Courier New’s Kinda Hot
A cute video to start your morning off: Font Conference. It’s on College Humor, so watch but maybe don’t scroll down. Honu Girl sent me this yesterday afternoon and we laughed and laughed until we both had a moment of extreme facepalm. I’ll be interested to see if you have the same reaction.
I’m a font snob. I admit it. It’s going to get me in trouble one of these days, possibly beaten up in a parking lot, because I will totally tell you to your face your favorite font is nonsense. Especially if it is Comic Sans.
I’m a big fan of Modern No. 20 if a serif is required. For sans-serif fonts, I like them just a touch on the diffent, pretty side, like Gill Sans.
Do you all get snotty about fonts? Have favorites?
Linkology: Orthography, Perpetual Motion Machines
Couple things for fun this morning, then maybe some lexpionage this afternoon. Sound good?
First, an Ode to Improper Orthography: Rediculous.
One little common misspelling, a whole domain of hilarious vitriol. From the section on statistics:
0% of people that spell “Ridiculous” as “Rediculous” aren’t getting enough Omega 3, Biffidus Digestivum or whatever else fucking snake oil is currently doing the rounds with the shite spouting “nutritionist” crowd.
I mean, I get cheesed when people misspell certain words. These people, though, are taking it the next level. And that level is awesome.
Second, under awesome of a different sort, is The Museum of Unworkable Physics Devices. It begins by listing the 13 Principles of Unworkable Devices, after this caveat:
Perpetual motion machine inventors do have principles. Unfortunately the physical principles they assume are often ones not obeyed by nature.
It’s a text-heavy site, but there are plenty of illustrations of the principles and the language is easy to understand, even for someone like me– in love with the idea of physics, but completely boneheaded in all other respects.
I particularly liked looking at the section on “The ‘heavier on one side’ seduction.” There was part of a sculpture at the museum that seemed to use this to create a constantly moving piece of art. People would ask, “Is that a perpetual motion machine?” And no matter how many times I wanted to say, “Yes. It is. Don’t tell, or it’s the heat death of the universe.” I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had to say, “If you look at the corner, you’ll see a little fan. That’s what starts and stops its motion.”
I also really like the names of the Principles. They’re inspiring all out of proportion with what I know about physics. They make me want to write a series of novels with those as titles. Failure to Isolate the System, the seventh novel in the epic series by Sarah, et cetera. Would you buy it?
This Blog is Manly
Via Editrix, I spent some time last week playing around with the Gender Genie. I used large passages of fiction and non-fiction (each nearly 1500 words, since it says that more is better). For fiction I pasted in different passages of the story I’m currently working on. For non-fiction, I pasted in The Opposite of Hallelujah. In both cases? I write like a man!
For the fiction:
Female Score: 1902
Male Score: 2287The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
That’s not that far out. It’s a story about spaceships and war and double-crossing people. Not precisely chick-lit.
For the non-fiction:
Female Score: 1793
Male Score: 2193The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
To me, that one’s a little more perplexing. I talk about being attracted to a man. I talk about crying my eyes out. I talk about a lot of feelings. Possibly it’s the consistent use of the first person? Maybe it’s passages like, “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.” Is that masculine?
I don’t have any broad conclusions or anything. And I’m really not so very surprised about the results. I am trying not to be smug about them because they confirm my anti-feminist tendencies. Maybe I just use a lot of prepositions. I do. And when I write fiction, I tend to write short sentences and lots of dialogue without much description. Maybe that’s masculine. I considered trying to write something that would net me a female response, but the only ways I could think of to do it made me make gagging noises like a 9-year old boy. Maybe that should be a third category– Writes like a pre-adolescent!
I’m Nerdy in the Extreme
I have been lucky enough to see some good concerts in my day. I saw Live during the Throwing Copper tour, just as “Lightning Crashes” got huge. I saw Oasis, but more importantly, I saw Oasis’s opening act, Travis, just a couple months after they won NME’s best new artist award. I’ve seen crazy tiny shows, like Kula Shaker, where it was just me and a friend and a handful of other people. And humongous arena shows, like Billy Joel. And none of them compared to seeing Weird Al Yankovic on Saturday night.
It was honestly the greatest concert I’ve ever seen in my whole life. The multimedia, the costume changes, the fact that it was WEIRD AL. It opened with “Polkarama” and rocked solidly for the next two hours and 15 minutes. It was a little more sedate than I thought it would be. I was ready to stand up and dance the entire time, but that didn’t really happen. Nevertheless, it was still an amazing show.
“Polkarama” was the only polka he did, though later in the show he did sort of a medley thing where he did one verse and the chorus of several songs in row, making “Gump” flow into “A Complicated Song” flow into “Ode to a Superhero” and similar. Most of the songs were off the recent albums, but he did go right from, “The Saga Begins” into “Yoda,” which made us all explode with joy. Then, in the middle of singing “Yoda,” he stopped and did the Yoda Chant, which may be the most complex, strange, amazing thing I’ve seen anyone do on stage. And since Al himself did it in the middle of the show, the audience didn’t do it to demand an encore.
The costume changes were a hoot. I particularly liked his singing “You’re Pitiful” while constantly removing layers of clothing until he was down to a SpongeBob t-shirt, a pink tutu, and a pair of white boxer shorts with red hearts on them. And he returned to the stage after “Couch Potato” on a red segway to sing “White and Nerdy.”
He sang relatively few originals, but he did sing “Wanna B Ur Lovr.” On the album, the song is funny the first time, silly the second, and for me, never merited another listen after that. The live performance, though. Al came off stage, out into the audience and sang each line to a new person. Y’all, you will not believe me, but I have to say it anyway: It was the sex. I mean it. It’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen live. The pelvic thrusting alone. The line about looking him up in the dictionary under “kapow”? I about lost it.
The show ended with “Fat,” in full costume, with all the crazy gestures and moves that accompany the sound effects.
The encore itself was crazy. Part of the multimedia during costume changes are old Al TV interviews, and one of them is with Michael Stipe. Al suggests they collaborate on a song and tells Stipe to come up wit some lyrics, and says he’ll come up with the music. Stipe says, “We’ve all got cell phones. Let’s be real.” Al then riffs on it, but that’s about as far as it goes. The first encore was a full-band version of that song, the only lyrics, “We’ve all got cell phones. Let’s be real.” It was extraordinary.
And the second encore? Was “Albuquerque.” I’ve never experienced anything like listening to a thousand people shout, “I! HATE! SAUERKRAUT!” Albuquerque, y’all. Wow.
Best concert of my life. Christopher enjoyed it, too, which was the primary goal. This was our anniversary present to one another. To see a concert by a singer we’ve been listening to since we were little kids. A! L! B! U! Querque!!!
Have some Polkarama:
They Say It’s Better the Second Time; They Say You Get to Do the Weird Stuff!
Y’all, Act III of Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog is a triumph! Definitely my favorite part of the three. And I won’t go too deeply into why, but it’ll be pretty obvious. And also, you’ve got about 14 hours left to see it, so go go go!
The newscasters were Greenwalt and Noxon, so how about that. And it was edited by Lisa Lassek and the costume designer was Shawna Trpcic and it’s a big Mutant Enemy reunion, made extra-Firefly with a special thanks to Ben Edlund in the credits. That said, is it just me or was there a conspicuous lack of Tim Minear?
When’s the DVD come out? I want to buy some special features!
Post-Coital Squee!
Firefly: Shindig, lulzed. Please note cap the greatest couple in sci-fi history, all the excellent Kaylee, and excellent use of bonus “Badger badger badger” meme.
Remember Those Parts of Speech?
If so, try your hand at an Obamalib. You type in a few words and it generates a paragraph full of hope and change, according to the way you see things.
I chose three bad plural nouns: hippies, hobos, and taxes; one good plural noun: the internets; and two vague concepts, one good and one bad: contentment and paranoia. And this is what I got:
“These people haven’t had contentment for fifty years. So you can’t be surprised if they get bitter and cling to their hippies and their hobos and their taxes. That’s what my campaign is about. Teaching all the little people in this country that they can have the internets.”
Gawd help me, I would vote for that!
I Also Need to Be a Little More Careful About What I Say On This Blog
Go watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog Act II right now!
I especially liked it when Dr Horrible said:
I say successful in that I achieved my objective. It was less succesful in that I inadvertently introduced my arch nemesis to the girl of my dreams and he’s taking her on dates and they’re probably going to French kiss or something.
So good. So funny. And I feel like a total dork for loving all of Bad Horse’s songs.
Shadowhelm’s asking, in the previous post, to what extent do fans have an obligation to monetarily support, via purchase, a free product. I think the concise answer is only insofar as they wish to contribute to the demand of the product. If, when the DVD comes out, it makes a bunch of money, producers may recognize it as something that is in demand. They’ll therefore finance supply, which gives us more good stuff and on and on. Would I purchase it if I didn’t like it? If it were 15 minutes of Wash being harpooned footage on loop? Not at all. But I do like, so yeah. Plus, you know, Nathan Fillion talking about sex. Who’s not gonna want to purchase that?
Edited to Add: Anybody else find themselve’s singing Anya’s retro pastiche? I can’t remember any of the Dr. Horrible songs except the words, “Bad Hooorse! Bad Hooorrrrse!” So my mind turns that into, “She snores. He wheezes. Say housework and he freezes. She eats these skeezy cheeses that I can’t describe!” Eventually there’s a trombone solo!
Balls!
Y’all, Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is really good. NPH is outstanding. Nathan Fillion makes me feel fluttery with all his muscles and his dimples and singing like he’s auditioning for a Journey cover band. Felicia Day should get her own personal time machine so she can go back and replace Julia Roberts in all Julia Roberts movies turning them into Felicia Day movies. Jeez, it’s good.
I saw it first thing yesterday morning and didn’t watch it right away. All the worse for me because traffic crashed the site and I couldn’t get to it when I really wanted to watch it over lunch. I managed to watch it a few times after work yesterday, but I know some people were still having trouble, like String Slinger.
The server issues were ever more hilarious in light of some of the press. The L.A. Times Web Scout blog wrote:
“Dr. Horrible,” you see, has the Internet cooked into its DNA. Rather than being a top-down, studio controlled production, it began earlier this year as a kind of dinner table brainstorm between Whedon, his brothers Zack and Jed, and Jed’s fiancée Maurissa Tancharoen.
Were that the case, the DNA part, I think they’d have anticipated the traffic.
Part two comes out tomorrow, so I’ll make sure to watch it first thing. And I’ll certainly be buying this when it comes out on DVD. I’ll buy a special copy for eating, too. Did I get real worked up about this? And bitchy and bitter cos Joss Whedon broke my Wash-loving heart? Crow! Om nom nom.
Potato, Po-tah-to, Contractions
From the comments section, you’ve got questions. I’ve got inept attempts at humor!
Locrian asks: If you had written “me neither” at the end of your post instead of “me either”, would that have been grammatically correct, or would it have been a double negative?
It would not have been a double negative, and it may have actually been more correct in an either/neither choice. It all depends on whether or not you read the subject of that sentence, “you” as singular or plural. Either means one or the other of two choices. Neither means “none of these,” the negative form of either.
So let’s think about what I was really asking. Did either one of us remember Doc’s birthday? That would work, if I were talking to just one other person. But I said, “you all.” I’m lucky to live in the south where I have a built in second-person plural, “y’all,” and that’s what happened there, I think. You could say, “Did niether of you remember Doc’s birthday?” But it would only work conversationally if the question were rhetorical.
Still, “me either” suggests there were just two of us expected to remember. “Me neither” suggests that all of us forgot. I’m going to go ahead and say that “neither” would have been a better choice. Good catch!
Apollo asks: Speaking of made up punctuation i’ve been wondering a good bit recently about contractions. not the ‘zomg i’m having a baby’ type, obviously, but more the type like i used previously (that’d). firefox is telling me that’s a no-no, but i always thought that it was a valid contraction. i’ve noticed a slew of these lately.
It is a valid contraction. You can confidently tell Firefox to shut up. “That’d” is a contract of that and would, right? A demonstrative pronoun and an auxillary verb is a perfectly fine thing to contract. I wounder if it would’ve called you on, “I’d.” Or for that matter, “would’ve.” If you were writing an academic paper, it would be a no go. There should be no contractions in formal writing. Did I make that clear enough? FORMAL. Since the web is anything but, contract away and give Firefox’s grammar checker the finger while you’re at it.