I’m happy to announce that The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is now available in Chinese (complex characters), courtesy of Taiwan’s Rye Field Publications. It’s available now and is priced at NT$550. If you happen to buy a copy, please leave a comment below or drop me a line via the contact form to let me know what you think!
Long-time readers will remember that 99% Invisible, the wide-ranging podcast hosted by Roman Mars and produced in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California, featured an episode on the octothorpe back in December 2014. It’s a great listen: 99PI producer Avery Trufelman managed to track down Doug Kerr and Lorne Asplund, two of the engineers at Bell Labs who were instrumental in placing the ‘#’ on the then-new telephone keypad and later christening it as the “octothorpe”, to get the story behind the mark’s rebirth in the computer age.
A very quick note this week: Shady Characters now runs exclusively over HTTPS. What does this mean? Well, rather like my recent post about how references work here on the blog, my hope is that very little will change — other than an extra ‘s’ in the site’s address.
We’ve visited Ampersand Mountain, with its eponymous creek and hotel, and we’ve heard tell of mythical San Seriffe Island; now, welcome to scenic Asterisk Pass in Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park! This excellent image was taken by Travis Kochel of Trail Type. Many thanks to him for permission to republish it.
Giving credit where it’s due has been an important part of writing for Shady Characters since I started back in 2010. Where I use an image that I don’t own myself, for instance, I try my best to find the owner, obtain their permission and then credit them in the caption for their work. Equally as important, I try to link to or cite all of the sources I use when writing about a given subject. That last part has given me no end of grief, and that’s what I’m going to write about today.