Loon Gathering - Mia Bergeron , 2026.
American , b. 1979 -
Coloured acrylic on flat panel , 6 x 6 in.
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posted on latelylately.tumblr.com
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posted on chavisory.wordpress.com Communication authenticity and autistic social media
I don’t know if it’s coming from this wishful thinking that’s taken hold again that “neurodivergent people’s communication is honest and clear and direct, but neurotypicals’ is deceptive and unnecessarily vague,” but if it is— From the bottom of my heart, please get off of Twitter for a little bit.
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"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me yuri" - Himedanshi Julius Caesar
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posted on lr0.org An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
The history deserves recording because most people outside the small world of Arabic font engineering don't know it, and it is wonderful. Classical Arabic typography, by which I mean the manuscript tradition that the early printers of Istanbul and Bulaq spent their careers chasing, justifies a line of text without stretching the spaces between words at all. Stretched spaces are the Latin convention, and in Arabic they produce an effect the scribes would have found simply ugly. Instead the scribe extends the letterforms themselves along the baseline, using what is called taṭwīl or, in the modern technical vocabulary, kashida: the connecting strokes between certain pairs of letters can be lengthened, sometimes lavishly, to carry a line out to the margin. A well-set page of Naskh from the seventeenth century has every line flush at both margins, and the result is the dense, regular weave that anyone who has spent time with a good manuscript Qurʾān will recognise on sight.
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The one great exception is Amiri, the Naskh face that Khaled Hosny, an Egyptian doctor by training who taught himself OpenType tooling over the course of about a decade, built and released under the SIL Open Font License in 2011 and has polished continuously since. The name is the lineage: Amiri revives the typeface of al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya, the Bulaq Press face that set the 1924 Cairo Qurʾān, which means the best free Arabic font of the digital era is a one-man reconstruction of the best government-funded font of the metal era, and I never get tired of saying that sentence. And it is engineered, not merely drawn. The required ligatures are done with care; the 1.0 rewrite, in 2022, reimplemented the allāh ligature to be more cautious about when it fires. The mark stacking holds up under fully vowelled text. And since that rewrite the font carries a curvilinear kashida: feed it elongations and it substitutes graded, swelling curved strokes, in four sizes, the way the pen would. Scroll back to the mockup card at the top of the page; those curves are Amiri's own work, performed live in your browser. If you are reading an Arabic text rendered well on the open web in 2026, there is a respectable chance you are reading Amiri. The rest of the ecosystem (Scheherazade New from SIL International, Reem Kufi also by Hosny, the various Noto Arabic faces Google commissioned) fills in around it.
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Microsoft saw the Netflix model of "sell a subscription for a tremendous amount of content at a loss to drive the old industry out of business" and thought that was just the sort of evil they loved to do. Then they started game pass without stopping to realize that they were the old industry they were going to drive out of business.
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The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836), by Cole Thomas
posted on www.newsweek.com Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran has jointly agreed in good faith on on the following:
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- The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions
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- Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions, and will not deploy additional forces in the region.
This is incredible. I feel like maybe people don't understand how world-historic this is. Not only did the United States of America lose this war, there's a strong argument to be made that this is the worst the USA has ever lost a war. The only other war that's even in the conversation is Vietnam, but the consequences of that loss were entirely domestic. The US wasn't forced to make any geopolitical concessions at all[1] despite losing soundly.
In fact, the USA has never in history had to make major strategic concessions after a war[2]. Every single goal it had going into this conflict—forcing regime change, further hobbling the economy, eliminating the nuclear program, bolstering Israel's expansionism—is explicitly disclaimed by this treaty. Not only that, but the latter three ended up in a substantially better place for Iran than the status quo ante bellum.
This is a world-historic event. This is the USA's Suez canal moment[3]. I don't see how the country can go on enforcing its hegemonic will globally after so thoroughly failing to do so in Iran, especially when the domestic appetite for war has been obliterated after decades of quagmires even before this spectacular loss. Maybe the US will be able to fall back to Monroe doctrine lines and continue to coup the Americas at will, but illegally abducting Maduro already failed to produce regime change (although it did prompt meaningful concessions) and it's hard to imagine the US having more leverage now than it did at the beginning of the year.
And just to be very clear: this is a resoundingly positive development. Since World War II, the United State of America has been far and away the greatest force for evil in the world. It has done everything in its power to prevent the development of real sovereignty, democracy, and prosperity of the masses, and to destroy those anywhere they've managed to take root. It has and continues to enact genocide and slavery as matters of policy, and props up fascists and ethnostates to force its will across the globe. Every loss for the US is a victory for the…
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it's embarrassing that French has a less gendered term for "kingdom" than English does. we have to start saying "royome" instead
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the problem with every show in the world having a cold open now is that after all these years I still instinctively expect to hear the theme from The Wire or The Sopranos after the HBO sting
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dogs should have pouches, like marsupials
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if I were the captain of a whole-ass starship and every time I wanted tea I had to explicitly specify that I wanted it hot I would not let a single engineer sleep until the problem was solved. I do not give a gorn's scaly ass that the warp core is on fire, the goddamn computer keeps giving me lukewarm tea
