For some odd reason I’m not really comfortable posting long ranty things to my LiveJournal. There’s something weird going on in my head there. I think it’s because I have this constant awareness that I’m dropping an acrid pissed off political rant in the middle of a couple of dozen nice peaceful friends pages, between a perfectly harmless quiz answer and a thoughtful introspective discussion of someone’s day. “If I were a Sluggy Freelance character, I would be — holy shit, what the hell got up his ass?” That sort of thing. Also I keep finding myself self-conscious about profanity, cause I know some of my readers aren’t fond of the stuff. ...

Aimee Mann has announced her new album, Lost in Space, which excites and pleases me beyond all measure. Except not quite all measure, because the discovery that she has put the entire thing up on her Website (Flash, Windows Media, and RealAudio streams only) excited and pleased me even more. So I have at least one point from which to measure my joy. I blame the tone of that on glenn mcdonald, whose online record review column The War Against Silence is near and dear to my heart. I’d just been reading him to see if he had reviewed Ms. Mann’s latest output. No such luck, although he was as distressed by the new Bob Mould as I am. I’ll have to give Modulate another listen with his comments in mind. In the meantime, if you’re an old school Mould fan who was thinking about his new records, you might want to stick to LiveDog98, as the other two are rather… full of synths and drum loops. They might grow on me. Haven’t yet. ...

The day of typographical entries may never end, but I really like this site on writing systems. It includes both Klingon and Romulan. Good stuff.

Note to self: reinstall the RSS feed when the guy releases the more stable version. Current version is tanking on the Gaming Report feed, which causes my index page to not rebuild, which makes the Baby Jesus cry.

The perils of finding a good typography blog is an entire morning spent on reading cool articles like the one I just found on the erotics of type (original). Might be one of those days. (Not worksafe.)

Every now and then I find one of those tasty indie fontdesigner sites and wind up spending half an hour downloading a bunch of free fonts and yeah. “This font was started with the idea, “Make that cool ‘m’ that you see in magazines sometimes. Make a whole font out of it!!” So I did, and it was drab. Meanwhile, a new idea is creeping around. “Make it 2 lines thick, you love to make fonts like that!” So I did. Then, it was not so drab. I named this baby Supreme, because sometimes when you throw spectacular names on so-so fonts, people get all raged up to download them. But this font is not so-so, it is the most. You couple that with the name, and geez, you know what I’m talking about!!” ...

Jess Nevins has, impressively, already annotated League of Extraordinary Gentlemen v2 #1 (original). Quick work, that. I’ve linked to the version on Enjolrasworld.com because Jess’ site is overtasked at the moment (ah, Geocities) and because Enjolrasworld archives all the comic book annotations available. Which is darned impressive.

Reign of Fire was bad on so many levels. It was good on one level: exceptional effects. But the people were stupid, they had stupid plans, the biology was fairly insulting, and just oh geeze. I’m not really the type to bitch about military deployment flaws and so on; I’m not a military history buff and I’d be a poor strategist. Same goes for my biological knowledge, actually. So when I realize I’m shifting uncomfortably in my seat due to the flaws, and when I realize that the logical holes have eaten up the fabric of story and I can’t care what happens to the characters because I don’t believe they could possibly wiggle themselves into their on-screen situation, it’s a bad sign. ...

The estimable Q Daily News pointed me at the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway across Manhattan. There are some absolutely beautiful photographs of the line on that side; grassy and overgrown, and looking very out of place in Manhattan.

Umberto Eco always has such cool things to say. “I calculated that I had saved the reader at least 25% reading time by shortening Dumas’s language. But then I realised that it was exactly those extra words and repetition that had a fundamental strategic function - they created anticipation and tension - they delayed the final event and were fundamental for the excellent vendetta to work so effectively.” A lovely little article on the nature of translations.