areiamus

2010-07-26

I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water ands air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain, all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their histories, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day in the lives of the stars.

— Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. (Interestingly, though this passage appears to borrow heavily from Carl Sagan’s iconic Pale Blue Dot passage, the above was written in 1937 - 20 years before Sputnik)

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There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

— Epigraph of You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe

I’ve had some minor interest in typography for years. Ever since I discovered that I didn’t have to use Times New Roman, I’ve come to (unjustly) despise its ubiquity. The much-maligned Comic Sans and Papyrus have been written about elsewhere. I railed against the expectation in undergraduate interpretation of APA that everything be written in Times New, and given some tenuous and half-remembered article about how novel fonts raise grades, I selected alternatives such as Georgia or Verdana. I reveled in the discovery of a whole selection of new fonts from Microsoft, and set about writing reports and essays in Cambria (Constantia, unfortunately, uses text figures and is not appropriate for research reports).

As I began to create resumes, cover letters and other documents that represent me professionally, I realised that typeface, content layout and visual flow contributed substantively to how a document was considered. Selecting a typeface (or pair, for contrast) would allow for consistency in how I presented myself.

I download many things without paying for them or licensing them from the copyright holder; this is copyright infringement. I generally ignore the legal issues associated with infringement given Australia’s lack of widespread prosecution, and tend to sidestep around the ethical issues using the ‘I’d never buy it anyway’ (I might) excuse, the ‘I don’t want to wait 6 months for it to get to Australia’ (I still don’t buy it when it’s here) excuse, or the ‘Big companies are evil and must be punished’ (true, but fails to address artists/creators who lose out) excuse.

I downloaded the complete font catalogue of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, an exceptional font foundry who designed Gotham, the font used by Obama in his presidential campaign, Verlag, a variant of a font designed for the Guggenheim, and so on. I was immediately captivated by Whitney and its Condensed variant, enjoying its clarity in small widths, and its similarity to Arial Narrow made the latter suitable for substitution in a pinch. The heading for this tumblr page is in Whitney Condensed, the text in Arial Narrow.

After using the fonts for a year, I began to grow concerned. My continued usage of the font without licensing failed all three excuses. I fell back on fourth and least-defensible excuse: I really didn’t want to pay A$180 for a font. I’ve sought and found evidence to support my position from H&FJ, who explicitly prohibit the use of licensed fonts on documents that are publicly available. That means no downloadable PDFs of resumes, position papers, newsletters, and so on. I also can’t purchase a single license and use the font on my Mac, for writing, as well as on my PC, for designing.

Where does this leave me? I’m reaching the point where I consider it unethical to financially or professionally benefit from a font I don’t have a license for. However, if I were to license the font, most of what I’d do with it would be in violation of the license. Does purchasing a license in order to assuage my guilt while intending to violate its terms put me in a better ethical position than doing nothing at all?

Comments, please, to @areiamus.

2010-03-16

From Q&A, 15 March 2010

TONY JONES: ...is climate change and global warming a conservative idea? Do you think the scientists are conservative or radical?
WALEED ALY: I think they're being scientists... Let's just all be honest. Most people in this room, unless there are climatologists among us, really have no idea about whether or not climate change is real. What's happening, though, is that we make decisions about whether or not we are going to believe that it is real or not and usually we make those decisions on the basis of what we want the answer to be and that is why you find that at the moment on the conservative side of party politics around the world you are more like to find people who are climate sceptics or denialists because - because that side of politics has overwhelmingly bought into the idea of neo-liberalism and the idea that the free market should be our guiding philosophy. Not just the free market is a good thing, but it's our guiding political philosophy. And when you buy that, climate change becomes very difficult to accommodate. So this becomes an ideological contest for people who are of that persuasion, because the minute they accept the reality of climate change, it destroys the idea that the market is our guiding philosophy, and so they are forced, essentially, to start from a position that says, well, we need to deny this, and then they will look around for data and scientists here and there and so on...

2010-02-11

Much of contemporary developmental psychology is the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.

— From a New York Magazine article, Why Kindergarten Admission Tests Are Worthless.

2010-01-13

Astro Boy” is rated PG. A few of the small children in the theater in which I saw the movie occasionally screamed, but it’s unclear if they were frightened, bored or hungry.

— From Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review of Astro Boy.

2009-12-17

Dear Apple

In Australia, the iPhone has been embraced with fervour. Far from its roots as a stylish, reasonably capable phone for Apple customers, it’s now been adopted as the standard in desirable mobile [cell] phones. I am never the only person on the bus or train carriage with an iPhone. I’m rarely the only person in the lift with one. Sometimes, I’m not even the only person in my apartment with one - and I live alone, and I don’t receive visitors.

Although Apple allows the use of custom ringtones - including ringtones for use with specific contacts - the fact that iPhone users are both restricted to a small set of stock SMS tones and a single new mail/voicemail tone, and rapidly growing in number, suggests that custom SMS and other tones must be enabled soon to prevent mass hysteria arising from confusion over ‘whose phone was it?’.

Nokia neatly solved this problem by making the default ringtone so iconically awful that users were highly motivated to change it as soon as possible.

The iPhone has been so well adopted that if an unfortunate person receives a message during a university lecture, in the ringing wake of the ‘huh-HEE-huh-HEE’ clown horn tone, half the class scrambles to check it wasn’t them.

My downstairs neighbour shares my SMS tone, and on more than one occasion I’ve woken with a start to a ‘DING DING’, only to be crushed with disappointment when no message awaits me, as well as ever-growing resentment towards my more-popular neighbour.

For the sake of avoiding those embarrassing situations when a new mail tone rings out on the train and 3 people simultaneously reach into their pockets to retrieve their phones, and then have to experience the embarrassment of pretending that they just happened to want to check on facebook or twitter or their other messages right then when everyone else in the carriage knows what’s really going on because they have iPhones too; for the sake of my professors’ virginal ears and short tempers; for the sake of my relationship with my neighbour (she’s kind of cute): please add the functionality for custom SMS and other tones.

Yours, etc.

2009-12-09

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Radiohead - Talk Show Host / Romeo + Juliet

2009-12-04

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Tennyson, Ulysses

2009-12-03

At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass, and Man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here… but stardust.

— Pinbacker, Sunshine.

2009-11-27

The Coalition are said to be putting together a ‘three-step plan’. Malcolm Turnbull steps down, Tony Abbott steps aside, and Joe Hockey steps up. The only problem is, Malcolm Turnbull is standing his ground, leaving the others… out of step.

— Channel 7 news torturing a defenseless metaphor.

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Atoms are nature’s pixels!

— T-Rex, via Dinosaur Comics.

[lots of fire trucks in the mall]
Matt: I can't see the fire
Zan: that's because it's in MY PANTS

2010-07-26

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2010-03-24

Licensing fonts - an infringer’s dilemma