I learned a new webweaving trick this week. Most of my pages have a standard font but there are some where I've chosen to have a different one as an artistic choice to match the theme. For example, my newest page, Mogollan Monster, has a newspaper/old-timey style font. Well, I am not the most versed webweaver out there. In fact, I'm kind of piratey and I will look for code that does what I want and just copy/paste, like snippets I've found on Stackoverflow. Yeah, it would probably be better if I actually went through the steps and learned what I was doing. But I just want to make my site and have it work.

So! All that digression is to say that when I was finding the fonts, it was the path of least resistance to just use the code that Google so helpfully provides. That seemed to work as well as hosting your own fonts, which sounded a little daunting to this piratical weaver of webs. And I was fine with this until a discussion on the 32-Bit Cafe Discord where one user mentioned they had third party fonts disabled and weren't interested in being tracked by Google. I never thought about the fact that some people would block fonts because of that because, well, I just never thought about it.

Now, my website isn't dependent on font style but I chose them to stylistically complement my content. And I wanted others to be able to see that. So I spent some time this week downloading fonts and changing the html accordingly. And you know what? It was actually SO EASY!

Every now and then there's a new influx of users on Bluesky and this usually happens when something has happened on that OTHER site. There's been another huge wave of accounts and I'm just thrilled to see more of the content I enjoyed on that other place before it became what it is now. I social media about as well as I webweave but I have some tips for you if you're new to Bluesky. It helped me out so it might help you out, too. First of all, look through the feeds available and subscribe to the ones that interest you. I follow these feeds:

There are like a bajillion feeds - I'm sure there is something out there for you! Another tip is to look for "starter packs." This is a grouping of accounts that someone has put together which usually follows a theme - could be a profession or just their group of friends or afficinados of something. I subscribed to a couple of cat starter packs and, as a result, I now follow SO MANY cat accounts. Which is fine! That's what I use Bluesky for - a daily dopamine hit of kitties. This link is to a listing of over 41K starter packs. I would suggest filtering by number of uses and maybe a key word for what you're looking for. Sometimes you'll find starter packs in your feeds.

Just in case anyone is curious, these are the accounts I follow.

Reading

Still chipping away at Into the Narrowdark. Have I mentioned that this is an excellent book? It is so good. There used to be a time in my life when I read several books at once. I'd have the living room book, the bathroom book, the bedside book. I'm not sure why I fell out of doing that.

Watching

I watched a couple of cool shows on PBS this week. Both of them were episodes of the series Nature. The first one was Lions of the Skeleton Coast. This is a desolate area of Namibia which is on the coast. It follows 3 lioness cubs who were orphaned and how they end up surviving. They had to adapt to their environment so they learned how to hunt for seabirds and seals - not a lion's usual prey! Super interesting. The other episode was Dracula's Hidden Kingdom which was all about the wildlife in Transylvania - wolves, bears, lynx and the most jaw-dropping scenery.

Playing

I am still enthralled with Pixel Cats! I've learned a new profession, Baker, so now I can make food items that give buffs. I've been gifted another kitten and 2 of my village members are officially friends. I also made it all the way to the end of the adventure track, only to be defeated by the boss. But your kitties don't die - they are just escorted out of the forest by ascendent cats who chastise you for being in the woods. This is such a sweet game!

That's about it for this week. See you on the flip side!