Category Archives: Uncategorized

Transformers Fonts

Today’s update is a trio of overdue updates for my various science-fiction fonts, all related to Transformers! Each can be found on the science-fiction fonts page.

album_dai-atlasDai-Atlas
Dai-Atlas is a science-fiction themed, lcd-like font is based on the original Transformers logo from Hasbro, except thinner and leaner for each of reading. Includes full alphabet, extended punctuation, and Euro. Includes italic and bold versions.
album_fractylFractyl
This decorative typeface used for the Predacons’ speaking bubbles in the BotCon “Ground Zero” comic in 1997. Includes full alphabet, extended characters, and Euro. Includes bold and italic versions.
album_mechalockMechalock
This simple-stylistic typeface is based on the “Combiners” subline logo from Hasbro’s “Robots in Disguise” Transformers series. Includes full alphabet, extended punctuation, and Euro. Includes italic version.

Western Fonts II

For the most part, today’s update is an attempt to fill the last of the maintenance holes in the Western Fonts archive. I’m also going to take the opportunity to get some fixes and updates into the overall site itself while I’m at it…

  • All main tables now sort alphabetically
  • Alien Glyphs page added, sorted under Science Fiction Fonts
  • Fantasy Scripts and Glyphs page added, sorted under Fantasy Fonts
  • Art-Deco Fonts now display correctly
album_roughknightRoughknight
Roughknight is a western-style typeface based on Sony’s “Wild Arms 5” video game title logo. Includes full alphabet and extended punctuation, Euro.
album_tonopahTonopah
Tonopah is about as basic as Western-themed fonts get. Simple, straight, and boxy, with very heavy serifs. Includes numerals, punctuation, accent characters, and Euro. Includes Hollow, Bold, Italic, and Bold-Italic versions.
album_winslettWinslett
Winslett is a decorative ‘old-west’ style font with thin letters and heavily-thickened serifs and accents. Includes full alphabet, accent characters, and Euro. Includes ‘hollow’ version.

Quantum

This is a quick font update, well overdue. Just getting it out of the way while I had some free time!

album_quantumQuantum
Quantum is a simple, ‘classic-sans’ typeface that is based on the title credits of the James Bond movie “Quantum of Solace”. Includes full alphabet, extended punctuation, Euro. Includes regular and italic versions.

Western Fonts

Today’s update (on an off-day!) is a quick attempt on my part to clean up a little bit of the western fonts page with some much-overdue maintenance updates. Enjoy! More will come through the week as I find time!

album_bantorainBantorain
A simple ‘old west’ font based on some of the common building marquees of the period. Includes international characters, Euro, full alphabet and punctuation.
album_steampuffSteampuff
Steampuff was created as a ‘challenge’ font, based on a concept introduced in the Powerpuff Girls television series. The font has a basic western motif but with little hearts adding deco touches to the stalks and dots. Includes accent marks, Euro, and full upper and lower-case alphabet.
album_hetfieldHetfield
Hetfield is a simple western font with decorative flourish for all the serifs. Includes full alphabet, lower case, punctuation, extended character set, and Euro. Includes bold and italic versions.

Caps Fonts Updates

With the past few days dedicated to redoing the database and registration system, I decided to use today to knock out a few much-needed updates to some ‘all caps’ decorative fonts, and throw a new one in the mix too boot. Again, thank you, everyone, for your patience and understanding for the past few days. The new system works wonderfully and should make things a lot easier for those browsing the fonts here.

album_strongarm_capsStrongarm Caps
This ‘caps’ font is based on the lettering and ‘tech emblem’ used in Hasbro’s 2015 “Robots in Disguise” line, with the tech emblem surrounding the capital letters used in the “Strongarm” font. Includes Autobot, Predacon, and Decepticon symbols, all letters and numerals.
album_trek_arrowcapsTrek Arrowcaps
This decorative-caps typeface basically takes the capital letters from the original “Star Trek” logo and places them within the traditional Federation Arrowhead. Includes numerals and capital letters.
album_steamcog_capsSteamcog Caps
Steamcog Caps is a companion font for “Steamwreck”, consisting of all caps and numerals housed in decorative gears.

More Art-Deco Updates

Today’s update includes a new font, “Hastings”, done in a classic, simple art-deco style, along with a couple of other maintenance updates for the art-deco page.

album_hastingsHastings
Hastings is classic, basic art-deco face based on marquee posters found everywhere in the 1920s and 1930s. Perfect for anything that evokes the ‘pulp’ feel. Includes full alphabet, extended character set, euro. Includes bold, italic, bold-italic weights.
album_broadmoorBroadmoor
Broadmoor is a classic-style art-deco font based on a wide swath of lettering from the pulp era. The name is taken from the popular resort in Colorado Springs. Includes full alphabet, punctuation, accents, and Euro. Includes bold and italic versions.
album_lorreLorre
Lorre is a thick, bold art-deco typeface modeled after posters and marquees from the late 1920s. Includes full alphabet, extended characters and punctuation, Euro. Includes regular and italic forms.

Montalban Update

Minor fix to this one.. turns out I forgot the kerning tables.. oops. This fixes that. Sorry!

album_montalbanMontalban is a bold display face based heavily on the title and end-credits from the legendary Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan movie. Includes full alphabet, extended punctuation, euro. Includes bold, italic, and bold-italic, and condensed versions of all of the above.

Happy New Year!

Well, 2015 is here, and so far Unicron is ten years’ late for his big arrival. This should teach us to be thankful for little things.

Also, due to the holiday, no major updates today! See you on next Tuesday!

Gamergate 103: The Press

It is a strange sense of business acumen to demonize and dehumanize to attack your customers. Imagine if when confronted with a series of recalls, Ford Motor Company decided to launch advertisements and articles claiming the “Death of the Redneck”, labelled all Ford customers “redneck”, and brazenly declared “good riddance” to all of them because Ford no longer wanted their money anyway. Ford would, more than likely, get their wish and find that if they are not completely going out of business, then they are certainly enjoying a dramatic loss in sales and corporate worth. In short, it would be a decidedly stupid corporate move.

When the sordid details of Zoe Quinn’s sexual relationships, which included game reviewers, hit the internet, there were indeed the usual trolls that hit upon this issue and behaved in a sub-human manner. As I said before, I have no sympathy for these trolls, who thrive on doing harm wherever they can and to whomever they can. Those that have made death and rape threats deserve jail time, and I doubt you’ll find few people, including very few actual gamers, that will disagree with me on this point.

But beyond the trolls there was, and remains, a reasonable questioning of the integrity of some in the journalistic press. And, to be fair, some in the gaming media actually did revise their ethical practices, and even lay off some of the worst ethical offenders for such things as taking bribes, unethical collusion, and so on. And kudos to those members of the gaming press that chose their integrity over their ego.

Unfortunately, a large chunk, and certainly the loudest chunk, of the gaming press chose not to go this route. Instead a group of so-called ‘reporters’ and editors got together on their own mailing list to devise a plan to deflect all criticism away from their own behavior by equating any and all video-gamers with the internet trolls attacking Zoe Quinn (and also now Anita Sarkeesian). Within two days over one-dozen near-identical articles were released in the gaming press declaring gaming culture “right-wing”, “misogynist”, “tea-party-like” and, above all “dead”, along with the idea that the gaming culture itself deserved to die for being so incredibly evil.

And to a point, this cadre of propagandists successfully played upon very old and outdated stereotypes of the ‘college-loser-gamers’ to push the notion that the whole affair was not about how the media was acting, but about another chapter on the “war on women” with the virtuous feminists against the vile gamers. The relatively handful of vile tweets from the internet’s most disturbed was and is cited as proof of the ‘evil gamer’, and anyone who dared question the media’s role in all this was automatically thrown in with the worst misogynists.

Personally I think that this is the most disturbing aspect of all of the Gamergate controversy. What we have is a large segment of the ‘gaming press’ deciding to take the entire gaming culture, consisting of millions of fans worldwide, and making them social outcasts (once again). They’ve used the terrible behavior of a few dozen, at most, internet trolls and used that to justify the demonization and dehumanization of – quite literally – tens of millions of people.

So in closing up this whole sordid affair, I leave this as an open question: How is labelling all those who play video-gamers ‘right-wing misogynist would-be-rapist basement dwellers’ any different or any better than the internet trolling that has victimized Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn? Is degrading a whole and sizable subset of the world’s population really supposed to support the ‘feminist’ position, or this all a very juvenile response on the part of a chunk of the gaming media to deflect away from their own maleficence, even if it means destroying their own audience?

In the end, the so-called “Gamergaters” (and I do not mean the trolls) are really the only winners here, though it may not feel like much of a victory. The gaming press has revealed itself, and the good players – the ones that revisited their practices and treated their audience with some respect, will be the ones to carry the ball forward. For them, the beginnings of a much-needed journalistic reform have begun, albeit with great reluctance involving a great deal of kicking and screaming.

The losers, then, are those chunks of the gaming press that doubled-down, infuriating their audiences and alienating their sponsors. It’s hard to imagine that sites like Verge.com or Kotaku will ever command any level of respect that they once had, or even if they’ll survive the dramatic loss of their audience. But they should remember that journalism requires a high level of intregity, one that too many of them have failed to live up.

Gamergate 102: The Sides

One of the games I worked on while at Talonsoft was called East Front, which presented an interesting problem. Between Adolph Hitler’s Nazis and Joseph Stalin’s communists, exactly who was the player supposed to be rooting for? I did a good job on my part of the game and it was well received but that question is one that always stuck with me. In such a titanic struggle, a person naturally wants someone to root for and someone to root against. Our nature demands that there be a “good guy” and a “bad guy”. So what happens when there are just “bad guys” and no good options to be had?

In a real sense this is the situation we have with Gamergate. There’s a strong desire to declare one side or another ‘morally right’, or ‘the vile human beings to have ever existed on the planet’. Certainly cries of misogyny, death-threats, rape-threats, and other forms of vile internet communication would be emotionally swaying except for the fact that all sides of this controversy are rife with such examples. While there’s a certain expectation with the lowest form of internet trolls to engage in this behavior, when it becomes mirrored in professional sites like Kotaku, where writers state that “Gamer culture is dead, and rightfully so,” because “All gamers are nothing but would-be rapists that are thankfully too cowardly to leave their parent’s basements”, the problem is far, far worse.

There just isn’t a lot of moral high-ground to be found here. Even the well-documented victims of this controversy, Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, have engaged in their own hostile and hateful behavior, sometimes even to their own supporters (as evidenced by their own websites). Indeed both women have made large numbers of threats and attacks of their own.

So with all this hate and anger and lack of positive role-models to be found, how do we define the sides of this conflict and where they stand? Obviously the roles of ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ aren’t going to cut it, since you’re not going to easily find many examples of either.

It’s easy, and probably obvious, to say, that the internet trolls are the obvious bad guys here, but they’re not really the villains of the piece. They’re more like the looters that show up after a natural disaster. Spare them no sympathy and offer them no comfort, but do not endow upon them a level of importance that they do not deserve. The only ‘movement’ than can be ascribed onto them is one that should not be described in a professional-sounding article.

Zoe and Anita? Both of these women have screwed up in several ways, are passionate political advocates, and have well-earned reputations as being less than honest. Yet all of this actually describes most of the internet. While these two women have indeed become, for better or worse, poster children for whatever causes are thrown around, they are not all that unique. Again, that this whole controversy stemmed from either or both of these women is farcical.

Can we blame feminism? Certainly quite a few sites and reporters have attempted to lay this whole controversy down at the feet of misogyny alone and have even gone so far as labelling all gamers as ‘right-wing tea-partying cavemen’, which came as a shock to the four female gamers in my household, of course. But feminist concerns in gaming aren’t new issues either. And, indeed, gaming in general has made great positive strides at addressing real concerns about misogyny in gaming content in the past several years. Indeed, it seems a little odd to attack gamers as such cretins now after so much has been accomplished overall. In fact, GDA has recently announced that the majority of game-purchases are for and by women – making the claim that the whole culture and industry is misogynist rather bizarre.

So what’s actually changed? Why has this moment, above and beyond all others, caused Gamergate to be this much of a firestorm? After all, we’ve seen everything else before, and all the players have been around and considerably vocal at least since AOL first went online. If gaming survived Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem, and even Ms. PacMan, why are so many people declaring gaming and gamers ‘dead’? Why are things so horrible now? If you notice, I did leave one side of this controversy largely out of this article, and that’s because that’s where the heart of this controversy lies and they deserve an article all of their own.

Next: The Gaming Press