¶ Rage is a beautiful word. To start, it’s with a single syllable, and I’m quite partial to single-syllable words: will, hope, throes, fawn, &c.1 You get more bang with a single syllable word. Not to say that 4-or-mores lose out on that magic, but the immediate associations and explorations of thought are easily repeated with more simple words, and thusly more profound in a sense and yada yada… elegantly, in terse: Short words hit hard. ¶ I hadn’t found much a love for this word until I saw Interstellar and somewhere in the middle (or maybe the end; I’m not forgetful as I know the story but not the plot) Sir Michael Caine’s character2 recites the poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. I mean, you probably know this poem, and—heck—probably everyone does—and if not, everyone should. I’m no poetry buff, and myself am also not the biggest into poetry—I know only a fair sliver of the big gut punchers; and I only knew of Mr. Thomas’s poem through the viewing of Interstellar—a poetry buff probably has a better, more profound poem to suggest for immediate broadcast to everyone’s brain right this instant, but goddamn if this poem isn’t just beautiful, from it’s reasons and the momentum behind those verses, to have cast a new light on the word for my interpretation. ¶ But I still dislike rage. Rage in another sense: the emotion. You get big; you get dumb; you get into a fight; you destroy something nice; you scream; you cry (but it’s not the sad kind of crying); then you get to feel regret—at the temporary blindness of your conscience fueled by something you could've stopped but you just couldn't. ¶ I was not the calmest kid. I think this is where it originates: all my dislike for anger as a response was because I was an angry kid. I wasn’t always angry, but whenever I felt any sort of wrong coming my way, the response from me was a resounding anger. It’s usually that way, and then you get better as you grow up. I did. Not without its costs, but I did. It still haunts me, all that anger from the past, and some still remaining until today. I have yet to bow myself fully down and become perfect, and I doubt I ever will; now I am better, I suppose. This is not something I wished for as a kid, but one thing kid me will probably thank me for becoming. “You’re welcome. And I thank you as well. For giving art a chance.” ¶ What triggered this thought is something silly and incomprehensible, quite fearful and outright dumb in reflection—most things are in hindsight. I had been working on my font (which has yet to receive its official name but has the working name of RM Fora, with the RM standing for read me) and the work on diacritics had begun. Diacritic design is mostly fine, however, in the case of capital diacritics, there’s some finessing involved.3 Observe the following characters: /Á/ and /á/ — do you see it? You might need to zoom in, or just wait for me to point it out for you: that acute accent (´) is not the same for the two characters; since /A/ is uppercase,4 thus taking more vertical space than /a/, the acute accent has to be adjusted to conform with the taken real estate. This is done in the case of Cantarell by slightly rotating the accent so that it’s flatter. Seems simple enough, right?—It is. And I simply could not understand why I flew into a headache-inducing rage fumbling around with anchor points and substitutions when I could’ve just sat there, calmly taking my time doing adjustments that would be simple enough to amend if ever a capital character gets redesigned. ¶ I was mashing poorly worded queries into the search bar (and I think this was already a lost hope considering FontForge’s guide is so surface-level, and the documentation so technical, truncated, and pretty much outdated, that any resource I was fishing out of these queries were doomed to be slightly related Reddit threads, or the exact Reddit thread with the exact question but the only (assumed to be right) answer was by a deleted/banned user) and resorting to, my horror, ChatGPT to somehow use it’s unethically webscraped data to find an answer to the most stupid question which started this whole ordeal of energy wasting; and there I still found no answer, only myself angrier, and also an actual headache forming somewhere around my forehead. When I had lost the plot, I found the answer come to me like the sweetest smack issued by an upset lover, upset at their partner for acting so different, except I don’t have a lover and I’m alone at the kitchen table with my laptop, now feeling so naked despite having clothes on. I simply just needed to not do any of that. And it was so sobering it felt ridiculous. And maybe I laughed but no. It was just ridiculous in a way it was pathetic and you didn’t need to laugh since it said it all. I simply didn’t need some weird, nonexistent automation to happen; I could just do it all by hand. And I was happy. ¶ There is great merit in doing things. So much so I don’t quite understand why we procrastinate. Some days I loathe taking a shower, convincing myself of the terribleness of being wet and naked, soap somehow crawling between my eyelids, then slipping and cracking my skull on the floor, blood running river down the drain. The latter has not happened (yet) but the being there and doing it is more different than the thinking about it and worrying, or—in the case of personal endeavors—thinking about how great it could be. It feels the best/worst in your head; it’s better when you’ve done it; it’s the best when you’re doing it. Not exactly the best, but the process is where the rollercoaster is, and where the crests and troughs lie—when it feels like it’s all falling down, it only means that you’re building the momentum to make it to the next crest, or loop-the-loop—I wonder what that one could stand for.5 ¶ Speaking of doing things, I feel quite split on my two projects. Right now I have the momentum to keep working on RM Fora and maybe complete the roman font. At that break point I could continue writing my novel, finish that and then continue on the italics and then be done with RM Fora, if I so choose to not have weight variants. But then again I think it lies before me the trouble of continuing this novel after a long time is that I might do it all over again. Given so long not looking at it, I might have formed a quiet distaste of what I have written and just wish it down the well all over again as I have done with it in the past. It has been four times that I’ve done that; and while with each iteration I felt better with the new prose I was crafting, I fear that this time it could turn itself inside out6 and scare me away forever. ¶ The decision is mine to make, after all. And progress has been steady so I shouldn’t fear much. I can show you some of the things I’ve done now.
There’s not much to say—though I do note that oldstyle figures are the default. I might speak of my design choices and inspirations since there are quite a few to note, but one very big and main one that I invoke for every glyph.7 It’s just this for now. It just means I’ll have more to talk about. ¶ Bye-bye. ∎