Still fully snow north of the Davenport escarpment! #dlws

Instead we have a provincial government making it easier to evict people, unable or unwilling to get enough housing built, and a federal government unwilling to properly fund refugee shelters and housing.

Purchased! Kobo Canada link for anyone like me: www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/...

Lots of languages, not just French!

My kid’s high school French class is reading chapters from a Québécois book, and there are no quotation marks at all though, just em dashes to mark dialogue.

I feel like English has become more consistent, but I’ve seen this style in older English books too.

I grew up in Vancouver but left 25+ years ago. I return regularly though, and I’ve loved seeing the recent rise of Salish names on signs. It’s beautiful to see Indigenous history newly respected. And yet it feels so alienating for so many of us—especially visitors—not to be able to read the names.

The Times also no longer uses Times New Roman. Their current typeface from 2006 is called Times Modern, also meant to work better on digital screens. frenchtype.com/Times-Modern 7/7

(And if you have no idea why I’m talking about all this, then congratulations, your Bluesky feed is purer than mine.)

In 2025, neither of these are great typefaces for documents! We have high resolution displays. Calibri looks a little crude now. Times New Roman looks downright archaic. Microsoft knows this. That’s why they made Aptos their new default typeface in 2023. 6/7

When Calibri replaced Times in 2006, it was designed both to look more contemporary, but also to work better on the digital screens of the era running Windows, with better font smoothing software, and a declining reliance on print. 5/7

It was also a reasonable choice for Microsoft in the early 1990s, an era of photocopied documents from inkjet and laser printers, with similar qualities to newspapers. The purpose of documents was to be printed, so they chose a typeface that worked well for that purpose. 4/7

One of the aims of both Plantin and Times New Roman was to look better on the newer coated paper of the era, where ink spread less than it used to. Older metal typefaces had started to look too wispy. The Times, the newspaper, wanted to update for modern times and better contrast. 3/7

“Roman” is a typographical reference to a style of lettering, but Times New Roman has no more connection to Ancient Rome than any other serif typeface.

In fact, “Times New Roman Italic” is a bit of an oxymoron, because type can either be a roman or an italic, not both! 2/7

Amazing! I knew I couldn’t be the only one.

I had to remind myself exactly what we just voted for, and once again winced about lowering taxes on private planes and fancy yachts. 😐

Relieved that Canada continues its tradition of having the least exciting outcome be the one that takes place.