Ansuz

Like something out of a Thurber story

I will soon be ready to start sending out agent queries for my novel. My plan is to send the queries on paper to agents that allow that (some require it); and it is standard practice to send a self-addressed stamped envelope with the query, and inasmuch as agents are generally located in New York City, that means I have to source some US stamps.

Zazzle offers a service where you can upload an image and they'll create stamps - real, legally valid US postage stamps - with your image. They have some kind of deal with the US Postal Service to do this. So I figured I'd use that, and get the bonus benefit of being able to design an appropriate thematic image for my SASEs.

Chinese Seal Script fonts

Here's a page of Chinese fonts including a few for the Seal Script. Could come in handy...

Tsukurimashou 0.1

This is the announcement of a now-obsolete version. Check out the latest progress of Tsukurimashou at sourceforge.jp!

日本語のページは読んで下さい。

I'm pleased to announce the first release of the Tsukurimashou font family. The user's manual and demo is available as a PDF file; so is the complete package in bzipped TAR and ZIP formats. Precompiled OpenType fonts, compatible with all currently-popular typesetting systems, are included in those packages for two styles (Tsukurimashou Kaku and Mincho). Other styles you'll have to compile yourself.

These fonts are released with source code under the GNU GPL version 3 with font-embedding clarification. The current version contains the full repertoire of ISO Latin-1, hiragana, and katakana; more characters are on the way.

How Wikipedia could save itself

I don't think Wikipedia wants to save itself. But if they really wanted to, I know how they could do it.

On bible-ophilia, and a call for better pagan book design

I hope to push the first release of Tsukurimashou out the door tomorrow, and as part of that, I was looking at the possibility of adding optical sizes to it. That won't happen in tomorrow's release, but it will happen eventually, and the train of thought led from there to a thing I once saw in an historical mail-order catalog: an entire multi-page selection of Christian Bibles, organized by different optional features, such as type size, paper and binding quality, and so on. It occurred to me to look on the Net for the current state of the art in such things, and that led me to this site, which is fascinating. It's an entire Web log about the design of Bibles.

Which dollar was it?

Wondermark 700 raises the question of which dollar you're withdrawing when you withdraw a dollar from a bank account. Is it first-in first-out like a queue? Is it last-in first-out like a stack? One character in the strip says the question is silly and meaningless, but I'm not so sure; and I think the correct answer is neither stack nor queue.