It’s extremely simple: don’t. Establish a zero-tolerance policy for the accursed Comic Sans font and its cross-platform counterpart, Comic Sans MS. This font is the typographic equivalent of IE6, by which I mean if you’re still using it, you’re part of the problem. Help us all get to where we should have been long ago: a world sans Comic Sans. Here’s a subtly annotated glimpse.

After taking this screenshot I uninstalled Marker Felt, too

I recommend reading the McSweeney’s article from the screenshot above. It is pretty damn funny. Whether you read it before uninstalling Comic Sans (and its almost equally obnoxious font stack successor Marker Felt¹) or afterward is up to you.

If extortion is what it takes…
(image: Flickr/Pooch the dog)

If you have a sentimental attachment to Comic Sans, there is help for you. I know that ending things can be difficult, even with a font you know is mistreating you. It is absolutely not your fault. Remind yourself that this font ain’t treating the rest of the world any better — so it’s not about you. And if you just have a thing for the freewheeling whimsy of comic-type fonts, there are plenty of better options out there waiting to meet you when you’re ready.

Uninstall Comic Sans on your computer, and on any others you get your hands on. Especially your office manager’s computer. I say that because in my experience, office managers are often known to post signs printed in Comic Sans. The reason for this is that such signs are most often either 1) announcements of upcoming events which they want to portray as sources of fun, or 2) admonishing you about the sorts of things your mother used to when you were a kid, like cleaning up after yourself in the break room, copy room, and/or bathroom, and attempting to dilute the nag factor by using a “cheerful” typeface. I hardly need point out that in either case, Comic Sans has the exact opposite effect than the one sought by the woefully misguided office manager.

Don’t stall — uninstall! Here’s how.

C:\Windows\Fonts

To post is better than to not post. Hey, I’m outta town visiting my parents since Thursday – whaddya want from my life? In any case, here’s my contribution to previously-mentioned Patrick’s present Sunday Seven question:

Here’s a list of the 7 top typefaces used by graphic design professionals.

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Rank your seven favorite typefaces listed in the article linked above.

I noticed that in the article referenced, the word “professional” is printed in quotation marks, which I take to mean that the ranking and perceived professionalism are a matter of the original author’s opinion. I’m willing to take his word for it. Here, then, are the seven fonts in order of my own personal preference (click on the image of for a larger view with more examples of the corresponding font):

1. Garamond was one I was very glad to see on the “top 7″ list, because if it hadn’t been I would have been tempted to dismiss the whole thing. To get right to the heart of the matter, I’m a serif guy (see also: numbers 2 and 3 in this ranking), and Garamond is the paragon of, um… serif-ness, in my opinion. I love Garamond because it reminds me of reading the hardcover edition of a good book. I’d publish my whole blog with it as the primary font, but last time I checked it wasn’t among the 6 or so fonts that are considered truly “web-safe,” i.e., it might not render the same in all the most common browser/OS combinations found in the wild. Damn old ladies with Win2000 and IE5, still ruining it for everybody…

2. Bodoni comes in at number 2 of this seven, riding the wave of my serif affinity. Bodoni’s a little more ordinary-looking than my man Garamond, but comfy nonetheless.

3. Trajan. Or, I suppose I should say TRAJAN, in honor of its all-caps all-the-time ethos. Complete candor moment: I feel like a cretin because when I read the “top 7″ article this is based upon and saw the font and name “Trajan,” the first association into my head was this guy rather than this guy.

4. Bickham Script Pro is one for which I can’t post an example image, because I can’t find one whose copyright allows me to do so. Maybe it would be fair use, but whatever – if you click on my placeholder image you’ll see what it looks like on another site. Anyway, I like script fonts the same way I like most old-fashionedey-looking stuff. The original article says that Bickham Script Pro is good for stuff like formal inscriptions and wedding invitations, which seems about right. Script fonts are pretty when used properly, but you don’t want to hand in your thesis printed in Bickham Script. Better that than Vivaldi, though (more on that after the list).

5. Frutiger may be sans-serif, but I like the sound of the word “Frutiger.” It just sounds like it should be pronounced with a strong German accent, almost as if there were an umlaut over the “u.” I know, I know, if they’d meant it to be pronounced that way they would have spelled it that way – “Frütiger” – but I don’t care, it’s fun to say. Go on, say it – you know you want to.

6. Futura is about waist-deep in the inherent uninterestingness of sans-serif fonts. Personal taste thing? Absolutely, and my personal taste is that sans-serif is sans personality.

7. Helvetica is BOR-ING. I think it’s second only to the ubiquitous Arial in its yawn-inducing potency. I guess the best you can say about it is that it’s inoffensive and nondescript, which for some things can be what is needed. But do you really want to be one of those things? Loving Helvetica or Arial would be like if your favorite ice cream flavor was vanilla. Dear God, take a chance!

One thing I noticed is that most (if not all) of the seven fonts aren’t freely available. They may be the fonts professional graphic designers use, but I ain’t paying money for the ones that didn’t come with my laptop. Not when there are thousands of free fonts to be had at sites like DaFont and 1001FreeFonts. I guess that means I’m not a professional graphic designer, but of course I already knew that.

To follow up on my earlier reference to the Vivaldi font – check out another blogger’s scathing run-down of The 7 Worst Fonts. I wouldn’t change a single item on her list. I look forward to a brighter day sometime in the future when we are all finally spared from the scourge of Comic Sans MS.

What about it, people? Any ‘foughts ’bout fonts? Type ‘em into a comment, and rest assured that they’ll end up in the nice pleasant Georgia typeface of the rest of this blog.

This little Facebook meme has found its way to me. OK, what am I supposed to do?

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I’ll do it, and I’ll send it to the friends who tagged me in theirs, but no way am I going to require 25 of my Facebook friends to write lists too. My friends have more important things to do… well, most of them, anyway.

25 Random Things About Me

1. I am a compulsive copy editor and a remorseless grammar nazi (in case you hadn’t noticed).
2. I am geeky enough to use HTML markup when posting things on community web sites. In case you still hadn’t noticed.
3. I’m seriously considering getting a bicycle to use for getting around town, in order to both save money on gas and get more exercise. The only drawback I foresee is the increased chance of severe injury due to LA’s shortage of bike lanes and surplus of reckless drivers.
4. I’m discouraged at having already written this much and only being on #4.
5. Guiltiest dietary pleasure: ice cream.
6. I just decided that if I’m going to write this much, I’m damn well going to make it a blog post — come to think of it, then it’ll automatically become a Facebook note anyway. Screw it, I am now composing this on WordPress.
7. I first used a computer in about 1981 when my elementary school obtained three or four machines and stationed them in the library. They taught us to program a little bit of BASIC, which never really came in handy. Within a couple of years I was writing school essays on my family’s IBM PC and telling people how totally choice WordStar for DOS was.



8. I am not a grammar martinet with regard to casual conversation. The standard for spoken English is necessarily much broader than the one for written English. How dull and colorless would conversation be without the wild cards of things like dialect and slang?
9. I inadvertently stayed up working on something until 2:30 A.M. last night, and it’s altogether possible that I’ll fall asleep before I finish this.


She’s worth every penny

10. Pretty soon I’ll need to go pick up my dog Bella from her bi-monthly cardiac ultrasound re-check appointment at the vet. I’ll feel lucky if we get out of there for less than $350.
11. I can’t believe I already need to do laundry again.
12. Every so often I hear the Italian woman in the building next door having sex. Usually it’s when I need to concentrate on something else, but can’t, because she apparently likes her nookie with a generous supply of fresh air via her open window. C’est la vie, she’s clearly faking it most of the time anyway.
13. In my opinion The Office has fallen off a little bit lately, especially compared to 30 Rock, which still consistently cracks my shit up.
WARNING: items 14, 15 and 16 contain a high level of geekery. Viewer discretion is advised.
14. I’d love to be able to uninstall iTunes (and the irritating Apple Software Update app piggybacked onto it, which pesters me daily to install something called Bonjour for Windows) and use Songbird for everything. The problem is my iPod, which I like to use for listening to podcasts. With Songbird’s graduation from Beta into its full 1.0 release, its functions for podcast reading, metadata editing, and iPod device support went from “useless or nonexistent” to “kind of a pain in the ass, but it works.” It just ain’t there yet.
15. Which reminds me, I have a couple of web-related crusades of principle going, so I think I’ll give them each a number on Ye Olde List here. First in line: the iTunes Store. Think we’re supposed to stop hating them because they’re finally selling songs without DRM now? Think again. The new “DRM-free” media files they’re selling still have the customer’s registered e-mail address embedded in them, making any future copies thereof potentially traceable to that customer. Also, if you want DRM-free versions of music you already bought from the iTunes Store, they’ll give them to you… for 30 cents per song. That’s right, they want to charge you again for music you already paid them for. Say it with me: the iTunes Store sucks. Buy your MP3 music downloads from Amazon, where they’ve always come without DRM and at the higher-quality 256-kbps bitrate that iTunes just now started providing.



16. Next, a Colbertian wag of my finger at Internet Explorer. I would say “people who use Internet Explorer,” but Google Analytics tells me that would implicate 40% of the visitors to this blog over the last month, and I dearly love each and every visitor I get. Even the ones who use a shitty browser. Never mind that IE is the bane of any web designer’s existence (unless you’re a web designer, in which case I don’t need to tell you). There is simply no humane reason for anyone to deny him or herself the improved ease of use, configurability, speed, and stability of the superior alternatives: either my favorite, Firefox, or any of Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Flock, and the Mac-only Camino, among others will do (but for God’s sake, not AOL Desktop). Seriously, do yourself a favor.
17. Now that I’ve heard Terry Gross interview Darren Aronofsky on Fresh Air, I really want to see The Wrestler.
18. All due credit to the Cardinals for peaking at the right time, but I’m rooting for the Steelers.
19. Every move Rod Blagojevich makes still leaves me saying, “Can you fucking believe this guy?” Wow. Not even a decade in, and he’s already making a credible run at Douchebag of the Century.
20. I believe that my biggest liability as a blogger is my constitutional inability to write something brief. However, in this instance it was not I who decided the list had to be 25 items long.
21. It is downright nippy in my apartment right now, but after last month’s bill I don’t want to keep cranking up the thermostat.
22. I haven’t used most of the Amazon gift certificate my brother gave me for my birthday yet. Possible items include Season 2 of The Shield on DVD (God, I already miss that show). Earlier today I also thought of two more glaring holes to fill in my music library, namely, Sam Cooke and Junior Walker & the All-Stars.
23. I’m having trouble restraining myself from putting up little cop-out entries for these few remaining list items… whoops — see, that one got by me.
24. Our refrigerator in this apartment is at least 25 years old. When it first cycles on it makes a sound like a garbage disposal that a piece of silverware fell into, which lasts for about ten seconds before trailing off. I barely notice it anymore, but it tends to startle guests.
25. I’m far from perfect, but one thing I’m very good about is always putting the toilet seat down.

Since I ended up not doing this on Facebook, the tagging people thing doesn’t really apply. I’ll forward a link to this post to some friends and hope some of them leave comments here. Even if their comments are just to ask why I wasted their time with this frivolous crap. Don’t be shy, mock me!  I’ve teed it right up for you with this list, so bring it, bitchez!

It has come to pass that my friend Todd, he of my blogroll, has seen fit to mock me in the comments section of my last post for my lack of new content. He is lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on one’s personal taste) to have caught me in a particularly sarcastic mood. I might even call it a particularly snark-castic mood, but that would just be too fucking precious. Anyway, the following is very likely going to sound much more surly than usual for me; rest assured that I mean it to be tongue-in-cheek. I’m feeling a little Denis Learyish.

That’s correct, Todd, I haven’t posted in awhile — and my, aren’t you a keen observer of detail. Wanna know why? Because I’ve been busting my ass building a site for the theatre company I’m in. Need proof? Fine, here are a couple of screenshots:

[PHOTOS REDACTED]

Not exactly a slapdash half-hour-with-FrontPage kind of a job.  Put it this way: in the last month alone, I’ve spent enough time building and administrating that site to fulfill my company volunteer hours quota for the next three years. That is, if we were allowed to carry over extra hours to the succeeding year, which we’re not. But it doesn’t matter, because as long as I’m running the website I’ll never have to wonder if I’ve done enough volunteer hours.

So then Todd informs me that I’ve been “tagged in a meme,” and to find out the meaning of this memeing I need to visit his site. Deciding to play along for the moment, I click over to his blog post and find the answer to be as follows (grammatical corrections are mine, and included for no good reason):

1. Link back to the person who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking [to] them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’sbloggers’ blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

As I said in a comment to Todd’s post: oh, jaysus.

First of all — and I don’t fault Todd for not knowing this — here’s the thing about me: I don’t follow memes. I start memes. I am the natural source from which memes flow; that’s why I call them MEmes. If somebody else came up with it, then by definition it is not a meme — it is a THEMe.

To be completely honest, I’m usually not even aware of it when I start a meme. I never set out with the purpose of producing the latest Thing You Have to See, the internet touchstone-du jour, the virtual face that launched a thousand forwarded emails. I don’t wake up in the morning going, “Let’s see… I think I’ll have some breakfast, feed the dogs, shower, and set the zeitgeist aflame.” It just happens. Such is the nature of being mightily influential.

That aside, I find this so-called meme’s question thoroughly mediocre. Six “unspectacular” quirks? It’s such a mediocre question that it specifically calls for mediocre answers! And not just one, but SIX of them. Well, be careful what you wish for. After two or three of anyone’s unspectacular quirks, it’s a sure bet that the rest of the list is going to get more and more unspectacular.

One or two spectacular quirks — now that would at least be worth forwarding to your MySpace friends.  Who cares if you prefer crushed ice to ice cubes or whatever — I want to read about your quirkiest, weirdest foibles. Like, say, if you perpetually emit static electricity, no matter where you are. Or how you have one toenail that grows four times faster than normal. Or perhaps how you smashed your genitalia between two handheld freeweights while doing standing flys, and now the brand “Everlast” is permanently embossed on your penis. You know, that kind of thing.

I know it’s the internet, but holy shit, people — aim at least a little higher. So, I’m sorry, Todd. I won’t be tagging six other bloggers and perpetuating this chain-letter posting thing. Whatever, call me Ebenezer. I’m taking a principled stand for the cause of better content.  Demand more from your internet questionnaires!

Or don’t. Seriously, do whatever you like. I like to agitate for a better internet, but, you know, that’s just me.

Excerpted from The State of the Web – Summer 2008, a clever commentary in illustration form by web designer Matthew Inman:

If you don’t get all of the web-geeky references in the picture, you’re not alone (anyone want to fill me in on what the “Rick/Never gonna give you up, etc.” thing is?). I’ll own up to my penchant for Facebook, but I have been cutting way back on the SuperPoking.