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.
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.
It is a Saturday morning during wintertime. At about 7:00 a.m. I wake up to go to the bathroom and then to the kitchen for a snack. As usual the cats are milling about, clamoring to be fed in their gentle way. We are temporarily out of dry kibble, since I hadn’t had time the previous night to refill their dry-food storage canisters upstairs from the long-term supply of bagged food in the basement. (If we keep bags upstairs, one or another of the cats will eventually claw them open.) I had skipped the chore to get to bed at an hour at least approximating something halfway decent.
After the cats have been fed some unexpected and always-appreciated canned food, instead of the usual kibble at this hour, I head back to bed for more sleep. It’s the weekend and I want to catch up. With enough sleep, I am myself, and I’ve been overworked and a little short of it this week.
I drift back to sleep. Then at some point I am in a dream. I am in a small town the size of, say, a small university town. Bigger than the town of less than 10,000 I grew up in, but still small compared to the cities where most of us live these days. (Having grown up in a small town, I prefer them to cities.) In the dream, it’s a gray day — the type of day I generally like, except it’s somewhat cold, and some snow and slush are on the streets. I find myself in the downtown area of this small town, with ice skates on. I begin skating over the pavement, and even though the snow and ice are melting away, I can still skate over the last remaining bits, more or less.
In the late 1990s, I launched a controversial website — Beyond Vegetarianism — that was at or near ground zero for both the vegetarian and paleo diet movements on the early web. Why would someone who formerly had much to say disappear from the internet for 15 years? Especially at a time when the website was going strong, and just as the paleo movement it had helped publicize was gathering real momentum?
The first several sections of Part 1 here are a retrospective partly for people who knew, or knew of, me “back when” as the guy who created BeyondVeg.com and who was allied with the early paleo diet movement online. These sections provide perspective on my motivations at the time, which were often misinterpreted, and tie up some loose ends. When I eventually dropped off the scene at the time, it was done without much of an explanation, if any.
For those without close familiarity with vegetarianism and paleo diet, these initial sections should help give an idea of what the “veggie vs. paleo” landscape of the times was like, and the role Beyond Veg served, as I saw it.
Whatever your familiarity with any of this, though, if you’d prefer to skip the initial retrospective sections, you can jump to the main part of the story here, recounting the “prequel” years leading up to Beyond Veg, its formation and growth, and then the aftermath.
The “Beyond Veg” website I started in the early days of the web established its position then by drawing a few different lines in the sand that provoked controversy. First, by publishing the earliest widely referenced debunkings of vegetarianism’s claim (at that time) of being the original human diet. This we accomplished by also being the first online to translate and present in plain English the findings of peer-reviewed science on paleoanthropology and human evolution as they pertained to diet.
My motivation was not debunking for debunking’s sake, but because I myself had been misled into believing the above claim. And, following advice based on it had delayed my recovery from health problems by a few years. Perhaps I might help others avoid the troubles I had undergone and not also lose months or years to inferior health — time they could not get back.
I also wanted to set the scientific record straight. While many if not most in the vegetarian movement probably did not base their adherence to the diet primarily on the belief that humans’ biological dietary adaptation was originally vegetarian and presumably supported by evolution (or the Bible, some believed), still, it was part of the “canon,” more or less. At the least, vegetarianism’s status as more whole and “natural” than the indiscriminate standard American mixed diet was usually a selling point. And it was true it was more natural in terms of its inclusion of a large proportion of whole plant foods — if one also ignored its omission of meat. So Beyond Veg’s debunking of that omission as unnatural and less whole did not sit well, at all.
Honestly, kids don’t have much going for them other than carrying on the family name. And you might have very good reason to fear even that. Cats, on the other hand… Well, by almost every other measure, they’ve got kids beat by a country mile.
From the cost to raise them to their agreeable nature, disciplined habits, all-around respectful behavior, and athletic ability — from toilet training all the way through the teenage years — it’s not hard to find a slew of reasons why you might find a cat preferable to a kid. Why anybody in their right mind would think otherwise is hard to fathom. In fact, once done reading these 36 reasons, you might well be itchin’ to find the nearest merchandise return counter to exchange your snotty hapless kid for a felicitous furry feline.
You can raise six cats for the cost of one-quarter of a kid.
You don’t have to pay for cats to go to college.
Cats won’t owe student loan debt the rest of their life and yours.
Cats come in five or six different fur colors.
Kids scream. Cats purr.
Cats will still cuddle with you on the sofa after they’ve grown up.
Kids will move back home to live on the sofa after they’ve grown up.
Cats know how to pee in the box right away and don’t need to be potty-trained.
When a cat meows back at you, you know they appreciate you. When a kid talks back, it ain’t the same.
Note: “Think Outside the Box” in the post title refers to the name of the blog here before it was changed to “Hermit Spirit.”
After fifteen years with no personal presence on the internet, events over the last year or two have pushed me into gearing up to become active again. It has been a “long time gone,” as well as a long time reaching a turning point where the time feels right and I’m now ready to surface online again beyond just lurker mode.
