Category: writing

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TypeSites

I love typography.

It’s true. I always have. I think think that, in the same way that most writers love words, for some of us, it just keeps cascading down. A love for prose and poetry leads to a love of words, which leads to a love of letters, which leads to a love of the shapes of letters… and then the spaces between letters… etc… etc…

Today my friend (and co-worker) Kyle launched http://www.typesites.com/, “a biweekly showcase of websites with interesting typographic design”. There’s just one review there… (for now), but it’s getting some attention already.

There was a brief time when I thought I would become a designer. But really I just wanted to shape letters on a page. I think this is part of the reason I ended up designing everything in black and white. For example, my brother Dan’s website, which I designed for him back in something like 2000, basically just uses his old email signature’s ascii art as navigation and design element. (I spent part of this last weekend re-vamping that site so he could use wordpress to manage his pages.)

In my present occupation, programming does actually fill some of these same needs. (I’m a bit of a syntax fascist, enforcing strict whitespace rules whenever I can.) Which leads me to an article on the typography of code, which another co-worker sent around the office today. I liked the article, but think it spent all its efforts on the fonts the author uses (or has used) to write code, which is really only one aspect of typography. I’m contemplating writing my own article, about the arrangement of code independent of font, a sort of field guide to whitespace in fixed width font environments. Then again, I’m lazy, so don’t expect it any time soon…

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reading old journals

I’ve been reading through old posts, mostly looking for this one that I linked to in another old post, but since my permalinks have changed six ways from sunday (what a fun phrase, technically, it’s only been three ways since sunday), the link was/is broken. (I still haven’t found the post I was looking for.)

Point? Was there a point? The point is that my posts, even the longer ones, are totally unfocused and pointless. Maybe especially the longer ones.

This is not to say that I don’t say anything… (HA!) just that all my rants are about six different things at once. I’ve been trying to add categories to all the old posts I read (hey, why not?), and I’m finding myself checking boxes for at least two or three categories per post. And these are broad categories!

Anyway, what I meant to get to with this post is how reading my old posts feels a lot like reading excerpts from my journal. I guess I’m getting a bit nostalgic. I read this stuff and flashes of memory are jarred into the present. It’s not re-living moments, but it’s like reliving a very narrow slice of a moment. Like a phrase, or a glance, or an image… a tiny sliver of the whole memory suddenly jumps out at me, not supplanting the present, because the present is so much larger, but supplanting one tiny sliver of the present.

Is it worthwhile, this nostalgia? I guess it’s compelling, and that’s enough. For sure it’s as worthwhile as any other non-productive activity. And are non-productive activities worthwhile? That’s a different question, and one that’s bigger than this blog post. I think my inclination is to say no… but that doesn’t mean that I don’t take part in non-productive activities on a daily basis.

Hmmm… This begs the question: What is a non-productive activity? I basically mean anything that does not directly lead to the creation of something. So for me, common ones are playing video games, reading, watching TV. Hell, even eating counts, really. So I guess we’re forced to participate in some of these activities, and maybe the goal is just to maximize your productive to non-productive “time spent” ratio. I guess it depends on how you count work, but I’m guessing my ratio is very low right now. I’m sort of planning to raise the bar after x-mas/new years, when I’ll begin creating my new video game in earnest.

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random thoughts on poetry, writing, and the internet

Wrote that last poem a couple of days ago on the bus… I wish I could say I was thinking about my own death at the time, but honestly it was totally random what came out of me at the time. I did follow it up in my notebook with “Read this at my funeral. Ha!”. Aside from “Where did this come from?” my thoughts after writing it were all things like “Am I going to think this is any good in a couple of days? (Answer: yes, but predictably not as good.) …and “This must be the first poem I’ve written start to finish in months.” That last feels weird because while I haven’t been writing, life has been racing past full-bore. (Full-bore is an interesting phrase to use here, since it, life, hasn’t been “a bore” at all in this time of fast-pacededness.)

Married life, and life in general lately, has been a whirlwind of pleasant chaos.

Anyway, this chaos hasn’t left me time to write. Or rather, I haven’t pushed life aside enough lately to make time for writing. But now, conversely, I’ve been thinking about writing more… which has led, in turn, (finally) to more writing.

Parts of the impetus for this post was the inspired discussion over at Is blogging per se a dying art? (via semifat sediment). I found myself wondering whether it’s useful to talk about “ages of the internet”, which is semantically (in my head anyway) identical to “trends of the internet as a function of time”… which then led me to ask myself whether a single lifetime can have “ages”, which, when my brain then translated to “trends of my life as a function of time”, I found the answer was clearly yes. I hope that makes sense, because I’m rapidly running out of time to elaborate.

One more aside… which I already twittered earlier, but since the tweet was aimed at an individual (not-quite-coincidentally Josh who runs Semifat Sediment) it didn’t show up here. (Better to post the exchange anyway:)

“joshleejosh: Finding more and more obscure crash conditions in my AI scripts. It’s like malfunctioning turtles all the way down.

me: @joshleejosh: What’s underneath the bottom malfunctioning turtle? …is it WINDOWS?! (Interesting to imagine the universe as an OS.)”

So yeah… I find it immensely (intensely) amusing compare the universe to computer systems (and of course vice versa). Rudy Rucker does this superbly, and (in yet another cosmic coincidence) I picked up his latest novel, Postsingular, from the library this morning. I’m still not done reading Day Watch, but I’ll probably put that one on hold until I finish Postsingular, which I’ve already started and has already sucked me in.

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the write tools for every job

In this old post (back in 2004) I ranted about how I wanted a program for writing that took over the whole computer screen… no menus or anything. And now today I saw a guy here at work using iTerm in full screen mode. This was basically EXACTLY what I’d been looking for back in the day.

Now, I’ve been resisting the switch to iTerm, mostly because I usually “work” on a linux box, and only end up using my laptop for programming on trips or when I’m working in Flash (on my puzzle games). Anyway, Terminal has been “good enough” for my purposes thus far.

But suddenly (for a little more than the last week) I’ve been working on a (completely asinine) front-end project (ie, javascript), where I need to keep my PC booted into windows for IE testing. I’ve also recently upgraded to 10.5, and I’ve been enjoying the tabs in the new Terminal. At first, this was just another reason Terminal was “good enough” for my purposes, but now I’m upgrading to iTerm RIGHT NOW.

So then, after raving about how great this was, and how I’ve been wanting to do that for AGES, my co-workers point out there is another writing-specific application for mac that has the full-screen idea as its basic premise. It’s called WriteRoom, and looks pretty cool to me. I’m guessing that I’ll stick to vim and iTerm, but I might download it and give it a try sometime anyway. It’s got a nice price tag, if I did decide to buy.

This makes me wish (yet again) that I were doing nanowrimo this year.