Week 267: fi

I use the font Charter for the body text on this website these days, and I think it’s really great, apart from one thing. It has glyphs for the fi and fl ligatures, but none of the versions I could find had the OpenType lookup tables to make the substitution automatically, you know what I mean? Well, I just used FontForge – where by “just” I mean “moments ago”, not “simply” – and I think it’s worked and it’s an improvement?

• The previous highlight of my typographic career was adding a ŷ to Black Jack (for a thing about Wales’s Llŷn Peninsula) (also using FontForge). And I thought the nadir was a reply to Erik Spiekermann on Twitter, but I just checked and turns out I wasn’t that shamefully reply guy–ish.

Watching a compilation of some old Vine videos, I noticed something about them – an I don’t know what, a je ne sais quoi? – like a distinctive smell that’s peculiar to Vines, that transported me back to the last time I watched a different compilation of some other Vines. Is it the framerate, the compression algorithm, or just what cameraphones were like 10 years ago?

Anyway. It’s so pathetic that Vine withered and died instead of becoming what TikTok became, and it says something about the decline of the west or something.

Ivo Graham (h).

I thought, as I have before, about how everyone these days has a Prince Andrew joke, you simply have to, like he occupies a role once filled by Škoda motor cars, and so Andy’s best hope for rehabilitation could be getting bought by the Volkswagen Group?

📺 The Fall. (Yes, everything I’ve been watching is from 10 years ago.) There’s a fellow in it who looks disquietingly like Eric Cantona. I’m yet to reach the point where the phrase “fetch the bolt cutters” is spoken, and perhaps I’ll applaud or something when I do.