Darien MV

I only learned about this phenomenon some years later. At one point it was even documented in a Wikipedia article. I was surprised to find the article ... but much more surprised that it was dominated by a whole section with the heading “Adult Content”!

But oops, the penises. And the arbitrary drawing power. Some forum censorship software began filtering the specific private use code points I’d chosen in the font which had been deemed offensive.

This is where the censorship thing comes in. Apparently the font was common enough in some communities that folks who discovered the private use characters would use them not just on IRC, but also on forums, etc, with the expectation that at least some other users would see them.

Operating systems didn’t ship with font sets meant to provide extensive coverage of various writing systems at that time. This meant that people who installed Fixedsys Excelsior would often see its jarring, blocky glyphs showing up in contexts where it wasn’t the active font.

I’d imagined mIRC users with an attachment to the original font would hopefully find it and switch over. I released it, and I guess a good number of strangers did find and use it.

I took requests, which led to some of the more confusing icons. And yes, there were penis icons. Of course there were. And not one but three different turds. I don’t think any of them had faces — but you could add them!

I also added a large series of zero-width overlay chars where each one contained a single pixel in the grid. This enabled “drawing” arbitrary things with the font, though IRC’s message length constraint limited its power a lot.

I devised a system for emoticon glyph composition in the private use range. (They were more like what we’d now call emoji, but that word didn’t exist in English then.) Base chars (like an empty face shape) could be followed by zero-width overlay chars (eyes, hat, etc).

Thinking about how to ”spend” the remaining few thousand glyphs permitted by the software, I decided to focus on silly stuff. I intended this for fellow IRC folks, and it would be cool to have our own icons and emoticons in there. I began adding things to the private use range.

“Pan-Unicode” was not to be. CJK was obviously not gonna happen regardless, but there was a glyph limit in the font software I was using — and I was approaching it. I couldn’t find a (cracked) alternative that would let me get past it.

Many scripts require advanced OpenType shaping features which were over my head. But I eventually figured out enough and was able to take care of Arabic, and later, Tamil.

I tried to understand the underlying identity-range of each glyph so that I could adapt it to the tiny grid somewhat literately and consistently. Now, to be clear, I said I tried, I didn’t say I succeeded. I did a shit job with a lot of it, and there were I def phoned in.

Despite the tiny canvas, I did try to do justice to most of the scripts I took on. I didn’t copy glyphs from the published charts — rather, I studied each writing system and searched for diverse example texts.

Anyway, my ambitious mission had become about making this stupid font — with its 8 by 16 pixel (iirc) cells — “pan-Unicode,” or at least something like it.

(I asked for, and received, a print edition of the Unicode 4.0 standard for my 19th birthday.)

I would read all the proposals. There was this Irish(?) dude, Michael Everson, who wrote tons of them. I only knew him through these formal proposals and docs but he was like a hero to me. It just totally captured my imagination. I dunno, I was a weird kid. So many letters!!!

So I started expanding it — and I got really into Unicode. I didn’t understand anything about the more technical side of it, but I’d been into scripts and historical alphabets since I was very little, so it was both a continuation of that and a new world of fascination.

You couldn’t retain the default Fixedsys and also take advantage of the newly expanded character set. But the vector version I’d made for the flash site didn’t have to have a 255 char limitation.