Hello smile

I'm Siobhan Curran/Kisa Naumova, and this is my weblog. I tend to write about stuff like crossdressing, Macs, code, cats, wine and Second Life, but in general it's just an ongoing conversation about all sorts of stuff. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what this all is, I recommend starting on this page which has a little bit of info on who I am, and what I'm trying to do — or you could dive into my five years worth of archives if you like.

Otherwise, feel free to close this box and explore...

Swiss Corruption

Via the magic of Daring Fireball this morning, I was thrust into a frenzy of WANT! by this piece of mug-based merchandising from Veer. Genius. Utter genius — a bit like those PANTONE mugs from a while back, but with a puntastic typographic bent.

The thing is though, Helvetica and me have been falling out a bit recently. I've been having a fling with Arial on the side.

It started a few months ago — just about the same time that my copy of Safari on my G5 decided to spontaneously crash For No Reason Whatsoever™, and I switched to using several portable versions of Camino to manage my various 'existences' online — any site that specified Helvetica (like twitter.com) as a preference to Arial looked awful.

The kernings were all over the place — to the extent that sometimes, the cursor wouldn't actually be at the end of words. I'd be typing in the middle of text, watching the characters overwrite each other ... and trying to work out what I was about to delete was near-impossible.

It was obviously (I deduced) a corrupt copy of Helvetica on that machine somewhere — but which one was it? After my long stint in the repro industry, I've ended up with a collection of (no exaggeration) Fifty Million Helveticas — and it always seemed to be a hit-and-miss affair turning them off on a trial-and-error basis to see what worked.

(And of course, after a logout or something, they'd all turn themselves back on for no reason, and I'd have to go through the elimination process again, having forgotten which one it was)

Today though, in a well-meaning attempt to update my font collection on my G4 (which has Quark on it), I copied everything I had from one machine to another — and inadvertently copied across the corrupt one as well.

"Shit", I muttered, as I watched the textual content of Twitter fragment before my eyes. "I've fucked up this machine as well."

But.

I'd only copied across the contents from my ~/Library/Fonts/ folder — which meant that I'd instantly narrowed-down which version it might be.

And, there amongst the HelveticaNeues, was a suspicious-looking "Helvetica.suit"

"Hello Mr. Old Skool Font Suitcase. I wonder what happens if I delete you..."

Letters jumped back into position. Words demangled themselves. The cursor decided to move to the end of the type.

...

Dear Arial,

I'm sorry, it's over. Your kerning gave me a welcome respite from Corrupt Helvetica's ghastliness, but my baby's back to herself again. And quite frankly, your capital R made me secretly vomit.

Oh, and I faked all my orgasms.

Yours,

Siobhan

PS. Tell Times New Roman he has a tiny cock.

ROFL

I've got to say I see this too, occasionally, but don't have any .suit files that show up in finder, except a couple of very obscure ones — things like titling caps fonts. I get this mainly is badly constructed forms with textareas I think.

The other one I get is just randomly some proportion of letters not rendering sometimes. It happened yesterday in mail, with about one letter in 5 missing until I quit and restarted. Any good ideas for where to look for that one?

But, love the Dear Arial letter!