I got up and out earlier this morning to try to get ahead of the curve. We’ve got workmen coming to the house this morning and I have to take the younger daughter to register for school this afternoon.
I can’t express in simple words the degree to which I loathe and abhor this registration process.
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One day, I would love to write a wildly popular novel, and get a national TV interview, and get asked “Why didn’t you include a gay or lesbian character?” To which I could reply easily – “Oh, who says I didn’t? Just because they didn’t act flamboyantly gay, all out in the open, well… It wasn’t important to the story, so why should I have bothered to make a point of it?”
Digging around a bit about 36 Dramatic Situations, it appears the original was in the mid 1800s in French, and what’s found on the web is from an early 1900s translation. Internet Archive has a copy you can read online that works from page images, rather than the OCR, and WikiBooks is working on taking those and converting to text. A quick look suggests both are working from the same original copy.
I find myself somewhat … disappointed in a number of the services scanning books and other documents. My State Library has a number of such documents available via the web – however, for the most part, they are relatively low resolution scans. One document “Historic Record of Camp Nicholls, New Orleans” is a pamphlet, some 18 pages long. Though the object description does not include the size, it appears to be from the layout and general font size used in such documents, to be somewhat larger than the normal tradeback size. And yet, the best version I can convince their database to return is a 348×480 image returned at 200% zoom (696×960).
The Internet Archive doesn’t seem to be quite that bad – but I’m thinking the minimum for scanning documents in full color should be at least 150 DPI, and 1-bit color should be pushed for 600-1200 DPI. (Maybe if we had more scans like that, the OCR software could actually make sense of it!)
I think you are reading the 1914 English translation from the original French edition of the 36 Dramatic Situations. Of course, there is a wikipedia entry on this!
Yeah. I am reading the 1914 translation. I had to go look at the original scan to see it. 🙂