What's going on. Why did the font change? This is a dangerous game you're playing, man; getting crazy with fonts. It's not the done thing. You'll be arrested by the typography police if you aren't careful.

I'll highlight a couple other fonts in a bit, but tastefully; mostly just keep it to this one, which is called Underwood Champion. You may well ask what the fuck. It's fine, go ahead. I'll assume you've already muttered it under your breath.

Because I goddam can. More specifically, because ideally I want this website to be in it's own little ecosystem, with the least amount of reliance on anything third party. I can hardly keep up with my first party, let alone second or third. Hitherto, and for at least a while ongoing, I have had to rely on G--gle Fonts. It's a great resource. G--gle's huge and probably isn't going anywhere soon, but but but: they're a great big damn corporation and I'd rather not have these things tied down to it. Only problem is finding the same or similar enough fonts to switch out with what I've been using. If I have to use completely different (but visually very similar) fonts, the backend updating shouldn't be difficult.

I'm picky with fonts, though. I love 'em to death and/but I have gazillions of them floating around my hard drive. I've got a bunch of books, mostly old, pre-internet, on typography, and they are the most fascinating things.

It feels a bit magic to host my own damn fonts. I can even use ones that I've designed myself! How crazy is that? Let's cue up a couple:

This one is based on the handwriting of a wonderfully gruff and gnomish old English teacher I had in highschool. His class on Beowulf was the best.

Let's add a bit of a gap between that one and the following, because otherwise they clash obscenely:

I found a handwriting sample from a 19th century German man for this. I'm not sure it works the best for a block of text, but it's great for short things. The kerning definitely could use some work.

If you can't read that, I did say it's probably not the best for a block of text. Better for a decorative word or display or something. The kerning needs work, for one. Seeing a short paragraph of it is a little painful, honestly!

Monster!

See? Looks great for a single word.

If you've missed out on the comic strip Cul-de-Sac, well, you're darn well MISSING OUT. It's by the late Richard Thompson, who spent a career as an editorial cartoonist before deciding to try a syndicated strip. I named this font after the main family in the strip, the Otterloops.

That's probably enough for now. Don't want anyone having a seizure or brain aneurysm trying to decode these fonts. Visual overload. Excess stimulus!!! ... Deep breaths. Close your eyes and practice your breathing exercises.

Making this website 100% an enclosed ecosystem is basically impossible. I don't have the means or know-how, anyway. I do have to rely on the company I bought the domain from and GitHub, for sure. And FontAwesome, I do make use of their services here and there, but maybe I could do without. I only use them for super small things. If I want to link out to a video, I pretty much have to use YouTube. Well, that's a lie: I'm sure I could get something going to host whatever little videos of my own right here. Upload them fine, just need to figure out how easy it is to display it. Might be super easy.