Omega Point

Catherine is not speaking at SL Pro!

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, I will not be speak­ing at the upcom­ing SL Pro! con­fer­ence this month. I had some recent ques­tions about that point, so I wanted to clear things up in case you were plan­ning on email­ing me:

• To say you are excited to hear I was speaking
• To ask ques­tions about why on earth I would speak at SL Pro!
• Express­ing sur­prise that I have been in Sec­ond Life at all in the past 2 years
• Telling me I have no busi­ness speak­ing about anything
• Com­plain­ing about a video you saw of me
• Com­plain­ing about LSL
• Com­plain­ing about a script I wrote in 2004
• Assert­ing that women who use com­put­ers or are lit­er­ate taint the purity of the Aryan race–yes, even women of colour–and that gays and les­bians should be arrested and sent to con­cen­tra­tion camps.

So yeah, I just wanted to clear that up.

Catherine’s Vancouver is growing

While hang­ing out at a Main Street cof­fee shop this after­noon, I over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion between a mom and her four-year-old.

“We can go out to the air­port,” the mom said as they were leaving.

“Oh, that’s a long drive!”

Yes. Yes it is. With the open­ing of the Canada Line now moved up to August 17th, less than two weeks away, it will actu­ally be quite a bit faster–for me, at least. The clos­est sta­tion is a 2km walk, bus, or bike ride away, but I expect door-to-door travel time to be much, much shorter than call­ing a cab.

It remains to be seen how well the exist­ing bus ser­vice will inte­grate with the new sta­tions, and if more fre­quent east-west buses will be needed to fun­nel Van­cou­ver res­i­dents into the Cam­bie Street cor­ri­dor. In any event, by open­ing early, Translink and InTran­sit BC will hope­fully have some extra time to work out many of the bugs before the old bus routes out of Rich­mond get discontinued.

I prob­a­bly won’t use the Canada Line much myself, still being closer to the Main Street bus myself. Since I tend not to go to Rich­mond or Oakridge Cen­tre much, I don’t see a lot of oppor­tu­nity to use it, but it would def­i­nitely make get­ting to Yale­town or Davie Street from my neigh­bour­hood much more convenient.

Plus, as has been pointed out to me by friends and drink­ing bud­dies alike, now that I’ll be attend­ing Lan­gara Col­lege, the 49th Avenue sta­tion makes it extremely con­ve­nient to blast down to Gas­town for a drink imme­di­ately after class. (Guys, you get that school isn’t 9–5, right?)

Still, this really does ham­mer home the point that for a pedes­trian and tran­sit user, the shape of our city really is defined by which buses go where. (Hint: they go down­town.) Per­son­ally, when I’m a pas­sen­ger in a friend’s car, I never think about tak­ing 12th Avenue to cut across town because there aren’t buses that go there.

These fas­ci­nat­ing travel-time maps of Great Britain effec­tively illus­trate what even a densely-populated coun­try like the United King­dom must con­tend with when mov­ing peo­ple and goods around.

Also inter­est­ing is the impli­ca­tion of what “cen­tral” means to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. This week, there’s been some dis­cus­sion over at the Van­cou­ver League of Dru­palers, of hav­ing some cowork­ing mee­tups to chat about Dru­pal projects we’ve been work­ing on, get some cod­ing down, and so forth. But where to actu­ally meet? The Grind at Main and King Edward? Sweet, I’m there. Waves in New West? Yeah, not as con­ve­nient. How­ever, if I lived right beside any Expo Line Sky­Train sta­tion in Van­cou­ver proper save for Sta­dium or Main Street, it would be faster to go all the way out to New West­min­ster, hands down.

For­tu­nately, hav­ing my spiffy new bike has opened up a lot of options too, par­tic­u­larly with the abil­ity to switch to tran­sit when I need it, now that all the buses have bike racks.

So far today, I’ve rid­den just under 8 kilo­me­tres to three out of four sched­uled errands. The last one will dou­ble that. I’ll spend most of it on the cross-town 10th Avenue bike route. In the end, I will have spent about the same amount of time on the road as I would have, had I dri­ven, if you fac­tor in park­ing. It’s pretty lib­er­at­ing, I have to say.

But hey, even if it isn’t some­thing that’s totally use­ful for me, a link to Rich­mond and the air­port was nec­es­sary. I wish dif­fer­ent choices had been made in con­struc­tion and plan­ning, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing we’ll be get­ting some use out of as a city. Plus, hey, Vancouver’s the first Cana­dian city with a sub­way link to the air­port. Go us.

Catherine Dyke Marches

Yes­ter­day, I kicked off my Pride week­end¹ here in Van­cou­ver by head­ing to Com­mer­cial Drive for the 6th Annual Van­cou­ver Dyke March.² Sweet.

I’ve writ­ten recently about why I like the Dyke March: its inclu­sive­ness, the sense of com­mu­nity, the cute girls… but mostly, it’s an oppor­tu­nity to feel nor­mal with­out being normalized.

Despite pop­u­lar rumours to the con­trary, Cather­ine Win­ters is not a com­bi­na­tion of Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn in Hack­ers and Kather­ine Moen­nig as Shane on The L Word. I’ve never been arrested by the FBI, I don’t bring a different–or even the same–girl home every night to my les­bian bach­e­lor pad, and I’m not the great­est pro­gram­mer ever. It’s true, I’m afraid.

In fact, I’ve only been in a styl­ized, cyber­punkesque sword fight at most three or four times. (I know, right?)

Still, while I may tend towards the femme/lipstick side of the scale these days, I’ve never exactly con­sid­ered myself par­tic­u­larly straight-acting–whatever that means. For some rea­son, some peo­ple are still sur­prised to learn I’m gay though. In a way, it’s actu­ally more irri­tat­ing than my baby dyke phase^[3] when I buzzed my hair and was assumed to be a les­bian by pretty much every­one I met. At least then, I knew where every­one stood.

In fact, after I decided that maybe being gay and tall didn’t nec­es­sar­ily imply “butch”, I didn’t actu­ally fig­ure out how to come out to any­one for a while. I hadn’t done it since I was a teenager and even today, I’m out of prac­tice. In fact, I still tend to assume every­one just knows at a glance. It’s always quite jar­ring to me when acquain­tances ask about boyfriends or expect some com­mis­er­a­tive ban­ter about men: “You know what guys are like!” “Um, sure!”

Some­times I don’t bother cor­rect­ing any­one, and I won­der at times, if that’s being dis­hon­est. Maybe. Then again, most of the time it isn’t rel­e­vant. What I’ve never become con­fi­dent about is my abil­ity to tell when it is.

As I pointed out to a friend over cof­fee recently, I hadn’t actu­ally ticked the “Inter­ested in Women” check­box on my Face­book pro­file until a few months ago. On the one hand, if we’re friends on Face­book, you prob­a­bly already know that about me. Still, what if you don’t? Almost nobody assumes “I don’t know” about people’s sex­ual orientation–that’s sim­ply not how our soci­ety works. Instead, we assume a default of “straight”. In the absence of that bit of infor­ma­tion, some­one would have an inac­cu­rate pic­ture of who I am.

So what’s the rest of that pic­ture? Well, I’m loyal to my friends. I like cof­fee. I’m into graphic design and web devel­op­ment and user inter­ac­tion and typog­ra­phy. I read a lot of nov­els and like rid­ing my bike. That’s what defines “Cather­ine”, not who I am–or am not–attracted to. That said, my sex­u­al­ity affects who I am in a sig­nif­i­cant way, just as my height does. I see the world dif­fer­ently as a les­bian than I would if I was straight.

I won­der at times if I’m putting too much of myself out there when I share my thoughts about this kind of uncer­tainty. My over­shares usu­ally involve bod­ily func­tions, so I can’t use my usual tricks to fig­ure out if this is get­ting too per­sonal. At the same time, it’s impos­si­ble for me to write about queer top­ics or events with­out get­ting into my per­sonal experience–and I do want to write about them.

So that said, how did the Dyke March go, anyway?

Good! Except it was really hot out. That’s def­i­nitely my least favourite part, hon­estly. I man­aged to escape with­out a huge sun­burn, thank­fully, but I still got more sun than I prefer.

I got to McSpad­den Park early and chat­ted with a few women before my friends arrived. By the time it was ready for us all to walk up Com­mer­cial, there were a thou­sand women clus­tered under the lim­ited shade pro­vided by the trees at the edges of the field. “No, you all have to come over here,” the emcee shouted into her megaphone.

Mable Elmore, cur­rently the Mem­ber of BC’s Leg­isla­tive Assem­bly for my rid­ing, LGBT and Fil­ipino com­mu­nity activist, tran­sit union orga­nizer, and for­merly my bus dri­ver, opened the march. When talk­ing with friends, I’ve been quite enthu­si­as­tic about her, (“You grew up in a big union town, huh, Cat?”) but sadly, we’ve never met.

The weird­est part of the day came at Grand­view Park once we’d arrived: some­one actu­ally rec­og­nized me. By reputation.

I finally found a friend and her “les­brar­i­ans” ban­ner, com­plete with Venn dia­gram indi­cat­ing the inter­sec­tion between “librar­i­ans” and “les­bians”. Frankly, I’m guess­ing her illus­tra­tion was con­ser­v­a­tive about the overlap.

She intro­duced me to a cou­ple of the other les­brar­i­ans: “And this is Cather­ine, the Dru­pal devel­oper I was telling you about!”

“Wow, Dru­pal!”

“Dru­pal!?” my friend said. “Pfft, Cather­ine also invented Sec­ond Life–”

That is not even close to being true,” I said.

“Sec­ond Life? Wait, Cather­ine Win­ters?”

Yes, seri­ously. It was the most impressed any­one has ever been with me. So that part was pretty rad.

As for pho­tos, no, I didn’t bother tak­ing my cam­era, and my iPhone is not well-suited for out­door shots in incred­i­bly bright direct sun­light. There aren’t many on Flickr either, as it hap­pens. I guess the crazy social media cir­cles I usu­ally run in haven’t totally spread to Vancouver’s les­bian com­mu­nity yet.

I know there plenty were pho­tos taken, mind you. While walk­ing up the Drive, my friend noticed a cou­ple dudes with fairly serious-looking video cameras.

“Wait, are we going to be on the news?” she asked.

I assured her I felt this to be extremely unlikely.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Well, the media tends to not be sure how to describe the event…”

“Hmm?”

“Well, ‘Dyke’ is kind of a slur…”

“Ha!”

True enough, there’s hun­dreds of sto­ries about Vancouver’s Pride Parade in Google News today and three about the Dyke March. So maybe next year.

[1] The rest of it will be spent being a tired old lady and going to bed at 9PM.

[2] Proof I can be wrong about things:

Girl: “Is this the first one they’ve had?“
Me: “No!“
Other Girl: “Like… the sec­ond?“
Me: “It’s the eighth, I think.“
Most Enger­getic Emcee Ever: “WELCOME TO THE SIXTH ANNUAL VANCOUVER DYKE MARCH!“
Them: “Ha!”

And then they kept men­tion­ing that! It’s like I have some kind of reputation.

[3] Dis­claimer: while I had a phase–and it was a phase for me–where I thought I had to iden­tify as butch in order to be a “real” les­bian, I do want to clar­ify that I’m not speak­ing of androg­y­nous or butch les­bians in gen­eral. This is strictly my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence of fig­ur­ing out my sex­ual iden­tity and the impli­ca­tions thereof. It took me a while to feel com­fort­able with the idea that I wasn’t betray­ing any­one by being true to myself. (And hey, I’m still com­pelled to write this foot­note, so maybe I’ll get there fully one day!)

Pride by any other name

As a quick aside, one argu­ment I’ve heard about the Gay Pride Parade recently is that if its pur­pose as an activism tool has ended in North Amer­ica, maybe it shouldn’t be called “Pride” any­more. Hon­estly though, we have vir­tu­ally no hol­i­days or tra­di­tions that make any sense when viewed from their orig­i­nal con­texts. Seri­ously, Guy Fawkes Day? Valentine’s day? April Fools’ Day? Look­ing for authen­tic­ity in hol­i­days is pretty futile, in my opin­ion. They are what we want them to be, and they’re sig­nif­i­cant because we cel­e­brated them last year and the year before that, not because our great-grandparents observed them exactly the same way as we do.

Frankly, in a thou­sand years, when Pride has become all mixed up with St Patrick’s Day and every­one car­ries a genet­i­cally engi­neered blue cucum­ber because that’s tra­di­tional, the ori­gin of the day’s name–whatever that may be by then–is just going to be a weird bit of trivia men­tioned on the news on years when they need hol­i­day filler.

So there.

Critical Pride

On his blog this morn­ing, Buzz Bishop posed the ques­tion: Are you proud of Pride?

In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sun­day is really the best way to demon­strate that gays are just like every­one else. This reminded me of another famil­iar argu­ment, about Crit­i­cal Mass: are 3000 peo­ple on bicy­cles block­ing com­muter traf­fic really help­ing the image of cyclists?

Hon­estly, Buzz does raise a good point, though it’s hardly a new argu­ment, going back to the exclu­sion of activists we would today con­sider to be trans­gen­dered in the imme­di­ate post-Stonewall era.

Still, as I wrote in Buzz’s com­ments, it’s a debate I feel is pretty well moot at this point. As of last week, it’s been four years since we for­mally enacted gay mar­riage nation­wide here in Canada, an anniver­sary that totally passed me by due to no men­tion what­so­ever in the media. Peo­ple don’t care.

At the same time, though, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Cana­di­ans are very cau­tious not to offend. At all. Ever. (We’re very passive-aggressive, though.) The prob­lem I have with this is that it’s fun­da­men­tally dis­hon­est. Frankly, as much as I like not hav­ing bot­tles hurled at my head should I choose to hold my girlfriend’s hand in down­town Van­cou­ver, it would be nice if peo­ple adver­tised their hate and intolerance.

“Cather­ine, stop blog­ging while drunk,” you might say.

No, I’m seri­ous. I want to know who to avoid. I want to know who’s trust­wor­thy and who’s biased against me. It may not be pop­u­larly accepted that we’re all prej­u­diced, but I’m sorry, we are. Frankly, humans are a bunch of xeno­pho­bic jerks. Our abil­ity to pigeon­hole “the other” is why, as I men­tioned to @_lisas on Twit­ter this morn­ing–in the course of explain­ing why I’m freaked out by birds of all things–there’s a sin­gle species of human sur­viv­ing today.

Everyone’s a lit­tle bit racist. Sure, we’re taught that it’s wrong, but I think this leads less to dis­cus­sion and edu­ca­tion, and more to big­ots becom­ing clos­eted themselves.

So… obvi­ously my friends are cool with it. Very few of the peo­ple I know are homo­pho­bic in the least. But I don’t date a lot. I haven’t had a girl­friend in… well, let’s just put it at “a while”. Very few peo­ple I know have seen me totally mak­ing out with girls. Doing so wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily pro­voke a homo­pho­bic reac­tion, more “Cat does PDAs? Since when?”

Would my land­lady be on board with my being gay? Prob­a­bly not, but it’s never come up. She’s con­tent to assume that my extreme height is what has pre­vented me meet­ing a suc­ces­sion of hor­ri­ble, chainsmok­ing boyfriends to bring home to the hottest 300 square foot apart­ment ever known to mankind. But at the same time, it’s not like I would bring boys there if I was into that sort of thing either.

Last year, I remem­ber her express­ing skep­ti­cism about Obama and his abil­ity to han­dle the finan­cial cri­sis, which I pre­sumed to be of the usual Cana­dian vari­ety: “Can you believe he doesn’t sup­port single-tier health­care!?” It turned out that, no, she liked McCain bet­ter. I had def­i­nitely never heard this view expressed by any­one in Van­cou­ver. I real­ize I’m stereo­typ­ing, but there is a bit of a cor­re­la­tion there.

The major­ity of Cana­di­ans are in favour of gay mar­riage, with an over­whelm­ing major­ity at least being on board with some sort of “sep­a­rate but equal” equiv­a­lent. The most con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment of my life­time has stated the mat­ter is set­tled. That may be debat­able, but it’s just not some­thing we’re spend­ing time on.

At the same time as this was going on at Buzz’s blog, there was a con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring on my Twit­ter feed about the VPD advi­sory regard­ing the esti­mated 3000 cyclists par­tic­i­pat­ing in this month’s Crit­i­cal Mass. (Mind you, I’m highly skep­ti­cal about the like­li­hood that so many peo­ple will brave 30° Cel­sius weather just to irri­tate com­muters and climb up on top of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.) Still, the eter­nal “yay, Crit­i­cal Mass”/“stop being ass­holes” debate rages on.

You know what? I sup­port the Bur­rard Bridge bicy­cle lane project — which seems to be work­ing out just fine at this point. (I do agree with Van­cou­ver City Coun­cil mem­ber Andrea Reimer, how­ever: “Enough about the Bur­rard Bridge.”) I sup­port the con­struc­tion of increased cycling and tran­sit infra­struc­ture. We need bil­lions of dol­lars more for tran­sit and mil­lions more to improve bike lanes.

But is Crit­i­cal Mass the way to con­vince other peo­ple to get on board with this plan, nec­es­sar­ily? Yeah, prob­a­bly not. I actu­ally do under­stand the “now dri­vers know how we feel!” argu­ment. But, dude? No they don’t. Now they hate cyclists even more. And the dri­vers who didn’t ever con­sider cyclists much? Yeah, they remem­ber that it took them two hours to make their 20-minute com­mute home after a long week.

And ulti­mately, this acts against my inter­ests as a cyclist.

At the same time, Crit­i­cal Mass looks like a lot of fun. It’s just fun at the expense of other people’s day. And I’m a staunch believer in the idea that we’re all enti­tled to do what­ever we want until such time as what we want inter­feres with oth­ers’ abil­ity to do what they want. Also, sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

So how do I pair my this with my moral out­rage towards post-Stonewall activists fight­ing for “straight-acting” gay and les­bian rights 30 years ago, or my posi­tion that it was was wrong and ulti­mately self-defeating to delib­er­ately exclude the rest of the LGBT community?

I don’t know. I’m judg­ing his­tory from the per­spec­tive of some­one who didn’t live through it, who just inher­ited the world activists worked towards a gen­er­a­tion ago. And frankly, that’s dan­ger­ous. Today, it may seem obvi­ous that includ­ing bisex­u­als, effem­i­nate men, butches and trans­gen­dered peo­ple has always been the right thing to do, but I have to con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that I can even assert that posi­tion today because of the fact that they were effec­tively booted out of the move­ment decades ear­lier. Which is actu­ally really depressing.

So, would a 21st-Century-style Pride parade and LGBT move­ment have flown in the early 1970s? The spec­ta­tors and par­tic­i­pants def­i­nitely wouldn’t have been the same, but the fact of the mat­ter is, if you think The Queers are doing things to the soil, nobody’s going to con­vince you oth­er­wise with a float cov­ered in incred­i­bly ripped guys wear­ing thongs.

So maybe that’s not what Pride’s for any­more. Maybe it’s just a party. As Buzz’s com­menter Eter­nal­Cana­dian points out, hon­estly, what’s the dif­fer­ence between Pride and Mardi Gras or Carib­ana?

Edit: Also see Crit­i­cal Pride Part 2: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Blogathon 2009: WordPress, WordPress, Wordpress!

This is what hap­pens when you spend all day at Blogathon:

• “Cather­ine, do you want any­thing?“
  “No, I’ll get some­thing upstairs at Word­Press.“
  ”…what?”
• “Raul, is that your phone?“
  “No, it’s WordPress’–WordCamp–Work. Space. It’s Workspace’s phone.”

Blogathon 2009: In which Catherine is now a cyclist for some reason

So I’ve men­tioned this here a few times, but haven’t gone into huge amounts of detail: I have a bicy­cle again!

It’s a Kuwahara-built Apollo road bike, with a 62cm frame with double-butted Tange 900 chro­moly steel tubes. From 1984, if the ser­ial num­ber is accu­rate at all. I bought the frame sep­a­rately, though it came with the orig­i­nal seat, stem and a pair of ter­ri­ble, out-of-true wheels that were still good enough to walk it home from Rich­mond.^[1]

It had orig­i­nally been intended to be con­verted into a fixie, which is why a lot of the other orig­i­nal parts were absent. As it turned out, the rider for which it had orig­i­nally been intended was way too short for it. (Read: under 6 feet tall.)

Because of this, the woman I bought it from was extremely care­ful to be clear just what I was buy­ing when I talked to her on the phone.

“You know this is just the frame, right?“
“Yeah, it’s cool.“
“And you get how big it is, right?”

Just right, as it turns out!

I assem­bled it myself with help from the folks at Our Com­mu­nity Bikes on Main Street a few weeks ago. It’s a 62cm frame with double-butted Tange 900 chro­moly steel tubes.^[2] From 1984, if the ser­ial num­ber is accu­rate at all.

I opted for a some­what lamer braking/gears arrange­ment than is tra­di­tional in Mount Pleas­ant. In short: I actu­ally have them. And it’s a good thing too; I may be stronger now than I’ve ever been, but there’s no way I’m mak­ing it up Vancouver’s hills on a fixed-gear bike. ^[3]

It’s got a Shi­mano 105 crank, with func­tional but bor­ing brakes and Sun­tour shifters and derailleurs. So it’s kind of a beast, but the orig­i­nal parts it still has are in great shape.

Sadly, jog­ging seems to be just too hard on my knees, but cycling 8-10km a day is work­ing out just fine. I mean, I made it here, right?

[1] On the way home with my new bike, I man­aged to find the sole Amer­i­can tourist cou­ple tak­ing the 98 B-line and tell them hor­ror sto­ries about the Down­town East­side and Lower Mainland’s lit­tle drug war. Maybe I should be send­ing my resume to Tourism BC.

[2] And I know what that means now!

[3] Still, I like it, even if I’m not allowed to go to Gene anymore.

Blogathon 2009: Refueling

Ahh, deli­cious, deli­cious food. Cour­te­ously donated by Dairy Queen, as it hap­pens. They just deliv­ered it so we’re cur­rently all chow­ing down. A few peo­ple here raised the point ear­lier that 6am-6am is a pretty dif­fi­cult sched­ule to keep, and I def­i­nitely agree with that. I usu­ally like to eat lunch 3–4 hours after wak­ing up; Today? About seven hours.

For­tu­nately, I’m feel­ing my blog­ging pow­ers com­ing back and I recon­fig­ured my desk here at Workspace.

I brought along my track­ball and clicky Apple key­board^[1] for use when my fin­gers became just too sleepy, so I’m good to go there. I’ve boosted my lap­top up on some ASP pro­gram­ming books, because, well… insert elit­ist state­ment here, baby.

Dairy Queen wasn’t the only orga­ni­za­tion to have brought us good­ies, either. The BC SPCA dropped off a bunch of water bot­tles and a bor­der col­lie to enter­tain us, and the BC Can­cer Foun­da­tion has a bunch of chips wait­ing for us on the table. Cool!

[1] In my gym bag, hang­ing off the hous­ing for my rear brake han­dle on my drop bars. Nah, I don’t need pan­niers here.

Blogathon 2009: To WordTwit or not to WordTwit?

So I hadn’t tweeted announce­ments of my Blo­gathon blog posts for fear of totally spam­ming the hell out of my Twit­ter, but every­one else seems to be doing it — and in fact, are sur­prised that I’m not. So what the heck, let’s do this.

I’m told WordTwit is the “dear Twit­ter: I posted on my blog” Word­press plu­gin of choice, and it’s cer­tainly highly rated enough! I hadn’t real­ized it was code­vel­oped by fel­low Blo­gathon Vancouver-er Duane Storey, but that just means I can huck some­thing across the room at him if I need help, right?

I def­i­nitely like that installing plu­g­ins on Word­press is a lot quicker and eas­ier than installing mod­ules on Dru­pal. The two are apples and oranges, really, but it sure is a pleas­ant change.

So it’s installed, acti­vated, and now I just have to turn it on. Aaaaand, done. Neat.

One handy fea­ture is that it can option­ally use your own server as a URL short­erner ser­vice rather than some­thing like bit.ly or TinyURL. Sadly, “catherineomega.com” is not exactly short.

While I was writ­ing this post, Karen Fung brought up a good point: how to include the #blo­gathon hash­tag at the end of the tweet?

Sim­ple: in the Set­tings panel, you can just set the string, with escape codes for [title] and [link]. (Guess which one does what?)

Just add your hash­tags wher­ever you like.

So the whole thing is pretty pain-free, frankly. Now let’s see if this tweets any­one when I pub­lish it.

Edit: Yes, yes it does.

Blogathon 2009: The Typography of Idiocracy

So I’m a giant typog­ra­phy nerd, as any of my friends can attest:

Me: “Hey, a friend of a friend designed the font they’re using in that logo!“
Every sin­gle other per­son I know: “Yeah, that’s super, Catherine.”

As such, I enjoyed this analy­sis of the fonts and brand­ing fea­tured in Mike Judge’s 2007 eugeni­cist cult favourite Idiocracy.

“Haulin’ Ass, Get­ting Paid”: finally, the reli­gious right and “sep­a­ra­tion of church and state” peo­ple can agree on a slo­gan to print on currency.

A quick syn­op­sis of Idioc­racy: stu­pid peo­ple out­breed the yup­pies and nerds. Con­se­quently, the aver­age IQ drops steadily. 500 years later… FOX News employs sex­u­al­ized mod­els as anchors, all enter­tain­ment is lowest-common denom­i­na­tor, and cloth­ing is cov­ered with cor­po­rate logos. Er, wait a minute…

So the joke runs out pretty quickly, but it’s still an enter­tain­ing movie, if only for the sets and one-liners: “You went to law school at Costco!?”

Ahh, Star­bucks, home of Exotic Cof­fee for Men.

Any­way, I ref­er­enced Vancouver’s own typog­ra­pher Ray Lara­bie above because many of the design choices in Idioc­racy look like his 1990s free fonts. Which is kinda cool, actually.

You should read the review, Idio­cratic Design at Under­Con­sid­er­a­tion now!