Everything I never wanted (dream 2)

I am in a palatial, multistory building with floor upon floor, room upon room. All the furnishings are sumptuous and well appointed with impeccable taste, but I do not feel particularly enthused to be here.

There are many people busy doing things in this building, but the people I am nearest to are focusing their attentions on me.

“Here,” they seem to say. “This is for you. Wouldn’t you like to do such-and-such, or to have this?” — this nice thing or this experience that is what one should really like, or be doing.

But none of it interests me.

I realize why. It is like The Truman Show movie in a way, with everything revolving around me. Except unlike the movie, it is not that they are secretly manipulating my experience for the benefit of a TV series, or for others. The purpose isn’t to leave me in the dark within a larger story scripted for the entertainment of an audience. Instead, it is being done openly to convince me of things the others are enraptured by but I am not, so that I will join in with them.

A number of luxury items that would have cost significant sums to design or create are shown to me that most anyone would desire and feel flattered to be presented with.

But the people in this place want me to buy into their experience in a way that I do not, or cannot. I am not moved, and so they only try harder to interest me.

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Achieving enhanced web typography, by a 30-year veteran

Enhanced typography is still difficult to achieve on the web — well over 20 years after the web’s inception, no less — and by now should be much easier, to my way of thinking. As a professional typographer for 30-plus years now, I thought it might be helpful for others to explore how I went about putting that aspect of things together here on Hermit Spirit.

This overview takes a look at the various typographic elements I’ve given special treatment on the Hermit Spirit blog and website, including a number of WordPress plug-ins that have been utilized. For those who are more intrepid, what’s covered in this post should hopefully be enough as a jumping-off point to help get started implementing these solutions as well. Although I had experience hand-coding a couple of previous websites (HTML and CSS, though not more advanced code like JavaScript or PHP), I myself could certainly have used an overview like this over a year ago when I began trying to get Hermit Spirit going in my spare time using WordPress.

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