[It's] an incurable if not mortal disease. I can’t explain it, I just like looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it. … Other people like looking at bottles of wine or girls’ bottoms, I get my kicks out of looking at type. It’s a little worrying, I must admit.

For incurable typomaniacs and those just starting down the road, here’s a trio of font games you’ll find a lot more fulfilling than Minesweeper ever was. In the bad, bad old days.

Helvetica vs. Arial

Do Tekken-style battle (sort of) as the hopping, high-jumping Helvetica against the Microsoft-imposed mediocrity of Arial.

The Rather Difficult Font Game

Big, clean, pretty font identification practice from the good folks at I Love Typography. Rather difficult, as it turns out.

Deep Font Challenge

Font ID meets the old carnival  shooting gallery. Timed and progressively more difficult. Great fun. In a really, really dorky way.

It’s too good a chance to pass up. As the call for entries points out, “if your logo is chosen, it will appear on hundreds of attendee t-shirts, on web sites receiving millions of hits, and on all the printed materials at the actual event in October.”

Click here for full rules.

There’s plenty to dispute in the categorization, methodology, and meaning of the results, but one of the most interesting results was accidental, namely:

Our initial hypothesis that we intended to prove was that Twitter was being used predominantly for self-promotion. These are tweets that are trying to push a product, service or have a distinct “Twitter only offer” of some kind.

Surprisingly for Pear, only 5.85% of the tweets they tracked (2,000 public tweets over two weeks) fell into the “Self-Promotion” category.

A selfless lot, Twitter users. Or else it’s evidence that some of the ten-thousand odd self-proclaimed social media gurus ready to charge hundreds of dollars an hour to tell small business owners how to tweet their way to success may know a little less than they pretend to.

Pear plans to repeat the study each quarter to track trends. It’ll be interesting to watch.

Download the full results here (PDF).

The best place to start if you want to use WP as a blogging tool within an existing website (and on many other WP how-tos) is the relevant article in the WP Codex, which can be a little dry but is quite thorough.

An incredibly useful general info source is Smashing Magazine, which as you  know is the no. 2 most popular and best-loved web design blog after A List Apart. Smashing is very WP-friendly and has a whole host of WP resources and tutorials here.

The best way to understand WP from the inside out is in two steps.

First, just do a fresh install somewhere on your own site, download a few themes from one of Smashing’s Wordpress theme galleries or the official WP gallery, and start messing around, adding plugins, making sample posts and pages, sticking widgets in here or there. The WP 2.7+ backend is incredibly intuitive and requires virtually no explanation for basic functionality.

Once you want to get in under the hood and figure out what to do with the PHP and CSS files in the Appearance>Editor to make fully customized sites with real CMS functionality for clients, read through this great Themeshaper tutorial.

When you understand all the pieces of the puzzle that go into a typical theme, you’ll understand how to do just about anything you like.

This isn’t the first Baconfest in the country, but there isn’t a square inch of America where it fits better. A dangerously delicious time guaranteed for all.

The New Lines, a Brooklyn-based band that plays reverby, melancholy, melodic pop influenced in equal measures by Stephin Merritt, Broadcast, and Joy Division, had a pair of concerts at the festival. Mastermind multi-instrumentalist Hewson Chen asked Prescient Media to produce a poster in the old Bauhaus spirit for a pair of concerts it played that day.

If you were around Williamsburg/Bushwick that Saturday night or Sunday, you may have seen the result: