font font font (that's the sound fonts make)

Okay, apparently it is typography week on the internet or something, or possibly it's just one of those things where the interrelatedness of the universe pounds me in the face for a while. Either way, there are letters coming at me from all directions lately. I've just started a class called "history of books and publishing" and it has me doing things like memorizing font families and comparing axes and serifs, and also my host father words at a printing press. Add in the many churches of Paris with their gift shops full of calligraphy kits that I have to resist buying (Do you know how many calligraphy kits I was given as a child? It was a lot. I guess I was just a kid that seemed like I should be writing something.) and perhaps you will understand that at the moment my brain is saturated in words.

So here are some letter-related things that I like at the moment.

Daily Drop Cap is a blog that puts up a new big illuminated letter every day. There's a link to this on here somewhere already, because sometimes I use them in blog posts, until I get overcome with minimalism and take them all out. But anyway, a lot of them are really good. (This is the person responsible for the above image too, look at those birds!)

A video, via Design*Sponge:

Legacy of Letters from Luca Barcellona on Vimeo.

Aughh, where are all my calligraphy pens? (Short answer: in another country) Really though, those things got in my way for years but every time I wanted them they disappeared.

Also from Design*Sponge, typeface contest! I might enter this just to give myself something fun to work on during this break.

Poppytalk does Font Fridays, which are what they sound like. I keep adding these to my computer even though I know I'll never use them.

Font Generator - I haven't actually used this, because I don't have a scanner, but it's been living in my bookmarks for a million years because I feel like I should have the option at all times. You know, for the times when I might really need a font of my handwriting. It could happen.

ABC Button Font - I can't get this to work on my computer, but maybe you can. Pretty cool though.

The Machine Awoke

he machine awoke to find itself in the desert.

It understood that this was desert. It understood that this was ground, that this was air. It understood that it was sideways.

It did not remember how it had gotten there, but it didn’t know that.

It raised itself up from the scorched earth, stood unsteadily, tilted its bruised metal head from side to side and looked around. For as far as it could see in any direction—and this was quite a few miles, for it was a well-made and efficient machine—there were lengths upon lengths of bare dirt, baked like red clay in the sun. Wide cracks crisscrossed its surface like empty veins, and the sky was a faint yellowish-white canopy overhead, the roof of an immeasurable circus tent stained with dust clouds.

The machine thought of words like vast and expansive. The word alone formed itself somewhere in its mind. It was a word, made from letters picked mechanically out of its consciousness, and it was meaningless.

With nothing left to do, the machine began to walk.

It walked methodically, without deliberation, the instinctive walk of one who has long forgotten how the skill was learned in the first place. Its feet made a dry crunching sound in the dust as it walked. One of its thin metal hands brushed its thigh with each step. It made a faint metallic sound with each swing and drew a faint metallic line in the layer of dust that had settled on the machine as it stood.

Now a wind picked up, a soft background noise that came hissing across the flat earth. The machine turned to look, and, seeing nothing, it thought, wind. The wind came with a fine cloud of dust that settled over the machine again, filling in the lines that had been scratched out until the sun no longer reflected its shape but as a dusty silhouette. It blew away the rocks that had been cracked by the machine’s heavy footsteps, and everything was flat again.

The machine watched its feet as it walked, and it thought, walking. Once it brought its foot forward too low over some brown stone, and the stone went skittering off across the emptiness, the sound disappearing with nothing to echo it. The machine stopped and watched it until the sun swallowed up the stone’s minute shadow, and then it kept walking.

It walked until the sun grew so low in the sky that it could see its own outline stretched out in front of it, and it watched the shape mimic its even footsteps, and it thought, shadow. The shadow swung its hands in gentle mockery and shuffled ahead, its feet fettered by the machine’s real ones. It tilted its comical head and limped almost imperceptibly, although its flat black figure showed no damage.

The machine itself was rather battered, and much of its body bore blackish patches of charred metal, but it could not see itself anyway, and if it had it would not have noticed. It limped because one of the connections in its right leg had been shaken loose, but it didn’t know that either. It simply thought, limp, and recognized it as a word that meant nothing.

It limped onward and, abruptly, stopped. Ahead it could see several things, and as it looked on impassively it thought, people.

The people were still and brownish and swaddled in thin cloth. There were around twenty of them, all standing about holding machines and monitors that must have been black before the dust got to them. It had settled unevenly on their clothes and faces and their lips were coated with a kind of wax to protect them from the heat, and they stood unmoving and stared in shock at the machine.

The machine thought, looking. It watched them curiously for a minute or two, but they simply stood wide-eyed and motionless, and, seeing no change, it turned back to the dry void and continued to walk.

---------------

A pretty old one, actually. But I can't remember if people have seen it, so here.

Shiny

e is carrying his umbrella, because it is raining. It's always raining. In a way it's no wonder so many of the city's inhabitants are so unhappy, considering that they only see the sun every ten days or so. But he doesn't mind the rain. With the umbrella, and wearing his black suit, he can hardly feel it, though he can tell from the steadily sliding temperature that he is becoming a little damp despite all the protection, deflected droplets and upward splashes from the deeper puddles grabbing onto the cuffs of his pant legs and making their way upward.

He is walking steadily, not exactly eager but certainly looking forward to the door of his apartment, the gentle light, the soft give of the bed under him. There is no one waiting for him, and this does not really bother him. It is late, after all, and the only people on the street are running home from the rain now, holding coats or plastic bags of cereal and batteries over their heads, or else just straightening their damp collars and giving themselves shamelessly to the weather. Every now and then he passes a police officer in glistening bad-weather gear, the streetlights reflecting blue and starry off their coats and hats and leaving the rest of them in shadow.

He rarely ever sees police-programmed androids in this town, though they could certainly use them. It's hard to tell why. Possibly it's the rain again, so adept at forcing its way into the kind of miniscule cracks and hinges the human body learned to move without. Certainly it would seem a little unnecessary to churn out all those regulation waterproof uniforms only to put them on rows of tin soldiers instead of men, and there is the fact that what can make a man seem stolid and indestructible can do exactly the opposite to a machine. It would be a shame, he admits to himself, to cover all those gleaming, symmetrical steel bodies with wet, creased oilcloth and canvas, not to mention the faint undertones of deceit. Even he, in his wet cotton suit, cannot help to think of it like that—computers masquerading as men, as if the public wouldn't know the difference.

And that brings him to the next possible reason, which rears its head just so as he passes under the shallow ledge of a convenience shop, sidestepping a few figures silhouetted against a window.

"Hey," one of the figures calls sharply. "Watch your space."

"Sorry," he says. He lowers his head and tries to get by quickly, knowing it's all up to luck, but still hoping a little, maybe futilely. And for a moment it looks as if luck has taken the ball, but there is a fumble, then, and the man, no longer a silhouette, has stepped in front of him.

He is tall. He is wearing a white nylon jacket, with the skin of a smoker and a fine layer of the kind of grime you get in cities only. His face has the thinness of someone who spent the last of his paycheck a few days ago and the remains of yesterdays unshaven beard, and he smiles a humorless smile. "Hey," he says again. "Look at this. Found ourselves a shiny."

Devon does not run. To run would be to abandon even luck, and so instead he stands as still as he can, holds his head down, waits for an opportunity. Hopes for one. He gives the response he has been taught: “I’m not looking for any trouble.”

The man smiles down at him. “Not lookin’ for trouble? Heh. Not the kind of thing you go lookin’ for, is it?” He looks first to one side and then the other, and the other two silhouettes have appeared around him, now the sorry shapes of people, shadowed black and blue in the streetlight and watching with the alertness that comes from waiting too long to sleep. They are smiling grimly—not laughing at him, just watching, just enjoying the suspense of the moment.

“Hey,” says the tall one, a third time. He tilts his head as if he’s speaking to a child, and puts on a mocking imitation of civility. “Whose’re you, anyway? Who d’you belong to, huh?” He waits for a response, and when nothing comes he tries again, a dangerous note in his voice this time. “Where you come from, shiny?”

Devon thinks of lying. It wouldn’t help, and he can’t do it anyway, so he hesitates for a second more and decides to tell the truth. “I’m-“

And this is when the bottle hits his head, swinging, from the left and into his temple, sending a jolt through him and snapping his neck to the side. He does not lose his balance, but the vision in his left eye goes rapidly bright and then dark, the other eye brightening to compensate so that the whole picture in front of him flickers like a broken projection, a little sideways and reeling when the second hit sends him to his knees.

The tall man is still smiling, just a little, but he loses this in a second or two, pulls back his foot and sends out a kick that catches Devon in the soft space where his hip hits the front of his body. Someone else aims a blow at a point on his back that makes him let out an involuntary noise like a stuck typewriter, and someone snickers. “Call for your mother,” says a flat voice, devoid even of the emotion to really tease him, and a boot presses down, hard and abrupt, on his shoulder, wrenching it away from his body with such force that above the sound of his shirt ripping he can hear the wires ripping inside him.

And then there is a new voice. It comes out of the darkness with a sureness that stops all of them, and it says, “Excuse me.”

In the ensuing pause Devon is able to turn his head enough to look up, to see the tall figure of a man in a hat and a long raincoat standing over him. His unnamed assailants back up warily, and the voice comes again from the seemingly empty space under the brim of the newcomer’s hat. “I believe you have something of mine,” it says. “And you appear to have broken it.”

There is a moment, as the four men on the other side of Devon seem to weigh their options, and then one of them spits a stilted “Sorry,” less in resignation than disdain, and they turn and go. Devon waits for a second, allows himself to regain a little equilibrium, and when a thin white hand comes into his field of vision from above he lets go of his umbrella and takes it, letting it pull him into an unsteady standing position. “Thanks,” he says. “I would’ve been in some trouble if you hadn’t shown up like that.”

“No problem,” says the man in the long coat, and when he tilts back his hat to let Devon see his face, there is the shock of finding not the face of a man but the flat white mask and empty eyes of something that sounds like one but is fundamentally not. “I’m Kay,” he says.

“You’re-“ says Devon, and a second later after the realization has fully set in, “I thought you were human. They thought you were... Well. My name’s Devon.”

“No offense taken,” says Kay. “You’re actually the first mec I’ve seen here. I suppose I see why, now. Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” says Devon. “One of them got my arm pretty hard, though.” He tries, experimentally, to lift it, but it remains as lifeless as a doll’s. “I think it’s disconnected.”

“I can fix that if you want,” says Kay. “Your left eye’s still flickering a little too. Is there somewhere we can go around here to get out of the rain? A bridge, maybe?”

“Yeah,” Devon says again. “I know somewhere.”

And this is how, after a short walk, they find themselves in the shelter of an overpass, Devon’s torn shirt and jacket set aside as Kay works over the exposed machinery of his shoulder, filaments and wires fraying out of the open seam between metal and thin black plastic. “This is some clever work,” says Kay. “I take it you’re pretty new?”

Devon nods, indicates the lettering etched into his chest: DEV1. “For the International Robotics Summit,” he says. “I’m team D’s experimental version one.”

“Emancipated, I assume.”

“Yes. I’ve got an apartment on thirty-third and a job in data entry for Seisma Manufacturing.”

Kay slides a few connectors into place, and the arm comes back to life with a twitch. Devon looks down at it and flexes his fingers gently. “Thanks again. I really owe you. You know, that was a real risk you took, lying for me back there. If they’d seen you…”

“Oh, I doubt I would have had any problems with them,” says Kay, and though there is nothing in his voice that should indicate more than what he has said, Devon is struck with the uncomfortable feeling that there are things not being said.

“Why not?”

Kay does a subtle tilt of his head, one that turns the light on his maskish face and makes it almost look as if he’s smiling. “I’ve had a few modifications done,” he says. “You could say I can take care of myself.”

Devon is no good at figurative language, at implications, but this has a kind of finality that can only be one thing. “Your hippocratics,” he says quietly. “You had your hippocratics removed?” The thought makes him feel weak, deeply, vitally wrong. “That’s illegal. They could have you burned out for that.”

“Only if they catch me,” says Kay. “Hey, your patterns are reading strange. Are you okay? Hey, it’s not like I’ve done anything. It’s just a precaution.”

And this is true, even if Devon has seen him lie before, but the thought of breaking that first rule—the impossible option of fighting back—feels like ending some deep-seated law of reality. But he overrides the feeling, holds himself steady, and stands up. “Yes, I’m all right,” he says. “Listen, Kay, if you need somewhere to stay, you’re welcome to come with me for the night. I’ve got room.” He picks up his shirt and jacket from the cool ground, puts them on as one, and shakes his battered umbrella back into shape.

“Thanks,” says Kay. “That sounds good.”

They walk out, into the rain again, into the lamplight and the reflections off the surface of the canal and the puddles still draining out of the cracks in the sidewalk. It is later now, and most of those who were running home from the weather have gotten there by now. Devon holds his umbrella. It is seven blocks until his apartment, and though now he can feel the resistance and the reaction of the water seeping between the plates of his side, and though the left edge of his vision still sometimes goes momentarily pixilated when he comes down too hard on his feet, he is glad to be headed home.

---------------

An oldish one. Some of you have seen this one already, I think, but I figured I'd put it up.

The Legend of Poor John Terrace

ohn Terrace was maybe twenty years old, almost unnaturally serious, the son of a family of wealthy investors who entrusted their money to a company of undeniably brilliant scientists who had dreams, and even a bit of physical progress, in the area of great giant machines designed to be operated by the human mind. He was strong, solid, and famously taciturn, with the kind of smooth-edged face that made him look younger and maybe stupider than he was. He was soft-spoken and soft-handed, and this is how the legend starts, no matter who happens to be telling it.

The legend is vague, of course, as every good legend should be, and though the story is more specific than the legend, both come to the same point through the kind of accident horrific enough to be censored by the passage of time, the kind that can tear the arms and legs off someone as strong and solid as poor John Terrace. And this, of course, is what happened to poor John Terrace, his shoulders turned to gaping, red sockets and the near-indestructible bones in his thighs snapped like sugar glass, leaving him unable to do anything but stare at the rafters above the concrete floor where he lay, the shouts of the people panicking around him growing fainter and the lights dimmer with every spinning, passing second.

"Jesus Christ!" shouted John Terrace's incredibly wealthy parents to the team of overworked scientists who stood about in their white lab coats. "Do something!"

"What do you mean?" said the scientists, who honestly didn't know.

"Our son's been ripped apart!" cried the Terraces, understandably hysterical. "You've got to do something!"

(“Oh God," said John, quietly, from across the room where he lay on a table, a hastily rigged machine pouring his blood back into his body. No one heard him.)

The scientists looked uncomfortable. "Well," they said, shifting nervously and looking at each other, giving each other the kind of looks that make it clear that There Are No Guarantees. "We can try."

And when John woke up he had new arms and legs, ones that were five times stronger than his old ones, and sized in proportion to their strength but not to his bruised, mended little body, having been taken from a machine that was made to do all the things people are too small to do. And they were wired into the torn ends of the nerves of his shoulders and hips so that he could move them with the remainders of his battered musculature, and so that every single time he did he would get blinding, searing, excruciating pains that went all the way up his spine.

"Oh God," he said again, and like the last time his parents didn't really hear--this was the first time he had been awake in two days, of course, and all they heard was the sound of him being alive, and instead of particularly listening they cried and hugged the little bit of him that wasn't made of chrome tubing and thanked God for not taking him from them.

If you have heard the legend of John Terrace, you will know already that he had a girlfriend. In the legend she is never given a name, being at most a sympathetic minor character. In the real story her name was Poloma. Her parents, as one would expect, called her Polly, but John had always called her by her full name, making him sound oddly serious in a way that sometimes made her laugh. And in both stories, after two days of tearful waiting, she was brought into a weirdly sterile room, and after a moment the door opened and John's father led him in by the hand, and she took one look at him and screamed.

And when he stepped toward her she screamed again, even though she didn't want to, and backed up until her back was against the wall and she had to lean her head back as far as it could go just to look him in the eye.

"Poloma," said John, very seriously, and very, very quietly. "It hurts."

"Get away from me, John," she said. She said it calmly, but the truth was that there wasn't much of John left between all those wires and pistons, and what was even more horrifying was that he was crying, plainly and openly as if he wasn't even aware of it, the tears just streaming down his face even though it was as blank as ever.

"Poloma," he said again. "It's hurting me. It hurts so bad."

"Stop saying my name!" she said, and she covered her face and sobbed.

John watched her for a few seconds. "Poloma," he said finally, "I want you to kill me."

And she screamed again.

"Kill me," said John Terrace.

"No," said Poloma. "Don't you dare tell me that. I won't."

"Kill me," said John.

"No!" Poloma screamed.

And then something sudden happened, like something that had been stretched too tight had suddenly reached its breaking point, and by the time the police got there there was nothing left but broken beams and broken bones and a lingering haze of pulverized concrete, fragments of glass tubing that crunched underfoot and dark smears on what was left of the walls. They didn’t even find poor John Terrace.

It was cleaned up well, of course, not least for the benefit of the poor scientists and their unfinished machine that had made its unknowing and unfortunate sacrifice, because despite what some may say there is nothing quite so devastating to a business than having its name connected to a vague and mindless rampage. And that was how he became a legend—not even a proper legend, but the sort that parents use to idly threaten disobedient children. “You close that window, or John Terrace’s going to come in in the middle of the night and get you!”

He never did, obviously. By the time most children were old enough to have heard the legend they knew that John Terrace had never existed anyway. But there were always a few odd characters who claimed otherwise; who maintained that they had seen him in the ruins of the old mansion that everyone called the Terrace estate, despite their knowing that there had almost certainly never been any such family. They went out there on dares and with young delusions of adventure and came back slightly quieter, scraped up and covered in dust and rambling about that monster John Terrace. They said he was nearly twice the height of the average man, with legs like stone columns and arms like tarnished silver tree trunks stitched into shoulders far too small. They said he never spoke, but there were tracks down the cheeks of his empty face from crying and he could deal out destruction to brick walls and windows and the brittle inner framework of the fearful and fragile human body without blinking, without hesitation, without change of expression or bringing one awful hand up to wipe the thin skin under his eyes.

No one ever tried to kill John Terrace. One can only make so many sacrifices, I suppose.

---------------

A rather old one. Thinking about legends, the kind of things where the story finishes and you just sort of stare and go, "Was that supposed to teach me something?" And the person telling the story look confused and says, "What? I don't know, it's just a story."

it was ten years

One year the Japanese beetles came like prisms,
oil-slick beauty crowding over the thistles like dark pearls
at the edges of our property.
They dug out the unused field--
bulldozers, not beetles,
though the effect could have been the same--
and red dirt came from under the alfalfa and dried in the sun,
studded with all those glass-backed beetles,
blue-green and violet and voracious.
(I was ten years old.)

I watched them as I dug stones out of the earth
barefoot and reddish, crouching in the open dust,
and they wove over and around each other
with immunity and iridescence.
And here is what I knew:
that this was only once.
Years would come and there would be plagues,
blue beads settling over our property.
They would devour our tomato plants and cluster over the peaches,
and we would kill them by the thousands
in those plastic bags on the clothesline.
But now was only once,
in new deserts with cement curing and nails scattered
and nothing planted yet,
and this time they lived
so we could see them.
(It was ten years ago now.)