Note: Don’t take anything here as medical advice. I’m not sure why you would, but don’t.
Parasites get a pretty bad rap, and for good reason: they’re the embodiment of free-loaders,
can severely damage their hosts, and have a strong disgust factor. I’m not too fond of
them, so I probably won’t make any pages dedicated to a parasite unless it’s particularly
interesting.
That said, parasites are a very important part of their ecosystems. They make up over half
of all species on Earth, and 85–95% of them could be unknown to science1. They can control
population growths like any other predator. Many also encourage their hosts to be preyed upon,
such as Toxoplasma gondii2.
There are many well-known font websites out there—Google Fonts, 1001Fonts, DaFont, etc.
However, there are many more around the web that may be a little more obscure, but not
any less valuable!
This is a wonderful and huge archive of fonts of various foundries and styles. It was made
with an encyclopedic treatment, so in addition to images of the fonts, it has information
on the foundries’ history and such.
I’ve also included TypOasis in my site buttons, but it was too good to not elaborate on it.
The Lost + Found section includes many original files from foundries that have
otherwise shut down and no longer offer their fonts for download. You can probably trust them
to not alter anything like mass font aggregators may do.
Sacoglossa is a superorder of shelled and unshelled marine gastropods, also known as sea snails
and sea slugs.
They feed on algae, which is why they’re sometimes called sap-sucking slugs.
Some members take it a step further, and steal the algae’s chloroplasts for themselves in a behavior
known as kleptoplasty. These chloroplasts serve as extra energy sources. They’re one of the few
animals out there that technically do photosynthesis!
Ah, monospace fonts. I’m a big fan, both because I’m a chronic terminal hermit and because
unlike sans serif fonts, a majority of them don’t look too
corporate or geometric for my tastes. They have very distinct letterforms and a sort of
irregular charm.
Unfortunately, they’re not the best fonts for readability, especially not for long stretches
of prose. Oftentimes, the “w” and the “m” look too narrow, or the “l” and the “i” have too
much whitespace. It’s very apparent if you bump the font size up, in headings for example.
“Faux monospace” fonts, as I’ve come to call them, can be the best of both worlds! They’re
mostly monospace, but widen or narrow some of the glyphs for readability.
Google Fonts is a great collection of free-to-use and high quality fonts, but Google
the company doesn’t have quite as good of a reputation.
If you’d like to self-host your fonts, google-webfonts-helper is a great choice!
You can download the fonts in multiple formats and subsetted so they only need to
support the characters you require.
It was a huge aid for me to download Google Fonts in
WOFF2 format,
which I used to showcase many fonts in
my font collections.
Many fonts aren’t available in WOFF2 format, but rather TTF or OTF format.
They’re great for general use on the computer, but a little big for use on the web.
Casady & Greene first got on my radar in my search for a higher contrast alternative to
Limelight. I arrived at
Ritz FLF and sought to find the original source so I could package
and install it with Nix. However, I hit a roadblock: the earliest source I could find was
a page on typOasis
from 2004.1 There was little to no information on Ritz FLF itself or its license.
And so began my curiosity.
Robin Casady founded Casady Company in 1984, later renamed to CasadyWare.2
Mike Greene founded Greene, Inc. in 19863 to make software.2
The two merged on August 1988 into Casady & Greene, producing both fonts and entertainment software.3
Many excellent fonts don’t allow website embedding, which is a shame, but understandable!
Instead, here are several options for further browsing:
Blambot
Blambot is a popular foundry with many popular comic-style fonts you’ve
likely seen before. Their free fonts allow commercial use for indie comics. To my understanding,
unless you’re operating under a big publisher, you can use those fonts for free even if
you’re making money off your comics!
Typodermic Fonts is a foundry based in Nagoya, Japan with a treasure trove of cool
display fonts!
It was founded in 2001 by talented Canadian designer Raymond Larabie.
All of the following fonts are by Raymond Larabie and are under the
Creative Commons Zero license (CC0),
meaning they’re in the public domain. As their licenses state, please don’t
contact Mr. Larabie for permission to use these fonts. Anything goes!
Sources
Typodermic Font’s catalogue includes many other wonderful fonts under a
desktop license,
so I can’t have them on my website without paying for a web license. However, you can
still use some of them to make graphics for personal and commercial use. I encourage anyone
interested to check them out!
SPHINX OF BLACK QUARTZ, JUDGE MY VOW.
sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
0123456789 ?! ‘’ “” () [] {} / &@%*#$£¥
Cantarell is well-known in the Linux world for its use by the GNOME project,
which was also how I was introduced to it.
As a humanist font, it has a warm feel to it.
Cantarell has a different version on Google Fonts. However, it hasn’t been updated
there due to one of Cantarell’s main drawbacks, the lack of an explicit italic variant.
Of course, I can’t thank Neocities enough for providing people a way to host their website!
I used their built-in editor at first, but switched to my preferred editor. It’s thanks to the Neocities CLI that I can edit this website on my computer and upload the files later.
Speaking of my editor, I use Neovim! It supports LSPs that can spot errors in your code and provide suggestions. With Vim keybindings, navigating and editing files is quick and easy. There’s a learning curve, but it’s super fun once you get the hang of it. Plus, Neovim can be beautiful and very functional with the right plugins.
user
mimvoid@neocities
pronouns
she/they
b-day
29 March
os
Linux
distro
NixOS :D