Dan Rhatigan finally republishes evidence of a dream come true: Visiting an accurate replica of the Space: 1999 Command Centre.

Had enough of queers, trannies, and LGBTs? So have we.

Peak Trans Moment (Gay Men)

While we’re here: Since I speak Tumblère with a fractured accent, this project, modelled after the vibrant wymmynz original, has had a slow start. But gay males are welcome to write in with their peak trans moments.

Or this month in coverage of Private Eye (layout [exhibition]; Matthew Carter masthead typeface).

• Times on Ian Hislop

• Fascinating interview on Private Eye podcast with its in-house lawyer, whose plummy echt-RP accent outdoes Richard Dawkins’

Douglas Rushkoff:

Archetypally speaking, the Internet is a feminine space. The Internet is something you enter into, that you’re enveloped by. The Internet goes hand in hand with the real feminism movement, in that for the last 2,000 years we’ve had stories and media about male tragic heroes that climb up an incline plane of tension, have a climax of some kind, and then get to rest, die, or sleep. You know, crisis, climax, sleep. Male-orgasm curve. That’s the way TV works and radio works and theater worked and novels work.

Now we’re on the Internet. The Internet works through a series of connections. There is no ending. There is no finale. There is no climax and sleep, there’s just another connection, another connection, another connection. And the more and more you connect, the more potentially euphoric it becomes, the more empathic it becomes, the more connected we all are, the more intimate it all is. That’s archetypally female.

What gamers are ultimately dealing with is that this medium that they believed was going to be dry and boylike and help them experience difference and antagonism is having the reverse effect. It’s acting like water. It’s connecting them to everyone and everything, and all of a sudden this tool that they thought could prevent intimacy while still giving them orgasms and death thrills is now promoting intimacy on a level that human beings couldn’t even imagine was possible 20 years ago, much less that we’re experiencing today.

And that’s the problem. That’s really what the backlash is against. But that might be too heady a concept.

• Jonathan Barnbrook, the most active political graphic designer, discusses the origin of the ★ glyphs that comprise the title of the new David Bowie album.

  I asked [Burroughs] about the future of typography and he said that letterforms would go back to hieroglyphs, similar to the ancient Egyptians. You can actually see it happening with the emoji – they are becoming very common with people creating whole narratives out of them as well as using them in everyday communication. Will there be a time when we use only these to express thought?

  Barnbrook talks about realeasing the glyph font as open source, but all I can find is Virus DejaVu and companion faces from 2014. Also: Spot the reference to North Korea embedded in the cover art for the previous album. I had no idea.

• Further: Is Barnbrook remixing Volkswagen billboards to mock its clean-diesel engines? Apparently. (Full gallery.)

• Are emoji – which word, like “deer,” is singular and plural – merely little illustrations or are they glyphs that can and should be incorporated into fonts? Trying to talk about this with civilians is like trying to explain that you have not created a podcast if all you’ve done is posted an audio file to SoundCloud. Still, CBC in Canada has for some reason released “emoji stickers,” to appropriately tart response. Finland has done something similar (coverage in Finnish). I remember the days when learned typographers insisted that colour fonts had no reason to exist. I think emoji “stickers” have no reason to exist.

  (Ken Lunde’s Unicode emoji acceptance flowchart.)

• Finns, then: I like what Annukka Mäkijärvi is doing with bears and Underware.

• Cherokee is now less unreadable. We were told this when Microsoft released new Cherokee fonts, which I’m not going to look up, but we are being told this again in the context of Mark Jamra’s Phoreus Cherokee, which got a mention in the newspaper and is now being used by Unicode for its code charts. Here is the part I do not understand: “Before Mark, there were a handful of fonts that existed, but many of the glyphs weren’t accurate or were completely wrong.” As I like to say to recurring acclaim here, citation needed.

• By the way, Inuktitut in all its forms will likely end up being written in Latin script. (“Existing writing systems have been imposed on us.”)

• “People Need to Use Typography: An Interview with Non-Latin Type Designer Erin McLaughlin.”

• The CFL, the Canadian Football League, is not “soccer” and is not “American football.” It has rebranded with a dull and childish logo that will surely work well as a favicon if nowhere else. The logo uses a free Google font.

• For Team Tobias, our long national nightmare is over. Voici Mallory.

This year, the 519, which used to be the lesbian and gay community centre here and is still a City of Toronto agency, hired a young academic with the most transgender name ever, Jack Hixson-Vulpe, to write a report nobody asked for. “Creating Authentic Spaces: A Gender-Identity and Gender-Expression Toolkit to Support the Implementation of Institutional and Social Change” ostensibly exists to document transgendered persons’ legal rights on the job. A worthwhile goal, but the sort of thing a simple Web page could and does handle.

The report is a tagged PDF that one may download directly (PDF). (I also have a local copy [PDF] should the original disappear.)

The report spends a great deal of time lying to its readers about the supposed legal right of male-to-female transgenders to use female washrooms, bathrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms (and female-to-males to use equivalent male facilities). There is no such right. I should know, because I extensively searched the human-rights jurisprudence and found precisely no rulings in Ontario establishing such a right. (Text file of citations.) There are claims and opinions that the Ontario Human Rights Code confers such a right, but it has never been tested, hence does not exist.

The report includes many graphically busy posters or “info sheets” one may print out. They’re also found separately at the 519’s Web site (example) and on its outpost in the online home of transgender “activism” and harassment, Tumblère.

Naturally I had questions. Two weeks ago I sent along a detailed E‑mail to Ms Hixson-Vulpe and two of the 519 staff listed in connection with the report. I began with:

I have questions for attribution about the 519’s report that carries the unintentionally ironic title “Creating Authentic Spaces.” I will wait a reasonable time before publishing, and will accurately report any and all relevant comments you give me, but you need to understand that what I also intend to publish is my opinion that this report amounts to transgender propaganda. Worse, I will report that it misleads readers about the true state of jurisprudence about transgender use of washrooms, bathrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms.

I certainly encourage you to file any and all complaints you can think of against an established journalist who intends to publish his opinions about a publicly-financed public document published by a public agency. In fact, I would dearly love to find myself in a context where transgender and transgender-apologist respondents are forced to answer questions under oath. Your move.

Oh, and don’t top-post.

No response. (I included the citations on transgender washroom etc. use.)

So here are the questions I asked, mildly edited and marked up. (I removed some of my suggested copy-edits, for example, but nothing substantive.) [continue with: ‘Creating Authentic Spaces’ (sic) →]

American white nationalist Richard Spencer (SPLC profile) gave an address (YouTube) at the white-nationalist conference put on by his own white-nationalist organization. And he did so on Hallowe’en.

There Spencer gave us the most white supremacist sentence of the 21st century: “We’ve swallowed the red pill whole. We abandoned our illusions of democracy, race, class, Jews, religion, America, und so weiter.” Gratuitously deploying the German for “and so on” was the vanilla icing on the angel-food cake.

(Previously, Spencer made a half-assed linguistics joke in suggesting white nationalists audibly differentiate “white” and “White.” They could pronounce the latter with the old-timey initial phoneme that sounds like hw and is written [ʍ] in IPA. Then maybe they could also say “hwJews” and “hwBlacks,” Spencer proposed, which made as much sense in speech as it does here. In any event, capitalizing racial or ethnic group names does not automatically connote fascism; Ebony, for example, has written “White” and “Black” that way for decades.)

Keeping track of those pesky white supremacists

I had previously decried young downtown-progressive hacks too lazy to investigate hate groups, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, accusing them of being unable even to read those groups’ blogs without becoming so politically nauseated and triggered they had to find a campus safe space to hyperventilate in. No Stieg Larssons they, these young kids will get up your nose the minute you misgender a tranny on Twitter, or write the preceding clause, but can’t be bothered keeping tabs on actual racists.

I tried asking an academic for some help on which hacks really are doing that legwork and writing that coverage, but that didn’t work. This is not necessarily the sort of thing one can Google, which in itself is the too-often-used “research” method preferred by downtown progressives, who think journalism is Gmail and Twitter. As with Larsson, who knew Swedish racists personally, this is the sort of thing that requires personal connections.

Still, Anti-Racist Canada is a punchy and enjoyable blog, if badly-copy-edited and literally unreadable, that really does cover racists and anti-Semites. They could spend less time posting screenshots of Facebook (the wrong archival method, among other things) and more time actually talking to these people, but it’s something. (Again, I doubt they’d have the stomach to even talk to them on the phone.) And there are countless Blogger templates one can actually read.

Meanwhile, the Wolves of Vinland, previously mentioned here, if in a largely unrelated context, is amusingly parodied by Fools of Vinland, which models the Wolves as furries with cutoff sleeves and runic tattoos.

I do think this would be a rich vein of ongoing investigative journalism, again with a tone of half-bemused mockery, for the content farm a highly credible Jew from Halifax runs, namely BuzzFeed Canada and Craig Silverman. But he doesn’t answer my mail.

Bonus question: Is it a contradiction to oppose white nationalists and anti-Semites but also oppose militant Islam and defend the legitimately constituted gay and lesbian community? Let’s crowdsource the answer – surely Twitter can decide that for us forever.