The TeX Users Group or TUG is a decades-old organization for users of the mathematical typesetting language that is not exactly called TeX. Bizarrely, as a teenager I phoned up Prof. Donald Knuth, TeX’s inventor, at Stanford, whereupon his secretary corrected my pronunciation of his name.

In July, TUG held its biannual conference here in Toronto. I was invited to give a presentation to these typographers about TTC type ’n’ tile. I did, and you can read the journal article that resulted.

Now, by far the most interesting fact here is that the average age of the attendees of the TeX Users Group conference is the same as that of TeX – 50. (I exaggerate. Everyone started working on TeX in their 20s and just didn’t bother quitting.)

These are serious and learned and also technically competent people working on a seemingly obscure markup language that is still in common use in its intended fields. The speaking notes from my presentation were obviously in HTML, which journal editors converted to some version of TeX. I then just natively edited the TeX files in BBEdit despite my never having done that before. A reason why TeX is still in use is because it actually works.

TUG TTC Type & Tile Tour

I advertised to attendees that they could meet in the hotel lobby later that same day for a short tour of the subway. I arrived to a packed room and realized that everybody wanted to go on the tour. We ended up with two groups. I had never had the experience of leading, Pied Piper–style, twenty-odd aging computer scientists and typesetters across the humidity and noise of Yonge and Dundas in summertime.

Of course it was hard to hear, and in fact I tended to give impromptu lessons to the different groups twice over, but my audience was amazed by two facts: TTC has its own typography and TTC is really blowing it.

At Bay station, two things happened.

1. One audiencemember saw a break in the wall and diagnosed that the walls are not really made of “tiles.”

   

   Apparently they aren’t!

2. My friend from a large software conglomerate, a Ph.D. in reading acquisition who shall remain nameless except inasmuch as he is Kevin Larson from Microsoft, was bursting with excitement when I told him that a Grimes music video was filmed in Bay Lower. He almost but not quite squealed like a schoolgirl at being so close to somewhere Grimes had also been.

   You just never know with these people! And by the way, they loved me.

   

You could too.

Quick update: Contrary to the headline Barbara Kay tells me she did not select for her National Post column about me, I am not “lonely.” (2016.12.14)

In 2016, the Ontario legislature introduced Bill 28. Its official subtitle is All Families Are Equal Act (Parentage and Related Registrations Statute Law Amendment), 2016. I call it Bill 28: The Handmaid’s Tale Act, because it attempts to rewrite actual biological facts about human reproduction. [continue with: Bill 28: The ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Act →]

needed? needed.

1. Prince sure has been dead a long time. Writing his icon in Unicode. (Imagine the unsympathetic response to a proposal to add that pictograph to Unicode. You can guess who would be most unsympathetic.) Prince-logo “floppys” and “legend.” Undocumented: Font format; characters replaced with symbol; if it still works in the 21st century. No, actually, that was documented (knowledgeably).

2. ATypI IPA: fixed.

3. Rod McDonald (misrendering in breadcrumb UI: MCDONALD) further undermines the legitimacy of griping about that horrific Arial G.

4. Hi still can’t keep up with the kidz (now pushing 50) at LettError KTHXBYE

5. TeleRead, easily one of the stupider blogs (in a wide field), still cannot wrap its head around the concept of single-pixel stems and how those may affect legibility and readability of E‑books, even after I told them same over and over again. The actual problem is “bold text,” Dr. Einstein informs us.

6. 1ilI|!

7. LettError used to ax “Does ‘PDF’ stand for ‘public-domain fonts’?” Similarly: LostType or LostRevenue? (“Lost Type is the first of its kind, a Pay-What-You-Want type foundry[™©®].”)

8. Last Resort or NotDef?

9. Burmese in Unicode (but Buginese).

10. Hi iA this is really rather a non-starter even by rebus/emoji/Prince-in-Unicode standards KTHXBYE

11. (REPRISE w/ UPDATE) Hobo. (Hobeaux!) Hobo! Rococeaux!

12. б (Zhukov alert) but gesäß.

13. I was never going to finish this overlong article on UI fonts and for once I doubt I am unique.

14. “4 ½ new Unicode characters” (sic): We did it! (Also shows the perils of failing to use a custom WordPress slug. Like top-posting, that separates men from boys.)

15. EISENHOWER (1952) but 3689 (1943) (also 1888).

16. BAGLEY PALMS (but ONTARIO’s Lakelands).

17. “[W]e will continue to develop FontFonts with their fair designer contracts.”

18. “Hard to imagine, but not long ago, the type design industry was a quiet people using loud machines.” Epitaph?

19. My single aperçu about blackletter is worthier and more substantive than this entire Times piece that quotes Bierut. Even the title shouts “ignoramus” (in “gothic”).

20. I have the letter I wrote to the author of the Scientific American article on the multilingual typesetting capacity of the Xerox Star. That letter was circa 1984 and asked why there weren’t two cursors in mixed Arabic/English text, because – logically – you never know what the next keystroke will be. I thought then and still think that was a pretty smart question for a 19-year-old, and look where all that got me. (The answer was the system uses one cursor for simplicity but does the right thing with any input. Oh? How about digits and parentheses, I wonder now? Or less-than and greater-than?)

21. Variable fonts? Déjà passé.

22. Tired of Tufte? (Tufté[e]?) Try the TSO. Or compare Dublin trams de l’époque to Euclid.

23. Not passé: Bladé Runnère. Still, nothing’s more futuristic than Italian futurism.

24. Who really designed the Apple San Francisco font? Now we may never know.

When Men Meet is a not-very-well-typeset academic book, now rather obscure and possibly no less obscure when it came out, by Danish sociologist Henning Bech. (I believe his health is not good at present.)

The book is packed to the walls with unique insights, all written down in non-academic English. What’s even more interesting is that Bech does not even bother apologizing for locating his interests in his own history and what happens in Denmark. Only an American would think what happens in Denmark isn’t interesting, and one thing I am not is American. [continue with: ‘When Men Meet’ →]

Paula Scher, quoted in one of those endless books full of profiles of already-successful designers and additionally full of those designers’ Words to Live By.

I knew when I was going to work with Tiffany that what was wrong with their packaging was that the type was too big. It didn’t look expensive enough. What looks expensive? Something that’s withholding, something pulled back. Who wants it? Women who shop. What do they do? They go like this – they feel it. If you have a shiny, crappy piece of paper on the outside of your box that isn’t making a beautiful pattern, get some expensive paper. It’s goddamn Tiffany’s. Don’t have this crap stuff you can buy at a five-and-dime store. Dye the inside of the box. Make this stuff look like it’s letterpressed. It’s money. You’re designing for money.

Instagram functions in 29 of the 32 discrete languages of iOS (42 if all national or dialectal variants are counted). Its purpose is to communicate via one photograph at a time. You can scroll, but you cannot set up a lightbox or layout of photographs as you can everywhere else. Nor can you embiggen a photograph without taking heroic measures. (Both are possible in a browser.)

Because the application senses your system language, when it does need to talk to you it uses your language without any effort of your own. Instagram fundamentally communicates nonlinguistically via thousand-word pictures – and also with words you already understand. And in the majority of its languages, “Instagram” is itself a plausible and pronounceable word.

The fly in the ointment here is comments. I’m sure it’s much worse for girls, who appear in my “feed” so rarely I’m taken aback every single time, but any reasonably cute narcissistic male with a plethora of shirtless and/or swimsuit pics will be larded with comments in Portuguese (Brazilian in every case), Spanish, possibly Thai and Arabic, and always English.

Further:

• Spanish is most annoying here given Instatwits’ insistence on calling every cute boy guapo, an irksome word whether or not one pronounces the G.

• Rich Arab Muslim gays with their own shirtless and/or swimsuit pictures are a cultural phenomenon unto themselves. They’re at risk of murder by fellow Muslims and they aren’t fooling anybody.

• The cutlines you write for your pictures are, I believe, ignored. I know this in part because any time I fact-check kids’ asses they can’t believe my temerity. (As elsewhere, they must be new here.)

• Emoji are another nonlinguistic system seen everywhere.

Instagram thus achieves paralanguage. It represents the apex of software localization: Nothing it presents to you seems foreign or takes effort to understand. Instagram hovers on top of human language, functioning as a de facto global medium. Yet it does so without a hint of cultural appropriation or imperialism.

Added fun fact: As with blocking on Twitter, blocking on Instagram is pointless. Any open account is viewable when not logged in, and in fact blocking produces a Streisand effect. It also tempts me to download pictures, an easy task I have done on occasion.

I did tell you to listen to right-wing podcasts. Via an episode of Red Ice Radio I learned of Evalion (not Neon Genesis Evangelion), an 18-year-old Nazi and anti-Semite who, by her own admission, lives in “Southern Ontario.”

With her parents, actually. (Or parent; see below.) “Your parents know that you’re in the next room, possibly talking about Hitler?” asks amusing hostess Lena Lokteff. “Yes, and they support me 1488%,” the little Nazi replied in code. “They didn’t always support me, but now they do…. They just kind of caught on [to what I was reading].” This little Christer is the kind of girl who, no doubt due to Internet contagion, actually utters the acronym “SJW.” Evalion responds to every lobbed criticism by stagily interjecting “Oy vey!”

She also wants Jews removed. (“Do you despise the Jews as much as I do?” she asks.) Then there’s her offhand mentions of “lazy niggers” and “faggots.” “I see myself more like Joseph Goebbels,” she told Lokteff.

I return to Irshad Manji’s formulation: “Great issue. Where’s the story?” The issue is Canada’s littlest Nazi. The story is her parents. Even if Evalion is a legal adult, she states she lives at her parents’ house (her side of the interview was recorded in the basement, where it’s cooler, she told us). What exactly happened with Evalion’s parents such that “they just kind of caught on”?

Are we talking about both parents or just her mom? (From a separate video: “I’m not sure about my dad; I haven’t talked to him in eight years. But my mom, she shares my views now.” And, proving that Google makes money off infringement, an ad for Google Play Music [!] interposed itself during viewing.)

If Anti-Racist Canada were a viable progressive activist group instead of bloggers who seek to dismantle white supremacy by screencapping Facebook comments, here’s what they’d do.

• They would put not very much effort into finding her home address. A private dick can do that for not much money.

  Armed solely with an audio recorder, they would knock on that house’s door when the parents are likely to be home and demand an interview. When the parents refuse, as they surely will, activists would hand the parents a written request for interview with all sorts of methods of contact. That won’t result in an interview either, but it will discharge all ethically and legally necessary prerequisites for a responsible-communication defence should the little Nazi and/or her parents try to sue the activists.

• Next, activists would pay attention to Evalion’s supporters. Her YouTube videos keep getting taken down, then reposted by fellow-travellers. But one or more supporters run a fan page that solicits donations via PayPal, in clear violation of PayPal’s terms of service. It is colossally difficult to file a terms-of-service complaint with PayPal, and its sole help page on the topic implies that it will take action only in countries with legal bans in place. Nonetheless, that is an avenue to be pursued.

• Then, last but not least, activists should carry out a decidedly limited form of doxxing. By definition the activists would know where Evalion and her presumed enablers live. It would lead to potentially irreparable harm to publish that information, even implicitly. It is grievously irresponsible to publish home addresses even of people you hate; you then become complicit in anything that happens. Here, a single photograph of a house would be enough to identify its location, as we learned in the Rob Ford case, so no such photographs should be taken. (Turn geotagging off.)

  Since I am accusing Anti-Racist Canada of being glorified keyboard warriors, barely discernible from the mythic Angry Pyjamas who post comments that hurt leftist feelings, I propose the alternative of holding a small demonstration on the public sidewalk outside that house (or the roadway if it’s in a subdivision without sidewalks). Take photos and videos only of yourselves, with no architecture whatsoever, and no landscaping other than lawns or edges thereof, in the background. An easy way to accomplish this is to bring your own backdrop, which could double as a surface on which to scribble slogans with the lousy type that leftists are prone to using. (Right-wing assholes use different lousy type – lots of Arial cap’s with misplaced apostrophe’s.) You can record audio no problem.

• Last but not least, take on the hardest task of all – a criminal prosecution for hate speech. That always requires signoff from the attorney general, a high bar that is in place for good reason. But it’s not impossible. From the interview:

  — So what are the laws in Canada? Could you get in trouble?

  — Only if I’m making actual, like, flyers? and books? It’s the distribution of material, and, uh, I don’t think making videos is considered that. I would be in jail already.

  Let’s put that to the test.

I do think Nazism, anti-Semitism, and, yes, racism are worse when espoused by the very young. Such a case warrants the exact opposite of the principles underpinning young-offender provisions or aboriginal healing circles. Evalion is the kind of Nazi one makes an example of.

And, while I have ridden the asses of Anti-Racist Canada here, I could have done the same with any number of keyboard-warrior downtown-progressive journalists, and not merely that Trigglypuff manqué with a Toronto City Hall beat. This would certainly be well within Vice’s wheelhouse; if Justin Ling could just take some time out of a workday filled with decrying transphobia and (foreign) Islamophobia, wonders could be done.

Last: Evalion claims to be a vegan. So’s her boyfriend, apparently, and I guess his would be another story to follow. So would her estranged dad and her stepsister. Important stories to investigate… if we had hacks with balls and activists who took action.

I do question if those hacks would refuse to investigate Evalion because I’m the one suggesting it.