I’m trying out a programming font, the free Sometype Mono. It avoids almost everything I hate about coding fonts, and beats out the previous champ Office Code Pro by not having an italic $ or five-lobed *. Set width is a bit narrower, but not as condensed as the same designer’s non-free Code Saver ($25 for 3 weights and matching italics, if you like squeezing a few extra columns into your windows). Specifically, an 80-column window of Office Code Pro will fit 83 of Sometype Mono, 86 of Code Saver, or 88 of my former standard Anonymous Pro.

I can get Code Saver through my Adobe CC subscription, but I’m going to start with the free one, since I’m setting up a new work laptop this weekend, and it won’t have an Adobe license.

Update

The Programming Fonts web site, which I hadn’t visited for a few years, includes Sometype Mono in its live previews, as well as an increasing number of cleanups of existing fonts to fix many of my complaints. The least-unreadable preview setting at the bottom is the base16-light color scheme and the None syntax coloring.

The SCU Complex and CZU Complex fires continue to threaten Silicon Valley from both sides, but while the evacuation zones have advanced, they still haven’t crossed 101 or 280 yet, and the fires were not visible from 101 when I drove up to San Jose yesterday (needed to show ID to prove I’m legally eligible for employment; the company’s using a remote service, but their location in Salinas was booked past my start date).

On the way home, I stopped off in Morgan Hill for Boar’s Head lunchmeat and a car wash, and not only was the car still clean today (apart from the paw-prints), late this afternoon the air quality index was back to a safe-and-healthy 25, so I was able to open up all the windows and air the place out.

According to AirNow, the sensor nearest to my house peaked at just over 200 on Saturday, but is down to 8 right now. By comparison, Mountain View was over 150 today, and is currently down to 62.

Adobe CC periodically removes downloaded fonts that it decides you’re not using… in Adobe CC. Using them in other applications doesn’t count, apparently. To get them back from the Clown, you can either completely deactivate the family, switch menus, and reactivate, or click the Clown-down icon for each and every font file that’s been removed.

In other news, Adobe will finally be abandoning support for Type 1 fonts in their product line in an upcoming release. In J-specific news, Adobe doesn’t include my go-to poster font Barmeno in their Clown, and it’s $300 from Berthold. I think I’ll try converting it with Fontforge first…

(Adobe disguises the location of their Clown font files, so to use them in my PDF::Cairo scripts, I have a Perl script that symlinks them into directories scanned by Fontconfig)

Yes, California is on fire. Mostly in the mountains right now, but the mandatory evacuation zones cover a lot of the highways leading out of the affected areas, so, y’know, leave now while you still can. The LA Times has a useful but graphically muddy map covering all the active fires.

The one nearest me, the River Fire, is mostly working its way through mountain areas that are very sparsely populated, with the exception of Carmel Valley. The perimeter doesn’t seem to have shifted much in that direction, so presumably that’s part of the ~10% they have contained. It’s not a threat to me at this time, apart from the smoke and ash; it would have to go through a lot of irrigated fields and the entire city of Salinas, which would admittedly suck.

The SCU Complex Fire (East Bay) is huge, prompting evacuations in parts of Fremont, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, etc, and is getting close to I-5 near Patterson. The evacuations are only advisory for Morgan Hill and Gilroy at the moment, according to this map. While the northwest edge is getting close to I-680, the southwest edge is still comfortably far from Highway 101.

The CZU Complex Fire (Santa Cruz Mountains) is currently completely uncontained and the mandatory evacuation zone now includes parts of Santa Cruz and all of Scotts Valley, as well as Highways 1, 9, and 17.

North of the Bay Area, Napa and Sonoma are threatened by the LNU Complex Fire, and west of that, the 13-4 Fire stretches from Highway 101 to the ocean, northwest of Santa Rosa. And there are a lot of smaller fires scattered around the state.

On the bright side, the heat wave that had the utilities threatening rolling outages has subsided somewhat, although the advice to open your windows at night when it’s cool is probably not being followed in most areas (coughcough).

After being exposed to the trailer, I skimmed the fan translations of the original web-novels of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, the upcoming isekai series about a girl and her bear suit. The web-novels were written chapter by chapter with no plan, which I presume was cleaned up for the print edition, currently up to 16 books. The author’s notes are sometimes more amusing than the story, which is the over-familiar “Japanese teen becomes ridiculously overpowered in a fantasy world”.

Judging by the book covers, Our Heroine’s hobby is loli-collecting.

Afternoon Update

At the present time, my neighborhood is not on fire, and is not predicted to be on fire any time soon. The wildfire that’s south of town is apparently moving further southeast into the mountains. This would be a good day to wear real masks, though, rather than the mandated sneezeguards.

Just Say No

MoveOn just spam-texted me to ask if I’ll be supporting Joe Biden, because (no shit, it really says this) “we deserve real leaders who govern for all of us – not just the wealthy few”.

Related, did anyone ask Billy Porter why he borrowed his DNC wardrobe from the set of The Hunger Games? Is he working on a Broadway musical version of it?

When October Goes

As I continue casting about for things to watch, I tried out Netflix’s October Faction. It’s a one-a-day sort of series that doesn’t binge well, and so far Deloris is the only character I find interesting. Also, while the twins are delivering lines written in comprehensible Japanese, the actors obviously don’t speak it. Their phonetic delivery reminds me a lot of Jack in Asobi Ni Iku Yo!. At least it didn’t remind me of this (Not Safe For Sanity).

This discussion of its non-renewal pretty much nailed it:

“For fans of the monster-of-the-week genre, you can think of it like Supernatural with a more stagnant setting and less charismatic leads.”

This rare moment of clarity doesn’t mean that every other article on Looper isn’t completely full of shit, of course.

Amusing connection: the actress playing mystery gal Alice was on an episode of Forever Knight.

Bullfight of Love

Completely unrelated, I happened to be listening to a mix of the top 100 songs in Japan from 1981, and Ai no Corrida is on it. I’m inclined to think that Quincy Jones kind of missed the point of the original movie.

Amusing note: one of the short pieces we went through in my Japanese group reading class mentioned filmmaker Ōshima and this film, and the teacher realized for the first time that the title included the Spanish word for “bullfight”. Difficulty: she has a PhD in Spanish literature.

By the way, that top-100 list also included Fame and Morning Train. And, yes, City Connection.

Lindsey Stirling has recorded a new theme song for the Azur Lane mobile game. Not terrible, but I hoped for better.

My favorite mobile game song is still Saori Hayama’s DanMemo theme, Lumière. And she has a new album coming out soon.

Meanwhile, the Act-Age manga series has been cancelled after the writer was arrested for not acting his age. I haven’t followed up to see precisely what the cameras showed him doing (or trying to do) to those two junior high school girls, but they reported him to the cops for it, and he was identifiable in the video.

Get out of jail free

According to the official daily numbers for my county, fully 25% of jail inmates have tested positive since they started covid-counting, with zero deaths.

Geofail

Engadget’s inline ads continue to think I’m located in Quincy, this time to shill for match.com. Pretty sure I don’t want to drive 300 miles to meet an available woman. Mostly because stories that begin that way often end with “found in shallow grave”. Also, not desperate.

9 to 5

With two weeks left to go before I start the new job, I’m trying to come up with a “workday routine”. It has, after all, been over four months since I had a “work day”.

Since I don’t have actual work to do yet, those portions of the routine will be devoted to things like tearing my home office apart and putting it back together in a way that looks good on Zoom. I believe the large framed photo of Carmen Berg in lingerie would invite unwanted attention from HR, and I should probably keep the sword rack out of sight for at least the first few weeks.

I’m thinking travel posters, Funko Pops, plushies, and the usual pile of obsolete computer hardware should work nicely. Maybe some camera gear.

Wide base to prevent loss

I parsed this image wrong at first. At least, I hope I did.