Ben Mitchell

This is starting to get like universal basic income where every single objective study shows the same result but the people who don't like that result go "uh, well there's just really no way to know"

Disappointing to see Google Translate thinks 'Myanmar' is a language. Myanmar/Burma is a country, home to over a hundred languages. One of those languages, the official language, is Burmese, but it's incorrect to call it anything but Burmese because it is the language of the Burman people.

Entirely predictable…

recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best. It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.

it’s come to my attention that my tumblr post has been crossposted to bluesky, so I’m posting it on my account here #AntiAI #GenAI

Futura 100 Myanmar's glyph set for Asho language, in six weights.

Futura 100 Myanmar's glyph set for Western Pwo language, in six weights.

Futura 100 Myanmar now supports Asho and Western Pwo, in addition to Burmese, Eastern Pwo, Mon, Palaung, Pa'O, S'gaw and Shan.
☞ www.type-together.com/futura100-my...

Selection of books: The Book of Fallen Trees by Marcus Attwater The Garden of Delights by Amal Singh Silver in the Wood by Emily Test The Owl Men of Shanidar by Coy Hall Dissolution by Nicholas Binge Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler The Ancients by John Larison Seascraper by Benjamin Wood The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

My top 10 books of 2025! Hit a bit of a slump this year and only managed 20 books in total, but enjoyed a mix of different kinds of fiction. Special favourite for fantasy lovers: 'The Garden of Delights' by Amal Singh. #booksky #sff

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

Ah then my results might skew things a bit as I put my country as UK and didn’t mention other familiar scripts, sorry

I suspect this might also be influenced by which writing systems the viewer is familiar with. Having worked a lot with SEAsian scripts, I tend to perceive lighter weights as regular, even for Latin.

People perceive thickness of letters very individually, and that’s why we are conducting Font Weight Survey to understand the regional preferences of font weight. Could we ask you for 10 min of your time? The findings will be published publicly once we have some results.
tptq.com/weight

New release! Futura မြန်မာ ខ្មែរ ລາວ ไทย and more!

Having trouble getting Myanmar fonts to trigger the Myanmar shaping engine on Word/Windows — reordering isn't even occurring — does anyone have troubleshooting suggestions? I fear having too many Unicode ranges (geometric shapes etc) selected might be interfering with USE handling?

Lao and Thai interpretations of a Benguiat display font and a loopless geometric grotesque. Text reads 'Stranger Things' and 26 November

Ten weights of my in-progress geometric grotesque loopless Thai typeface

Ten weights of my in-progress geometric grotesque loopless Lao typeface

Had a little time over the last few days to make progress with this pair of typefaces. Couldn't find a Lao version of the Stranger Things logo so here's my guess how it could look, along with Thai, and the geo-grotesque interpreting how a contemporary loopless design might have looked in the 1980s.

New documentary out now!

Around Luang Prabang is one of the world’s few regions where traditional manuscript culture still thrives. Researchers Agnieszka Helman-Wazny & Volker Grabowsky spent years capturing the voices of those keeping this legacy alive.

🎞️Watch the full film here: uhh.de/csmc-laos

Photo of paperback book The Garden of Delights by Amal Singh.

This book, The Garden of Delights, is a real treasure! Such a joy to read! Deeply imaginative, deliciously written, multi-layered story with magic, gods and flowers. Stunning! Thank you @amalsingh.bsky.social

The fundamental miscalculation that the ruling elite in the UK are making is that they can have polite fascism against trans people. You cannot contain it. Don't be surprised if Reform UK is elected into power with Farage as PM in the next few years and plunges the UK into authoritarianism.

This is why they can't fix it: it's not broken

It's *structurally indifferent to truth*

I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas. I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.

On hatred.

We persistently underestimate the vulnerability of democracies to authoritarianism, because we treat tyranny as something that attacks democracy from the outside.

We need to recognise it as something that can grow up within democracies, and that wins support by latching on to democratic ideas.

Flyer publicizing two forthcoming Handbooks on Material Text Culture from De Gruyter: Handbook of Medieval Book Ornament [ISBN 978-3-11-141107-1] and Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures (3 volumes) [ISBN 978-3-11-124094-7]

Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.

Don't use generative AI

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

Gongratulations! Great to see you're including Thai! Thank you for accommodating large screensize, most foundry websites present the content in a little container that drowns in a sea of emptiness. I didn't know you'd moved to Surakarta, thought you loved Jogja?

Hello from the Wirral!

Amid Hope and Despair, Myanmar’s Civil War Enters Its Fifth Year As the conflict drags on, politicians and “irritating voices” emerge from the liberated rear.

Myanmar marks four years of a bloody civil war on Saturday. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), at least 73,069 people have died in this conflict with almost 20,000 deaths added to the list in 2024 alone.

➡️ January 20: FAA director fired
➡️ January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring frozen
➡️ January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded
➡️ January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees
➡️ January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years

Making America Great Again!

Thank you for shining a light on this, it's a very pertinent issue with such ubiquitous conflict around the world, and it's heartening to see a business reflecting honestly and publicly about what's important.

Working with the languages of the world means also engaging with the world and feeling both its joys and pains. After the unspeakable horrors in Lebanon and Gaza, @tptq-arabic.com thought it was highly inappropriate to go about business as usual, and promote fonts.

Two blocks of text, set in the same typeface (MD Lórien) at the same size. One is the classic ‘lorem ipsum’ dummy text, with a very clean, regular appearance; the other is English (taken from an article about type design history), with punctuation, capitals, numbers and a bit of italic all contributing to it being a messier, less rhythmic texture.

If you’re starting a new project this week and reaching for the Lorem Ipsum text, make sure you also testing with real-world copy.

Latin always looks great, it’s all n’s and o’s and beautiful rhythm — real text is messy, full of k’s and 5’s and punctuation. Design for the mess!

Has anyone managed to get scrollbars back in Acrobat Reader? I've enabled 'always show scrollbars' in Acrobat preferences and in Mac system preferences, and I've disabled new Acrobat Reader. Still no sign of scrollbars, quite annoying in a long document to only be able to advance one page at a time.