The formerly smashingly cute Mr. MATTHEW BUTTERICK, on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: “Hated it. A rancid reactionary fantasia of pre–Baby Boomer American masculinity.” (He misrendered that adjective chain.)

Few now recall how, as a young/hung/full-of-cum designer, Mr. BUTTERICK slaved away in Roger Black’s hothouse. The consternatingly dapper and accomplished Mr. BLACK is of course one of the few homosexualist graphic designers, said profession being as hetero as roofing but with less of a raison d’être. Like John Du Pont, about whom I wrote a “Talk of the Town” piece for the New Yorker that Brendan Lemon couldn’t quite manage to run, Mr. BLACK operated a flat-out harem in the 1990s, with a staff made up of cute young things like Mr. BUTTERICK – and the dyspeptic Michael Goff, whose looks have fallen off a cliff but whose editing skills were always in the gulley alongside the flattened corpse of Wile E. Coyote, whom he indeed now resembles.

Given the history, Mr. BUTTERICK’s post-teenage-girl American self-hatred disqualifies him from passing judgement on men. The name “Butterick” is a masculinity disqualifier on its face. Remind us again how important it is, in the Drumpf era, to centre Black trans wymmynz’ lives in American discourse, and how some men have vaginas.

Why do I bother promoting his book Typography for Lawyers, which I did as recently as a fortnight ago?

Our great lodestar of digital accessibility is Apple, which makes computers and screenphones that blind people can use, except for my blind friend of 30 years who couldn’t dial voicemail for months, and who still cannot read Web content embedded within apps, and who could not even manage to reliably tell the time with an Apple Watch, which he had no choice but to return.

Further, “[t]he Apple Park Visitor’s Center is a demonstration of an accessible building when cost is no object,” unless you need to press an elevator button.

One manager at an Apple Store good-naturedly griped that he was constrained in hiring persons with mobility impairments of nearly any kind (certainly including wheelchair usage) because the staff breakroom was up a flight of stairs. (No longer true, it is said.) At no time did I have the heart to tell him that somebody in a wheelchair simply could not work at his store – until news broke of Robert Shaw’s lawsuit against Apple, at which point I did tell the manager that I had known that fact all along.

By my reading, Apple was inaccessible to Robert Shaw. But his lawyer’s pleading and Apple Canada’s response are both rather half-assed. [continue with: Apple Store accessibility lawsuit (Robert Shaw vs. Apple) →]

The older boys, Rhyan and Dustin, were athletes and hunters. While they were out chopping wood with their dad, Chasten says, “I would be inside reading Harry Potter or singing Céline Dion at the top of my lungs while my mom and I were dusting the cabinets.”

For the love of God, take your sons hunting.

(Q.v.; q.q.v.)

And most people have to choose between those things at the very outset of their work. Um and so in a sense like it’s like OK say you’re you’re you’re Aimee Terese. You have to basically tell the story of how the um progressive movement um you know considered in its whole as a century-long American phenomenon – of course it existed before the Soviet Union as well as after it. Um and you have to basically tell the story of how um uh the uh professional/managerial class – have I got the terminology right? – uh how the professional/managerial class basically um um you know takes over from the workers and does these bad things. […]

Um you know and so, the fact that this revolution, which was never about the goddamn workers, then threw the workers under the bus and decided it would be about identity politics is in fact completely consistent with its entire nature from beginning to end! It’s not even surprising at all, and so basically [laughs] you know for someone like Aimee who I’m sure is crazy and wonderful um not to mention big and natural um [laughs] you know haha it’s um um the um um um um I apologize for that, uh, Aimee, if you’re listening um um uuum uuum the um I’m repeating a comment that someone else made um and and the um um the um uh this is not my joke and and I don’t even – I have no even knowledge at all of the subject and and the um um

Ladies and gentledykes, your thought leader of the New Right (cf. Malice’s The New Right, pp. 138–139 inter alia).

Then, of course, there’s how he writes.

I banged out this whole list entitled “Here’s what Windows users think they know about typography”:

• Typography does not exist. How can it exist? I’ve never heard of it.

• Even if typography might exist, it can’t be important. Now that I think of it, I know typography isn’t important. I knew that all along.

• Even if it might be important, I already know everything anyone needs to know about it.

• If somebody else shows up claiming to be an expert on typography, well, I am just as much of an expert. I use Microsoft Word and I can make jokes about Comic Sans.

• I have a right to be angry at anyone who questions my skills in typography or how much I know about it. (How dare you.)

• Apart from Comic Sans, which I can make jokes about, no font can ever be better than any other font.

• No layout can ever be better than any other layout.

• Typography is just “aesthetics.”

• Microsoft Word documents do not have “typography” and don’t need it.

Waaay too long. As I wrote before: “I do not know how to explain to Windoids, NPCs, basic bitches, and other nonentities who have so little going for them that I can sum them up in catchphrases that beauty has value.”

So I boiled everything down to this:

Typography doesn’t exist,
it isn’t important,
and I’m really good at it anyway

Use that as a cudgel. I do.