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I think the OpenBSD people started doing this after the CERN presentation on the Higgs boson that also used Comic Sans. By making it slightly harder to read and therefore more difficult to scan diagonally, it increases the attention the reader gives to the text.

Comic sans is not so bad.

Covering it with artifacts makes anything painful to read.

And yet they could have improved readability by simply using png instead of jpg. This isn't a 'hipster' thing, it's a 'be thoughtful of your users' thing.