Teresa Nielsen Hayden has innumerable likable qualities, but certainly one of her finest traits is her penchant for finding laughably misinformed information on the interweb and then gently, throughly and lovingly correcting it in a way that is funny enough to provoke milk-in-your-sinuses-and-on-your-keyboard laughter. In today's installment, she takes apart a webpage that "describes" how printing and book-design work.

They call themselves Back Yard Publisher, but I prefer the page's title tag: Publishing Your Manuescript. Their motto is good, too: Remember! There's A Publisher in You're Own Back Yard.

Most of their page is given over to explaining hitherto-unknown Alternate Facts about book design, typography, and printing. For instance:

In gravure printing the letters are etched into a plate (usually Copper), then ink is forced into the letters, scraped from the area around the letters and paper is forced onto the ink at extremely high pressure. The ink is then transferred to the paper. This is what the song "In Your Easter Bonnet" is all about.

You know-- "In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, / You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade ..." Bet you never suspected.

Link Discuss

Need to build yourself a software MP3 player that does playlist queueing? Why not set up a print-queue that outputs to the sound-card and then "print" your music to the queue? ("Why not" in this case being a purely rhetorical question, though the answer, "Because it's there" would be wholly responsive.) Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary)

Cheaper by the Dozen, one of my favorite books, is being made into a film (again), starring Steve Martin and the tween-heroine from Lizzy McGuire. The story is the memoir of two of the children of Frank Gilbreth, an obsessive-compulsive who invented and largely perfected the business of time-motion study and efficiency consulting. This is a man who used a stopwatch to determine the optimal method of buttoning a shirt -- bottom-up/top-down -- and had his enormous brood of children given sequential tonsilectomies which he filmed in order to establish today's familiar operating-theatre procedure. He also invented touch-typing and much of today's ergonomics and assembly-line best-practices. The memoir is utterly charming, a warm account of a man who was at least one-third tyrant but who was also the most loving of fathers. The style is strongly reminiscent of Heinlein's stories about entrepreneurs, like the Doorway into Summer, serving up an archetype of American commonsense find-a-need-and-fill-it business that feels as homespun as an Andy of Mayberry episode when compared to today's baroque B-school wisdom. I hope that Steve Martin does it justice -- he's certainly the kind of ambiguous comic who could bring the character to life. Though, from the plot synopsis, it appears that rather severe liberties have been taken with the storyline. Link Discuss

Great K5 article on "Otherkin" -- people who believe that they are members of faerie races trapped in human bodies.

Often, Otherkin believe that they are from another world or place in the universe, and feel like they don't belong on Earth. This is known as Yearning. They often find speak a unique language from this homeworld, and may believe that they lived out a past life on it. These past life memories are another key belief, and the main cause of that pain during an Awakening -- essentially, the memories they discover might be unpleasant, perhaps even memories of dying or worse. Otherkin often keep diaries during their Awakening and after documenting any memories they might have. Another frequent belief is the True-Form, which is a 'real' body outside of the Seeming. For example, a dragon Otherkin will have wings, and will be able to feel them as a sort of aura, and perhaps see them. Otherkin with the Sight are said to be able to see the True-Form of themselves or others, even those who are still Sleeping. Interestingly, some Otherkin feel RPG-style Callings, for example to Heal or to Guard a specific person or just everyone, and will devote their lives to doing just that.

Link Discuss (via Futurismic)