From The Point Of View Of A Typeface

The most popular link last week was this piece about personal style malaise, with this one about the death of cultural gatekeepers coming second.

1. When Kylie Minogue Was a Font. This is about the 1997 techno-pop track "GBI (German Bold Italic)", in which Minogue sings from the point of view of a typeface. I'd never heard it before and I love it.
2. An update for a favourite podcast episode of mine: "Secret Mall Apartment" by 99% Invisible.
3. Advice from a beauty expert for someone who doesn't wear makeup and is feeling pressured to put it on for her wedding:

"I agree with you: it is radical to get married without makeup in 2025. It’s radical to choose embodied freedom – your ability to 'cry, laugh and hug' without regard for running mascara – over performance as a bride. It might be hard for your community to understand, but 200 years ago, so was marrying for love! People did it anyway."

4. Speaking of weddings, this is a great anecdote from someone who, with their then-partner, accidentally went to a wedding a year late. They ended up attending the nuptials of two total strangers who happened to be getting married in the same venue. Said couple thought it was hilarious, and invited the crashers to stay for the whole event and be in all the pictures. They still invite them to their anniversary celebrations, and even though the attendees aren't partners any more, they still go to enjoy the reunion of a strange yet fun day.
5. What did the Hubble telescope see on your birthday? This is what I got. Sparkly!

6. I'm going to be both serious and angry for a second, because since I last wrote to you I found out that my work is among the many, many thousands of books in the illegally pirated LibGen database that Meta has used to train its AI model. There is more detail and context about this in the original reporting here. Even some advance copies of books that haven't been published yet were included. That this is, at the very least, a copyright infringement is absolutely clear to me. I trust the various professional bodies I belong to and will be closely monitoring their attempts at litigation. But there is also an emotional and cultural component to this for me. Over the past nine months or so, I have increasingly come to feel that the platforms operated by companies like Meta are essentially extractive; that they take ideas — photos, text, content — from users, for free, make a profit off it and offer nothing of value in exchange. The world as mediated through a social network built for this purpose is a sterile and sometimes scary place. Daisy Buchanan described the feeling of having her four very personal novels harvested in this scrape as like a "brain pick" in the worst possible way. I agree, but that's also how the products of Meta and other such companies make me feel now more generally, beyond this specific incident. And I want to opt out, as far as I'm able. I'm still working out exactly what this will look like for me, someone who has work to flog online, but I do know I won't be going back to posting any of my personal images or thoughts on Instagram or Facebook. I will find a new home for the dog photos, I promise.
7. Mara Wilson's tribute to Michelle Trachtenberg is so moving and revealing of what it was like to be a child star in the 1990s.
8. A poem I liked: "Observations Concerning the Role of the Anglican Funeral Service in the Murder Mystery" by Maryann Corbett.

Man that is born of woman (saith the prayer book)
hath but a short time to live, especially
in British detective dramas
since it is foreordained that some poor sod
will be shot, strangled, drowned, or brained with a shovel
before the opening credits and theme music.

9. I'm obsessed with the fish doorbell. This feels like such a Dutch solution to a problem to me? Take your turn watching to see if the fish need to be let through here.

10. Michalina Janoszanka did extraordinary things with reverse painting, building up layers of pigment on the reverse of a piece of glass to create a kaleidoscopic image.
11. I want someone to make this bag for me.

12. At the same time as "serious" or "difficult" literature is becoming more popular (probably because of the advent of AI slop), the publishing industry has to face up to the biases involved in how these qualities are signalled with marketing.
13. Colorfle: like Wordle, but for mixing colours.