Chad Comello

The typewriter emoji is dead; long live the typewriter emoticon

Richard Polt reports sad news from the Typewriter Insurgency:

A few years ago I kvetched about the lack of a typewriter emoji and even started a letter-writing campaign. Well, there is a formal and elaborate process for requesting a new emoji. And since nobody else seemed to be doing it, I sat down last summer and created a proposal that I sent to the emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee.

The response he received:

Thank you again for your proposal. The emoji subcommittee has reviewed it, and has decided to decline the addition of “typewriter”. The statistics do not seem to justify the addition. The “office” category of emoji is already well represented and of lower usage than many other emoji. The “keyboard” emoji is also very close to this. ( https://emojipedia.org/keyboard/ )

Alas, it is not to be. I thank Richard for fighting this battle on behalf of the Insurgency. But perhaps instead of seeking legitimacy from within the Paradigm, we should invent a lo-fi typewriter emoticon that anyone can deploy at will. A simple but powerful symbol for the Revolution, a la the Mockingjay or the Bat-signal. This would also better align with the Insurgency’s principles.

My first attempt: ‘[:::]

This is more of a from-above view, whereas Richard chimed in with a good one that is more of a side view: ~/:::/º

The degree symbol isn’t very common (the Mac shortcut is Alt-Shift-8), though it’s a secondary character within the zero on iPhone keyboards. The bullet point • could be another option as it’s also in the iPhone punctuation menu.

But these are starting points. How can we make it better?

Like lightning

October 15, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

“Come on, Doc, it’s not science! When it happens, it just hits you. It’s like lightning.” – Marty McFly, Back to the Future Part III

A couple nights before my buddy’s wedding, I was at his house with a bunch of other guys for a time of toasting, roasting, and advice-giving. One thing I shared was how immediately evident it was to me that the couple was The Real Deal, and how a similar certainty hit me like a bolt of lightning when I first met my future wife.

Later on, the wedding reception was held at Ace Eat Serve, a ping pong hall in a converted auto garage serving pan-Asian cuisine. (Loved the amazing food and the novelty of playing ping pong at a wedding.) The ping pong tables outside were made of concrete and had metal nets with Ace’s lightning logo cut through them, which in the sunlight looked like this:

It’s almost as if I was at the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.

Päntsdrunk, baby box, Moomin, and Finland’s other official emojis

October 10, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

God bless Finland, my ancestral homeland. First, there’s the new book Pantsdrunk (Kalsarikanni): The Finnish Path to Relaxation (Drinking at Home Alone in your Underwear) by Miska Rantanen. From the publisher:

Danes have hygge. Swedes have lagom. But the Finnish secret to contentment is faster and easier—”kalsarikänni” or pantsdrunk—drinking at home, alone, in your underwear.

When it comes to happiness rankings, Finland always scores near the top. Many Finnish phenomena set the bar high: the best education system, gender equality, a flourishing welfare state, sisu or bull-headed pluck. Behind all of these accomplishments lies a Finnish ability to stay calm, healthy and content in a riptide of endless tasks and temptations. The ability comes from the practice of “kalsarikanni” translated as pantsdrunk.

Peel off your clothes down to your underwear. Place savory or sweet snacks within reach alongside your bed or sofa. Make sure your television remote control is nearby along with any and all devices to access social media. Open your preferred alcohol. Your journey toward inner strength, higher quality of life, and peace of mind has begun.

Second, Finland’s official Ministry of Foreign Affairs produced a set of 56 emojis to “explain some hard-to-describe Finnish emotions, Finnish words and customs.” I can and cannot believe these are real:

“pantsdrunk” personified:

The famous Baby Box:

The Aurora Borealis:

“Finnish Love”, which is so emo:

The concept of sisu:

The sauna:

And of course, the OG cell phone, the Nokia (which they call “Unbreakable”):

Download the app or the image files for more pantsdrunk-ing pleasure.

Abolish the apostrophe!

October 6, 2018 / Chad / 3 Comments

I came out against irregular superlatives. I lobbied for the interrobang. Now throw this on my personal 2018 platform: Abolish the apostrophe.

James Harbeck laid out the case against them a few years ago in an article that, to make his point, lacks apostrophes:

Why are so many people so confused by apostrophes? Because they cant hear them in speech, and they dont serve a valuable grammatical function. They simply mark contraction or possession, and you can tell the meaning without them. If you couldnt, the indignant red-pen-wielding self-appointed correction brigades wouldnt know for sure which ones were wrong because the meaning wouldnt be clear. But they always do know, because the meaning is clear even when the apostrophe is used wrongly or omitted.

I liken apostrophes to library fines. Fines are an outmoded practice based on faulty assumptions, and they annoy patrons and staff equally. When libraries do get rid of them, patron satisfaction increases and items miraculously still come back.

Same with apostrophes. They no longer serve any practical function, are too easily misused, and, most importantly, are a pain to type on a typewriter. English would be better off without them. So lets get rid of them.

Denver Crush Walls

October 4, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

Got to visit Denver for the second time this year for a friend’s wedding. While there another Denver friend brought me on a walking tour of the Crush Walls urban art festival in the RiNo neighborhood, where we saw some really cool graffiti:

Media of the moment, ctd.

September 27, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

An ongoing series on books, movies, and music I’ve encountered recently.

Truman by David McCullough. I’m not saying some parts aren’t skimmable, but I am saying this 1,000-page book (not including endnotes and index) didn’t feel that long and indeed deserves the Pulitzer Prize for Biography it received. That’s a testament to both McCullough and Truman, a match made in history buff heaven.

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. When I watched these initially in college, I preferred Part II. This time around I see that the original reigns supreme.

Tag. Goofy fun.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King. A good complement to Won’t You Be My Neighbor. Bounces around more than I wish it did. Love that the only TV shows he watched were The Waltons and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Mister Rogers on CD. Not being a great singer didn’t stop Rogers from writing and performing hundreds of songs on television. Check out Coming and Going, You Are Special, Bedtime, and You’re Growing.

Searching. Cleverly crafted thriller that unfurls exclusively through a computer screen, which means it’ll be dated by this time next year.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. This is a 12-course meal of a book that touches a mind-boggling range of disciplines. It’s almost too much. But I enjoyed the challenge, the feeling of flying through millennia from a bird’s-eye view.

King of Comedy. This might be DeNiro’s best performance.

Go Pack Horse Librarians, Go!

September 24, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

One podcast that survived my recent purge is The Keepers, a series from The Kitchen Sisters and NPR. The series features:

“stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections they keep. Guardians of history, large and small, protectors of the free flow of information and ideas, eccentric individuals who take it upon themselves to preserve some part of our cultural heritage.”

The latest episode is about the “Pack Horse Librarians,” a group of women in 1930s rural Kentucky who brought books to isolated areas. The Depression-era WPA paid their salary of $1 per day; everything else was their responsibility, including renting the horses and collecting donated books and magazines to distribute.

It’s an inspiring, well-told story that shows the value of preserving local history.

The happiest typewriter on earth

September 19, 2018 / Chad / 2 Comments

My sister-in-law picked this up from a baby resale for me. And by me I mean my future child:

I’ve trotted out my real typewriters for my nieces and nephew, but they are still too young to use them correctly. This will be a great gateway drug to the typist lifestyle.

Next step: replace all the Disney branding with something a little less corporate-behemothy.

Bill of Reader’s Rights

September 18, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

I wanna put up these “Rights of the Reader” (from Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader) in my library:

1. The right not to read.

2. The right to skip pages.

3. The right to not finish.

4. The right to reread.

5. The right to read anything.

6. The right to escapism.

7. The right to read anywhere.

8. The right to browse.

9. The right to read aloud.

10. The right to not defend your tastes.

The only right I don’t take advantage of is rereading. There are just too many books out there to read that rereading seems like a wasteful indulgence. But all the more reason to try it once in a while.

(h/t Austin Kleon)