Comic Sans as a font needs no defense.

Just like a good band with bad fans, we don't balk at Comic Sans, we balk at the people who use comic sans for inappropriate things. (Or to use a more computery analogy, there's nothing wrong with capital letters or all-caps, but some users use them inappropriately).

City memo minutes should not be distributed in Comic Sans. Wedding invitations should probably not be in Comic Sans. The Surrey police should not have released a memo on rape and sexual assault in Comic Sans[1].

There are times when you do not want to be unserious and insincere, and some people are, and its embarrassing. Comic Sans is just a vector for that, but if you find fault with it, its still the people who are at fault.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/C6QY1yp.jpg

(The Surrey Police strike again! http://i.imgur.com/Kn68ubk.jpg)

(the compulsive designers in us will notice the logo at the top of that one is off-center, too)

"When I tried to think of a project suitable for learning JavaScript, a terrain flyover demo came to mind."

Me too! But then I re-establish contact with the reality of my actual abilities and create a button which, when pressed, prints "Hello, world!" to an alert window.

Silicon Valley used to be a place with cheap land where people went because the cost of living was low, and they could tinker with cool ideas whereas, in the expensive East Coast cities, they'd have to work themselves to death just to tread water. California was this place where you could come and do cool stuff and build on land the East Coast elite didn't want.

It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's why urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city per se) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness.

Enter VC, which connects people with the resources (funding) to try out their ideas and, better yet, enough resources that they have a "rocket fuel" advantage over any competitors. Over time, the VCs and "tech press" became king-makers. Then, the well-connected became a new, informal, executive suite who care more about protecting each other than genuine competition.

Hence, VC-istan. It's the first postmodern corporation, cleverly designed to look like a free market. Reputable investors are the executive suite. People with the authority to write welfare-checks-I-mean-acqhires at big companies are The Compensation Board because they decide on bonuses. "Tech press" are another part of the HR department that writes performance reviews. So-called startup "CEOs" are semi-independent PMs. Software engineers are peons who work long hours because they haven't figured out yet that they work at a big company and aren't actually going to getting investor contact and made founders in 7.35 months-- that was a degenerate empty promise.

VC-istan has clever marketing. It doesn't look like a stodgy corporate behemoth, but it is. That is why it has ceased to innovate.