Rabbit holes I fall into
I've had a weird month. Progesterone kicked my mental health in the teeth, and I've had schoolwork to contend with on top of it. I haven't had the spoons to write, I guess. But, I have had the spoons for rabbit holes, and there are two I keep falling into these last couple of months.
1. Keyboards
Every once in a while, I get caught up on keyboards. Not because there's anything wrong with my current one (an older SteelSeries Apex M500, with the gamer-girl wasd/space keycaps wearing off), but I'll just see a picture or article about a cool keyboard someone made, and start thinking about the ways standard keyboards are silly. This time around, it was the bayleaf:
So I went back to looking at ergonomic mechanical keyboards. Because it'd be fun to imagine what my ideal keyboard would look like, I guess. Maybe change the key layout to something like dvorak. Offset the space bar so I don't have to tilt my wrist to get my thumb on it. Homerow mods? the possibilities are endless.
The main thing that makes me mad about standard keyboard layouts is the left hand - the row stagger works fine for the right hand, but is awkward for the left; it doesn't make sense to me why our keyboards are shaped like this |\ /| when our hands approach them like this |/ \|. Ah well. I don't know that I'll ever actually take the leap to build out a custom ergo, but it's fun to fantasize about.
2. The font of my e-reader
Individual letters will bother me and take me out of a story when I'm reading on my ereader. For Times New Roman and related fonts, it's the letter e. I tried Century Schoolbook (well, TeX Gyre Schola actually) for a while, but the lowercase o sticks out like a sore thumb to me: it seems too small. I tried using Inter, my beloved font for all things on screen, but it's not as great for long-form reading, plus, after trying Atkinson Hyperlegible too, I think the ereader screen is sharp enough that a serif font makes more sense.
I was using Century Schoolbook because I like modern fonts with higher stroke contrast and ball terminals on the f and r characters, but I think they're just too spindly to read comfortably. I tried Ingeborg, but it was too ornate. After spending yet more time scrolling through the freely available fonts from google, I've started trying out geometric slab serifs - I put Arbutus Slab, Solway, and Sanchez on my kobo. Arbutus slab is cool, with the ball terminals I like, but it's a bit too weighty; Sanchez is too wide; but, Solway seems kind of nice. I'm reading Vonnegut's Galapagos in it right now. It hasn't announced itself as distractingly weird in any way yet.
So that's what I'm up to, how are you?