meanwhile, on the internet

[jazzfish]

The radical notion that women are people:
I Do Not Want My Daughter to Be 'Nice': "If I had all that energy back -- all the hours and neurochemicals and facial musculature I have expended in my wanton pursuit of likedness -- I could propel myself to Mars and back. Or, at the very least, write the book 'Mars and Back: Gendered Constraints and Wasted Smiling.'"

Related, Surviving Tuesday, on the perils of 'nice.'

Seeing Is Understanding: "This is about speaking up, creepers, and what good men don’t always see."

Artistry:
Edward Gorey illustrates Little Red Riding Hood, etc: as advertised.

Glas, a short (10 min) film about glassmaking. Very pretty, but then I'm a sucker for glass.

Typography in ten minutes: "If you learn and fol­low these five ty­pog­ra­phy rules, you will be a bet­ter ty­pog­ra­ph­er than 95% of pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers and 70% of pro­fes­sion­al de­sign­ers." I can't argue; #4 is responsible for so many hard-to-read websites (Wikipedia, I'm glaring at *you*).

Alas Vegas tarot cards: pen-and-ink Vegas-themed Major Arcana for a forthcoming 'RPG of bad memories, bad luck & bad blood'. Classy. (Which is not a word you typically see in conjunction with "Vegas.")

Amusement:
Dear Recruiter: "However, any company that would use someone like you for recruiting is a company I wouldn't want to work for (and would be hesitant to use products/services from, since I know the quality of their employees), and so I respectfully ask you to remove me from your contact database."

My sister asked if the events of "The Labyrinth" are meant to be Sarah dreaming, or are they real?: "Although my primary reaction was that she shouldn't put that much thought into any children's movie (or any instance of David Bowie in tight pants), I'd like to take this opportunity to put so much thought into this children's movie, that it'll blow your mind."

Social Theory Through Complaining: "Each week we will focus on something grad students complain about when they are forced to take theory. You are required to attend under protest, write a paper that's a total waste of your time, and complain constantly."

Miscellanea:
Adrian Carton de Wiart has what may be the best opening paragraph in Wikipedia. "He later said 'frankly I had enjoyed the war.'"

25 Signs You Grew Up As A Military Brat: 1, 2, 3 for early-70s values of, 6, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, and I take offence at half of 25. When every other milbrat was learning how to make friends quickly, I learned not to bother, and as a needy oversensitive introvert I would have been much better served by a stable home and friends than by being sent to a different school every year until fourth grade. Feh. Water over the bridge, and as noted elseweb I no longer believe that raising a military brat should be automatic grounds for a child abuse prosecution.

Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created: "The drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, takes approximately eight hours when travelling in a vehicle whose top speed is forty-five miles per hour. In Desert Bus, an unreleased video game from 1995 conceived by the American illusionists and entertainers Penn Jillette and Teller, players must complete that journey in real time."

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The "practical typography" article is damn near unreadable, because of their lousy typography. The font size is too large and the lines are *way* too short, requiring me to jump back and forth far more often than is comfortable and slowing my reading. As a bonus, they commit the anti-pattern of disregarding my settings: They force their text into a way-too-thin column with gargantuan margins, rather than accepting the way I have my browser set as being my preferred reading style. Extra bonus: They suggest purchasing a commercial font that 99.9% of your users will not have, meaning you'll be seeing your website the way you designed it and everyone else will be seeing it with their system default font that they've chosen for when some luddite douchebag fails to understand the difference between print and web, so you'll be 'designing' on a site that will NEVER look that way to a real user.

So no, those aren't "five practical rules", those are "five obsolete and annoying things you can do to piss off your readers because you have no idea what a 'website' is and think it's some new form of newspaper, or maybe a salad."

[jazzfish]

De gustibus; I found the font size perfectly readable, and I strongly prefer columns to a line of text that spreads out across the whole browser window. I keep my window the size it is for stupid oversized images and the proliferation of websites with sidebars.

I can absolutely agree that the guy is full of it on 'buy a commercial font' for web typography, though. That's just awful.

(Some amount of it reads like he took some perfectly sound print-typography advice and applied it directly to the internet with barely any modification.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Fair. But I keep my window huge because that's how I prefer to read things, and any website that wants me to stick around should respect that I've set things a specific way, that's how I want them.

[ckd]

I had an attenuated military brat experience, because Dad figured out how to keep us living in one place for a while even though he was on active duty: the Fort and the Army Medical Center are two different installations, and if you're both a MEDEVAC pilot and a social worker you can PCS from one to the other. If that fails, do a tour in Korea (no dependents) and come back.

[jazzfish]

Ha, nice! My dad's solution to moving was to get put in command of a unit, and then get sent to Desert Storm, which I cannot particularly recommend.

(I also practically never lived overseas: a tour in Germany that ended when I was five, and after that it was all southern US.)