I'll tumbl For Ya

In celebration of my new work situation in San Francisco, and to stave off the morass of bleakness and political despair on certain other face-twittery social media, I've been taking more digital snapshots lately and posting on Instagram. I'm not entirely sure that those pics are open to the world, though, at least without me doing more work. We're all playing in walled gardens with WiFi these days, and I prefer to lounge in gardens, not work.

Yahoo seems to have buttoned up access to Flickr after their multiple catastrophic password-hack issues, thus breaking my former Instragram-to-flickr backup. Now I've set up a new tumblr, and re-re-posted some of my favorite shots there. The weirdness of one Yahoo property working while another one fails is not lost on me.

If you like looking at square pictures of things, especially abstract forms in urban settings, you could do worse than click over:

https://mpclemens.tumblr.com

So far it's just a visual record. I still like Clickthing as an outlet for verbiage, sporadic as it is.

If you want to hear what I think, pop in here every now and then. If you want to see tiny windows on my part of the world, tumble over to tumblr. No harm or offense taken if you want neither. :-)

EDIT: and just like that, Instagram -> Tumblr is broken, too. What the actual hell, Yahoo? Get your house in order.

Epoca Hunters: I Hear You

I like to dig around in the blog settings and look for how people are finding the site (and obsessively over-analyze which posts are getting viewed.) Lately the this search phrase keeps popping up.

hermes 3000 epoca font

I do have a 3000 with that typeface, but it's suffering from lighter top-halves of letters, which I think indicates that the platen diameter has shrunk narrower than the curvature of the slug faces.

Anyhow, someone is interested in it, and maybe you want to make a computer font of it? If so, have at it. I've uploaded a scan of the characters from my machine into my Google Drive which you should feel free to fontify or ogle or pity, persons-who-are-finding-the-blog.

Typospherians: if anyone has tips for getting better letter impressions, I'm open to ideas. These were typed by running about five sheets of paper through the machine at once -- there's little improvement over past examples of the machine in use. I know about recovering the platen, and that may ultimately need to happen when budget allows, and I'm willing to stare into the madness that is the Hermes line-spacing mechanism.

Prepared with the help of my otherwise-awesome 1958 Hermes 3000

A New Blog With Which To Waste Your Time

Hello all, just a brief word of shameless self-promotion. After picking up the name and then ignoring it, I'm finally getting off my duff and trying to start dumping a little content into a new blog:

http://typosphere.blogspot.com

I have no Grand Plans yet, but first order of business is to try and put together a map of where all the fine typecasting folks are located. I think the typosphere community has really boomed as of late, and I'd like to see this evolve into some kind of community blog, for general notes-of-interest -- type-in announcements, for instance, when I forget just which of the many Washington-based bloggers is hosting one, and when and where. As the community grows even bigger, I'm imagining some kind of virtual kiosk that we can all contribute to, beyond our own personal blogs. This is just a silly little side-project, and should in no way be construed as a power-grab, or some kind of mandatory administrative thing with Committees and Dues and Rules.

In other words, one of these:


by Jeffrey Beall

not one of these:


by Frozen Grapes

Thanks everyone.

Typecaster reminder: "Anablogger Archives"

The typosphere has gotten pretty big this year, so it might be time to throw out this reminder/offer again. If you (like me) use flickr to host the images for your blog, and if you (like me) are not currently paying for their "pro" service, you will notice that only the most recent 200 photos of your stream are available for casual browsing, among other service limitations. If you dump your images into a group, however, it's possible to go to that group's page and search for items submitted by you, no matter how far back in your stream they are.

I set up a dedicated members-only group specifically for typecasters, pencasters, typewriter nuts, etc. to use as a repository for their blogging goodness. It is:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/anablogger_archives/

The rules are simple: while logged in to flickr, send my account a flickr-mail with the URL of your blog. I'll check it out, and if it looks like "our kind of thing" I'll add you as a group member. Ask to join without a URL, and I'll ignore you. I'm trying to keep the group closed to folks who just sign up for as many as they can as a means of self-promotion. Flickr appears to not have any limitations on the total size of your account, but again, free accounts are limited to the total size of uploads per month -- the counter resets at the start of each month. You're also able to set rights for your images (I use Creative Commons) if you're so inclined. However, if you're hosting on Blogger of Photobucket, there is a total space allotment. It's something to consider.

More Drawing Details

Looks like the comments are slowly starting to trickle down, so I'll put a deadline on this thing. You have until Sunday August 15 to enter your comment on the giveaway topic. I will lock the topic to new comments at that point (publishing any that are still waiting) and then start the drawing/notification process. I'll announce winners in a new post.

Since Blogger makes it tricky to get in touch with you directly through your comments, I'm going to have the winners post their email address to a new topic so we can sort out shipment. I will not share the email address with anyone and will delete the comment once we've communicated. I'll do my best to get in touch with you, but if I get no response, then all the winners get moved "up" a notch and I'll draw a new winner. I'll keep going until I have four confirmed people to ship things out to. So even if you don't win right away, be patient. You might win in the end. This would be a good time to do a rain-dance wishing ill on your fellow commenters (not that I would suggest such a thing.)

If this whole process goes to pot, then I may just get sulky and keep it all! So please be sure to check back here starting on Monday August 16 to see who won, and thus who should be the focus of your broken-email-juju.

Wow

So... I guess there's just a few people interested in the Webbie. Glad to see it! Just a reminder to everyone that I have comments moderation turned on for the blog, as I'm a regular target of soft-core porn spammers. If you happen to double-post because you didn't know this, it's OK: I'll clean out the duplicate before the drawing. But you may have to wait a bit for me to get to the moderation screen to let your posts through. (Yes, spammers have hit the giveaway, too.)

Edit: I've figured out a way for winners to get in touch with me after the drawing. I'll start a "winner's circle" post when the time comes, and have winners post there privately for verification.

There's still time to enter! And don't forget to enter on the other blogs with giveaways, too: see Rhodia Drive for links.