Hello, and other thoughts.

¶ I don’t quite know what a blog is. I also can’t be bothered to make a trek to the search bar to find out for myself. I think it’s just words, and maybe images sometimes, if words aren’t enough. ¶ Hello. For now I’ll lay down some of my thoughts. And, maybe, at the end, I’ll lay down the odd/niche project I’m working on. Then, after that, I might find the lust to continue working on it and update on it’s progress. I think, really, that’s the main goal. ¶ Something that I’ve had a mixed relationship with for a long time is presentation: I don’t really care much about it when it comes to a random encounter or with friends and people I know—in that sense it’s quite a broad spectrum but I say it’s a fair sweep; that initial gut judgement still exists but is quickly smothered away by another thought, or purpose, for whatever you make of it. It doesn’t matter much to me if someone’s wearing their home clothes, all slovenly, radiating around them a sort of energy vacuum; or wearing something fancy, flashy, practically glowing in midday; or walking around with a swagger, bouncing between steps in an odd rhythm, in an exaggerated gait enough to impress Prof. Keating, and maybe even net a government grant; or simply fading away. I assume they know it, and they’ve realized it. I find judgement exhausting. But, turned inwards, presentation suddenly means a whole lot to me. Before, in long, tiring days of not doing anything I’ve grasped and admitted to myself that I am a perfectionist, or incredibly stubborn—as I don’t know the distinction between the two—to which my reaction was probably one of positive outburst, for, when one is young and bright-eyed, one usually had a propensity to twist this into a positive light:0 “Since I’m a perfectionist, everything I’ll ever do and make and create will be perfect!”—is what I probably thought. Not the case, sad to say. I’m reminded of a song but let’s not get into that now.0 ¶ Speaking of presentation, you might have noticed the formatting of this text is quite unusual. Yes, it’s deliberate—I spent quite a long time re-browsing Google Fonts for the umpteenth time to find the font that scratched my reading itch before I even set down the first few words of this text: I initially thought an all-serif setup would suffice, but my favorites EB Garamond , Crimson Pro , and Gentium Plus , either appeared too small on screen, in the case of EB Garamond, or possessed, to my surprise, a weird, less conspicuous pilcrow—or, known more commonly as the paragraph mark—in the case of the remaining two: you can see for yourself by pasting one of the various pilcrows I have set in this text in the previews of each font. If you don’t want to since you’re lazy (which I find fair), the pilcrows of Crimson Pro and Gentium Plus don’t have a filled counter,0 i.e., it doesn’t have that inked-out bump of the P. If it doesn’t find your imagination well, there are screenshots of this anomaly below—

—like so. (I would have preferred to have it in the footnotes but that’s just a limitation I will have to work around until it ever comes, or doesn’t.) Other serif options included Alegreya , Newsreader , Merriweather , and Libre Baskerville , but the first two still suffer from being too small, and the last two, while overcoming the optic problem, seem too bold, too inky for the page—especially in the case of Merriweather, which is a compressed nightmare, almost drowning you, crushing you between the words with how everything seems to blend together, so noisy, and somehow so aggressive also, even though it’s just pixels on the screen; I have nothing against it, it’s just the context it’s used in and it doesn’t work with mine. Running out of options in the serif side, I switched over to sans serifs. I admit, in all honesty, I liked sans serifs in the beginning, and still, I do like love Helvetica and somewhat forgive Arial ’s existence—this forgiveness of which has elevated my love for Helvetica, which does not overcome my love for Akzidenz-Grotesk —and to get back to the point, there is good to be found in the design of sans serifs, but as I’ve seen them more and more, the good thins out to a hairline between each and every one: Inter is a workhorse, open-source, recalls much of Helvetica, and possesses a lot of OpenType features, but I wish not to use it because it’s so overused—oh-so-notably by techbro-aligned companies, and through this affiliation, has, unfortunately, made it sort of synonymous with AI and crypto; looking more to the humanist sans out there, which is a bother due to the burdensome amount of Noto variants made by Google, not much caught my eyes, discounting all the good-but-overused-ones like Source Sans 3 and Lato , discounting as well the sans sister of Merriweather, not much caught my eyes than the one you’re reading now, Cantarell . It’s not without its caveats, as it has no italics nor obliques, doesn’t have circle/square punctuation, and doesn’t do oldstyle figures by default, but it just… looks really nice; the words and the letters can breathe, the page looks nice and even, not toothy or wall-ish, it’s just… text; nice and readable text. ¶ I don’t know. I get too carried away when rambling. The formatting pretty much reflects that: my ideas and thoughts run on. Though I don’t think I need to justify it, in fact, I could just say I like the way it looks and leave it at that. I like this presentation. It favors me. Do I need to say more? That’s up to me. I guess no. ¶ I did promise, or hint to the fact I might talk about a project I’m working on, and I guess this is the part I talk about it. I have two projects but I’m actively working on one. With all that font talk you should be able to guess the content of the one I’m actively working on—yes, indeed, it is a font. On the progress of this font, the alphabet is complete, as well as punctuation, numerals, and actually pretty much all of the characters you can input with your (assumed to be standard English) keyboard… but it is yet to be complete; there is still much work in creating diacritic combinations, ligatures , character alternates, and performing the unperfected art of kerning —all to be done in the mysterious cabinet of OpenType. That’s also excluding the fact that I plan on making an italic counterpart, and maybe even weight and optical size variations… but I aim to be as minimalist as possible, considering this is all stems to the root of hobby, and I plan to not spend a cent, only hours, into this, working with the free, open-source application of wonder and depression, FontForge . ¶ As for the other project, I am working on a novel. Well, I’m doing great work avoiding writing it, to be more precise. I’ll talk about it more later on, just to keep myself on my toes. ¶ I guess this is where my thoughts end. Oh, hello again; see you next time. Here, have a specimen of my font to see you out.

—And if you were wondering: yes, it will be free to use for everyone (if ever it comes out). ¶ Bye-bye. ∎