As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
- from 'The Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka
What you'll need:
(1) Credit Card
(1) Mailing Address
(1) Week
(0) Insecurities
Like Samsa, it became me. Just pure, unbridled word-nerdery.
My first stop—Unicomp Keyboards.
I kicked it back to the elementary school typing class days and purchased an IBM Model-M keyboard. The thing is a tank and features that classic buckling-spring clack-clack-clack sound and feel when you depress the keys.
What could be interpreted as just another laughable case of cultural irony, was, at least for me, a comforting blanket of nostalgia.
My next point of unnecessary spending brought me to Turn Nocturnal for what was quite possibly the epitome of guilty-pleasure purchases over the course of the transformation—a tshirt of San Serifs.
"Not too bad," I thought to myself. But who was I fooling. It was quintessential word-nerd.
When the keyboard finally arrived, I was fortunate enough to stumble upon this little gem. Type Racer.
Remember those speed typing tests cleverly masked as games to make typing class a little less lame than it already was? Well, they're back. This time in the form of VW Beetles and excerpts from famous books and screenplays. Nothing about it makes sense, but once you experience that initial crushing victory, you'll understand.
I've yet to achieve the final stage, but I hear it's exploding all over the Internet and accumulating a large base of non-typographers. FontStruct. It's free, too easy to use, and available as what I'm assuming to be a plugin as an on-site tool.
