On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

1. Someone sees the work of the Guardian as a threat.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/dec/21/guardian-hit-by-serious-it-incident-believed-to-be-ransomware-attack

2. If you're trying to get in or out of metropolitan Vancouver, Canada, you'll need more patience than usual:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/winter-weather-flight-cancellations-1.6693294

3. Same for Ottawa-Gatineau.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/don-t-travel-this-weekend-if-you-don-t-need-to-opp-says-1.6692802

4. Mon-Fri 9-5 may be over for many, but what's taking its place in the federal civil service may be problematic in other ways for the staff as much as for the public. Especially in Ottawa-Gatineau where we don't have mask rules back in place yet.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-departments-hybrid-directive-responses-1.6692401

5. The Convoy Siege of Ottawa continues to have consequences for a lot of people living here.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/zexi-li-freedom-convoy-year-in-review-1.6205324

Petra Meyer came up with this list the other day. You might have preferences of your own. Some of you, I see, have works included in this list, and I offer congratulations upon that inclusion!

Not sure how many of these I've been able to read yet, but that is a quest for another day.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/18/1027159166/best-books-science-fiction-fantasy-past-decade

You remember this poll?

Decided to go with an option unpicked to date by anyone: Stumptown Vol. 4: The Case of the Cup of Joe. Greg Rucka wrote it, he helped me out with some research on something I co-wrote a little over twenty years ago, and a lot of his stuff's entertained me over the decades since then. So he gets a little more of what I can spare, effective today. I pick the book up on Saturday.

Other titles I'm either reading, re-reading or trying to make time for right now, whether by my own finances or with the public library's help:

• Glimpses of Cumberland Township - For the Honour of Our Ancestors - Cumberland Township Historical Society
• The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent
• Star Trek: Discovery - Wonderlands by altariel
• Obscure Ottawa by Ray Corrin
• Earth by David Brin
• Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power (Yes, she's a Biden appointee nowadays.)
• Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen
• Draplin Design Co. - Pretty Much Everything by Aaron James Draplin
• This Day in Vancouver by Jesse Donaldson
• How to Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier
• On Property by Rinaldo Walcott
• The Library Book: An Overdue History of the Ottawa Public Library by Phil Jenkins
• Trumpocalypse by David Frum
• Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks
• Cartographic Grounds - Projecting the Landscape Imaginary by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim

Another incomplete list, and I'm not going to be able to get to all of them, anymore than I managed with the March 2021 list.

So, I'm back to the job search, listening to The Current on Radio One, and still feeling like I'm neglecting one aspect of the job search (teaching myself to use assorted design software) in favour of another (searching job boards and applying for specific positions).

Also, looking at videos in the "How to ADHD" series as part research, part self-care.

Also, keeping an eye on my immediate family for assorted reasons.

Also, "meeting" with some of my Ottawa SF Society friends via Zoom tonight after supper.

Also, getting laundry done this morning.

Also, newspaper pickup/shopping errands, because Point 2 of Timothy Snyder's Advice on Resisting/Defending Against Tyranny: defend institutions. In this case, Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by supporting a free press.

Also,...

1. Writing workshop today was okay.

2. So was the refresher from Ottawa City Hall on urban planning basics. They hold this class every few months for whoever is interested. The online version over Zoom was as packed as the one I attended in person back in the winter of 2019-2020. (At least I think it was back then.)

3. Still haven't seen WandaVision. Still resigned to spoilers because Disney+. Sounds like I'm missing out on fun stuff. Oh well.

4. More as it occurs to me.

New printer is up and running.

New eyeglasses are on order. I should be seeing them - and seeing with them - in about a month.

Made more progress with cataloguing my personal library today.

Last week, kestrell spoke about preferred fonts for accessibility re: websites. Also, she asked this question:

Do folks have favorite fonts?

She has her own goals in mind for the answers to that question, regarding accessibility, and she's been getting useful answers from her friendlist. For myself, selfishly, I do have a list of favourites. Many - most? - of these favourites have very little to do with such concerns. There's a lot of aesthetic considerations and a lot of personal nostalgia in play with my list. There is a certain amount of privilege - the privilege of being sighted all my life thus far - in my thinking here. This is selfish. Absolutely so.

That said, I am going to go into some detail about my own list of favoured fonts. In this entry, and probably others down the line.

I start with Space: 1999. That TV series in the mid-1970's created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson was where I first started to care about typefaces, fonts, that sort of thing. Particularly the first season. Moonbase Alpha, the main backdrop of the series, doomed to wander the universe by an ill-placed nuclear waste dump turning a large chunk of our Moon into a giant fusion rocket...that place had a particular design aesthetic. Signage across the moonbase was in a font called "Countdown". Designed by Colin Brignall, I don't know how it reached the attention of Space: 1999's set designers and graphic designers.

He also designed Superstar, the font that Milton Glaser incorporated into the classic "Bullet" logo of DC Comics. So there's two.

Back to Space: 1999. The space suits were jumpsuits with the helmets, life support hardware, and so on worn over them. The life support hardware packs - front and back - were numbered. The numerals came from "Data 70". The packs labelled "1" were usually worn by Martin Landau in character as moonbase commander John Koenig when a scene would call for him to expect to do EVA work, and had that numeral inverted. Not sure why.

(There's apparently an argument over whether Data 70 is a knock-off of another font, Westminster. If you're interested, check this essay out.)

More to follow...

• Applied for five jobs.
  
• Attempted to conduct a video interview, and had to settle for a phone call.
  
• Ushered a bumblebee out of the basement and out the front door of the house. And both I and the bee survived that.
  Got caught up on news from reliable publishers.

(How are the bee and the two wasps previous getting into the basement?)

And there's much more than the features marked out on that image file as well!

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200329.html

This barely begins to scratch the surface of what we know in that corner of "our" sky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_in_Orion

More on other topics as the day continues...