Mama needs new fonts.

Something has been keeping me very busy the past few rainy days, and it isn't anything I'd like to be doing.

I learned--just in time--that there are fonts you can't just use on things you plan to sell.

Usually, I open a font and my eyes go straight to the big, shiny, quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog. I have not, until this week, looked at the fourth line of official information included with each font.

Most of my fonts--which reside in a seperate folder until needed, I learned that lesson well--are dated between 1993 and 1997. 1993 was when I first got Windows, and 1997 was when my computer finally exploded from font overload.

There are those that have witnessed the horror of my fonts folder circa 1994. When Windows 3.1 takes over 15 minutes to start up, it's a symptom of a horrible addiction.

But I'm a collector, we know this. Usually it takes death or destruction to stop me from collecting certain things, but the fonts just took a back seat to Star Wars trailers, and then...music. That's all I'm sayin'. Just music.

So I got artsy again a few years back, and had to get a new font for the comic strip, and then I got dollar signs in my eyes and signed up at Etsy and Zazzle, and planned to make money with my lame-ass art. Of course I need to go and put words all over the crap to explain what's going on, and so I returned to my massive font folder, which is full of...what's politely called retired fonts.

Yeah, that's right, the fonts that weren't healthy enough to live off-world and the fonts that were slaves created by the WSI corporation were all hiding out in the dank, rainy innards of my computer, and they don't know how long they've got, but then again, who does?

Only instead of possibly luring a depressed Harrison Ford to my house to shoot my fonts, I faced possible fines. So I systematically went through every one of my fonts--all of which I know so well--and deleted the ones that were going to cost $95 to use commercially, and labeled the ones by foundries that no longer exist, so I could round them up and kill them all later if I was feeling evil.

Some font authors aren't careful where the copyright information is concerned, and they'll put down defunct AOL Hometown addresses instead of a name with which to track them down, and those offended me so badly that I think I deleted ten before I hit one with a name, an actual name.

Harold Lohner.

Harold, I love you. Or rather, I love Harold's Fonts. They are free for commercial use.

Oh hell yes.

So, between Harold's Fonts and BlamBot, home of the comic strip font that makes my shite readable (or at least legible), I'm set for at least another 12 years.

I'm not happy that Halloween Regular has been retired, though. Halloween Regular was fun. By definition, Halloween Regular should have just un-lived on forever. Ah well, we'll always have this.
(There's so much legally wrong with that picture that one retired font becomes hardly my biggest problem.)

Mama needs new fonts.