khakidoggy

Photography nerdery ahead. Be warned!

Some years ago Adobe introduced the Digital Negative Format, or DNG, as a universal RAW format for photography.

A quick primer. JPEG files store 8 bits of image data in each channel, so a JPEG file can describe 16.7 million colors. This is beyond the capacity of the human eye to distinguish, or the capacity of most screens to reproduce. However, it's only a fraction of what the human eye can observe. Sunlight can be one hundred thousand times brighter than candle-light, but we can still see clearly, and distinguish millions of colors, under both circumstances.

Audio trailer for Rukis' and Alector's comic Red Lantern. Direction, editing and sound design by Rahne Kallon, voices by Rahne, yours truly and Sparf, and music by the awesome Fox Amoore, who also did the sensational theme to Heathen City. 

Rahne did a great job putting this together. I'd previously collaborated with him on his adaptation of Cruelty and the reading of his story for the Bad Dog Book Club. 

Projects like these remind me why I love this community :)

In this article on the New Yorker, Richard Socarides uses the spelling "reëlection". This is the first time I've seen the diaeresis, the two points over the e, used in this fashion.

Germans call it Umlaut, but use it primarily to modify the sound of vowels. In Dutch we call it a 'trema' and use it exclusively to separate two adjoining monopthong vowels, preventing them from being parsed as a dipthong.

Concretely, that means exactly what's happening here: the diaeresis over the second e notifies the reader that the word is re/e/lec/tion, not reel/ec/tion.

Since Dutch borrows the German habit of combining related words, we need this diacritic pretty badly, though it's not such a huge problem since the late-'90s spelling reform.

A classic example is the word 'reeëëer', a bizarre word even by Dutch standards. A 'ree' is a deer, 'eer' is honor, and they're joined by another e to make the word flow. "Honor of deer / a deer". The result is that the connecting e needs a trema to separate it, and the first e in 'eer' also needs separating. The spelling reform chilled it out somewhat and now it's ' reeëneer', which is obviously miles better.

Anyway: I've never seen this diacritic used like this in English.

Socarides, who penned the author, was an adviser to Clinton, so I can only assume he enjoyed a robust education.

So, to my American friends, the question: what's up with this? Is this use of the diaeresis old-fashioned, or restricted to certain educational institutions?

Bad Dog Books and FurPlanet have long been partners, and now it's time to tie the knot! So to speak.

Effective immediately, Bad Dog Books will transition from an independent publisher to an imprint of FurPlanet, bringing with it the portfolio of novels and the anthology series ROAR and FANG. The anthologies will continue to be produced by their current staff, the books will continue to be sold with the BDB logo -- everything will keep going just as it was, only better.

Since its inception in 2005, BDB hasn't had its own printing and distribution facilities. These had to be secured elsewhere: first through the print-on-demand service Lulu.com, later by contracting FurPlanet. This has always been an expensive proposition, and by joining FurPlanet and becoming an imprint, a lot of overhead is eliminated.

In many ways it's business as usual. The finishing touches are being put on the fourth volumes of FANG and ROAR, we have a few cool new products on the horizon for 2012 (you'll hear more about those soon enough), and all of us at BDB will keep at our mission to deliver fine furry fiction to our readers.

Which means, concretely, that the authors, editors and artists will get more money. Score!

Of course, Bad Dog Books cares about readers as much as authors, and Furplanet share our passion. So until the end of December all BDB books and comics will be discounted $5.

Further, FurPlanet already has experience with e-book distribution, something we've been struggling with at BDB. This is something I'm personally very excited about, as it'll make our portfolio of furry fiction more convenient and accessible to modern readers.

The boyfriend and I snuck off for a quick, cheap weekend in Paris. It's been years since I've been there, and never before in winter. Magnificent!

Followup to the previous piece on the new ugliest word in my language, I'd like to expand a bit on this statement:

Dutch is a merchants' language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn't to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.

An example of this just popped on my screen. A car ad with a clip of a dog whos flews are fluttering in the wind with 'roll over for more' underneath it. At least, that's what I assume should be there, since the ad was creepily localized for me: 'Erover rollen voor meer'.  Let me break this down, since it illustrates the above point precisely.

In June I railed against 'geüpdated', the neerlandified word for 'updated'. Now there's a new contender: 'gelikete', meaning 'liked' in the context of Facebook's like button.

The verb 'to like' knows no translation in Dutch. No surprise; even among its Germanic siblings the Dutch language has a particular paucity in vocabulary, so it certainly can't hold a candle to its close cousin English, which suckles at the teats of various Francic, Celtic, Germanic and Latin sources.

Dutch is a merchants' language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn't to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.

Yuck.

Catching up on some of the recent posts.

Yours F. Truly discovering something new at the #Eurofurence bar., a photo by khakidog on Flickr.

EF 2011 was SUCH a blast :)