Warestones and Fonts

I’ve found that whenever I get stuck behind a really slow-moving vehicle, the driver tends to be an old guy wearing a hat. I think there’s something about the hat that makes the car move, on average, 20 miles under the speed limit. And the old dudes in hats are COMPLETELY oblivious to the world around them. It’s like they’re driving along in a Model T in 1934 or whenever, back when people drove 20 miles an hour all the time instead of 45 or 55 or more like they do these days.

Ever since I pointed out the old-man-in-a-hat thing, my family has begun to notice that it’s TOTALLY true.

I had this whole theory where I compared the hat to a warestone, which ought to show you just how much of a gigantic dork I am, that I’m so in love with The Dark Is Rising that I know precisely what a warestone is. For those of you who are normal human beings, it was a magical object used by the Dark to monitor the area where it was placed. Although it was tiny, it was so heavy that nobody could lift it, and that great heaviness affected everything around it. So. If the hat is a warestone, then its very presence slows the car down. A lot.

And by the way, if you’ve never read The Dark is Rising or the other books in the sequence, I very highly recommend them. Yeah, they’re supposed to be young adult novels, but I recently reread the series and loved it as much the second time around as I had the first. This was my absolute favorite fantasy series when I was a kid.

In other news, I want to confess that I’m a fontist. A font elitist, if you will. I’m very picky about fonts and tend to judge other people based on what they use.

Courier New, for example, is a font I love, and the standard for screenwriting, which was one of my concentrations in college. But Courier New is not a good font to use for reports, and I hate the Wordperfect-obsessed living-in-the-80s freaks who insist on typing reports and memos out in Courier New.

I think Times New Roman is kind of boring, and only good for professional letters. I don’t like people who use it for everything.

I have a friendly relationship with Arial, even though a lot of people don’t like it. I think it’s nice and clean, and it was wonderful at stretching my papers out to the required length in college time and time again. Hint: it’s really easy to tell when you’ve blown Times up to a larger font size to use up space, but you can get pretty big with Arial before it starts to look like an easy reader book. It’s what I always use for reports and analysis, because it’s so clean. I tend to prefer sans serif typefaces over serif ones. For that reason, I like Helvetica, Tahoma, and Verdana as well.

I hate Comic Sans. I loathe it. I hate people who think it’s a good idea to use Comic Sans, ever, for any reason. It’s the lamest font ever created. It’s not creative. It’s the font that people with Chocoholic tee shirts and Cathy strips pasted in their cubes like to use. Others that I hate include Forte, Impact, and especially, Lucida Handwriting. It doesn’t look like handwriting, people! No one is fooled! Cut it out already!

And the fact that I’ve given this much thought and time to fonts and warestones probably tells you that I’m way too dorky to be passing font-based character judgments on anyone.

13 Replies to “Warestones and Fonts”

  1. our newspaper uses poynter roman for body copy. i dig garamond, too, except for the fact that it utilizes the “double-V” W. my favorite sans-serif is optima, which was created by Mr. Zapf himself. it is the font used on the Vietnam memorial. Funhouse is my pet-peeve font. it shows up way too often.

  2. I've read THE DARK IS RISING. And I call myself a font addict. I like Comic Sans for its wonderful readability (which is why it's used there) but I don't use it where I am trying to “show off.” I like Arial Narrow for most website stuff. It's clear and easy to read. My “signature” font is Vladimer Script, because it actually does look like my handwriting when I'm trying to be fancy. (Not my normal handwriting at all, but I've been playing with writing styles and calligraphy since I learned to hold a pencil.) I don't care much for Lucida Handwriting, but I love Lucida Calligraphy with Old English-type headings.

  3. I probably have over 200 fonts on my computer, because I'm a freeware fonts nerd (fontlover.com!) and I have to say that my favorite for just plain ol' typing is Sylfaen. It's got a little bit of an attitude.

  4. oh, and i meant to add that my offbeat personal favorite font for everyday use is Symphony. the only problem is that the boldface isn't very bold.

  5. Here at EKU every paper I have written so far was required to be in Times New Roman size 12. I dislike most fonts the computer comes with and used to have over 200 downloaded until my computer fucked up. :(

  6. ikujafoiweurekl!!! i loved that book! i read it forever ago, and forgot who wrote it or what the book was called. and this guy just called me from forever ago, like, ' hey, we never hung out. ' and i' m like, ' yeah.. because i have been avoiding your calls like the bubonic plague' only minus everything after ' yeah' and he was like, ' okay, i tell you what, how about this. YOU call ME if you want to hang out. because i' m a really nice guy. okay? ' and i' m like, ' yeah, okay. ' and there' s this really long pause, and he hangs up. boys ♥

  7. hmm. i haven't read this particular entry because i'm still trying to catch on the old ones. -i ♥ everything so far.

    i just needed to stop by to inform you (in case you don't already know) that authentic Jello Pudding Pops! are now made by Popsicle (although they don't have them listed yet on the page) –if you did know then sorry for wasting your time.

  8. I dig a few fonts for the web… Georgia has been pretty trendy now for a while, admittedly I use it on my site.

    Had a project manager a couple years ago that was fucking nuts about Comic Sans. We hated her for that.

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