buyhercandy:

piquant:

Gentium is a free/open license font recommended to me by Nick, who’s something of a font connoisseur. It’s beautiful, particularly when printed out (vs. read onscreen), and it’s the same size as Times New Roman so it’s easy to make the switch.

Victor Gaultney designed Gentium for his Masters of Arts in Typeface Design at the University of Reading. His full explanation (pdf) of the design is thorough and intriguing. He used slightly different base shapes for the lowercase c, e, g, o and q, for example, because our eyes tend to read just the tops of letters, so it’s helpful for them to be distinctive. What’s particularly cool about Gentium is that it supports all the letters and diacritics of the “extended Latin” alphabet (proofs (pdf)), so minority language groups previously stuck using Arial Unicode now have an attractive, free font that can actually be used in print.

Oh my god, yes. This is gorgeous. Particularly useful for Vietnamese, for me. Look at all those diacritics!

(Source: http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium)

http://assets.tumblr.com/swf/audio_player.swf?audio_file=http://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/1025203200/tumblr_l6floeAUKb1qzz5rt&color=FFFFFF

germanheit:

I’ve decided to help you more with pronunciation by posting more audio. Hopefully this will help you a bit 🙂

In the past, I’ve written some posts called “Survival phrases” where I’m basically teaching you random, more or less important phrases. So now you actually get to hear the phrases and not only read them 😉

Please read along while listening 🙂 SURVIVAL PHRASES 1

thomasfitzpatrick:

laughingsquid:

Paper Tweet Notepad

want.

(Source: http://laughingsquid.com/paper-tweet-notepad/)

(via thingslikethat)

(Source: http://www.lifestylebazaar.com/shop/gifts_and_cards/for_him_and_her/pantone_a6_notebook)

That vacation I had been planning to take in May, I finally took in August. So, 2300 miles later, here’s ten things I learned or observed on the road. 10. Sirius satellite radio. Channels of… read more »

Ten things about traveling

Ten things about traveling

That vacation I had been planning to take in May, I finally took in August. So, 2300 miles later, here’s ten things I learned or observed on the road.

10. Sirius satellite radio. Channels of interested included Outlaw Country and The Coffeehouse. But other than that, I think I’d prefer my own music collection… if only the CD player worked.

9. Upper Peninsula Michigan is a gorgeous, moderate climate to visit in mid to late August. Highs in the 70s. Leave the window open and enjoy the evening lows in the 50s.

8. Indiana, I can’t leave you fast enough. Your rest stop areas are deplorable, unsanitary and unsafe. Your fueling stations are even worse. I don’t think there’s a gear in the automobile that gets me out of Indiana fast enough.

7. Miscalculated the miles per gallon ratio. Next fuel stop in 250 miles.

6. Every bite of Danish Kringle pastry is worth the 813 miles of travel. Now if I can lose the 20 pounds I gained.

5. Illy coffee really is that good. Especially brewed from a stovetop espresso maker.

4. Starbucks has free wi-fi. So does McDonald’s, truck stops and occasionally Perkins.

3. Those four books I placed in my bag and planned to read… didn’t get read. I guess it has something to do with don’t read and drive at the same time.

2. Sometimes visiting a hometown is simply finding that spot on the radio that is as much home as the house you grew up in. So when did my hometown radio station start running strip club radio ads? It’s like coming home to a brothel.

1. Oh, yeah, and that old house I used to call home… it’s now a parking lot.

There was a brief, shiny moment sometime in the early 90s when Barnes & Nobles and Borders were opening on every corner, and at the same time the bubbling dot-coms were luring editorial talent away from print and into digital publishing. Those two factors converged to make life as a Publisher or Acquisitions editor pretty lush for a few years — salaries in the industry went up by over 30% and the enormous competition to sign talent to fill the shelves of all those miles of shelves in those new stores (and that mysterious new thing called Amazon.com too) made way for expense accounts and advance budgets that were unprecedented. That crazy growth, however, was totally unsustainable. Once the dot-com bubble burst, and new stores were no longer coming online, we were left with no new growth, a significant erosion of independent bookstores, consumer trained to expect cheap prices on books, and a overabundance of new “B-level” titles.

High times in publishing! « ConfessionsOfAnITGirl.com (via fluffynotes)

A village split in two

Tracks heading east through the village

There’s a place where the railroad splits a village in two and still tries to remain whole.

germanheit:

“Acht, neun, zehn” (Eight, nine, ten) is a graphic novel by a young, talented German comic artist called Arne Bellstorf. It was his diploma thesis and he also won an award for it. The story is about this kid Christoph. He doesn’t really get along with his mom, has to repeat his last schoolyear and is kinda lonely. It’s a really nice story and I love the drawings. If you’re into graphic novels, check it out. In German of course 😉

sitzenbleiben (irreg.) = (to) repeat a schoolyear

der Comic (-s) = comic

der Zeichner (“) = graphic artist (-s) / drawer (-s)

She says to me, even Kerouac said that road trips have unexpected turns. He also wrote, “My witness is the empty sky.”

The empty sky and tracks below

The empty sky and tracks below

Railroad tracks heading west

She says to me, even Kerouac said that road trips have unexpected turns. He also wrote, “My witness is the empty sky.”

A Midwest downtown on a Sunday afternoon.

Downtown

Downtown

Downtown in the village on a Sunday afternoon

A Midwest downtown on a Sunday afternoon.

Quote: “Astonishment is the root of philosophy.”

~ Paul Tillich, The Writer’s Almanac

Quote

“Astonishment is the root of philosophy.”

Paul Tillich

Link: The Writer’s Almanac

Eichelman Park

Eichelman Park

Eichelman Park.

How to find wifi hotspots for digital nomads

If you’re traveling on the road and need some wifi connectivity, a couple websites help locate hotposts. Obviously, any Starbucks in America will have free wifi, as well as Barnes and Noble, but for other places I use jiwire and openwifispots to find wifi hotpots.

Advice for writers

In the September issue of Writer’s Digest, Sherman Alexie says:

Every word on your blog is a word not in your book.

As someone who has been blogging for a few years, that’s conflicting advice. I was encouraged by a friend to start a blog as a way to work on my writing skills. So, I started blogging as a way to discipline myself to write every day. Six years later I have several working or completed manuscripts and no books. Mr. Alexie may have a point. He also offers this:

Don’t Google search yourself.

Last night for a few minutes it felt like August 1988. Driving west on Highway 11, a half moon rising to the southwest, a line of red radio tower lights on the horizon to the northwest, the evening… read more »

August 1988

A long time ago I used to work at this place when it was called Atlantis Family Restaurant.

Mulberry’s Cafe