Miscellany – Page 12 – Shady Characters

Miscellany № 54: Facebook doesn’t get satire. Let’s help it out.

August 18, 2014

Or rather: Facebook gets irony perfectly well, but its users don’t trust themselves to catch it.

Sam Machkovech of tech news site Ars Technica has discovered that certain news stories posted Facebook now come prefixed with the word “[Satire]”, square brackets and all. Machkovech determined that this happens to links in the set of “related articles” box presented to you, the Facebook user, when you click through to the original news article and then return to Facebook. Of course, it goes without saying that the tag is only applied to satirical articles — for now, it appears that only The Onion is being targeted — but this may yet prove to be the thin end of the wedge.

Miscellany № 53: Dinner ampersand drinks

August 3, 2014

I don’t mind telling you: I could use a drink. Work on the The Book continues apace — if all goes according to plan, the manuscript will be delivered to Mr Brendan Curry by the end of this year and the book published by the end of 2015 — and my thoughts are turning to how I might celebrate its completion. A tasty beverage would hit the spot.

Miscellany № 52: Eric Gill gets handsy

July 20, 2014

A visual treat this week!

Our header image (above) depicts a pair of manicules as drawn by celebrity pilcrow-user, type designer, and all-round reprehensible human being Mr. Eric Gill. The picture here was taken by Molly Woodward (aka @VernacularType) at a lecture given by Dan Rhatigan of Monotype. There’s little more to say, except look at those manicules! Gill Sans has its idiosyncracies, certainly, but to the casual observer it remains an exercise in geometric forms and yet these expressive manicules are cut from a quite different cloth.

Miscellany № 51: a new-old-stock irony mark

July 6, 2014

A grab-bag of miscellaneous links for you this week; I am knee-deep in nineteenth-century printing history at the moment, courtesy of The Book. Enjoy!

After writing about irony marks again recently (specifically, Michele Buchanan’s project to introduce an irony mark along with two other marks of punctuation), I was simultaneously happy and dismayed to come across yet another irony mark on Twitter recently. This one, however, is something of a blast from the past.

Miscellany № 50: interrobangs in space!

June 22, 2014

I exaggerate for effect. Although thanks to Martin von Wyss, an Australian geographer, cartographer and punctuation enthusiast, we’re on the cusp of interrobangs visible from space even if they aren’t technically in space. I came across a tweet of Martin’s a few weeks ago, and if you take a second to click on that link you’ll see exactly why I was keen to get in touch.