STay dry and stay safe.
Looks as if Lane is veering…and weakening. One hopes.
by CJ | Aug 25, 2018 | Journal | 16 comments
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We seem to have come through all right here. The Big Island got the brunt of it, with heavy rains augmented by moisture coming up from the windward side of the island; lots of flooding and landslides. For the last 3 days, Lane more or less slowed to a crawl, then fizzled, dropping from major hurricane to tropical storm in that time. We are still having some rain and wind, and parts of Maui have had mudslides (especially the road to Hana), but nothing outrageous. WE had reports of a tornado in Lahaina.
The worst part was the brush fires both on Maui and Oahu; the wind we were getting whipped them on, and the helicopters which usually would bomb them with water couldn’t take off. There was also a rumor that as the hurricane approached, a couple of idiots on dirt bikes were setting the fires in the old cane fields by Lahaina; there are a number of people who would like to File Intent on them if that is true.
Good to hear that you are managing tolerably well, Chondrite! I and I’m certain others have been thinking about you and this storm.
Justifiably!
Good to hear you’re safe!
Its path was wierd! Like heading west out alone in the ocean it said to itself, “Oh, look! There’s Hawaii. Everybody visits Hawaii. I want to go!” So it took a hard right and veered toward the Big Island, then veered hard left again so’s it could take in all the islands before heading west again.
Waiting to hear from my friends on the Big Island, the Hwy to their home is closed and the Saddle Rd to work is closed, what a mess, so much rain. And we here in the Inland Northwest are celebrating a short shot of water here dampening the earth hopefully enough the wildfire season can end now and the smoke can go away.
My daughter, Nyssa (she came with us to the first ShejiCon) is living in Hawaii and said the storm disintegrated and never hit their island. They are happy and relieved.
Whew! — Hurricanes can do _weird_ things, like hairpin turns or S-curves, just to make it extra unsure where they’re going to make landfall. They can, at times, turn back out to sea and wobble. Or they can fizzle out. — I’d guess that the Hawaiian Islands’ underwater geography makes for a strange obstacle for a Pacific storm: very tall, spiky underwater “mountains” whose peaks, ah, peek out of the water. (Oh, the pun was too tempting once it got started, sorry….) I’d guess it acts like a wall or a gate, towards whatever’s headed there. — Best Wishes to folks in Hawaii. Our hurricane season here is still not quite over. Until last year, I would’ve said our chances taper off once we get to September, but I’m not sure how true that is now. — So, keep safe out there, everyone.
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Last week and this have so far been frustrating on the type design front. Let’s say a draft to try something did not work out nearly so well as planned, and I ended up scrapping it. However, it did teach me a little, so it wasn’t a total loss. I learned a bit more of how to do things and what not to do.
Miriam is half way to Hawaii, but it should turn north and dissipate; Norman should be a storm in a day or two, and Olivia soon after. They’re making it humid in SoCal, but better that than the Gulf Coast gets hit with a Hurricane.
When ENSO–El Niño Southern Oscillation–flips, those hurricanes will be back in the Atlantic and Caribbean, but at the rate they’ve been forming south of Baja, I’m cautiously optimistic you’re safe for some time.
And we got our first rain since it feels like forever. It helped with the fires, and we actually see blue sky here and there.
We had at least a little, maybe more, rain last night and the night before. This is good. — Glad the NW got some rain to combat fires and generally murky air quality.
Current status: brain is mush. Worked on fonts yesterday for too long, and woke early again today (typical lately, insomnia as usual) and so I’ve put in about 6 hrs, minus breakfast, and need a break. Something funny: didn’t like how a draft was working, so I scrapped it and did something else, which was converging on a rough draft from earlier in the month, but in a bolder weight. Huh. So I compared the two and decided, yup, if I reconcile the best features from the two, I have the start of two weights. Ambitious. Still have to finish reconciling them and I need a good name, instead of the ho-hum, so-so name they have now. I think I can get at least one bolder weight, so ultimately four or five weights, at least three. So I’m taking a break and then back to it, while my brain thinks over which way to go with the look of the two drafts, so they unify.
@CJ — The font-family might take a Greek name to do with stone inscription carving or statuary, or something related to the sea or dolphins. The draft is a “glyphic” or “lapidary” style, somewhat like Optima or Friz Quadrata or the old Trajan capitals model, also known as a “flare serif,” and another branch of fonts have sometimes used “Hellenistic” names, such as Ionian, Doric, Attican, Spartan, and so on. Delphin and Orpheus are taken. (I’m considering Phidias as a name for something else, but related, was there any known Greek female sculptor? I might swap the Phidias name with that and use Phidias for this.) I’ll continue thinking on it, but ideas would be welcome and might spur something else.
From ancient Greek statuary, maybe kore or kouros, the female and male Archaic sculptural types? Or the types of marble used, such as Naxos, Pentelic or Parian?
All done and dusted, how’d you guys come out?
Same here. The brushfires were the worst part of everything here on Maui; Lahainaluna school, the oldest school west of the Rockies, nearly burned and only heroic efforts of the firefighters (many of which are alum!) kept it from being more than singed. The landslides around the Hana end of things have mostly been cleared. We came off only lightly damaged, with no hard rain and slightly heavy winds.
I’m not sure if Kore or Kouros would work there; I’ll mull those over. (There’s a South Korean font foundry called S-Core.) Naxos might work; I’ll need to double-check for font names already taken. Pentelic is too close to Pentalic, a company that made or makes calligraphy pen nibs and ink, if they’re still around. (That may be a Speedball brand name, come to think of it; not a company.) Parian looks close to Parisian to me, so I’m discounting it.
However, that might give me a couple of directions to look toward.
(I have a made-up word for another font-family, and hope no one stumbles on it. Heh.)
Tests show me that what I’d thought would be the extra-bold weight is really just bold, so there’s room to fit another one or two bolder weights. The lighter weight is a bit too light for a regular book weight to suit me, but by my plan, I’d have to put another weight in between that and the semi-bold weight to do what I want, which, if I go for completeness, gives me a seven or nine weight family, which I was trying to avoid. Yet that’s the big thing nowadays, to provide a wide range of weights to suit designers (or make more money for the font designer and vendor, heh).
I’ve been working well on that bold weight, but still need to go back to the light weight to reconcile the two so they’re a consistent look across the family. — But so far, so good. This is shaping up nicely for the basic character set. I still have several of the “lower ASCII” (the basic characters you get from your computer keyboard), and then the upper range of the old “extended ASCII” (what most fonts have for Windows or Macintosh). From there is the daunting work of extending it to the full Latin-based range, and adding Greek and Cyrillic, which IMHO, I might as well do, in part for the fun of doing those, and because they’re similar in so many ways. — I may have the lower and upper ASCII done in a first draft for the bold weight by the end of the week. I know I can’t get the light weight reconciled too by then.
Still unsure how long to get a satisfactory, complete font-weight/style done, and a complete family done. But working towards this for this font-family, and I’m sure I’ll fiddle with other drafts/ideas which have been in progress or on the back burner. — I still have to learn how to do some of the advanced features I want to put in a font like this, to cover “stylistic variants,” and a few other fancy things.
I would love it if my word processor were OpenType-savvy for things like the true, drawn small caps that come in some good fonts, but alas, no, it still is not and may never be. (Nearly every word processor out there does “scaled” small caps because many fonts don’t come with true, drawn ones pre-made.)
I’m encouraged, but also have got to get a more workable plan, so I stick with it and get a font-family completed and out the door for sale to the public, to get my income improved.
Happy with what I’ve got going, and happy with several draft ideas that have been sitting there in various stages of completion, worked on periodically in a sort of Round Robin or “Red Rover, won’t you come over?” fashion.
However, I see I’m learning as I go, and gaining some confidence again in how I’m doing these. I’m also loosening up again a little, which is better. — Still have to put in some time to teach myself Inkscape. I still do not want to bite the bullet and have a $20 to $30 monthly subscription for Adobe Illustrator or some version of their Creative Suite, which _starts_ at that price and adds as you go, and which, woe be unto thee if thou makes not a payment, or if thy bank skips it through no fault of thine, for thou shalt most surely have wailing and gnashing of teeth, because thy data files shall then become as useless as the chaff or the dried straw, for Adobe hath not mercy; and with their subscription, thy access to their programs and to the data files thou greatest with them, are held hostage to that monthly subscription. They’ve been doing that now for many years, unlike the old way where thou couldest buy a suite, and then upgrade at thy pleasure when thy coin purse was full to overflowing. Alas and Alack! (Oh, dear, I seem to have become stuck in “thou” mode….) 😉
Ooh! Hey, thunder, we’re about to have rain again!
Another brush fire popped up, next to a paintball field that some of our friends frequent. The firefighters came out in force, smacked down the fire, and the field owner comped all of them a day’s play for saving the field. Today all the firefighters are playing for free.
Still no public comment on whether there actually were arsonists at work during the hurricane. At least seven houses burned, and last report 55 people had been rendered homeless. One hopes that if there were firebugs, karma gets them!