If you’re not reading this in an RSS reader, you might have noticed that Z1NZ0L1N has got a fresh coat of paint. I’ve been trying for years to design a “typewriter theme” with just one font, one size, and one weight. It never stuck because it always felt too rigid, even when i used a “two-colour ribbon”.
This time around, i cheated a little bit by giving myself permission to use a slightly smaller size font and a slightly lighter shade of “ink” when needed. I’m still restricting myself to using only one weight, but i’m letting italics be italics. It might not be as pure of a concept, but it’s far more clear of an execution.
I have to admit i loved working in WordPress’s full-site editor and writing fewer than 200 lines of CSS. In the end, it’s the first design in a long time that i haven’t wanted to tear apart as soon as it was finished. I’ll clean it up and submit it to the WordPress directory in the coming weeks.
Apps
WordPress Studio. In theory, Studio allows you to install WordPress locally in a few clicks (you don’t even need to set up an admin password!). In practice, i found it painfully slow and frustratingly buggy (you might as well install WordPress on a Raspberry Pi on the other side of the world with a 56 kbit/s line). I’ll stick with Local for now, but i’ll definitely pay attention to Studio’s future updates.
Typographer. We need more alternatives to Adobe’s extortionate prices and Monotype’s hegemonist tendencies, so every new font distribution platform is welcome. The list of partner foundries is solid and the pricing structure is more than fair. I can’t wait to have a reason to try it out.
Books
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. At first, i was prepared to overlook the tedium of this alphabetical collage for the strength of the concept alone. But there’s much too much inane chatter for it to be enjoyable. Case in point: “there was salt on my lips, and when I licked them, they tasted salty.” Did we really need to be submitted to Heti’s (presumed) diary? Evidently not, much like we shouldn’t read her tweets. For real, never meet your heroes’ stream of thoughts. Good for her for having so much sex, though, i fret just thinking about the logistics. Her friends must be pissed off to be so thoroughly thrashed page after page after page. I know i’d be. Just what’s the point is the question. Knowing the Latin alphabet has only 26 letters is sweet solace — a Tamil version would have been a nightmare. Let’s not beat around the bush: this isn’t “a radical fusion of linguistic experiment and philosophical inquiry”, but it’s a worthwhile literary exercise nonetheless. Most repetitions feel gratuitous, however, almost like Heti wanted to assert her authorship with fabricated mistakes. Nothing coming out of Microsoft fucking Excel could be a work of art. Of course, “I” is the longest chapter. Perec never sacrificed the story to the device, but i guess being compared to Perec was the point. QWERTY Diaries would be a great title for my memoirs. “Remember that each chapter must deliver some narrative or suspense satisfactions, so that things change from beginning to end, leading the reader forward so that they will want to finish the book”, she wrote, apparently not noting the irony of it. She has a teenage way of looking at life, and i don’t think it’s always a bad thing. There are moments of delightful coincidence, “give the reader everything, which is the opposite of the modernist thing of expecting the reader to put it all together, to fill in the gaps. Gives me vertigo just to think about it.”, but they’re the moments when i can feel Heti working. Upon finishing Alphabetical Diaries, i sighed a sigh of relief. Valuable as it may be as a literary curio, it was a tiresome and insipid read. When all is said and done, it kind of turned me off Heti. X marks the spot and she missed it. You can’t win them all. Zadie Smith is really charitable when she says that it’s “a future classic”.
Magazines
Cherry Bones. Cherry Bones is a delightful throwback to Longberry, the “occasional journal of coffee” published by former journalist Ben Szobody and barista extraordinaire James Hoffmann. It’s best described as a coffee-adjacent magazine: it does talk about coffee, but only in the context of the systematic exploitation of Burundi, the EU deforestation regulations, a Colombian festival built around Jeeps or that one time there was coffee in Monica’s Chemex. The fact that it’s printed on recycled coffee cups is, well, the cherry on the cake. Easily the best magazine i’ve read this year (and that’s including my own).
Music
Sky by Sky. I listened to a lot of John Williams when i was learning classical guitar, but i didn’t know that he was leading a prog rock band in the 1980s. Imagine my surprise when i found Sky in the bottom bins of my local record shop. Their debut album is gloriously of its time: “Westway” has more than a whiff of Supertramp vibes, their arrangement of the first Gymnopédie sounds straight out of The Legend of Zelda and “Where Opposites Meet” is a five-part epic that takes all of the B-side. I can’t help but love it.
Videos
“Mixtape” by Digging the Greats. Brandon Shaw from Digging the Greats is one of the finest content creators around. I love his deep dives into songs, but his iPod series hinted at something deeper. This something is “Mixtape”, a new four-part series about how cassette tapes changed the world, made in collaboration with Simon Adler from Radiolab. The production value is off the charts and the stories are fascinating.