I'm in the process of moving, which means that I'm sorting through scraps of paper that accumulated in my office. Some of these are short ideas which I kept because I'm fond of them. Rather than throw them away or retain them as clutter in the new office, I'm sticking a pin in them by posting them here.

It's as if, every time someone drew a picture of their father, they drew Ronald McDonald without realizing that there were other options.

Years ago, I was thinking about writing a paper about the then-ubiquitous computer font Comic Sans. I was not going to complain that it's ugly, because some people have bad taste and so disagree. Instead, I was going to argue that Comic Sans reflected a kind of alienation. People use a standard font like Times or Helvetica when they want to be serious and official. When they use a handwriting font or something else non-standard, they mean to be injective levity and personality into the thing they're typing up. But Comic Sans, precisely because it's ubiquitous, is not personal or expressive at all.

The invitation to Das Man's birthday party is written in Comic Sans.

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the philosophical foofaraw of P.D. Magnus - Page Generated in 0.1475 seconds