T10 Druid Set: Ewww

The T10 Druid set is just mean looking: great for a bear or kitty, but for us healy types? Thorns and shoulders that looked like they were cut from Audrey II. Really?

Typographical woes

I love nice typography. A book that is typeset with care is a joy to behold. Good typography takes skill (though tools like TeX help immensely) and bad typography often leaves me feeling like I've been punched in the gut, especially when the mistakes are intentional or due to obvious ignorance or ineptitude. Here are two examples which I came across recently.

The cover for Yoko Tawada's Facing the Bridge contains (to me) an ugly scar, can you see it? Here's the first word in the title, as it is written: FДCING. The designer is using the capital Cyrillic letter de as the letter A. Minor point? Sure. Stylistic license? I suppose so, but it just freaks me out.

The second typographic travesty is much worse. Hans Safrian's book Eichmann's Men is published by Cambridge University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is a scholarly work, and is overall laid out and typeset nicely. Polish names are printed with the correct letter forms and diacritics (e.g., Łódź). Unfortunately the typesetter obviously doesn't know German, because throughout you see such things as  "Am Groβen Wansee". Do you see the problem? They used the Greek small letter beta β for the German ligature Eszett: Groβen vs. Großen. To make matters worse, some words such as Anschluß and Höß are correctly typeset. I really expected more from an academic publisher.

The Mabignogion and Middle Welsh

A friend posted on FaceBook that she was reading about the origins of the Arthurian legends in Britain, which got me thinking about The Mabignogion, which in turn started me wondering about Middle Welsh, and given my obsessive personality (at least about things that don't matter much to real life) I started looking for references on this language. Given that you can readily find books still in print for Old Norse (cf. my previous obsession with the Icelandic sagas and my collection of Old Norse dictionaries and grammars) I figured that there must be similar material for Middle Welsh. Alas, this is not the case.

The Internet Archive has a scan of Strachan's An Introduction to Early Welsh, published in 1909. There's even an (uncorrected) OCR version. Paging through this in a PDF reader is a pain. Taking a cue from the Germanic Lexicon Project, I decided that I'm going to clean up the plain-text version of Strachan, and then generate a nicely typeset version for other people interested in the language. Since the book is long out of copyright, there really isn't an impediment to doing this.

To this end I've started what I'm calling Project Gwrhyr. Named for Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd (Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues) — a minor but pivotol character in the tale of Culhwch ac Olwen — the intent is to collect together electronic versions of Middle and Old Welsh grammars, lexica, and texts that are in the public domain and make them available in clean, machine and human readable forms.

There is a GitHub repository for the work, which will be populated soon. I will also be fleshing out the website with more information as time allows, though I suspect few people will be interested in this right now.

As far as working with Strachan goes, I'm torn. On the one hand I'd like to get the raw OCR text cleaned up as quickly as possible and from there go directly to working on a nice LaTeX version. On the other hand part of me feels that I should be more methodical about it, using TEI markup on the OCR text to get a faithful (!) representation of the original. I'm not sure what is best. The academic community is undoubtedly served best by the TEI version, but it is more work. If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

T9 Druid Set: Vavavoom!

The T9 Druid set is pretty racy, and Charlotta looks damn fine.

Charlotta steps into the Arena

So one of my friends talked me into forming a 2v2 arena team. Yes, Charlotta is going to enter the arena and have her ass handed to her. I have one piece of PvP gear. The pwnage is going to be amazing.

Then again, I'm looking forward to it. Amicitia has been successful with the Faction Champions encounter in ToC, and the last few weeks I've survived the whole fight. On the one hand this has been great training but on the other the mobs in Faction Champions are controlled by a program (the fact they have rediculous mana and hit points offsets this a bit, but still.)

So I'm reading up on resto druid arena tactics and we'll see how it goes.

Converting FLAC to Apple Lossless

I've found the ultimate tool for converting audio files between different formats: Stephen Booth's Max. I sometimes buy high-quality audio from HDtracks (e.g., ECM uses them) which is available in FLAC. Unfortunately iTunes doesn't handle FLAC, and previous converters just didn't do everything I want (like copying over metadata from the original file.) Max to the rescue: it trivially and quickly converts the FLAC to Apple Lossless (or a plethora of other formats), and brings the metadata along. Wonderful stuff.

New TMAX 400 in HC-110

I developed a roll of New TMAX-400 (400TMY-2) in HC-110 Dilution B today and the results were excellent. Here are the details:

1. Developer: 6.5 minutes; spindle agitation for the first 30 seconds, then inversion for 10 seconds every minute.
2. Stop: 1 minute; spindle agitation for the first 30 seconds.
3. Fix: 5 minutes in Ilford Rapid Fixer (1+4); spindle agitation for the first 30 seconds, then inversion for 10 seconds every minute.
4. Wash: Ilford method (5 + 10 + 20 + 20, then 1 minute gentle spindle agitation with PhotoFlo).

All done at 20ºC.