his sense of the absurd.

I watch random Twitch channels of Player Unknown: Battlegrounds. There’s something incredibly amusing about watching people play a video game many miles/countries away, doubly so because my first video game was Space Invaders and/or some sort of Pong variant and the difference is astounding. Pretty sure Space Invaders didn’t have a tip jar.

• One of my favorite recent “episodes” was watching a South Korean woman racking up strategic kills while dealing with the hiccups in real life. The South Koreans I’ve watched do running commentary at low volume, then drop quick joyous outbursts when they “knock out” (injuring a competitor enough that they end up crawling – no longer able to use weaponry and having to wait for teammates to “revive” them with time-based first aid) or kill someone.

• With the British, the conversation is affable to a fault and somehow Nando’s is always mentioned. There is one take-out place in Great Britain. It is Nando’s.

• The Americans think they’re radio DJs along w/so many swears.

Your stereotypes may vary. I enjoy the varieties of reactions to common events within the game, and trying to figure out what’s being said when I can’t understand the language. When I’m feeling particularly nutty I’ll keep multiple tabs open w/all the attendant conversations mixed together while I’m doing something else (like writing this) then pop one open if something is popping off….

I’m tempted to buy PUBG and run around without shooting anyone. I could be a medic, helping people heal. It would probably take a few years before I’d actually win a round, but it would be worth it because I wouldn’t have hurt a soul and that’s a double win. I just want to help (turns out it’s been done).

(Unreliable link to foregoing.)

Kanadski bobsledders were wheeled into town last November for some absurd demo down at City Hall. I chatted up most of them, plus an Amerikanski coach (as strapping as you’d expect). When I was not being induced to talk to the girl bobsledders for some godawful reason, I was greeted with blank stares and various ricti of discomfort.

Poor Chris Spring, a perfectly nice Australian who is not a ginger, seemed politely baffled, while his occasional brakeman, Lascelles Brown, stood at a great remove with his arms crossed and barely grunted a response as his eyes averted mine. Some of us remember how this Ben Johnson manqué was hastily granted Canadian citizenship a mere fortnight before the Torino Olympics. (Run the following word by Lascelles Brown the next time you see him: “Monégasque.”) Only this country would send an Australian and a Jamaican down an international bobsleigh track and call it a “Canadian” team.

I had a nice chat with Alex Kopacz, his parents hovering nearby. “You must be very proud,” I said, as they smiled a firm yes. As I shook his hand goodbye, I turned it over in a way I have licence to do and saw an iron ring. I felt stupid for not having spotted that before rounding the corner. Yes, he’s an engineer.

And, unlike his teammates, he’s capable of being happy. Here’s Alex with the handsome and quite smart Justin Kripps after the two of them won gold.

The young man who was nicest to a fan turns out to be most able to express joy. I’ll take a happy giant over a squadron of grumpy ones any day.

Here we have an excerpt from Quantum Mortis, which is not Quantum Morris but is impossible to remember correctly.

Editor Vox Day (no relation):

1. January 5: “We chose a slightly larger font to make sure it was legible.” He also talks about making sure colours “pop,” which is not actually what you want to happen with a luminous screen a few inches from your eyes.

   I wrote, to no response:

   Typeface choice and size are but two factors in legibility and readability, which are different things. Your Futura Condensed is questionable because it’s (a) a geometric sansserif and (b) condensed. But you’ve guaranteed that legibility will be impaired by using too little leading and turning on full justification (note rivers of hyphens – a near-unheard-of four in a row in ¶2).

   If you were using a typeface that had been designed for onscreen legibility in, say, the current century, and had enough lead and didn’t justify your type, you might reasonably have produced legible pages.

   The book Never Use Futura (the title is rather ironic) is superbly done and would make for interesting reading after you hired qualified typographers to make your type legible. As it stands now, it isn’t legible, hence also isn’t readable. You aren’t ready to publish.

2. Three days later: Released.

3. January 10:

   I also believe in winning by being objectively superior to the competition, regardless of what they happen to be, and by thinking beyond the conventional assumptions….

   I don’t care about comic books. But I care deeply about… becoming the very best publisher of the best-written, most popular comic books and graphic novels in the comics industry. I expect excellence from everyone involved in the project, including myself. Sure, we fall short. Sure, we have no clue what we’re doing yet….

   So what? I don’t need to know [various details]. I certainly don’t need to care. I just need to stay out of the way of the experts with whom I’m surrounding myself and to whom I’m handing over the responsibility to do it right.

“We’re breaking more than a few of the ‘rules’ of modern comics here” (January 5): I’ll say. As ever, conservatives cannot design and refuse to learn.

Update

(2018.06.04) An Italian translation of one of Vox Day’s house’s comic books is typographically described thus:

Tolleranza Zero is our first foreign-language translation, and it was an interesting challenge because we needed a different font that had all the necessary accents.

Every professionally designed face has the piddling few diacritics Italian needs. The “font” chosen is some amateur creation whose cap height was shrunk to fit the accents – the sort of thing you’d have seen on a VT220 terminal 30 years ago.

We also needed to make sure the various text strings fit inside the existing speech balloons. We ended up going with one that worked out so well that we will probably switch to it for future English editions.

Why limit the pain to Italians?

A man this dumb (his IQ is claimed to be 150), whom no one likes, obviously is not going to admit he’s wrong or has anything to learn as an editor and publisher.

SJWs always double down, Vox Day says. Not just them, apparently.

My esteemed colleagues at the Amerikanski Dialect Society voted fake news as Word of the Year for 2017. With the available slate, that was the right choice.

• Press release

• Their PDF of vote tallies, which in no respect should be a PDF and they know it

• My samizdat HTML version

Present in the Political Word of the Year category was antifa (q.v.). Missing was fash, a productive and useful word (fashy haircut, bash the fash, go full fash). Nor was fash nominated from the floor, as happened a couple of years ago with White Students(’) Union. From memory, that got one vote.

In fact, right-wing-asshole neologisms barely ever make it to the ADS floor. I would expect the same fate to befall soyboy, incel, obsolete farm equipment, bugman, identitarian, and the older JQ. As linguists, we’re not supposed to play favourites.

(Once in a blue moon I wish my tiny Canadian Word of the Year project hadn’t been doomed from the start. For 2017, socks would have won.)

Who the hell wants to sit fixedly in a chair watching a visually uninteresting YouTube video when you can just listen to it while on the go? A lot of lectures and interviews have no useful visual component, and you really can just listen to them and miss almost nothing.

(Now with updated instruction [singular] that I had forgotten all along ☛) [continue with: How to listen to YouTube audio as a “podcast” →]

All told, I have about 2,000 subscriptions to “blogs,” Web sites, and podcasts. In the last year, I have seen a few arguments that fall into the troublesome category of “difficult to argue against.”

right-wing assholes

Millennial Woes video: “One Hour from Now.” (As it’s tightly scripted, this could easily be an article, and possibly should have been all along)

Frame Game Radio (not a radio station): Twitter; what passes for a “Web site”

antifa

∅

I do not hear “arguments” from the antifa side. The best I got from then was an insistence that Whites in South Africa are not undergoing genocide, and the exhortation NO ALFA ROMEOS FOR NAZIS!

I have listened to various interviews with Jonathan “Height” Haidt and read a good chunk of his Righteous Mind.

I’ve observed that male vegans who are not Indic or Seventh-Day Adventists, i.e., aren’t religiously motivated, seem to spontaneously convert to veganism even in spite of physiological and phenotypic characteristics that should push them in the opposite direction. One half-expects spindly left-wing intellectuals to be vegans, and nobody is surprised when a guy who looks like Moby turns out to be a vegan, and maybe long-distance runners could be veganist without surprise, but one certainly does not expect huge powerlifters and strength athletes to be vegans. Yet some of them are (q.v.), despite overwhelming cultural bias toward meat-eating and what could be called classic masculinity. (Muscles are classic masculinity.)

Barbara MacDonald’s research (PDF) shows a consistent pattern of reflection and a less consistent pattern of would-be vegans upending their lives so they can live with themselves and their moral code. My issue here is that such drives are so strong they overcome the two-steaks-a-day impulses of hugely muscular males.

Perhaps non-religious male vegans – and I am talking only about heterosexualists here – have an inbuilt predisposition to it. The issue seems to be age of onset and what the inciting incident might be. My mental image is of overlapping sets, in which some males with inbuilt veganist impulses they might not even know about start lifting weights, with, at some unforeseeable time, a trigger being pulled. But why?

I’m guessing that, just as moral beliefs and political orientations can be described as “innate” for some value of the term, so does veganism. These big strong veganist dudes would seem to be a highly conspicuous subgroup against which to test such a theory.

I dutifully ran this by Jonathan Haidt. “Totally cool topic! Food is so heavily moralized. Maybe purity plays a role, body-as-temple for some of these guys. Thank you!”

(What got me thinking here: The phrase “protein-deficient badass” on some veganist powerlifter dude’s Instagram. [Not an entirely original phrase, but a good one.] Also: “plantstrong”; “no-meat meathead” [both via].)

Update: Vegan Lifter Project

(2018.11.29) I later fact-checked my own ass and ran these hypotheses past about 15 male vegan powerlifters.

I don’t even like leather, and own barely anything made of it. I proffer my two pair of vegan Docs the way a Vermont private school seats its lone black student at the front of the class during state inspections.

Nonetheless, Skye Joseph Bartlett (no relation), who, self-evidently, hails from Adelaide, gives us the fetish photographs of the year.

(There are two others in that series you could check for.)

Runner-up

Neil Z. Page, whose name I can only ever hear as “Neilzee Page.”

To his credit, Page produced a few versions of this fantastical photo-illustration. Its classic pose, continuously re-attempted since “Power House Mechanic,” is barely possible to get right.

There was a time I was so well versed in the history of photography I could have taught a course.

(2013 nominee.)

I see now it was back in November 2016 that I attended a panel discussion at Buddies about deaf “queer” writers.

Apart from Raymond Luczak (second from left), a known name and an author or editor of a frankly staggering number of titles, everybody else on the panel was some kind of weird genderqueer or whatever – at least according to their online descriptions. But since these mild-mannered writers weren’t threating to cut my head off, incite a riot against me, or even cut my mike, it was fine to be in their presence. (It was part of the “LGBT+” Naked Heart literary festival, which has had nothing to commend it before or since.)

I was surprised to learn how much I learned. The first lesson came from Luczak, or rather from his œuvre: Keep writing and editing even if it doesn’t pay, because time will pass and you may accumulate an enormous catalogue. You’d think I’d know that already. I do, but then there’s living it.

The next came from the cartoonist on the panel (at left). Now, there’s a way to go to vocational school and still end up not making money. But if that ever occurred to him, that would be among the many deterrents he ignores completely. This fellow has an unremittingly positive outlook that translates even to his signing style, which takes up lots of space.

Underlying everything was a generational divide that is so passé it wasn’t even mentioned: These are all deaf writers, meaning they are dedicated to self-expression using English rather than ASL. Circa 1989 there would have been a movement at Gallaudet protesting the imperialist hegemony of the hearing language – even while people like me worked to ensure deaf people had access to English-language television and cinema and even as deaf people had, since time immemorial, used English to communicate when not in proximity.

“Bi‑bi” has been a buzzword among deaf (“Deaf”) persons for enough generations that it seems now everyone actually is bilingual/bicultural.

If these kids (Luczak isn’t a kid anymore) can be that positive, again, you’d think I could. As in Bill Buxton’s experience, sometimes olds need to learn from the young.

Sadly, the interpreting was severely mishandled. One panellist was hard-of-hearing and could speak, but was not simply handed the spare microphone that sat forlornly on a stand for the whole event. (I’d pointed it out to the organizeuse in advance.) Raymond Luczak’s service dog was constantly in the way of an interpretrix as she moved from front-row audience to stage, and she had to hike up her insanely overlong skirt to get over that dog. A simple swap of seats would have solved that problem. A service dog can handle moving over one seat.

There was no way to interrupt the proceedings and explain they were constantly interrupting their own proceedings. But they were.

I’ve been dealing with interpreters of many stripes since the previous century, and there has to be room for the audience to pause the show and get problems solved. (Then there was that time the acoustics were so bad in a meeting room that I had to sit directly next to the student interpretrix just to hear what she said. And my hearing is fine.)

As at all these events, I understood one word out of 300. But unlike at other events, I didn’t mutter helpful corrections to the interpreters.