running with paper

But if my spam filter kept statistics, I bet you dollars for doughnuts that this post would be at the top of the list of spammed posts.

Why? Keywords? Links? A puzzle.

As a writer, font fondling annoys the heck out of me. Give me a Helvetica, or Lucinda, or Times New Roman, or even Courier. That’s what I started out with (okay, not Helvetica) on my typewriters back in the day.

If I needed emphasis, I used character symbols or swapped out the daisy wheel on my Brother typewriter, or, as is now taboo in interwebby land, USED CAPITAL LETTERS or Cap Typing To Make My Point.

But only when necessary. I let my writing speak for itself (including one story I wrote as a tween that started nearly every word with the letter “T”).

As a designer, I was all about the Cool Fonting^TM. I drew my own letters (badly) and stripped them down to the barest pixels possible at web time, but back in the bad old days of dial-up download, that was a pretty slow solution, too. And I’m not a fantastic graphic artist, so things were even worse.

Putting a specialized font on a website was a bad idea, too – there was no way to fall back if a browser couldn’t handle it. But now? When web pages can or should be more artsy and you don’t want to force someone into frames or Flash? Enter TypeKit. It looks as though I’ll be able to pretty up my non-bland blog (this one is plain on purpose and won’t change) with fancy fonts that help convey the feeling and look I want to express. And people with a slower connection or older browser can skip it.

Although, being the grump I am, I do worry that this will turn the rest of the web into MySpace – so I hope, unlike some of the latest iPhone features, I can at least have the option to turn it off. Maybe I’ll build a greasemonkey app called “Turn off the Stupid”.

You know those silly lists, 5 authors you could read over and over, want to be stranded on a desert island with (or their books) … Donald E Westlake was on there, every time. Now he’s on the “people, dead or alive, I’d like to have dinner with” list; the dead side.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/books/02westlake.html

Mr. Westlake’s cinematic style of storytelling, along with his carefully crafted plots and crisp dialogue, translated well on the screen. More than 15 of his books were made into movies. In addition, he wrote a number of screenplays, including “The Grifters,” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991.

Mr. Westlake wrote seven days a week, his friends said. His productiveness was honed in part by an era in which publishing houses churned out books at a relentless pace. During that time, he also wrote erotic literature, science fiction and westerns.

Mr. Westlake resisted computers and typed his manuscripts on manual typewriters. “They came in perfectly typed,” Mr. Kirschbaum said. “You felt like it was almost written by hand.”

I’m kind of not a fan of the Discovery Channel’s new logo.

It’s no so much the intrusive kerning as the thin, wide lettering. It just looks … plainer to me. I realize the idea is to make it sleeker, but I’m afraid it blands down more smoothly too well. And looks far too similar to the variously tweaked Discover Card logos.

For instance, look what Federal Express did. They not only modernized their logo, but their name, as well. Federal Express shortened to FedEx. The space-sci-thriller-future lettering gave way to a custom font that’s very much like a real font. The letters are again mashed together, and cranked up subtly, indicates the creator, to quietly stash an image inside.

But FedEx written FedEx still looks recognizably FedEx. Discovery (Disoovery)’s logo … loses something, I think, in translation from image to type. The Planet’s placement, as others have noted, seems a bit after-thoughtish. If it were the “o”, or more of a wrapper as in previous versions, maybe I’d like it more. But it has been downsized in the name of whitespace. And in this case, there is just too much whitespace.

Maybe if they fatten it up, and even rename themselves. A bit hard to shorten “Discovery” Channel, though. Minimize it? Make it simply “Discover.” and leave it as The Discovery Channel. Brand kid’s stuff or “E for Everyone” stuff as Discover. Eeee!

But banish the bland! Please! I love the Boom-De-Yaddah campaign – but the diet logo needs some meat on its bones.

But I suppose the Couch Doctor is a little less obscure and pretentious.

Giangrande is obsessed with his cases and talks about them constantly at home. “It’s very annoying,” Holly protested, in her Long Island twang. “We’ll have plans to go somewhere, and then he gets an emergency call and I get dropped like a hot potato.”

Giangrande, who has the build of a bouncer and the work ethic of a heart surgeon, said, “It’s very exciting — you have to make a call whether a job can be done, and it’s not always clear.”

Like in the case of the $30,000 white leather sectional. Giangrande’s crew did an initial assessment and decided the two 90-inch-long pieces of the sectional couldn’t be easily taken apart — and they didn’t want to risk ruining something so expensive.

At 9 that night, Giangrande drove from Long Island to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to take a look for himself. “There were complications,” he conceded. “There weren’t the usual seams, and it had buttons pressed into the leather. That’s why my guys got intimidated. That’s where I came in.”

There’s a bit early on in the piece that talks about sofas held together with bolts that can be quickly wrenched on and off; I know of a friend’s sectional sofa that tends to come apart on me as I turn over in my sleep; I think it would do well with a quick but sturdy latching system.

There’s a lot of dust in here.

Your mutual friend has noticed that you last updated your journal on LiveJournal 187 weeks ago! Be a friend and go post, at http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml

Sincerely,
The LiveJournal, Inc Team, a division of SUP

It’s that feeling in the pit of your stomach that turns your thoughts into a Magic Eight ball …

• seek job now
• use this opportunity to move up
• start casually moving personal effects home
• become an inside leaker

What do you do when the enemy is you? That squidgy feeling when the life around you takes a turn for the bad or worse? I remember the squidgy feeling when I was hired as just window dressing, frankly, though I was qualified and then some to do the job. I know this has been practice since time immemorial, but I realized that I didn’t like it, didn’t want it, and I didn’t want to work for the slimes. So I left. I was broke and hitched a free ride to a new state with family moving that way, and with their help I landed on my feet and effectively started over.

Now LiveJournal has been sold again to a group named SUP. I wonder if anyone has squidgy feelings. Brad “windowdressing” Fitzpatrick? The former SixApart and now SUP employees? Continue Reading »

We’ve known about tool-wielding animals for years, but did our liquefied saurian friends have jobs, and study the planet in awareness and depth?

Is this all a mad time-travel-and-mummification scheme gone mad? Or simple attack of grammar gap? Mind the gap, there: Continue Reading »

Once, long ago, I had a Disagreement with my roommate. I wanted a cat. The roommate did not want a cat. Any cat. Any cats. Had cats with other roommates, didn’t want to do it again.

It drove me nuts. I’d spent every year I’d been alive living with cats, near cats, around cats. I’d watched them be born, I’d watched them die, I’d watched them survive what looked to be insurmountable injury. I’d taken them into the vet when it was time for them to die.

I wanted more cats. But roomie just didn’t get it. Until I equated cats to something just as ingrained in everyday life as cats were to me: music. Continue Reading »

http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/

As the writers go, so do the contracts of everyone else.

h/t: jnfr