The Sign Obscured by Tufted Vetch
Sometimes I sit down to write these updates and I look at my commit log and think, “what in the world am I doing?”
Notes
Building on the last update, links to draft notes now come with a little inline sticker. (I dislike the name “badge” and I’m not sure I understand why.) In the feed, the sticker text is prepended to the link. I’m hoping this does two things:
- Offers a hint as to why the link is differentiated
- Differentiates the link with something other than just color
Because there is no one to stop me, there’s now another broad category of differentiated links for notes that I’m unsure about, or still learning about. These links are green.
Between these two broad categories—notes that are incomplete, and notes that I’m unsure about—I hope this lets me publish notes that aren’t perfect, that need work, that are the result of something I’m in the middle of figuring out and don’t have the answers to.
Some people call this sort of thing “epistemic disclosure (external link).” That sure is a thing you could call it.
To make this easier on my end, transcluding snippets will now copy tags from the snippet to the note, so I can add the callout explanation and attach the right tags in one step.
Colors
All of that color-as-a-hint work has required some rationalization of the way colors are specified. Building this out has been frustratingly manual, partly because the tools for creating color systems make a lot of sRGB assumptions.
The light mode colors need another pass, I think.
Type
The header navigation is set in a new typeface, Archivo.
It was previously set in DM Mono, which I’m still using on the front page of the site. I imagined it as something used in a workshop, maybe light industry, something that is simultaneously practical or technical (monospaced) yet not obviously reading as either code or typewriter.
A monospaced type means monospaced advances, not consistent spacing between glyphs, and compromises are made to fit letterforms into those advances. With longer runs of text, the grid becomes visible, and the typeface makes sense as a whole. But when you have just a few letters, the reader may see the compromises instead.
It also didn’t help that my navigation header has a bit of positive tracking, which further obscured the base spacing.
So I’m instead trying Archivo, a proportional typeface that takes its cues from late nineteenth century grotesques. I like the idea of adding editorial to my list of keywords.
- Notes
- Zelda’s Puzzle Box Dungeons Require Global Spatial Thinking
- Learning Sample Rules Without Replacement to Avoid Repetitive Procgen
- Drawing the Same Item More Than Once is Surprisingly Likely
- Learning Notes C# Notes
- Learning Notes SageMath Notes
- Draft Tag Stickers
- Updated: Draft Diplograph’s Colors
- Heavy Rotation
- That! Feels Good! by Jessie Ware (especially “Begin Again”)
- Moogmentum by Lisa Bella Donna