#edit existing PDF documents

[chubsonthemoon]

It is done! This is The Death of Translation, originally written in English by @landwriter, translated into Mandarin by @thirrith. Binding is dos-à-dos, with English version on one side and Mandarin on the other. Bookcloth was handwoven by me, on my rigid heddle loom :3

More under the cut!

Typeset: Fanbinders are Liars

Full stop, this typeset would not have been possible without Eth and all their patience, enthusiasm, and willingness to do even more translating! I reached out to them *checks watch* nearly a year ago in July 2023 (lololol), asking if I could use their translation of TDOT in a surprise bind I wanted to send along with Gloam's author copy of Flower King. They were kind enough to say yes, and even kinder to answer my questions when I reached out six months later in January, when I was finally able to start work on the typeset.

We talked about the many delicious things that are bound to come up when discussing translating not just from English to Mandarin, but also from digital space to meatspace. Some topics I had anticipated, like font questions, translating the colophon, etc. But even with the topics I thought I'd prepared for, there were still things that came up that both surprised and delighted: for example, while AO3's website allows for italics in Mandarin--

--my publishing program doesn't (or at least, it doesn't without needing to manually tilt every character by about 10 degrees). So as a workaround, Eth suggested changing these cases of italics to the font 华文楷体:

Through no one's fault but my own, this ended up being only slightly less work than manually tilting every instance of italics--I wanted to be sure that I got all of them, so I ended up doing a lot of double-checking manually anyway, instead of relying solely on the Search function. There was a lot of cross-referencing with the Word document that Eth was kind enough to provide, as well as squinting and general swearing. I also did the same for the uses of Latin script, manually styling each instance as Garamond to keep it consistent with the English edition:

The only other time I've had to do font surgery this intensive is probably for my typeset for Tell Me About the Big Bang, which I had to port over from a PDF. Folks, hell on earth. Do not recommend XD I remember squinting at my monitor as I had to visually confirm every instance of italics, thinking I will never do this again. Welp, four years later, here were are: fanbinders are liars, LMAO. At the very least, using Eth's Word document at least allowed me to search by styles, so it was a little easier on my eyes. 🙏

Is there a script that I might've been able to use if I was more code-savvy? Probably. But I figured going at it sledgehammer style would be the least hair-pulling way to get the job done, weirdly enough. Still, despite my best efforts, there are a few instances of PMingLiU to Garamond and PMingLiU to 华文楷体 that I know I missed, and I know I missed them because I caught them after I'd printed/cut/folded/sewn/glued (cue more swearing), so Gloam and Eth, my apologies >.< please consider them artifacts of a uniquely handmade object ajslkdjfs

In addition to the fonts, there were also some other fun things Eth and I discussed, like how to translate the notes I usually provide on the colophons! In addition to information on fonts, I also usually include some variation of:

This private, limited edition published by chubsthehamster (Moonham Press, imprint of Renegade Publishing) in 2024. This is chubsthehamster's personal copy. Out of three existing copies, this is the first.

The thing that came up with this, which still tickles my brain to this day, was how Eth chose how to translate "Moonham Press, imprint of Renegade Publishing." To get a better sense of what word to use for "imprint," they asked what the relationship was between Moonham Press and Renegade Publishing, which got me thinking about the relationship between my lil imprint and the wonderful @renegadeguild:

What's all very funny about all of this is that we are now, in fact, going by the name "Renegade Bookbinding Guild," per our most recently updated Code of Conduct. While this renders the wording I asked for out of date (and thus, the wording that made it into the book out of date :'D), I think it's also a testament to how cool the work @renegadeguild is doing--like any artform, fanbinding is alive, with its own evolving language, communities, and ideas about the craft. And I love it, I love it so much. (Was this also a plug for our new-ish website? Perhaps).

There's more I could say here, but this post is already going to be long enough, so I'll move on for now! If you get anything from this section, it's that @thirrith is amazing and very patient and kind, and I'm so grateful that we got to talk shop together. Thank you so much for all your invaluable help with this, Eth! I hope the typeset, though undoubtedly flawed, does your hard work justice!

Binding: Or, SO Much Math. Like, So Much, Guys. (It was worth it, though!)

Whoo, boy! So math was never my strong suit in school, but when I set out to do this bind last year, that wasn't an issue. At first. The dos-à-dos binding, if anything, just requires a little bit of finagling on the usual case-bound format--a bit more math if you want to do an all-cloth cover, like I planned on doing, but nothing I couldn't work out with some trial and error. (My prototype below!)

Then came February, when I took a weaving class with my friend, and then everything kinda exploded.

My original idea was to use some green Duo bookcloth I had on hand (this color, actually)--for those of you not initiated into the Duo cult, Duo is a Rayon bookcloth with a very devoted fan following in Renegade. It's very pretty; the Rayon weave is one color, and the paper backing is usually complementary color, so it has this cool two-toned effect. Duo is in high demand in Renegade circles because sadly, the company that manufactures it went out of business last year. (Although I've heard rumors recently that there's another company making something similar, but the cloth has a really high purchase requirement and is, like, for businesses only I think).

Anyway, I also wanted to have a gold line around the whole book as a kind of bellyband/obi to further connect the two versions of the story (another reason why I chose the dos-à-dos format to begin with heh), as you can see from my scribbled notes here--

But alas! I knew going in that adhering things to Duo is often Problematic, thanks to one very painful experience trying to get some iron-on foil on another bind (the textured surface of Duo just makes it kinda hard to stick or paint stuff on it). So if I wanted a clean, continuous line, the remaining options were to either paint it on a strip of paper that I'd somehow...adhere to the cloth? Or maybe cut different slices of bookcloth and glue them on. I wasn't satisfied with either of those options, though.

Then--the weaving class. I made a scarf, and I love it and I loved making it. But the whole time, I'll not lie, my thoughts were elsewhere.

In short, my decision to weave my own bookcloth kinda came from a few different factors:

The desire to attempt to recreate Duo, that elusive beauty, the one that got away, etc. (I have several yards in my stash, but still). Others have also attempted to recreate it, and I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring.

My current spiral into the deep hole that is fiber arts (it started with crochet, then knitting, then sewing, then weaving, then spinning, and now I'm eyeing quilting! Please help me).

The gold line. It kept bugging me. And when I found weaving, I just thought there was something very neat about the process of actually making the cloth for a dos-à-dos binding from scratch, and especially for this binding. I wanted to bind a story about translation (or rather, the death of it, and yet still the necessity of it--how we must try to communicate, despite of, or perhaps precisely because of, everything that gets lost in the spaces between people, and the tragedy of that loss, and the beauty of what makes it through, and the love always present in the effort regardless), and also, the translation of that story. Weaving is a very meditative process, and with every pass of the shuttle, back and forth, building slowly but surely the fabric that would hold the story that Gloam had written and that Eth had translated, I thought a lot about translation, and the gaps between people, and how we choose our words not just when translating, but when we speak at all. From a design perspective, I used the same colors I would've used had I chosen the Duo bookcloth--green and gold--so the design wasn't too altered in terms of color scheme. But I think the choice to weave the bookcloth--the thing that bound it all together--made the project take on a completely new meaning for me, both in process and in scope, one that hadn't been there when I started. I saw the warp, perhaps, as the original story, laying the groundwork for the weft, the translation; or maybe it was the other way around, with the translation providing the scaffolding for its own, new meaning, choices that Eth had to make with this word or phrase or another building something new, something translated, and the original a live, moving thing that wove over and under each word turned phrase turned story; or maybe it was both. Maybe it didn't matter which was which, in the end. And as I wove, the thing that connected them, that gold line that had started all of this, slowly formed.

All that to say: Good God, was there a lot of math. So much math. That prototype pictured above was actually made specifically so I could calculate exactly how much I needed to weave, lol, because while I certainly had enough thread, I didn't want to have to warp more than once. I'd learned the basics in my class, but the training wheels came off here. I wanted to make my own custom fabric, which meant calculating things like ends per inch, picks per inch, loom waste, shrinkage after washing, the width of that damn gold line, how much I'd need for the hinge, the turn-ins, the boards--the whole nine yards (I didn't actually weave nine yards tho heh). It was all absolutely worth it in the end--so challenging and so, so rewarding!

(And my final reason for weaving the bookcloth? Not gonna lie, It was because I just wanted to see if I could do it LOL. I love trying at least one new thing with each of my binds, and this was it for this project. While I've been bookbinding for a few years now, I'm still very much a beginner weaver, and I'm so excited to continue to learn and experiment! Also, here's a video of me unwinding the cloth from the loom, heh. I used 10/2 Perle cotton in gold and green colors :3)

Also, turns out, you can back handmade cloth the same way you can any other cloth! I backed it using my usual heat-n-bond method, and with some Unryu Tissue in the color Forest. Since the cloth itself is a bit transparent, there are a bunch of really fun fibers you can see when it's held up to the light, but which aren't visible when the cloth is glued down to the boards. Still, knowing they're there still makes me happy :D

Finally, capping all this off, is one final, small detail I really liked: ginkgo leaf endpapers :3 this one's for me and Eth and Gloam specifically <3

Aaaand that's all from me for today, folks! Thus ends (several months late XD) my last Binderary project for the year. This was probably my most ambitious bind to date, and gosh it was so, so much fun.

And, of course, thank you so much to Gloam for sharing your story, and Eth for translating it. I can't wait for y'all to receive your copies soon!

All my love! <3

[thevixenwitch]

Sources for Celtic History and Paganism!

So today I was reading Ancient Fire: An Introduction to Gaulish Celtic Polytheism by Segomâros Widugeni when it struck me just how many of the sources were the type of thing that wouldn't necessarily come up on a regular search, particularly some out-of-print books, a lot of which are actually available on the Internet Archive! I took some time to take note of each listed source, and tried to see if I could find the right place to request them from (in the case of a handful of articles and theses), find PDF links where they did already exist, basically whatever I could! Some books are available to buy, most secondhand, and while most are available on Amazon, I won't be linking those here. I'd encourage anyone shopping to consider an alternative option if they can! Now, I haven't read through all of these, but the moment I found at least one of them seems to be impossible to find, I was reminded of the dangers of dying media. So I wanted to put these together so anyone could use them. Not every resource listed is in English. Anyway, on to the list~

Cernunnos: Looking a Different Way

By Ceisiwr Serith

https://ceisiwrserith.com/therest/Cernunnos/cernunnospaper.htm

Cernunnos Origin and Transformation of A Celtic Divinity

By Phyllis Fray Bober

https://www.scribd.com/document/460345187/cernunnos-origin-and-transformation-of-a-celtic-divinity-phyllis-fray-bober

Basic Celtic Deity Types

by Alexei Kondratiev

https://naomh-na-tursan.livejournal.com/5752.html

Deep Ancestors: Practicing the Religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans

Book by Ceisiwr Serith

https://www.scribd.com/document/362472999/Deep-Ancestors-Practicing-the-Religion-of-the-Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans

Book by Garrett S. Olmsted

https://www.academia.edu/38135817/The_Gods_of_the_Celts_and_the_Indo_Europeans_revised_2019_

Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend

Book by Miranda Aldhouse-Green

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/dictionary-of-celtic-myth-and-legend_miranda-aldhouse-green/543335/#edition=5215209&idiq=16154030

The Book of The Great Queen: The Many Faces of the Morrigan from Ancient Legends to Modern Devotions

Book by Morpheus Ravenna Further

to tongu do dia toinges mo thuath [“Mi a dyngaf dynged it”], &c.

By John Koch

https://www.academia.edu/7242277/Further_to_tongu_do_dia_toinges_mo_thuath_Mi_a_dyngaf_dynged_it_and_c

Goddesses in Celtic Religion Cult and Mythology: A Comparative Study of Ancient Ireland, Britain and Gaul

By Noémie Beck

http://theses.univ-lyon2.fr/documents/lyon2/2009/beck_n#p=0&a=title

The Integration of Mercury and Lugus: Myth and History in Late Iron Age and Early Roman Gaul

By Krista Ovist

https://archives.library.wales/index.php/integration-of-mercury-and-lugus

Lady with a Mead Cup: Ritual, Prophecy, and Lordship in the European Warband from La Tène to the Viking Age

Book by Michael J. Enright

How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics

Book by Calvert Watkins

https://ia801404.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/7/items/twain-mark-a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court/1-ptry.zip&file=How%20to%20Kill%20a%20Dragon%20-%20Aspects%20of%20Indo%20European%20Poetics.pdf

The Celtic Gauls: Gods, Rites and Sanctuaries

Book by Jean-Louis Brunaux

The Apple Branch: A Path to Celtic Ritual

Book by Alexei Kondratiev

https://archive.org/details/applebranchpatht0000kond

Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology

Book by James Mackillop

https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofcelt0000mack

The female deities of the Celtic religion: worship and mythology: a comparative study of ancient Ireland, Great Britain and Gaul

By Noémie Beck

https://theses.fr/2009LYO20084

Celtic Curses

Book by Bernard Mees

https://www.academia.edu/1012094/Celtic_Curses_Woodbridge_Boydell_2009

Guide to Irish Mythology

Book by Daragh Smyth

https://archive.org/details/guidetoirishmyth00smyt

The Sacred Isle

Book by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin

https://archive.org/details/sacredislebelief0000ohog

The Matronae and Matres: Breathing New Life into an Old Religion

By River Devora

http://polytheist.com/the-web-of-blessings/2015/08/12/the-matronae-and-matres-breathing-new-life-into-an-old-religion/

Interpretatio Romana and Matronae Iconography

By River Devora

http://polytheist.com/the-web-of-blessings/2015/08/31/interpretatio-romana-and-matronae-iconography/#:~:text=The%20overlay%20of%20interpretatio%20Romana,and%20plaques%20and%20glean%20valuable

Celtic chiefdom, Celtic state: the evolution of complex social systems in prehistoric Europe

By Arnold, Bettina and Gibson, D. Blair

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3086499

*butacos, *wossos, *geistlos, *ambactos. Celtic Socioeconomic Organisation in the European Iron Age. Studia Celtica 40, 2006: 23-41

By Raimund Karl

https://www.academia.edu/245239/_butacos_wossos_geistlos_ambactos_Celtic_Socioeconomic_Organisation_in_the_European_Iron_Age_Studia_Celtica_40_2006_23_41

The Ancient Celts

Book by Barry Cunliffe

https://archive.org/details/ancientcelts00cunl_0

Sengoidelc: Old Irish for Beginners

Book by David Stifter

https://archive.org/details/sengoidelcoldiri0000stif

Greek Kελτóς and Γαλάτης, Latin Gallus ‘Gaul’

By Kim McCone

https://spr.harrassowitz-library.com/article/spr/2006/1/6

Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales

Book by Alwyn and Brinley Rees

https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.36494

Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism

By Erynn Rowan Laurie, Kathryn Price NicDhàna, Aedh Rua Ó Mórríghan, Kym Lambert ní Dhoireann and John Machate, ed. by Erynn Rowan Laurie

https://web.archive.org/web/20080418025755/http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usma&c=trads&id=6645

Which witch is which? : a concise guide to Wiccan and Neo-Pagan paths and traditions

Book Compiled and Edited by Patricia Telesco

Sources for the Three Realms

By Annie Loughlin - original source link is dead, need help to locate!

Dictionnaire de la Langue Gauloise

Book by Xavier Delmarre

https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedelal00dela (referred to as “Essential for Gaulish Language study)

The Settling of the Manor of Tara

By R.I. Best

https://www.ucd.ie/tlh/trans/rib.eriu.4.001.t.text.html

The court of law in Iron Age ‚Celtic’ societies. In R. Karl & J. Leskovar (eds.), Interpretierte Eisenzeiten 3. Fallstudien, Methoden, Theorie. Tagungsbeiträge der 3. Linzer Gespräche zur interpretativen Eisenzeitarchäologie. Studien zur Kulturgeschichte von Oberösterreich Folge 22, Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum 2009: 135-60.

By Raimund Karl

https://www.academia.edu/245221/The_court_of_law_in_Iron_Age_Celtic_societies_In_R_Karl_and_J_Leskovar_eds_Interpretierte_Eisenzeiten_3_Fallstudien_Methoden_Theorie_Tagungsbeitr%C3%A4ge_der_3_Linzer_Gespr%C3%A4che_zur_interpretativen_Eisenzeitarch%C3%A4ologie_Studien_zur_Kulturgeschichte_von_Ober%C3%B6sterreich_Folge_22_Linz_Ober%C3%B6sterreichisches_Landesmuseum_2009_135_60

Matasović Etymological Dictionary Of Proto Celtic

By Ranko Matasović

https://archive.org/details/matasovic-etymological-dictionary-of-proto-celtic

Hammer of the Gods: Anglo-Saxon Paganism in Modern Times Second Edition

Book by Swain Wodening

https://archive.org/details/hammerofgodsangl0000swai

Various Works by Christopher Scott Thompson - recommended re: honor in Gaulish society

https://cateransociety.wordpress.com/books/

A Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World

Book by Michael Newton and Michael Steven Newton

Celtic Values

By Alexei Kondratiev

http://dagdacelt.freehostia.com/values.html

European paganism : the realities of cult from antiquity to the Middle Ages

By Ken Dowden

https://archive.org/details/europeanpaganism0000dowd

A Definitive Reconstructed Text of the Coligny Calendar

By Garrett Olmsted

https://www.academia.edu/62011364/A_Definitive_Reconstructed_Text_of_the_Coligny_Calendar

New Calendar of Gaulish Polytheism

By Jess via Nemeton Nigromanitcos

https://thebloodybones.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/new-calendar-of-gaulish-polytheism/#more-265

Calendar of Feast-Days of Deities

Via the blog Deo Mercutio

https://deomercurio.wordpress.com/calendar-of-feast-days-of-deities/

Altkeltische Sozialstrukturen

By Raimund Karl

https://homepage.univie.ac.at/Raimund.Karl/Sozialstrukturen.pdf

La Langue Gauloise

Book by Pierre-Yves Lambert

https://www.scribd.com/document/782869557/Lambert-1994-La-langue-gauloise-description-linguistique-commentaire-d-inscriptions-choisies

Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology & Practice

Book by Bruce Lincoln

The Gods of the Celts

Book by Miranda Aldhouse-Green

https://archive.org/details/godsofceltsar00mira

War Goddess The Morrigan And Her Germano Celtic Counterparts

Book by Angelique Gulermovich Epstein

https://archive.org/details/WarGoddessTheMorriganAndHerGermanoCelticCounterparts

Epigraphik-Datenbank Clauss/Slaby

- Database of “almost all inscriptions ever recorded”

https://db.edcs.eu/epigr/hinweise/hinweis-en.html

A website on Gallo-Roman religion:

http://www.deomercurio.be/en/

A scholarly website with information on Epona:

https://epona.net/

[vintagesimstress]

Northern & Southern European Dyes Palette(s)

It's been almost exactly two years since I made my Iron Age Palette. To celebrate that anniversary... No, you know what, actually not, it's a total coincidence 😅 I was working on a new thing and started wondering about this and that; to not bore you with the details, let's just say that one thing let to another and of course I ended up revisiting the very basics. So here it is! Not one, but TWO new colour palettes for our oldtime-y sims. Based on the lives of my Britons at some point in 1st century CE, shortly before the Roman conquest.

An important note: the southern palette is actually rather an add-on than a separate palette. As in, Romans would surely have access to the dyes from the northern palette as well. But as stated above, I made this whole thing from the viewpoint of a British Celt, hence we have two palettes: one with dyes which he could just obtain from native plants and the other with those he'd have to import. The southerners were more blessed in this aspect :]

You can download PDF files for both of those palettes and .txt files to be used in Paint.net (put them in Documents\paint.net User Files\Palettes). EDIT: the amazing @kyrassimhoard went ahead and made the .aco version of the palettes for all the Photoshop users! Thank you so much Kyra (also, special thanks to @aheathen-conceivably for double checking them for me 💗)

DOWNLOAD them on my Patreon! (always free, no early access etc.)

Apart from a bunch of visual changes (maybe the font will actually be readable this time? Gasp!), there's some new stuff in the palettes themselves (duh). Let's take a quick look, shall we?

undyed wool - hard to call it a dye, lol, but ofc it had to be here. The so-called primitive sheep of the Brittonic era looked quite different from what we imagine when we think 'sheep', and they most certainly came not only in white, but also in many shades of brown or even black. Perfect for making a colourful garment even without any dyes;

birch leaves - easy to obtain, easy to dye; almost no changes here, other than one added shade which used to be under 'mixed ingredients' before;

birch bark - OK, I don't remember where I took the old colours from, but I'm afraid I was being too optimistic. Birch bark gives rather pinkish than reddish shades; actually, it needs a looooooong soak and proper pH to turn anything but very bright, subtle pink. But it seems you can get them and they don't wash out that easily, so - there you go;

elderberry - here I was for sure being too optimistic, especially with that one pretty, saturated blue shade which got thrown away. From what I've read (and seen in photos...), elderberry is a very tricky dye, not particularly water- and lightfast. 'Not particularly' is mildly put - it just washes out in no time, leaving you either with a very pale or very greyish shade of the once vibrant colour. Adjusted accordingly (and they're still too pretty tbh);

apple leaves/twigs - that's a bit of a tricky point, because the Internet claims it was only Romans who brought apples to Britain. But at the same time apple cider was Britain's national drink allegedly already during the Celtic times. Heck, Welsh mythical island of Avalon literally means 'isle of apples', and mythology tends to be... you know... old. Huh? After a bit of research on the topic I'm inclined to believe that what Romans really brought with them were big, sweet apples and their organised cultivation; but small, tart, 'untasty' varieties did exist in Britain even before, growing in the wild. Perfect for making cider - or dyes 😉;

nettle - no changes here. Easy, cheap, grows everywhere, just that the colours are probably not something you'd wear to a party;

hedge bedstraw - seems it's growing everywhere in Britain, so it's plausible the ancients would've made use of it;

lichen - aaaaalriiight, now, that is a big discovery! Beautiful shades and absolutely possible to obtain from the varieties growing on the British Isles. One of the most crucial omissions from my old palette, here finally in its full glory.

That was it for the northern palette. And the southern? Glad you asked:

weld - previously called 'dyer's rocket', but no one in the whole wide natural dyeing Internet calls it that. Beautiful, vibrant, very steady yellow; won't give away even if you overdye it with indigo or woad. It's native to the Mediterranean and while it was cultivated in Britain in later centuries, I have no reason to believe that was also the case in 1 c. CE. I dub it imported;

madder - I keep reading that it's giving saturated red shades, but I have yet to see anyone dye a skein of yarn deep red with madder only. All that keeps popping up in pictures are gentle, pinkish reds, so that's what I included in my palette too. The orange comes from changed pH of the water;

woad - OK, that's my most epic fail of all. To make a Celtic palette and not include woad?! Putting aside the whole matter of Britons possibly maybe but actually maybe not using it to paint their faces (a very controversial matter, let's not go there 😅), woad was the blue dye in those times. Indigo was far away and while it was being imported to Rome, afaik it was used mostly for painting, not cloth dyeing; and besides, as crazy as it may sound, woad seems to do the job better. Seriously. Higher water and light fastness. The question is, was it cultivated in Britain or imported? Just like weld, it's native to the Mediterraean. There is a British find of a bunch of woad seeds, from 1 c. BCE - but then again, it's just one find. So... Mostly imported but slowly being introduced to the Isles? Maybe?

mixed ingredients - the ingredients specified in the PDFs are given in the order they're used - that makes a difference! My biggest discovery of this whole natural dyeing research is that, surprisingly, vibrant green is the absolutely most difficult colour to obtain. That dark green you see at the bottom - so-called Lincoln green - requires super high levels of both weld and woad, and you must put your yellow skein in the blue dye asap - if you're too slow, you get a lighter shade, e.g. like the one above it. The Hightowers surely knew how to show they're rich, huh...?

and last but not least, the luxury dyes! Some imported from far away (turmeric), some from nearby lands (Tyrian purple), some even grown locally (there were saffron plantations on Sicily. True story), but nevertheless, all super duper expensive. Tyrian purple was actually legally reserved for the emperor only - even if you could, by some miracle, afford it, you'd probably get arrested if you dared to dress in that particular shade of purple. Good that lichens could always come to the rescue!

Guess that's enough of behind-the-scenes trivia, isn't it? Props to you if you managed to get to this point, lol. Have fun with the palettes and happy recolouring!

***

Sources:

dzikiebarwy.com - in Polish, but the pictures should speak for themselves. Here you've got a post about dyeing with summer plants, including birch leaves, here - elderberry, here - apple leaves and twigs, here - nettle;

https://woolandpalette.com/blogs/news/making-vibrant-green-with-natural-dyes was my first step in finding out how to obtain a proper green shade with natural dyes;

wooltribulations.blogspot.com - dyeing with birch bark (here), another failed elderberry experiment (here) and overdyeing weld with woad for a deep Lincoln green shade (here);

www.jennydean.co.uk - an absolute godsend, especially two posts: 'Dyes of the Celts' (here) and 'Colours of the Romans' (here);

https://craftinvaders.co.uk/making-dye-from-lichen/

https://earlychurchhistory.org/fashion/colors-dyes-for-clothing-in-ancient-rome/ - on the posh dyes for the rich;

https://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/gallery - except for the general vibe (*chef's kiss*), the 'animals and nature' section of the gallery has pictures of the 'primitive' sheep which they keep at the farm;

...and a bunch of others which I didn't save in my bookmarks 🙃

[rjalker]

Flatland: An Adventure in Many Dimensions, a 2024 translation into casual English, is done!

You can read and download it completely 100% for free on the Internet Archive!

When it's done loading, you will be able to read it directly online, and the Internet Archive will automatically generate audiobook versions with text to speech.

You can also download and torrent various versions as PDFs, epubs, and editable documents so you can change the font, paragraph styles, and do anything else you want with it, like give everyone neopronouns or turn them into unicorns!

I will also be making my own audiobook version at some point. but that's gonna take a while since this is around 38,000 words long. You can make your own too! And you can translate this into other languages!

Edit: The "lazy" (unedited) audiobook is now available on youtube! It is in two videos, since my computer wouldn't let me combine them lol.

“https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpFcEwm88RUsMYmhY6DBYZcIvvKv6_ZS3”

Did I mention this is public domain? Because I hate capitalism and I'm poor and I want other people to also be able to enjoy books for free.

Buy the cheapest possible print version for $7.45 (I get $2).

This version is a paperback with no illustrations, no prefaces, a greyscale cover to make it as cheap to print as possible, so that more people can afford to buy it.

Buy the regular print version for $22.17 (I get $5).

This version is a hardpack with illustrations, the preface from the original author, and one from me.

You can also download all the HD illustrations included in this story here on the Internet Archive.

If you enjoy reading it, you can also donate directly to "TinyelFlatland" on paypal!

And if I haven't made it clear yet, this is Public Domain. You are 1million% encouraged to download it, print it, share it, do literally anything you want with it. I am 100% serious.

Now you can all join me in laughing at the narrator :)

Edit: oh wait lol. I realize I wrote this post assuming only people who already know what Flatland is will see it.

Uh so people who have no clue what Flatland is, here's a quick summary:

The narrator, who hides his identity using the alias "A. Square", is a resident of a world called Flatland, a world that only exists in two dimensions, where every person is a flat geometric shape. A. Square tells us the history and culture of his world, which is rife with bigotry that he buys into without question. Until New Year's Eve, before the first day of the year 2000, when a mysterious stranger claiming to come from the third dimension appears in his living room, and starts saying things that sound absurd, and performing what seem like magic tricks.

The original Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, was published in 1884 by Edwin Abbot Abbot. It is both a scathing political satire criticizing the systems of bigotry in Victorian England, and an entertaining introduction to the concept of more than three dimensions.

Edit: Now there's an itch.io page too!

Edit again: And you can read it here on tumblr now! @flatland-a-2024-translation and on Pillowfort!

[theoutcastrogue]

the internet is rotting, as Jonathan Zittrain noted in an important (but paywalled) 2021 Atlantic article. A huge percentage of the links on the internet are broken, and there is no single authoritative, accessible universal repository that keeps track of everything. It is frighteningly easy for crucial information to slip away. ...

The practice of making changes to an article without noting that you’ve made them is called “stealth editing,” and even the New York Times does it. ... The existence of stealth editing means that it’s difficult to trust that the version of an article you click on at any given moment is the article as it was originally published. ...

I also, to my alarm, realized just how dependent we are on private publications themselves to give us access to records of their own work. Often, they keep it payawalled behind locked gates and charge you admission if you want to have a look. There are lots of sources in the Chomsky book to which you have to subscribe if you want to verify, such as this 1999 story in the Los Angeles Times about NATO’s bombing of a bus in Yugoslavia. This is a story of national importance, far too overlooked at the time, but if you don’t subscribe to the LA Times, you need research library access or a workaround if you want to read it.

Thank God for the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine preserves as much of the internet as they can and is invaluable for researchers trying to figure out what was once housed at now-dead links. But the Internet Archive has its limits. Social media posts, YouTube videos, paywalled Substack posts, PDFs—all can be very difficult to track down after they disappear. If a politician tweets something embarrassing, for instance, and then deletes it, it might be preserved in a screenshot. But we know screenshots are easy to fake. So where do you turn to prove satisfactorily that something was in fact said? ...

it’s very easy to lose pieces of information that seem permanent. E-books, for instance, can be changed by their publisher without the changes even being noted. You might read a book on your Amazon Kindle one day and open it up the next day to look for a quote only to find that the quote has disappeared without a trace. The Guardian, for twenty years, hosted a copy of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people,” an important historical document. After the letter went viral on TikTok, the Guardian removed it from the site entirely. The New Republic did the same after an article of theirs about Pete Buttigieg caused controversy. The documents in question can still be found, but only by digging through the Internet Archive. If that ever goes down, researchers will find that trying to piece together the online past is like trying to learn about a lost civilization from excavated fragments. ...

I think that in an age where people (rightly) don’t trust the information they’re getting to be true, it needs to be as easy as possible to do research. Instead, while we have better technology than ever for sifting through information, it’s still the case that the truth is paywalled and the lies are free. If you want to “do your own research” to check on the veracity of claims, you will run headlong into a maze of broken links, paywalls, and pop-ups. How can anyone hope to find the truth when it’s so elusive, trapped behind so many toll gates? 

[still-a-morosexual-help]

Was going through my work phone & the girl who had it before me was using it to make bi & pan furry picrews

Queen Shit™ Girl I hope wherever you are, you are thriving. I hope the asshole I'm sitting next to was kinder to you. From one secret queer to another, I hope you hid it well and I hope you find a place where you can comfortably, safely and unapologetically be yourself

For the last two weeks I've been finding hints of this girl's existence everywhere from old emails, to documents she signed, to pdfs she edited and I don't even know what she looks like but this feels like the last piece and holy shit what a piece it was

The strange sense of kinship & pride? The "ah I'm not alone, there were others before me"

You know that scene in Moana where she wants to sail the seas and her father wants her to stay & fit perfectly into the role that everyone expects of her? Only for her to find out her ancestors were sailors as well? Different circumstances but that same feeling of "Oh."

[communist-ojou-sama]

Since nothing I'm doing is all that special and I figure some others might want to help out with it, I decided to make a shared folder: In it is the full text of "I've Found My Answers" by the martyr Bassel al-Araj, along with the book divided into pieces short enough for Deepseek's length limits (about 30 pages each of the original book), and a Word document that currently contains the raw OCR of the first 70 pages, with the first few having been proofread. If you can read Arabic and would like to help me proofread, help would be much appreciated! I think it'd be nice if after making a nice epub for this book (what I'm aiming to eventually do) we could do the same for the Thorn and the Carnation, and for other books that currently only exist as somewhat-blurry pdfs! by default this link only gives reading and commenting privileges because I don't want some zionist to come and grief my work. If you want editing privileges DM me.

[metro-2025-zine]

Hello, and welcome to this Zine! It exists to celebrate our shared love for the games, the books, and the extended universe.

All ships, headcanons, and writing and artistic experiences are welcome!

Sign up here!

Here are some more detailed rules:

RULES

This zine will be made available as a download able pdf on itch.io.

Submissions can include art, writing, or multimedia. Please don't discuss your work in public spaces before the zine release.

Your work can include anything metro 2033 adjacent, such as headcanons, OC, ship art/writing, etc. It will be presented chronologically in the zine, so please include a date to your piece. For writing, your fanfic cannot sprawl more than 3 months in-universe.

Please also include the canon you're following, if applicable (ie. Book/game).

All traditional art must be a clean scan on white (or non-lined/gridded/dotted) paper.

All digital art must be at at least 300 pdi resolution, in one of the following formats:

A4 portrait - 210mm × 297mm

A3 landscape - 420mm × 297mm

Photo - 3 × 4 aspect ratio

All art submissions must be a png or jpeg file.

All writing must be between 500 to 3000 words. We ask that you proofread your piece before submission. The submission must be either a word or text document.

All multimedia (screenshot edits, etc) must either be A4 portrait or A3 landscape, as outlined in the digital art section. The submission must be a pdf file.

Mild NSFW content is allowed, but not overt sexual content, or over the top gore.

After submission, a proof of concept of your piece will be sent to you.

All official communication will be done via email, and submissions will be made via Google drive.

If you're looking for inspiration about what to write/draw, check out our suggestions post.

TIMELINE

11 of February - Sign-up open (and stay open until the Submissions deadline) [Form]

16 of March - Submissions open

6 of August - Submissions close

26 of August - Zine release

CONTACT

This zine is ran or organised by Keleiner_Ghost. Feel free to drop xer a PM, or message or send in an ask here.

If you want to hang out and chat about your wip piece, join us in the Metro 2025 Zine discord.

All emails go here (inbox checked every 2-3 days): metro2025zine@gmail.com

LINKS

AO3 Collection || Discord || Twitter || VK || Email

[positivelyprime]

My favourite fucked up math fact™ is the Sharkovskii theorem:

For any continuous function f: [a,b] -> [a,b], if there exists a periodic point of order 3 (i.e. f(f(f(x))) = x for some x in [a,b] and not f(x) = x or f²(x) = x), then there exists a periodic point of ANY order n.¹

Yes you read that right. If you can find a point of order 3 then you can be sure that there is a point of order 4, 5, or even 142857 in your interval. The assumption is so innocent but I cannot understate how ridiculous the result is.²

For a (relatively) self-contained proof, see this document (this downloads a pdf).

(footnotes under read more)

¹ The interval does not have to be closed, but it should be connected. (a,b), (a,b] and [a,b) all work.

² Technically the result is even stronger! The natural numbers admit a certain ordering called the Sharkovskii ordering which starts with the odd primes numbers 3 > 5 > 7 > ... , then doubles of primes odds, then quadruples of primes odds and so forth until you get no more primes odds, left, ending the ordering in 2³ > 2² > 2. Sharkovskii's theorem actually says that if you have a periodic point of order k, then you have periodic points of any order less than k in the Sharkovskii ordering.

Edit: corrected footnote 2

[mcnuggyy]

✨ Rainbow Factory TTRPG! ✨

HIII!!!! As promised here is my silly little reskin of KOB (kids on bikes/brooms)!!! :o] <3

EDIT: This post got a bit long eek!! sorry!! if you just wanna see the silly stuff I did then just check out the links! You can ignore all the other text on this post jajaja!

Mini Rule Book  ( for GMs & Players!)

PDF Version!  

Here is the document I gave all my players beforehand! This is a simplification of all the KOB rules, character creation process, and the worldbuilding for Unicopia! Please feel free to use as much or as little of it as you like for your game! It goes step by step through the character creation process and has a wide variety of examples and references. I try to be as thorough as possible but ofc I may have missed something! Please feel free to make up what i miss or shoot me a message if you're really curious jaja!

Here is a jpg of the Player Character Sheet of needed! :o]

RFTTRPG: NPC Stats & BG Characters! (For GMs!)

This is what I used while GMing! Feel free to use these as you like! I tried to keep it simple and loose for the big characters like Hev and Trixie! And even simpler for the background characters. I didn't give the BG chars any stats as I knew I wouldn't need them for the one-shot I was running but please feel free to make your own BG chars, and stats, and all of that good stuff!

I also have a rough RF building chart for exploration! Our campaign was set inside the Rainbow Factory so it felt like a good idea to make this for my players! However please feel free to set your one-shot anywhere else in Unicopia! I hope to make a map of  the districts one day to add to the mini rule book later on! :o] You can also set it at another Happiness Factory such as the Tear Factory or Heart Factory! You could even have your unicorns visit Earth! The world is your oysta! ♡ 

Overall I tried to keep everything super simple and clear for both myself and my friends! I imagine other Factories in smaller districts would be much smaller than this but this is a rough idea of what I think most of them would sort of be like!

RFFTTRPG: One-shot Ideas & More! (For GM's)

I love love loved using the KOB system and reskinning it for my silly little world! and I love when a TTRPG gives you nice sort of rules to follow while still being super free and open in other aspects! It made it  easy for me to just come up with a simple problem/plot for my players! However I know coming up with something from scratch is also super intimidating and overwhelming! So here is the idea I did, along with some others I've thought of for fun! (and might even do in future games jejeje)

Kid on the Run!  This is super Monsters Inc inspired. Have the party over at a Factory for any reason you choose. I chose a tour/ted talk hosted by the lovely Trixie! It can also be a company party, or breaking and entering, or they already work there, etc.! Have one of the portals go haywire allowing a child to enter Unicopia! It's now up to the party to not only capture the child but return them back home safe and sound to the human world! All while keeping the child secret from the rest of unicornkind! RF: Happiness Special Forces The Counsel has decided to create a special task team in charge of going down to earth! Go undercover and stop those who cause great risk to Unicornkind! This could be stopping a huge evil corporation that is creating an excess amount of unhappiness, reducing the magic of Unicopia. Or having to go in and save multiple children in danger such as a field trip gone wrong! Or making an adult human who remembered their childhood unicorn forget about them again before things get dicey! Your players will have to keep their existence as unicorns a secret, all while saving their world, and exploring Earth as characters who may be unfamiliar with humans and their ways! Unicorn Hunters & the End of Unicopia What if unicorns biggest threat finally found out where they had been hiding all this time? and not just knew but had access to a portal? It's up to the players to stop them at all costs and save their world.  A high stakes adventure full of lore, magic, and potential unexpected allies!  The Daily Life of a Field Op/Happy Tech This is more of a slice of life concept! This would work well for smaller parties of 1-4 Players! Have your Players form teams and deal with the daily troubles a helping a kid/teen/pre-teen  as a Field op or Happy Tech! (You could even have one of your Players play one of the kids themselves!) While still balancing their social lives, self needs, etc.! A look inside what it's like for Unicopias most essential workers, their interpersonal dramas, relationships, etc. Great for those who love character centric collaboritive storytelling!

ANYWAYS!!! Sorry for the ridiculously long post </3 I just wanted to cover all my bases in case someone decides they wanna play this reskin!! If you do end up playing pleaseee let me know eeek!! very very exciting!!! <3 regardless i hope you have fun looking at all this silly stuff I did to make my friends smile and laugh :o]

You can check out our one-shot over on my Patreon yahoo!

[xiaokuer-schmetterling]

PODFICCER RESOURCE

https://cloudconvert.com

CloudConvert is an online file converter. We support nearly all audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet, and presentation formats

UPDATE: YOU CAN SET THINGS TO AUTOMATICALLY UPLOAD YOUR CONVERTED MP3 FILES TO GOOGLE DRIVE !!!

==========

BLESS THIS AMAZINGLY USEFUL TOOL ✧｡٩(ˊᗜˋ )و✧*｡

so as part of my podficcing project, i want to include readings of tumblr ficlets. (will be referring to these as podlets) was trying to figure out a way to do this without involving archive.org as a middleman everytime. AND THEN I REMEMBERED THIS EXISTS [discovered it while in college lol extremely useful to convert PDF scans to more easily editable formats and vice versa] !!!

now without having to put down my fire tablet i am able to:

read the ficlet, which records into a .wav format, convert it to .mp3 so tumblr will accept it, and then add the podlet directly to a reblog without having to do any of the workarounds i was considering (involving my screen busted iphone or the library computer or emailing myself files to download on the necessary device)

I AM VICTORIOUS

[centrally-unplanned]

River's Edge & The Flat Battle? Field: Deep Diving a Single Word

So the 1993 manga River's Edge, by Kyoko Okazaki, was finally officially released in English last week. It's a problematic fave of mine, and (as I discussed in my review of it many moons ago), the peak of its edgy angst is this poem, standing alone on a field of black, near the end of the book:

"The flat battlefield" is a phrase that has really stuck with me since I read it, and anything that has that level of sticking power is a meaningful piece of art. My opinion of the manga has grown over time.

So when I got to this section in the official translation and I saw:

I was a bit bummed, "flat field" really just lacks the impact "battlefield" ha-

-wait what?

Reprinted by Permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by William Gibson, originally published in "Robert Longo"

Okazaki didn't write this, William Gibson did?? The American cyberpunk fiction author? He...writes poetry? Turns out by the way this attribution is in the original manga, it just didn't survive the scanlation process.

I was curious about both how and when this translation shift occurred (if it ever did), and the origin of this poem - which was really hard to find! "Robert Longo" is not a book, he's a person - an American artist and filmmaker who directed the 1995 movie Johnny Mnemonic, which William Gibson wrote the screenplay for (and wrote the short story it is an adaptation of). When you search books by the two of them nothing really turns up - at least on the western side of things. In America they never really did publish a book. But in Japan they published a few actually - some too late for 1993's River's Edge, but in 1991: 

Publisher Kyoto Shion's Art RANDOM series, vol. 71, featuring the collected art of Robert Longo, edited by Kyoichi Tsuzuki...and featuring inset poetry by William Gibson. Funnily enough one of the listings (Fukkan) actually notes:

現代美術コレクターだけでなく、ウィリアム・ギブスンのファン、岡崎京子のファン共々気になる作品集だと思います。 This is a work that will be of interest not only to contemporary art collectors, but also to fans of William Gibson and Kyoko Okazaki.

The poem from this book - which is called "The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads" - is way more famous as a reference by Okazaki than as a work by Gibson. Which turned out to be a problem when I wanted to dig deeper and find the actual poem and its context; when you google it you get...almost entirely Japanese results discussing River's Edge! Which means I couldn’t actually find the poem, just Japanese translations of it. And I am pretty sure the poem was not originally in Japanese - the bookseller listings note that the book is bilingual in both Japanese & English, the Gibson poems would be the obvious English candidates. 

However, buried beneath piles of mid-2000’s Japanese Okazaki fandom blog posts, I found the work of academic Gary Westfahl. He wrote a deep dive book in 2013 on the works of William Gibson, and in the abstract header for Chapter Five:

It also considers Gibson's poems such as “The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads,” his ventures into writing song lyrics, and the approach he used in some of his later nonfiction works

Ba-bam - and with a quick trip to LibGen pulling up a pdf version of the book, here we go: 

Gibson's first literary publications, in 1963, were poems, and he obviously remained interested in the form, since in the 1980s and 1990s, when artists approached him about collaborative projects, he usually provided poetry. To date, Gibson has published three poems, not counting fanzine efforts, along with two other poems available only as excerpts.  Asked to contribute to Robert Longo's 1989 performance piece Dream Jumbo, Gibson wrote a poem, "The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads," later included in a book, Robert Longo: Art Random, largely devoted to documenting that show

Gary fucking Westfahl, coming through in the clutch!! I was curious why this combination art book/poetry existed, but now it makes sense; the poem and the art were already a packaged deal as part of a performance art exhibit. And this also explains why the poem was so hard to find - as of 2013 Gibson only ever published 3 poems in his career! I am curious how this play got over to Japan - Dream Jumbo premiered in LA in 1989, but additionally in 1989 Longo had a titular "Robert Longo" art exhibit at the Seibu Contemporary Art Gallery in Tokyo, which had its own art book published - its fair to say he was "big in Japan" and so the success of Dream Jumbo made its way over. He would actually run a sort of gallery-version of the performance in Tokyo in 1995, for which he gave an interview that taught me that the name "dream jumbo" is pulled from the name of a popular Japanese lottery; perhaps it was always destined for Japan and also Robert Longo is a bit of a weeb.

ANYWAY the actual text of the poem: 

Our love knew The flat field

Yeah, it was originally ‘field’. Westfahl also confirms that this poem was only ever published in print in Japan, making it virtually unknown outside of it. Which, and this is kind of cool, means that the publishing of the translation of the Japanese manga River's Edge is the first time Gibson's "The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads" has ever been published in the West. 

Knowing that the original is ‘field’, I checked the original Japanese page for River's Edge and:

戦場 - Battlefield

The first kanji is literally 'war', this is not ambiguous, there is no other read here. River's Edge changed the word from "field" to "battlefield" - assuming that the original art book did not have its own Japanese translation of the poem. On reflection, it probably did; it's not like Okazaki herself is a translator, and in the manga the poem’s translation is credited to translator Hisashi Kuromaru, who had previously translated Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. However, it’s not like I have a copy to check, so I can’t say for sure.

…or so I thought! But when looking around for Kuromaru’s translation credits, I stumbled on the most precious resource one can find; a blog post from an Okazaki-otaku a decade+ after the fact who was obsessed with the poem and hunted down a copy of the original Art RANDOM artbook to see it for themselves. In their post they give a line by line comparison of the poem and its translation…credited to Kuromaru, confirming that this book is where the translation comes from. And lo and behold:

Kuromaru is the source of our creative twist. Chad of chads, “Tach” from 2005.

What is funny is that this is not like a tiny little quirk I am interested in - I mean, okay, it's mainly that. But "the battlefield" is actually a small part of Okazaki's brand as an artist. Here is a sketch she sold titled "Girl's Life on the Battlefield" (It uses the same kanji)

Here is a link to an exhibit of her work in Japan that was titled:

(Her art is incredibly on point btw).

Here is an entire book by art critic Noi Sawagari investigating How we survive on a flat battlefield - Kyoko Okazaki's theory! The one Amazon review says its content is "thin” and it was “tiring to read”, 2 stars, ouch.

But you get what I'm saying- Okazaki leaned into this phrase. I'm actually a little let down, when I read River’s Edge and was so taken with this specific moment I thought it was a ‘me’ thing; turns out the entire country of Japan was equally smitten and it became the tagline for the manga. Real loss of hipster points for me on this one! Still, I really think “battlefield” is way more impactful - this elevation of the phrase would not have happened if it was just ‘field’, I feel confident on that. And I am not calling the translation ‘wrong’, or anything. It is just one of those tiny contingencies, this liberal translation and odd series of events, art crossing from LA to Japan, led to a brand for an up-and-coming josei manga author that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. And in fact, I am willing to say that the translation just published by Kodansha of River’s Edge is… not right. It doesn’t matter what Gibson wrote - this is Okazaki’s poem now. She wrote a manga about the battlefield, all of her fans agree, and a truly faithful translation would build on that.

So I’m sticking with “battlefield” and y’all should too.

[in-the-red-notebook]

"Ray's a Laugh" - Richard Billingham

What should a photo book be? A container for work? A physical reproduction of a bunch successful images? Or a work unto itself, in the tradition of the artist’s book, where book is the final formal goal ? To me, Ray’s a Laugh offers a high-water-mark affirmation of the latter. The body of work in this book is greater than any one image, the edit and sequence is brilliant, and the book speaks and lives for itself in an astounding way, a self-contained parable in its own humble world.

The work in this book was made in Billingham’s parents’ apartment in a small town in England, and centers on his father’s shut-in alcoholic lifestyle and his relationship with Billingham’s doting, caring mother. It’s a complex portrait of the whole family, posing playfully as a document but in reality functioning much more as impressionistic drama.

This work joins the likes of Larry Clark’s "Tulsa" and Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” in the discussion of ethical/exploitative photography—is it right for Billingham to publish work that shows his family in extremely personal, vulnerable, and sometimes graphic situations? Is it right for him to characterize them as he does—deeply flawed, but charming and loving? Is it exploitative to aestheticize their poverty? These questions are complicated, but I think that given the personal nature of the work—Billingham’s own family being the subject—it’s hard for me to really condone or criticize the work either way. I don’t think of this book as benevolent or as evil, but as existing in the gray area of exchanging the privacy of loved ones for artistic honesty. I truly hope that this exchange was made in good faith.

As to the aesthetization, if we give Billingham the benefit of the doubt about the work being “authentic” (even if it’s such a flimsy adjective), it can be argued that the real, cynical commercial exploitation of poverty and addiction aesthetics is done downstream, when work like this starts popping up on moodboards for advertising and editorial photography, in commercial contexts, etc. On this topic, there’s a really fascinating publication called “Opioid Crisis Lookbook” that interrogates the culture of addiction and recovery from within the current North American opioid crisis, and I think it’s really good reading for anyone interested in this discussion. PDF here: https://theopioidcrisislookbook.com/issue-1/ 

Aside from the moral quandaries, I don’t mean to be grandiose when I say that to me, this book is a testament to the power of photography; a reminder to pick up the camera and observe, because something photographed is so different from something remembered. The work rides a fine line between earnestness and what could be considered callousness: gritty, dynamic photographs ostensibly about the reality of an alcoholic family member that are somehow stubbornly light-hearted and whimsical. Billingham engages in something like anti-humanist humanism, breaking up somber, revealing portraits with funny, detached snapshots of almost baroque scenes unfolding in the apartment day to day. This complexity makes me think about a consistent, obsessive photography practice, close observation of the intangible, and the simple, revealing power of a photograph.

In Ray’s a Laugh, Billingham is able to approach and re-approach the same people, the same spaces, and the same ideas, over and over, over the course of several months. The result is this magical, complex book that really satisfyingly blurs the lines of truth and fiction, and tragedy and comedy. What I think most draws me to this book is Billingham’s extremely present voice. He seems to function half as a family photographer and half as a photojournalist, moving jarringly back and forth between tenderness and a distant ambivalence. This is what endures for me, the ever-looming fiction of the work, which seems to almost allow the pictures to be more truthful and honest, at least about Billingham’s feelings. I think he offers us a way to see his family in the way that he does, focusing on silver lining and humble moments of joy while acknowledging pain and imperfection. This, to me, is the “magic of photography” Billingham reveals: the camera’s capacity, after a long while, to show who is behind the lens almost as clearly as who is in front of it.

I’ve come to the conclusion (sadly a bit late in the year) that what I would like to do is find some kind of concrete subject or container within which to make a project. I picture this as a body of work about a group of people, or a specific place, or maybe a subculture. I think I’ve had a tendency in the last few years of photographing to kind of reject the idea of any concrete focus, instead approaching my practice as “carry a camera everywhere, and let photographs come to me.” I’m reaching a point now where I’m frustrated with my “pile,” hundreds of one-off photographs tied together maybe only by my own experiences. When I first started photographing, Wolfgang Tillmans and Daniel Arnold were front and center in my mind. Their work, at least as I’d seen it presented, was less about concrete things and more about espousing a “way of seeing” (hence the MoMA show name “To Look Without Fear”). And while I think finding a primal, almost subconscious visual language is invaluable to a photographer (being able to look at a photo and regardless of subject having a feeling that this is ”a Noor photo”), my thinking on it as a conceptual framework has shifted. I think I was originally aiming for a body of work that was chaotic, all over the place, and vastly dynamic in subject matter. I now find this kind of framework to be a crutch for an under-edited project. In terms of Arnold, and in terms of books, I much, much prefer Matt Leifheit and Eve Lyon’s edit of Arnold’s work to that of his monograph, Pickpocket, because the former edit is tighter, more vulnerable, and “says” so much more than the latter collection of already-instagram-famous street photographs. I’m now much more interested in honing in on something, both through re-editing my old pile (over and over) and through changing what I’m photographing, so that I have some specific guiding light.

For final critique this year, I want to focus on an edit that is more intentional and revelatory, and most importantly, more vulnerable. What photographs have I been omitting that have more of myself in them? What can I do to narrow the perspective and get at something deeper? Thinking forward to this summer, I have set the goal to find some kind of “container” for what I shoot. I haven’t yet decided on one, but I’m thinking of things along the lines of “5th avenue, between 14th and 42nd,” or “Little League Baseball in Prospect Park.” Something I can go back to, week after week, something I can slow down and observe. I’m also including in this goal the qualification that I may break out of the container as I see fit. Through this container, I hope to apply my photographic intuition --which until now has been the whole story--to a more self-contained world.

PS. Mack recently reprinted Ray’s a Laugh with a new, expanded edit in a larger size than the original. It kind of feels like a deluxe edition album; I like the new plates that were added but only because I liked the original work so much. I feel like the expanded edit and coffee-table size (which kind of gives it what I call the “Phaidon vibe” :/) detract from the magic of the original’s concise edit and humbler physical size. 

-Noor

[deafauthor]

Hello writers,

Besides Audible and Audiobooks, have you had your books converted to speech/voice? If so, what company did you use?

If not, have you thought about using AI text-to-speech software over using a live narrator? How does one turn the audio file into an audiobook and release it to the wild?

-- So, with that in mind, I asked Co-Pilot this same questions - here's what it said: "Converting Books to Audiobooks Using AI Text-to-Speech Software" There are several tools and platforms that allow you to convert your books or other written content into audiobooks using AI-driven text-to-speech technology. Here are some options:

1) Narakeet: Narakeet offers an online service that can transform your Word documents, EPUB files, or PDFs into audio recordings using lifelike text-to-speech voice generators. You can choose from a variety of voices in over 100 languages. Simply upload your book chapters, select a voice, and let Narakeet generate the audio for you. You’ll receive an MP3, WAV, or M4A file. This is a great option if you want a quick and efficient way to create audiobooks without hiring voice artists.

2. TTSReader: TTSReader allows you to upload EPUB files and converts them into spoken audio. It’s particularly useful for turning ebooks into audiobooks. You can find thousands of free EPUB books on sites like Project Gutenberg. After conversion, you’ll have an MP3 or WAV file ready for distribution.

3) Speechki: Speechki is an AI audiobook generator with a wide range of voices available in over 80 languages. It provides realistic text-to-speech voiceovers and can transform any text into high-quality audio content. You can use it to create audiobooks, podcasts, and more.

4) http://VEED.IO: http://VEED.IO offers an audiobook maker that uses AI text-to-speech technology. Select a suitable voice, paste your text, and let the AI read it aloud. It’s perfect for self-published authors.

"How to Release Your Audiobook" Once you’ve created your audiobook, the next step is to release it to the world. Here’s a brief guide:

1) Editing and Quality Assurance: Make sure your audio is error-free. Listen carefully for glitches, background noise, or any issues. Correct any mistakes and ensure the overall quality meets professional standards.

2) Choose a Distribution Platform: Platforms like Audible, ACX (Amazon’s audiobook platform), and Findaway Voices allow you to distribute your audiobook. Research their requirements, terms, and royalty rates. Choose the one that aligns with your goals.

3) Format Your Files: Most platforms accept specific audio formats (usually MP3 or WAV). Make sure your audiobook files meet their technical specifications.

4) Upload and Publish: Follow the platform’s instructions to upload your audiobook. Provide metadata (title, author, description, cover art) and set your pricing.

5) Promote Your Audiobook: Leverage your existing fan base, social media, and email newsletters to spread the word. Consider running promotions or offering free review copies to gain initial traction.

6) Monitor Sales and Reviews: Keep an eye on sales and reviews. Engage with listeners and gather feedback. -- https://ttsreader.com/ https://speechki.org/ https://www.veed.io/ https://www.narakeet.com/ https://murf.ai/ https://elevenlabs.io/ https://speechify.com/

-- And I also checked out with Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/audiobooks/comments/168y02a/best_programwebsite_for_texttospeech_audiobook/

Feedbacks are appreciated

[eiimblr]

Why hasn't anyone made a true PDF competitor?

By a PDF competitor, I mean a file format which has the same goals and non-goals as PDF does (or, at least, originally did). Here's how I see PDF's main goals:

* Document format

* Text-first

* Unambiguous visual representation (embedded fonts, per-glyph encoding)

* Embedded images

The most important non-goal is being editable. PDFs should be the final version of a document. Of course, Adobe has changed course on this and will now let you edit PDFs in various ways with generally much frustration. They needed to make forms as a place where things could be edited without much pain. This brings us to PDF's shortcomings:

* Complexity. PDF is not a straightforward format. Even with a good GUI, you can't dive into a PDF and figure out what's going on without some solid guidance. This makes it harder to build tools that work with PDFs. I don't think I've heard of anyone who's had to build something that digs deep into PDF's structure and enjoyed the experience. It also makes it easier for bugs to lurk beneath the surface, which is related to;

* Bloat. PDF has so many different things piled on that may or may not work together and may or may not work at all. You want interactivity? We can give you hyperlinks and popups. You want more than popups? You want a whole game in your PDF? Sure, it's possible, because they decided to embed JavaScript in there. You want to digitally sign your PDF so nobody can change it? Great! Except they can change certain parts that Adobe didn't think to include in the signature. Whoops.

* Inconsistency. Embedding fonts is great because you don't have to rely on certain fonts being installed on the viewer's computer. So, naturally, Adobe made sure that 14 fonts have to be installed on the viewer's computer. If not, it'll look wrong, which breaks goal 3. Also, there's whatever Scribd is doing, which I suspect is somehow related but who knows.

With all that said it seems like it should be possible to make a finalized document format with a stripped-down feature set, good cryptography (maybe by default! there's no reason not to sign such a file), and an unambiguous, pixel-perfect visual representation. Maybe something XML-based, like ODF and other document formats. Or maybe it already exists, in which case please yell at me in the comments.

[find-your-software]

Ashampoo PDF Pro 3

The universal PDF editor - create, edit and convert with ease. Ashampoo PDF Pro 3 is a powerful PDF editor to create, convert, edit and sign PDF documents. You can also merge existing documents, rearrange pages or modify document layouts. https://find-your-software.com/ashampoo/pdf-pro-3/