I searched Google for ‘google left margin,’ turning up no results. Of course, if it only happened this morning, nothing written about it would likely have been indexed by Google yet — unless they blogged about adding a dozen pixels to their margin, which seemed unlikely. But I had a hunch that if other people were noticing it, they must be talking about it, somewhere.

That somewhere, of course, is Twitter, where my suspicion was confirmed. The tagline for search.twitter.com (See what’s happening — right now.) is right — there’s really no better place to go to find out what people are saying about something that happened between five minutes and a couple hours ago.

The release notes.
The “What’s New” page.

I know very little about JavaScript and XUL, but that is going to have to change. My goal is to complete the add-on described here, an Artist Web media view, or perhaps “Constellations.”

To make the task appear less daunting, I’ve broken it up into many milestones of marginal improvements. If I follow this timeline, the plugin will be usable and released to the public as Constellations v0.1 on July 27.

I’m going to create a separate blog to track my progress on this, for several reasons:

1. Threat of shame. If I emphasize publicly that I am going to do this, and I fail, I’ll be kind of embarrassed. Hopefully that will motivate me to actually complete the project.
2. Geeks love proving that they’re smarter than you. If I’m having a tough time with some relatively elementary code, maybe people will mock me in the form of writing the correct code themselves. I’m certain that what I’m attempting could be done in no time flat if I’d been formally educated in things like JavaScript. Maybe the biting sarcasm of people who need to demonstrate their intelligence will show me where I’m going wrong.
3. To encourage plagiarism. Look, I’ll admit that I’d be proud if the add-on that comes out of this bore my name. But ultimately, I don’t care. If somebody sees what I’m doing, likes it, wants it to be their own, and knows they can beat me to it, then great. At least we’ll have the add-on.

If you feel like mocking me or encouraging me you can email me at topdownjimmy@gmail.com, leave/follow comments on this post, or visit my dedicated Constellations blog to see where I’m taking this and how quickly I fail.

protoplasmic flesh that flowed blackly outward to join together and form that eldritch, hideous horror from outer space, that spawn of the blankness of primal time, that tentacled amorphous monster which was the lurker at the threshold, whose mask was as a congeries of iridescent globes, the noxious Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time!

It is a manifestation of a terror that is based on insanity and chaos rather than ordinary mortal danger — comics, of course, being an apt target for this idea, as their innocence and relative shallowness make for an especially jarring juxtaposition.

Weirdly, Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields wrote a song about Yog-Sotheth with a side-project he called “The Gothic Archies,” a bizarre coincidence given that the first known Zalgo creations involve Archie comics.

First conceived by Something Awful member “Shmorky” in 2004 as grim modifications of old comic strips, it was embraced by other members of the forum. After remaining in obscurity for several years, Zalgo appears to have resurfaced in a pair of Something Awful threads (1, 2) mocking the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del, where the practice of Photoshopping certain strips eventually evolved into “Zalgo edits,” beginning I believe with this post (Google cache) by member Dammerung in October 2008.

A convenient summary of all these Photoshops was compiled in this post (Google cache).

The blog Grim Reviews posted an overview of the phenomenon shortly after its fall 2008 resurrection. The meme subsequently flourished on 4chan. A b3ta.com forum member named Evilscary credits himself with some of the more popular and more recent Garfield Zalgo comics, writing in his profile:

I seem to be responsible for the recent surge of ZALGO that has engulfed the internet.
I didn’t create ZALGO (indeed, he created himself in a torrent of darkness and corruption) but I certainly aided in reviving his following.

And because Internet loves Garfield parodies, it wasn’t long before Zalgo became popular and therefore no longer funny. One Something Awful member even noticed a reference to it (Google cache) in the game Space Trader.

Maybe most responsible for the curiosity around Zalgo is the proliferation of weird Unicode diacritics that accompany more recent Zalgo-babble, which creates the illusion that whatever Zalgo is, it is now directly affecting your computer and that by Googling it you have introduced it into your home. Try it and you’ll see what I mean. I’m pretty certain 4chan is responsible for this clever twist on the idea.

With the increased popularity of Zalgo, someone has come forward claiming to have thought it up in 1998 as “simply encroaching darkness” before infecting various forums with the idea in 2003, though most people aren’t taking this claim seriously.

As a side-note it also reminds me of the 1997 film Event Horizon, whose “antagonist” is some extra-dimensional realm of pure chaos.

More Zalgo resources include:

• Zalgo on Know Your Meme
• Zalgo on Encyclopedia Dramatica, Something Awful’s wiki
• The talk page for that article
• A deleted Wikipedia page
• Fortress: Ameritrash blogged about Zalgo before me
• So did centerNegative

Does anybody else get these? When you navigate to your labels or subscriptions using keyboard shortcuts, the highlighted item in this modal window thing has a text “shadow” or duplicate sitting ten pixels over to the left. It’s been bothering me for a while now and I can’t find anybody else talking about it. I guess I’m supposed to file a bug?

I knew that Google isn’t so great with their stylesheets, in some cases declaring a font-family of just “Arial,” with no “sans-serif” backup in the font-stack (which would, of course, let Firefox substitute in whichever default sans the user had set – in my case, Nimbus).

I also knew through playing around with ~/fonts.conf that Linux allows you to define substitutions for different font names. It was my hunch that there was something new about Jaunty (which has been praised for its better presentation of text) that defined Liberation Sans – the font I determined I was looking at – as the preferable substitute for Arial.

After looking around a bit I found the culprit in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf. Around line 182 you should see the beginning of a section devoted to the Microsoft typefaces, and shortly under that (around line 186), the line:

<family>Liberation Sans</family>

Just above that, insert the following line:

<family>Nimbus Sans L</family>

Reboot your system, and when you’re back up, Ubuntu should now replace any calls for Arial with Nimbus Sans.

Of course, this should only be done if you prefer Nimbus Sans. It’s been claimed that Liberation Sans is better hinted than either Nimbus or FreeSans, and from the looks of things, it is. Still, I just prefer Nimbus. That serif on the upper-case ‘J’ in Libertine especially bothers me.

I still love Linux Libertine as a Times substitute, however.