2026 mid-year link clearance

Oh boy, more random stuff.

• The hardest working font in Manhattan: Marcin Wichary digs up the history of the font named Gorton. I grew up with this font, seeing it not only on punch card keyboards but also in a Leroy lettering kit that we used in sixth grade graphics class when we studied mechanical drawing.
• RollerCoaster Tycoon’s Overengineered Puking System. Learn more than you ever needed to know about the algorithms in the game RollerCoaster Tycoon that determine when a park guest pukes. No really.
• The Spaghetti Policy for All MLB Teams by the appropriately named Sickos Committee breaks down the outside food policies for all of teams in Major League Baseball to determine which ones would let you bring in a gallon of spaghetti. The first part is fairly straightforward, but it gets far more weird (and sicko) as they look at the stadiums where a gallon of spaghetti might not be permitted. (Background information: Sports fans in Philadelphia have a reputation for poor behavior. These are the people who booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs.)
• We have reached the second generation now. “Microsoft invented “escrow builds” to launch functional apps – that’s internal ‘Microspeak’ jargon for quality control” is a rehash of my article on the history of the term “escrow”, but the article appears to just be a suspicious mishmash of fragments from the article. For example, in the sentence “He described it as unhelpful because the blog essentially described a metaphor using another metaphor” the antecedents of “it” and “the blog” are not present in the article, leading the reader to think that “it” is the explanation of what escrow means and that “the blog” is my blog. On top of that, the title of the article introduces the phrase “launch functional apps” (whatever that means), even though none of those three words appear anywhere in the original article, nor in the dodgy rehash. Undaunted, a different AI content farm picked up on that article and somehow expanded it into an even longer article that conveys even less information.