October 29, 2001 — The joys of online typography

I spent the first part of my day working on making antigreg a bit better as far as typography is concerned. I spent several hours automating things so that apostrophes and proper opening and closing quotes are automatically inserted along with em dashes and en dashes.

What does this mean for the average reader, you ask? Well, if you look very closely, you’ll notice that the apostrophe in the “you’ll” that I just wrote is actually curled instead of being a straight line, and the quotation marks that I just used are proper opening and closing marks at the beginning and end of the word. The excitement doesn’t stop there, though — instead of the double hyphen that I used to use, you’ll notice that that em dash is one solid line!

Even if the best you can do is feign excitement, I’m actually a lot happier with things the way they are now as compared to a couple of weeks ago, before I removed some unnecessary indents and started using better punctuation. Things could still be better, but we’re getting there.

So let’s see. Only two things remain on my list of things to talk about in this journal entry: “good fake chicken” and “porno on the toilet.” I should’ve dragged out that talk of typography for a bit longer.

I guess we’ll start with the fake chicken.

As some of you know, I’m rather lacking in range when it comes to food. I eat the same things over and over, and only if they’re bland enough that a four year old would want more complicated food. But my mother gave me a $50 gift certificate at Loblaws, so I’ve no excuse for not buying decent foods, and I found these breaded fake meat “cutlets” that didn’t look all that bad.

Today I made one of them.

It wasn’t all that bad, really. They’re supposed to be chicken-like, and I guess they kind of are, but they don’t have that strong a taste. Which I’m all for. But the consistency is all wrong. So I just think of them as breaded protein slabs with a talent for tasting like plum sauce after being dipped in plum sauce. Which pretty much makes them the ideal food item for someone as picky as me.

After I finished eating them, I called my mother to tell her that I’d expanded my culinary palette. She was less proud than I thought she would be. But she said she’d send me the second Harry Potter book anyway, after I asked. What a mom.

Pfft. Segues. Let’s just dive straight into that “porno on the toilet” bit, shall we?

To give you a bit of background, Andrew has been taking pictures of people sitting on our toilet looking at porno magazines with their pants down and a shocked look on their face. Then they get taped onto the back of the bathroom door.

Today was the first day since I moved in that he’d had black-and-white film in his camera. So it was my day to sit down with a copy of Penthouse and to make goofy faces with my boxer shorts hiked up and my pants down.

Andrew took two pictures. I’m sure they’ll both end up on here whether I like it or not.

I still haven’t handed out any résumés. Andrew’s printer was out of black ink, which gave me a decent excuse, I guess, but I still need to get on that. On the weekend, Amy’s sister said that she could see me working at a bookstore. I thought this was a tiny bit strange since I’ve only spoken with her twice. Maybe I’ll give those a try before I apply at too many Blockbuster video locations, though, if it’s really that evident that I belong at a bookstore.

In either case, I’m going to buy an ink jet cartridge tomorrow, and I’m going to print out some résumés, and I’m going to start trying to convince myself that handing them out won’t be so bad. In reality, I shudder to think of asking to speak to the manager and I don’t know if I can deal with the rejection. We’ll see how it goes.