An Age of Unintelligence
23 May 2026
I sit here in my parlour (office) having finally found the energy and will to do my first blog post of 2026. It only took 5 months. Lots of things have happened personally, professionally and societally in the intervening months - but I don't necessarily want to talk about any of that.
As large language models (LLM) increasingly twist themselves into more and more of our lives I can only see this going one way. The recent trends of physical media, more intentional media consumption and less cloud services will only grow. My own music purchasing habits (buying and ripping CDs, using digital music stores such as Bandcamp and even procuring music downloads through the library) have finally cycled back around to being (sort of) cool, a remarkable recovery from being "really weird". I'm buying more Blu-rays, as the video streaming services become ever balkanised. There are numberous news stories about how piracy of films and television is making a comeback. And what better escape from AI and algorithms than sitting down to read a book, written by an actual person?
My own rediscovery of libraries has been previously discussed, but with so many library cards I now feel like there isn't a book I can't get my hands on. My ereader has massively helped with this, so that even the (artificial) reserves and holds give me something to look forward to. "How long until my load becomes available?" is not a question I thought would excite me. Even managing my loans and making sure I transfer my books to my ereader at the right time has become enjoyable to me.
Less enjoyable is having to put up with publisher BS when it comes to ebook styles. The whole point of an ebook is I can change the font, the margins, the line spacing. It's all in my control! So why on earth do some publishers try to stop you from changing those? I now have a workflow with Calibre to remove all fonts and delete all enforced styles - but I shouldn't have to have one! My font of choice on my Kobo is OpenDyslexic. I'm not dyslexic but I find it the easiest to read by far. Unfortunately during the middle of reading Hooked by Asako Yuzuki I found that the character called "Shōko" was having her name rendered as "Sh ko". Surely OpenDyslexic wasn't missing unicode glyphs?
Here I started with an assumption that yes, OpenDyslexic was missing some glyphs. I found nicoverbruggen/ebook-fonts that had fonts especially patched for ereaders, and it included a version of OpenDyslexic that it called "Dysleksio". I loaded the fonts onto my ereader and Shōko's name was correct but the character shapes were... just wrong. Similar to the OpenDyslexic that I knew but not quite as nice. OpenDyslexic has a rather confusing version lineage, so it occurred to me that maybe the version Nico was using for Dysleksio was different from that on the Kobo. I ended up comparing 7 different versions of OpenDyslexic against what I could see on my ereader but I eventually figured out that the Kobo was using version 2. This was not the same version being used by Dysleksio.
At this point I should have just loaded OpenDyslexic 2 onto my ereader with a different name to see if it worked. And it would have. But that's not what I did, because I assumed there were missing unicode characters. So instead I created a script to merge fonts together without overwriting existing glyphs. Then I merged a few versions of OpenDyslexic together, to create a fully-featured OpenDyslexic. And it worked! But when I verified my findings I found all my merges, despite the script output saying otherwise, was only adding one new character. I realised my assumption was flawed, OpenDyslexic does have all the needed characters. But when Kobo loaded the font onto their ereaders as a default font they just... deleted a bunch of unicode characters? WHY?!
Not wanting my work to be in vain, I remembered Nerd Fonts. They are basically versions of fonts with loads of extra characters added, primarily to be used in a supercharged terminal setup. No reason I can't use it to create my own version of OpenDyslexic 2. A few more rabbit warrens later (I actually raised a PR for one of those burrows) I had something that would work and was unnecessarily complex. Perfect.
The result of my efforts is available here. The fonts work, so going forward they will be my new default font on Kobo.
And I feel reassured, as AI will never be able to replace the useless projects that I stumble into and become vessels for all my energy.