n8   Doesn't follow you    @n8@mastodon.social

ꜱʜᴏᴡ ʟᴇꜱꜱ

Fonts are 99% corner cases.

And we can all now get back to waiting for the real holiday, May The Sp8th.

All that being said, while I find it a fascinating phenomenon and it would be good fun IMHO to play around with the "multiple conflicting canons" scenario as commentary or pastiche, a non-zero portion the fanbases who care about this QUICKLY devolve into hatemongering, gamergate-like hostility, and are loud. It'd be tricky to satirize the situation without being mistaken for part of that crowd. Which I would definitely not want to give oxygen to. And that's too bad; I wish I could riff on it.

I find it fascinating that there are these coexisting, conflicting definitions of canonicity and it's intriguing that people still seem to genuinely get invested in them, even after being burned multiple times and told that the work they paid for, read, watched, etc is now persona non grata and should be forgotten. We're talking about centuries (in-story) of detailed worldbuilding, hundreds of books, ditched & replaced by hundreds more ... twice. And people still buy in to it.

2. The George Lucas refills his checking account and pretends to care again era, from the re-edited movie trilogy through all the prequel junk and up through Disney buyout day. Less chaotic, but shlocky and cheap.

3. The Mickey Mouse Machine Produced era, which I have totally avoided as much as possible and do not remotely regret. It explicitly disavows everything before Walt's frozen head signed on the dotted line, to the point of not paying author contracts it owed. With random exceptions.

In nobody-asked-for-or-needs-any-followup news, I am celebrating ISO Official 5 the 4 day with an update on the weirdness of how Corporate Star Wars defines canonicity.

There are basically 3 eras: 1. the early, anything-goes times, starting with the completely-movie-divergent Episode IV "novelization" that was ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster in 1976 based on a rough draft of the script, which ran up through the Special Editions. Total chaos but Seventies Weird.
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I've more-or-less gotten used to seeing fonts designed by people I know appear in prominent places, but it is a WHOLE other level to hear them mentioned by name during a late-night talk show monologue....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o47x6QzvHd8

Can't sleep? If you're anywhere between Europe and, say, the Americas, then tomorrow I can help you out for 1 hour: I'm doing a talk online about parametric font classification! 🎆🐈🥓

It's part of ATypI's "Tech Talks" series. The details, including all the more interesting-sounding presentations, are here: https://www.atypi.org/register-now-for-atypi-tech-talks-2021

I *can* confirm that you can watch along in any OS, & you get to see the wonders of my bookshelves. Plus critique my OBS skills.

I kinda envy the produce industry, who's content to package and ship unwashed vegetables, tell you they're your problem, then a couple times every year face down a nationwide E Coli outbreak disaster & shrug their shoulders like it was inevitable.

Wait; no, that's exactly what the software industry does too.

It seems really hard to use ForkAwesome for just 2–3 icons. Subsetting the font is easy (for me) but then there's all this minified CSS and CDN junk to untangle, manually, AFAICT.... I found one project advertised as "minimizing" it, but it has fifteen dependencies over multiple programming frameworks and requires you to write FOUR separate configuration files (in 2 formats). I feel like I must be missing something obvious.

The subtle nod of the head & the knowing thumbs-up that I always give to the Amazon delivery dudes truly establish that I, unlike others, am a genuine man of the people.

If I ever acquire total omnipotent powers, first thing on day one I'm declaring a moratorium on YouTubers describing a project as "DIY" anything if it involves using a planer and a jointer.

Few things are as depressing these days as reading a description of an interesting new application, then getting to the end to see the words "an AppImage is available for download."

As far as I can tell [*], the "replace your live-video background" feature does not work on any of the popular-video-meeting-service apps that I can get running on a desktop Linux system.

I can only assume this is somehow because of video APIs. Coin toss as to whether it's actually a compatibility problem with X or with Wayland or it's a "no one can figure out how to use the APIs that exist" situation.

* - or 'as near as I can tell', which means the exact same thing

Over on Twitter, FOSS Twitterati are all raging about something I don't understand that happened in some non-FOSS rokstar-VC-backed-SiliconValley DotCom CEO'd by some Mr Famous Dude. I cannot bring myself to exert the effort required to learn who he is or what brand of rok he's a star of.

* Correction, instead of "FOSS Twitter", I should have written "FOSS-connected San Francisco–local tech Twitter", which unfortunately is what passes for "FOSS" to people who care about PE ratios.

In all seriousness, I did just start a rewatch of The Last Man On Earth, which canonically starts in 2021. And it's still brutally brilliant at every turn. Still can't believe that it actually got made, on a US broadcast network to boot.

First dose of Bill Gates's #supersoldierserum done ✅. I actually got it beginning of the week, but was too distracted learning how to use my new, chemtrail-sensing DNA to post a real velfie. #5G #indestructibility #TheLastManOnEarthCosplay #StickerCollecting #IlluminatiMastodon

Hey, FOSS Graphics peeps — any recommendations for tools to create text-centric animations on Linux boxes?

Or, barring that, simple vector animation?

Everything I turn up searching for this is "oh, Inkscape doesn't do animations" or "spend six months learning Blender, and then it still won't have actual text tools and this how-to relies on a plugin on an abandoned Python"

I don't need a full drawbot framework; I just want to translate & morph a frame for 10 seconds.

The Grafana library (remote-system-monitoring stuff) & several of its related components are being relicensed from Apache to AGPL:

https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/grafana-loki-tempo-relicensing-to-agplv3/

The odd bit is that the post kind of frames this as a "protect the company" move, which makes me think that their view of AGPL is that it prevents outside competition.... Which of course is not true. Still, even if that's what they thought, kudos for picking a real (and good) OSI license.

Occasionally I forget that Ray Bradbury was a good writer. Then I'm reminded.

(For the record, this is from "Bright Phoenix," one of the precursor short stories to Fahrenheit 451. It's set long before the firemen, but loosely in the same continuity....)