For some reason, eink screens work significantly better for me when I have even the mildest of headaches, so my ereader has been an important accessibility device for me since it now means I can read something while I’m waiting for my painkillers to kick in. I currently use a Kobo Clara BW and aside from some weird hiccups that were likely related to my dying hard drive rather than the device, it’s been pretty good. But occasionally, both the fanfic I download from AO3 and the more modern novels I read on the device have emoji characters, and those weren’t displaying. In a lot of cases, they don’t show any indication that they were there.
I was reminded of this today while chatting with some fanfic people and decided it was time to try to fix it.
Kobo has a nice tutorial for this and it’s pretty straightforwards BUT it turns out that the default emoji font on my laptop (running fedora) is the Google Noto Color Emoji font which doesn’t work on my device. Won’t even show up as a font after I put it on the device.
Step 2: Find the right emoji font that actually works.
In theory, my Kobo has an option to add in “supplemental fonts” so it’ll try those if the main font doesn’t have the necessary characters. But that didn’t work at all, possibly because the font thinks it has the character and is displaying a blank in the epub file I tested? I really don’t know why except that it didn’t work.
Setting the emoji font as the main font for the document does work, though, and the emoji displays just fine. It’s… not a great font, though. Lots of giant spaces between words.
Step 4: ???
The internet has a bunch of random speculation like “epubs only support 1 font” (which seems unlikely but not actually impossible) so it might be best to merge the emoji into a font I actually like for reading.
It’s also possible that I could set up some automatic styling of my epubs in calibre that would make the fonts work better. Some people seemed to have ideas about that but a lot of it included styling each emoji and while I’m sure I can write a perl script for it I’m not convinced that’s the best choice. And, again, it requires me to know that there’s emoji in an epub before I transfer it to my device, which I don’t always know when I buy a book or grab a fanfic. I guess I could build a whole workflow to look for them, but it seems unlikely that’s what everyone else is doing? Surely I am not the only person who reads reasonably modern epubs with chat sections in them?
For now, I have the font on my device and can flip over to it to see if I can see an emoji if I think one is missing, then flip back when reading with weird spacing irritates me. Not the worst, since often I can tell when the narrative has a chat/texting section that might include emoji. But that doesn’t really help when it’s not obvious from context.
So… Not sure what my next step it, but that’s where I’m at and I’m going to give up and make some lunch. If anyone has found a good fix for this, I’d love to know!
Kobo Clara BW showing the fanfic Unknown Number by ZeldaElmo. At the bottom of the authors note there is an emoji character displaying correctly. The rest of the text on the preface page looks weirdly spaced.
We’re a bit more than halfway through the year so let’s see where we’re at!
Revisit Old Goals
Started strong in January by finishing up a rainbow shawl that had been on the needles for quite some time:
A rainbow bias knit shawl/wrap of my own design.
I’d intended to release the pattern since I had an old goal about writing patterns but… honestly, I haven’t felt like it, and I focused my time on other stuff that was bringing me joy. But I have a bunch of pattern notes and a bit more time right now so I may publish what I have without bothering to polish it.
February I worked on an old Beanie Bag kit from Jimmy Beans Wool that spanned 3 months. It was… honestly kind of boring and the pattern had a bunch of mistakes/confusing bits, but I finished one month’s worth and will likely do the other two at some point.
The first part of the Textures of Nevada Shawl that was part of a Jimmy Beans Wool kit subscription some years back.
March-April-May I finally got around to knitting Wingspan, which was on my “something famous” goal plan but I never made it. It was a pleasant knit once I got into the swing of things, but by the time I finished it was too warm to wear it here so I haven’t really gotten pictures! Here’s one from before it was blocked, though:
Wingspan shawl knit in a gradient yarn that goes from burgundy to red to orange. It has no been blocked so it looks a bit lumpy and smaller than the final product looks.
June I took a break from old goals (and focused on writing).
July I pulled out some gradient balls and made socks for my mom’s birthday (a bit early because the timing worked out), plus I did tour de fleece stuff.
Blue/green/yellow-green gradient socks using the Affixed pattern from Shoreland Socks by Hunter Hammersen.
Overall, A+ on revisiting old goals. I have a couple more “use kits from stash” ideas but I may otherwise declare this particular goal complete and focus on some other stuff.
Try Something New
January started strong with me working on a hexagon blanket, which I’m still working on between other projects.
February I tried assigned pooling and made the “Shard” shawl by Romi Hill. It was fun and I’ll likely do other assigned pooling patterns!
Me modelling my Shard shawl (pattern by Romi Hill) knit in Chemknits yarn from valentines day 2024. It’s a red shawl with purple “shards” from assigned pooling.
March-April-May I worked on Wingspan for the old goals and didn’t bother doing new stuff.
June again was a break from all knitting goals. (I was writing instead.)
July was mostly finishing up work/travel and I didn’t feel like learning something new.
There’s probably some more to be done here but… honestly, I’m not sure this goal is playing well with my burnout? I’ve got some tentative plans for learning some bookbinding in August if my kid is amenable so that might be up next. But I think I may just focus on finishing up the hex blanket rather than pushing myself to come up with new things to do if I’m not feeling it. So this goal may be as complete as it’s getting unless something fun occurs to me.
Stash Something Stash / Write more
I’d planned to run some kind of stash-focused event about appreciating what you have (as opposed to feeling guilty about what you have, a common vibe in a lot of “use your stash” events) and I got as far as coming up with a nice list of prompts and ideas. But then I realized that… I didn’t actually want to run it. I was burned out on social media and wanted to spend less time on my phone. So I’ve declared this goal as complete as it’s going to be. The prompts will keep if I decide I want to run things later.
That said, I replaced this goal that no longer fit with a goal of “Write more” instead since it was what was bringing me joy and it deserved some focus and time.
I’ve done a bit more writing for this blog but the biggest part of my writing this year has been fanfic since I’m having fun. I joined a discord to hang out with other writers in my current fandom of choice and I took part in a prompt challenge (which is why I didn’t knit as much in June-July so I could write). I’m now over the 40k “that’s a novel’s worth” of words since January and I’m pretty delighted with myself.
There’s something deeply satisfying in the current economic environment about making something that is basically non-monetizable put on a website run by a nonprofit (that I donated to!) and my output only serves to make strangers/new friends happy. And I definitely made a bunch of people happy! (Including my kid, who helped with some ideas in one of my stories.) Also I’m amused that my existing community of open source people and my new community of fan writers are somewhat similar and overlapping nerds. Not a surprise that people who share their creative outputs for free have some similarities but it’s still a delight.
I expect I’ll keep writing through the end of the year (and beyond but this post is about 2025 goals). I’ll probably join another challenge or two but even if I don’t do more than finish my current story in progress, I feel like this replacement goal has been met *and* it’s brought me a lot more joy than the original goal. And these goals have always been about finding time for things that bring me joy!
Game Design
It took waaaaay too long to get approval from work saying that my silly games weren’t going to conflict with my job at which point I was so frustrated with my boss for other reasons that I was intentionally trying to get put in the layoff pool (and I succeeded). But the end result is that I haven’t actually *done* any games stuff beyond a bit of helping my kid learn Scratch programming for his robot. I’m not replacing this goal because I still want to make games, but I haven’t figured out an actual plan yet so that’s on my list for part 2 of the year. So far I’ve got my personal laptop set up a bit better for game work (attached it to the kvm with my big screen and mouse) and I think I might aim to play around with some existing frameworks and make silly things with my kid as a goal for August.
More Thoughts
It turns out this year it hasn’t been *fiber* that was really keeping me happy. I mean, I still knit/spin/whatever but it’s writing and video games that have helped me cope with the burnout and grief (particularly from losing a friend earlier this year, but there’s grief tied up in climate and politics right now too). The fact that fiber wasn’t the perfect solution for this type of burnout makes sense because I needed something that engaged more of my brain and took me away from worrying about geopolitics/work/my deceased friend. I knit to focus my brain but when my brain is spiralling that’s not the right thing to do. I do knit-and-write-in-my-head a lot so it’s compatible with what works to distract me, at least, but fiber hasn’t been as much of a focus for a few months and I’m not sure if that’s going to change. I am wondering if I should stop calling these “fiber goals” next year so I can encompass some other hobbies, though.
With work as a stressor out of the way for now but more “international move” and “find a new job” stress coming, I’m intending to just roll with what works for these goals in the second half of the year. I *am* really enjoying using my fiber and stationary stashes now that I’m trying not to spend so much money — past me bought some lovely stuff and now I have time to use it. I think doing some game stuff is going to be fun when I sit down and start playing. And I’m really enjoying writing fanfic in a way that I haven’t in a long time, so I’m happy to keep leaning into that too. Last time I was involved in a fandom I presented as an artist, and writing is a different experience, and I’m loving it so much.
