I treated myself to Berkeley Mono

Technology
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I just bought my first font today. I’ve been looking at Berkeley Mono for a while, and I figured that instead of pre-ordering Metaphor: ReFantazio only to see it get a director’s cut or a price drop a year or two later, I’d treat myself to a nice font for use with my terminals and in Emacs. It’s also been nice to use in sway on my Linux machines.

$75 for a nice monospace font that I can also use at work vs $69.99 for a video game seems like a no-brainer.

The next time I upload, anybody who also has Berkeley Mono installed will see my website rendered with that font, too (though for sans-serif text Atkinson Hyperlegible will still take precedence).

Incidentally, I’m not knocking Metaphor. I got about eight hours worth of play out of the demo, and the game looks and sounds great. But since Persona 5 got a director’s cut as Persona 5 Royal and Shin Megami Tensei V became Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance (where Lilith got a major glow-up), I don’t want to jump aboard the hype train and pay the sucker tax.

There are only three developers/publishers whose games I’ll even consider pre-ordering — Square-Enix, From Software, and ATLUS — but even then I’m not likely to do it. Granted, somebody has to be a “dumb gamer” and pre-order games so that the developers keep working on them. I just don’t feel obligated to be one of them. If I’m going to be a tester and find bugs in a new game, I should be the one getting paid.

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I have that typeface saved because I do want to a complete setup change and switch to a different text editor and a different mono space typeface. It really does look lovely.

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I’m with you on not paying full price for games these days, unless it is something with a lot of replayability that I will play immediately (Civ 7, for example).

That’s a nice looking font, it captures the feel of vintage technical manuals. I like how much developer tooling like this exists, especially as a one-time purchase in a world full of SaaS offerings.

Link to the typeface for anyone interested

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I adore Berkeley Mono. I have a license that allows me to host it for my site, which is why I use it there, just like I have locally as my fixed width font for a few years. I am really excited by Houston, though it seems to be very slow going. I also don’t love that US Graphics heavily uses Twitter (with interesting content!) versus posting on their site or just about any alternative. That plus a move to Texas during COVID has me a little… uneasy. But I can’t help but adore the aesthetics.

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wow, berkeley mono is a gorgeous font! i love the way they talk about it on their site. :')