Stained-glass goggles • Joel Dueck

A couple of week ago, I took a tool made for sharing code snippets (Paste by Advent of Code founder Eric Wastl), and made a bunch of cosmetic changes to it to make it suitable for sharing poetry instead of code. The result, “Poest”, is a kind of web dingus that:

Uses a serif font instead of a monospaced coding font
Centers content horizontally based on the width of the longest line (again, read your Bringhurst)
Defaults to a light-on-dark color scheme

You can try it out here: https://otherjoel.github.io/poest/. Just type or paste in some text and use the buttons at the bottom to generate shareable links. It also works well as a poetic scratch pad, or a place to “typeset” text you want to screenshot: poems, maybe, or perhaps you’re being cancelled and need to give some kind of public statement, and you want it to be a bit classier than the Notes app on your phone.

This is a no-datastore service: nothing anyone enters there is stored on a server. Nothing is saved anywhere — until you generate a link, and then all the text you’ve entered is compressed and stored in the link itself. It’s quite a clever trick.

A word about poetry

I am not a fan of most poetry, or even of very much poetry. In general, I am wary of deploying it because of doubts about its cultural relevance, and how it might be received. “Poetry” — stanzas on deckled-edge paper, or whatever — is a species of dinosaur that has become culturally extinct, partly because of cataclysmic market forces, and partly because it evolved into other things like rap and memes. If I want to actually convey something, if I want to avoid posturing, poetry rarely feels to me like the right tool for the job.

But the handful of poems I do like, I really like. I like them so much I want everyone to read them. I don’t like them because they seem cool. I like them the way I like the music I turn up loud in the car by myself: because they just feel great. And you know how it is with music you like: you dream of the day you get the aux cord, of the mass mood when you invade a whole crowd with that mess and everyone gets on board. This is kind of a basic, degenerate impulse, but not a worthless one.

So I do, occasionally, want to share poetry. And I believe people should, if they have a poem they want to share, go ahead and share it the way we share memes (without getting hung up on copyright issues). This dingus is my practical expression of that belief, and a tool I have regularly wished for.

Punct has a customer

In September I was surprised and happy to see that Bogdan Popa had rewritten his personal website using Punct and Racket. This might be the only site out there using Punct besides my own, and I am stoked about it because Bogdan is already for some time now one of my favorite programmers to follow. Bogdan is an Ernest Hemingway level of programmer: his code is effective, economical, and attentive to detail, and yet creative. Personally I always find it a treat to read, and I always learn something from it. If you have ever been more then mildly curious about Punct, you will find examining the source code to his site very interesting. I found several ideas in it that I wish I had thought of. It might be cool at some point to do a live “office hours” tour of it on YouTube or Twitch. (Bogdan, if you’re reading this, sorry!)

Stained-glass goggles (a book recommendation)

When I was 13 or so, I used to ride my bike to Barnes and Noble and just camp out there for the day. On one such trip I found and bought a paperback book called Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique by Marc Drogin. I still have that copy of this book, and I still pull it out occasionally, even though it's been a long time since I held a calligraphy pen. It’s just what it says on the tin: a combination history book and calligraphy tutorial, and it’s really, really good at both, with lots of full-page facsimiles of manuscripts.

This book gives you a kind of niche superpower: the ability to look at a medieval manuscript and intuit how it was written, why it was written that way, and even, roughly, by whom. Once you can do this you might be surprised by how often it comes up. (Might.)

One of my favorite parts: a whole section on the history of Titivillus, the patron demon of scribes and calligraphers, who started by collecting transcription errors, and then got into the racket of causing them.

A Pollen book gig

About a year ago I designed a Pollen-based book/website for Jan Rutishauser, a comedian, slam poet and (now) writer from Switzerland. The book is Comedy Mindset, “a no-frills guide on how to write a joke and acquiring the mindset needed to become a comedy writer.” I provided only the design (no editing) and he was very happy with the result.

Jan was great to work with, and (not “but”!) he came into the project with fairly clear preferences and responses to the initial mockups. As you may be able to tell (and as he acknowledges), Jan is a fan of Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, and wanted a similar layout and navigation for his book. He was in many ways the ideal client: though not a programmer, willing to learn a new markup syntax and to tinker, and properly enamored of the ideals of web publishing. I had some additional work to do to make the site convenient for him to build on Windows, and to include facilities for multiple translations (he is currently working on the German edition of the book).

That’s all for now! More soon, but not sooner than a month from now. If you have anything to say or share, just reply to this email!

— Joel