Joel Dueck

I think often of this line from a Junip song:

where nothing is compromised
nothing is lost
when everything is realized
nothing is crossed

Looking back: when I’ve been angry, like really mad, it’s been a reliable signal that everything is not realized, that I’m missing something. That I’m about to do something stupid.

So I have a process: I try to look at all the angles, and then decide what feelings are actually going to help me deal. And when I follow this process honestly, I find that anger, even righteous anger, is just never on the menu of productive options. It’s not something I get to feel and then feel good about afterwards.

I’m a tall, straight, pale male; of course I’m going to have fewer real reasons to get het up than my ego might invent for me. I walk over the earth as I please, and I owe people the care it takes not to step on or hurt them.

I like to hope that ultimately, everything probably resolves: “when everything is realized / nothing is crossed.” Not in the sense that everything turns out right, but in the sense that if you had all the information, you couldn’t have written it any differently. That for every harm one person can do to another, there’s a missing twin of understanding out there somewhere that would take the poison out of it, if not the pain.

Not many people use Martina Plantijn. I came across it — I don’t remember when or how, and it was on my mind for months before I finally licensed it in December 2024. I didn’t know of anyone else using it at the time, but it’s such a good body font that surely it was in use lots of places.

Then at some point in summer of 2025, Frank #@!&ing Chimero switched to the same font for body text on his site. Miniscule pride! My own impeccable taste — validated! Frank, we should be pals.

Alongside pride, I admit to momentary… tiny …resentment? Because having good taste, and putting it to use in the things you make, is not enough to attract Signals of Interest from people you admire. No one will ever know or care that I beat Frank to a good font.

Anyhow, Frank has since switched fonts again, this time to… uh, Courier. I don’t think I’m quite cool enough to pull that off.

Write your content here.

[edit: oops. I created this post while recording a new YouTube demo for Camp. I forgot to delete it, and when I made an unrelated change the next day I accidentally published it. Now it’s appeared in feed readers and I think I have no choice but to leave it up. —Joel, Sep 21 2020]

I was rewatching the show Miss Fischer the other day. In the first episode, the maid Dorothy is so scared of this new-fangled electricity that she is terrified to pick up the telephone.

Miss Fischer

But don’t they [vacuum cleaners, washing machines] save you labor?

Dorothy

Yes, but at what cost, miss? My priest says it’s unnatural putting electricity through wires. Sooner or later, it will come in contact with the molten center of the earth and will blow up the whole world.

Dorothy is right about one thing. Electricity is dangerous. But it’s not dangerous in that way. It’s dangerous in much more mundane ways, ways that can be mitigated with boring things like codes, inspections, and licensing bureaus.

I can imagine a tweet from 1890:

I resigned from Westinghouse Electric Company today. I spent the last three years researching alternating current at both Thomas-Houston and Westinghouse. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to high-voltage arc lighting and gambling with our lives.

And…yeah. High-voltage overhead AC lines did kill people in New York. We had to figure out how to make them not do that, with policy choices and oversight. (Hopefully we can still do that kind of thing.)

I accidentally started another listen-through of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, one of my favorite books. Once again I am confronted with the weaknesses I share with the titular characters:

“Oh!” said Strange. “I think that the quicker one gets these things out of one’s brain and off to the printers, the better. I dare say, sir,” and he smiled at Mr. Norrell in a friendly manner, “that you find the same.”

Mr. Norrell, who had never yet got any thing successfully out of his brain and off to the printers, whose every attempt was still at some stage or other of revision, said nothing.

I am reminded how much I would like to see myself doing writing, not just making tools for writing and designs for writing. My tools are in good shape; I should start using them more often.

It’s tricky, from a design point of view, that the things I think I want to publish are sometimes an essay with a title, and sometimes a paragraph of something maybe just barely worth saying. But not having room for those little paragraphs means I’m losing some good stuff, and I rarely have time to do the essay thing in a way that’s up to my Norrelite standards. So I took some time to crack the design piece and I’m pretty happy with it.

I used to hate the word “blog”. I also used to be a prescriptivist.