A Cute Commission

by Ariela

Some commissions are easy. Some clients are wonderful to work with. Some projects are touching. And when you are very lucky, you get all three in one.

I was lucky like that recently. A fellow was referred to me who wanted to get a design done with the letter shin, his daughter's first initial. With a Hebrew name, she wouldn't be likely to find her name on commonly available novelty keychains, etc. and he wanted to get a design just for her. As someone else with a Hebrew name who could never get a novelty item off the rack, I was very taken with the project.

He suggested a few design elements he knew would appeal to her - a sun, butterflies, dinosaurs - but left the actual design entirely up to my discretion. These were the result:

He plans to print them on notebook covers and a tshirt for her. I really hope she likes them!

A Short Guide to Scribal Errors

by Ariela

The curse of engaging in a craft that many other people have done for centuries before you is that it is hard to come up with something original. But the flip side is that it's hard to screw up in a totally original way, too.

Calligraphy has been around for millennia, and basically any cock-up that can be done has been. Moreover, we have terms for them! And many of them are in Greek, because lots of them were made by monks copying bibles.

There are lots of ways to screw up writing a text. For now, I will only deal with the ones that arise from unintentional mistakes made while copying a text by looking at a reference document (called the exemplar). A different set of mistakes can be made if you are writing out a text that is being read to you, or writing from memory. I will also only deal with errors that occur in languages based on alphabets that are written horizontally; there is some overlap with syllabic or ideographic writing and vertical writing, but each does have their own pitfalls.

All examples below use the text of Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Haplography

This is when a scribe omits a chunk of text due to the eye skipping from one section to another. Dropping one letter by mistake is not haplography, it has to be more. There are several sub-types of haplography.

Homeo teleuton (also homeoteleuton): An eye-skip due to words or phrases having the same ending.

The word "child" is at the end of a phrase several times in this paragraph, leading to an eye jump from one instance to another. The text in purple is where the problem originates, and the text in green is omitted in the copy.

Homeo arcton (also homeoarchy): An eye skip due to words or phrases having the same beginning.

Here we have two sentences in short order that begin "There was a..." Jumping from the first to the second, we omit a bunch of text.

When the homeoarchy or homeoteleuton occurs at the beginning or end of a line, right up against the margin, it is a type of parablepsis.

Parablepsis is, according to Wiktionary, is "A circumstance in which a scribe miscopies text due to inadvertently looking to the side while copying, or accidentally skips over some of it." This is a bizarre definition, to my mind, as the punctuation seems to divide it into two completely disparate sets of errors: a) any type of error made due to looking to the side, or b) any omission of a bunch of text for any reason. I think a better definition would be "Haplography that occurs at the beginning or end of a line."

Here we have homeoteleuton that is also parablepsis: the word "public" appears at the end of two lines, and the eye skips from the first to the second.

Dittography

This is where you repeat a sequence. It can be anywhere in length from just a few letters to several lines, depending on how quickly you catch yourself.

Here we have a phrase duplicated. This sort of dittography usually indicates that the scribe's mind wandered in the middle of the line.

Dittography mostly happens when there is a repetitive element in the text, but every once in a while a scribe would just have a total brain fart and reproduce something for no apparent reason.

There's no obvious reason why the line in green was written twice.

It can also happen anywhere within a text.

This is an example of dittography within one word. "Possessed" is written correctly in the original on the left, but has an extra "ess" in the copy on the right.

Transposition

This is where you switch the order of things.

It can cover the swapping of letters in a word.

Here we have a simple letter-order swap. If you just had the copy text on the right, you would probably be able to figure it out.

It also includes the flipping of word order.

Two words are swapped around here. It makes some difference to the meaning of the text, but not a huge amount.

These are both fairly benign examples of transposition. The former is easily spotted and the latter doesn't change the text fundamentally. However, transposition can change the meaning of a text drastically if applied in the wrong place.

Changing the position of one word in this sentence changes its meaning completely.

As bad as this is, it can be much worse. English is a verbose language, and Shelley's writing style is flowery. In terse languages where word order matters (so not Esperanto, for example), moving a word around means greater disruption to the meaning imparted. In Hebrew, where words are generally shorter due to verb and noun constructs based on a three-letter root, swapping two letters can literally mean the difference between the words 'crisis' and 'meat' (שבר/בשר), 'evening' and 'hunger' (ערב/רעב), 'hate' and 'subject/thesis' (שונא/נושא). It is not always clear from context that a mistake occurred. 

How to Prevent Scribal Errors

No matter how careful you are, it's almost impossible to copy out a text of great length without making any mistakes at all. In the 13 years I have been working as a professional calligrapher, I have only once written a text which my proofreader found to be completely without error. Fortunately for me, I do my calligraphy in pencil first, get it proofed, and then ink it after the corrections are made. (That's part of Terri's job.) Other scribes throughout history have not been so lucky. It is possible to fix a mistake made in ink, but the longer the mistake drags on, the harder it is. Also, errors of omission frequently don't leave enough room for fixing.

So the next time you see a tweet from us like this: 

Dittography. Fudge.

— GeekCalligraphy (@GeekCalligraphy) June 29, 2016

You'll know what happened.

New Product: Tech Serenity Prayer

by Ariela

On days when you need help remembering how to take a deep breath and not take a baseball bat to all the machines in sight, it helps to have this Tech Serenity Prayer at your desk.

How it Came to Be

As with almost all of my art, the inspiration for this piece came from something that happened to me. In my day job I do tech stuff for a non-profit. I describe it as "playing a programmer on TV" - I don't actually do any programming, but I am the admin of a bunch of the applications we use. Recently one crashed and burned in ways that I don't want to relive in the course of this blog post, but it was offline for an unconscionably long time. I've never heard Support use the terms "dangit" and "horrified fascination" in consumer-facing correspondence before.

Some time during this fiasco, I quipped that I needed a serenity prayer for tech problems. Then I realized that there was no reason I couldn't have one, I just needed to figure out if "a hammer" or "rm -rf/" was funnier. After a brief poll of some programmer friends, I decided to go with the latter.

In the tradition of feel-good text, I used a Copperplate hand to write it out, but I put it in white on a blue background to reference the classic Blue Screen of Death. 

Prints are available in two sizes: 8"x10" for $30 and 11"x14" for $45 (matted dimensions).

What is it that I really do?

By Terri

My job title in this business is Manager, specifically Business Manager/Artist Wrangler. My personal business cards read "Knitting Instructor & Artist Wrangler*" But that's an incredibly vague term that conjures up images of Ariela in a Lasso of Truth and doesn't really describe what I do or how I learned how to do it.

I began working at The Judaica House in early 2006. Early on I was tasked with re-inventorying many of the special order items that they carry, such as personalized benchers** (yes, that's pronounced like the thing you sit on followed by the sound you use when you can't find a word), yarmulkes for imprinting and personalized ketubot from various artists (among them, Ariela's former employers). Over several years of employment, I developed relationships with some of the artists we carried and learned a whole lot about how the business works. The personalization form you fill out if you order a ketubah from us? It's a hybrid of the form I used to use at work and the one the Caspis use. My initial proofreading skills came from doing the final check on any ketubah before it went to the customer. And boy did I have to chase down a lot of rabbis. Why? Because before we would send the personalization information to any artist, that information needed to be verified by the wedding officiant.*** That led to me ranting to Ariela during May of 2009:

clearly, it must be wedding season

either that or Rabbi season, because all I seem to be doing is hunting them

Some time later, the following sketch arrived in the mail:

The giant kippah *really* makes this sketch. If you look carefully, you can see where Elmer used to be wearing a black hat.

[Image shows a pencil sketch of Elmer Fudd on the phone, wearing a kippah, holding forms. Text declares "Be vewwy vewwy QUIET. We'we hunting WABBIS...."]

So I amassed a set of incredibly specialized skills over the course of my employment (proofreading, how to get what you want from an artist without making them cranky, dogged persistence in tracking down officiants). I learned what sorts of designs appeal to the standard Jewish consumer vs. the geeky ones. And most importantly, I developed a deep and close friendship with an artist who wanted to start a calligraphy business. 

I stopped working full time at The Judaica House in 2010. By then, Ariela was living in New York City and was steadily taking commissions for ketubot.**** I was her on-tap proofreader for these (I even did one over email), and we began to banter back and forth about Ariela quitting her day job. It was all pipe dreams, even in 2012 when we established that I would be the business manager. It wasn't until 2013 that I actually started doing Business Manager type things (mostly attempting to adjust unreasonable expectations from clients - something I still do). 

But, you insist, none of this answers the question in the blog post title! So what is it that I do?

I proofread texts when possible (not being local to Ariela makes it trickier), answer wholesale inquiries, rein in Ariela's runaway impulses, respond to certain types of client inquiries, come up with product lines, track down phone numbers for licensing departments,***** make sure Ariela meets her deadlines, write many of our product release blog posts, serve as a sounding board, and generally act as the first line of defense for anything that keeps Ariela from being able to Do Art. I smile and nod at calligraphy details, keep our products within scope (and just slightly subversive), act as a font of completely useless knowledge, track down frames at thrift stores, make sure Ariela doesn't take on too much, tweet and share things on Facebook that are relevant to the business, and write long rants on our blog when fandom needs a good swift kick in the pants. Since that doesn't fit on a business card, you get Artist Wrangler instead.

*Unfortunately they went to print before I could get "professional killjoy" added to them

**Small prayerbooks or laminated cards containing the Grace After Meals and other assorted pre and post meal prayers for the Sabbath and Holidays. 

***We ask for your officiant's contact information for this very reason (also, if we have any questions we can avoid asking you them during what is a busy and stressful time for you).

****Our friends did persist in getting married.

*****It's amazing how much easier it is to contact the people in charge of Star Wars licenses now that Disney owns Lucasfilm. 

Hebrew is Stretchy and I Like It: or, Why Ariela Finds Hebrew Easier to Calligraph than English

by Ariela

I have been blathering on Twitter a bunch lately about how much I prefer writing Hebrew (specifically the square Aramaic alphabet, not the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet) to writing in the Latin alphabet. Mostly that has been context-free venting into the void, which is what Twitter is great at, but I thought perhaps I should explain why this is.

First and foremost, Hebrew makes spacing out text much easier by the presence of a number of letters that stretch very easily. Meet every Hebrew-writing calligrapher's best friends, Dalet, Heh, Ḥet, Lamed, Kuf, Reish, and Tav.

Say hello to the nice letters. Letters, say hello to the nice people.

What these letters all have in common is a single line across the top of the letter. That makes it very easy to use them to take up a lot of extra space, like so.

These are the same letters as above, but taking up much more room.
The letters are polite, though. The would never take up this much room on a crowded train.

So if you have a relatively short line of text, but want to take up the full width of the line, just having several of these letters makes that fairly easy.

Same words on both lines, but one is much longer. (Words are delet petucha, 'open door.')

Latin alphabet, by contrast, really only has the characters t and f with these easily extentable horizontal lines, with r and z having not quite horizontal bars. (Z's rarity makes it by far the least useful in this regard.)

The Latin alphabet's poor excuse for stretchy letters.

Even this, however, is different than the Hebrew stretchy letters. Excepting Reish, each of the Hebrew stretchy letters is stretching in the middle of the letter, and has a significant part of the letter at the beginning and the end. F, t, z, and r are stretching beyond themselves, which means that if you stick this in the middle of a word, it winds up making a break in the word.

Does this say "orbit" or "or bit"? #NoContextForYou

There are a few other Roman characters that have flourishes that are made to extend a letter, like e, y, and g.

Pretty flourishes are fun.

Same issue here with the making a visual break. You can really only use this at the end of a word.

These are both the same word, and they take up the same amount of space. But one is legible and the other is not. It's all about where the flourishes are.

But the biggest difference is that there is an accepted convention in Hebrew about these stretching letters, whereas we don't have that so much anymore in the English language. Instead, we have to stretch each letter a little bit, and when that isn't enough, resort to stretching the kerning (spacing between letters and words). I hate kerning. Not only is it more work, I like the aesthetic of the result less.

This is kerning. Kerning is not my friend. The top line has normal kerning, the bottom line has stretched kerning in order to take up more space.

And none of this even gets into the fact that Hebrew has no upper and lower cases (majuscule and miniscule), so it makes for a more solid block of text with fewer white spaces.

Basically, I like Hebrew because it makes my job easy. Well, easier.

New Product: Clockwork Lovebirds Art Prints

By Terri

Were you looking at our ketubot and wondering "I love the artwork, but already have a ketubah/would never buy a ketubah"? These art prints solve that problem!

How They Came To Be:

Way way back in the dark ages of 2012, Ariela and I figured out that we might be able to make a go of this business. I knew that the key to subsidizing the ketubot was to create smaller prints of the art with a quote on them, rather than the full ketubah text. That way someone coming across Ariela's work could be able to purchase the art they love, even if they weren't in the market for a ketubah. 

We actually got a request for a variation on the Clockwork Lovebirds a few months ago, making it the natural choice for the first set of prints. For the Hebrew quote, the obvious choice proved the best one. I looked through שיר השירים, (Song of Songs, the infamous Biblical erotic poem), to find the one quote in there about birds. Ariela found the English quote, using the incredibly difficult method of tossing search terms into BrainyQuote and choosing the best result.* It owes more to the clockwork than the birds, but is lovely.

The prints come matted and are available in two sizes:
Small - 11" x 14" - $45
Large - 16" x 20" - $60

*After performing the all important step of actually verifying that the quote really was from Ikeda-san -- we all know how reliable some of these databases are.

We Interrupt This Broadcast

By Terri

To inform you that things are going to look a little different around here. When we launched, it was with a new product release every other week. Ariela had a bunch of greeting cards on deck, and the other products on our schedule didn't seem too much. 

Fast forward a few months. We've added 2 professional oaths, several greeting cards and a ketubah to our product line. Ariela has stopped talking to me about how magical and wonderful art is.* She went to WisCon, and ran up against a project she really wanted to have ready in time. So it was time to have a reality check. Slowing down was in order.

As friends who are business partners, sometimes there is a push-pull that you have to walk very carefully. When your best friend is creative and driven, sometimes you have to talk her down from the ledge. It's easier with me - when I get startitis, I end up with several more in-progress projects, but I'm not tearing my hair out, nor is knitting making me unhappy. When Ariela has an attack of "Be Productive," it can end up with too many things on her plate at one time. So we're clearing the plate some.

Starting this month, we'll be ratcheting down to one product release a month.** This should hopefully give Ariela room to do her scribal practice, the occasional commission, Geek Calligraphy products AND her day job. If that works successfully, we'll stick with it. If it doesn't, we'll revisit it in a few months. 

*That sounds fluffy and silly, but when Ariela is happy with her art, she is talkative about it.

**With the right to add a simple second product if I think Ariela can cope

Post-WisCon40 Report

by Ariela

Ariela's name badge and program books from WisCon40.

This weekend was WisCon. To say that I had a blast is both true and incomplete. It was so much more than just a good time.

I was promised that it would be a very different con than any other I had attended, and that was very true. To start with, the majority of people I encountered were female presenting, and there was a much higher than usual NB representation. Racial representation was also much more diverse.

Programming had the typical problem of stacking great panels in the same time slots, so no matter what you do you miss something awesome. It was even more intense at WisCon than basically any other con I have attended. Also, they stop panels at mealtimes to encourage people to eat, so they have to cram even more awesome into the slots that are left. The one I probably enjoyed the most was Staying In Your Lane, how to be inclusive without stepping over the line, with Riley as moderator and Mark Oshiro and MedievalPOC as fellow panelists. It was utterly fascinating and all of them were really insightful. (I may have gone and fangirled a bit to MedievalPOC after the panel. Maybe.) My second favorite was probably Class Basics 101, which talked a lot about different constructs of class, intersections of classism and other prejudices, and the differences between the academic study of class vs the experience of being truly poor.

I sat on three panels and had a lovely time with all of them. The moderators were good, fellow panelists were good, and all of them were well attended. None of them were particularly well-tweeted, though. Not sure what it was about the panels I was on that inspired people to take notes on pen and paper. The first panel that I was on, Creating Your Own Religion, also extended into a multi-hour discussion over lunch, which was utterly fascinating. The second panel, SFF Where Religion Works, was the first panel where I have ever cried. We were discussing The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, and all of us got weepy, as expected; we even passed around a tissue box before we started discussing it. The third panel, The Tough Tribute to Fantasyland, was funny and fun, but I had to run out immediately after it ended to check out of the hotel and get my stuff from the art show.

Speaking of which, the art show was smaller than I am used to, and I sold more greeting cards than before but less matted art. Hmm. Lee Moyer assured me that this kind of win-some-lose-some is normal and you never really know what will happen. That made me feel better.

I got earrings from Elise Matthesen at her Haiku Party (she like my haiku!), soaked in the hot tub twice, and danced at the Floomp (which is the big Saturday night dance party). I made an utter cake of myself in front of Charlie Jane Anders when I was standing next to her in line to get salad and she was really kind about it.

Over the course of the weekend, someone did something that made me feel kind of uncomfortable [note: not sexual in nature] and I called them on it. They pushed back, kinda hard, and I decided to just walk away. The next evening, that person came up to me to apologize. They said that they were very sorry they reacted so defensively and that almost immediately after I left they realized that I was completely right. We parted on good terms. This is the kind of con that WisCon is - not only did this person do the emotional work of questioning their reaction, they sought me out to apologize and make amends.

Ariela at the WisCon40 dessert salon and GOH speeches.
Photo courtesy of John Scalzi.

The central experience of the con, for me at least, was the Guest of Honor speeches. They have all of the GOHs speak one after the other, right after the dessert salon. Many people, including the friends who dragooned me into attending WisCon, dress up for this. So I did, too. It made it feel much less like attending a con GOH speech and more like hearing a speech at a fancy dinner. I happen to have liked that. I also suspect that a larger percentage of con attendees came to the GOH speeches than at other cons I have attended. They really are the highlight.

The three GOHs this year were Justine Larblestier, Sofia Samatar, and Nalo Hopkinson.

Justine spoke first. She was hilarious. Like, really, really funny. Also, mad props to the closed captioning typist, who was actually interacting with her in real time, to the point that Justine would pause to see what the typist did with her various sounds of excitement and disgust, and then react to that in turn. She spoke about teens and teen literature and the history of the concept of being a teen, and class, and race, and representation. And she started off so funny and at the end we were all just sitting there with our mouths hanging open feeling struck. Or at least everyone around me was. There wasn't any laughter at the end of her speech, just some really hard truths.

Sofia Samatar spoke next. She was wonderfully eloquent speaking about breaking down the borders between genres, but her speech did not hit me as hard. Perhaps it was because I was not a writer.

Nalo Hopkinson went last. Justine tee'd me up, but Nalo knocked me flat. She addressed the Puppies, gatekeeping, hatred in fandom, how easy it is to descend into mob mentality in the name of social justice and called for us to resist that slide, the guilt that can be paralyzing when we fail and hurt someone, and so much more. Wow. I cannot wait for a transcript of her speech. She also announced that she is creating a new award, the Lemonade Award, for people or organizations who make a significant improvement to the fan community. When she talked about starting off by just awarding certificates, it was all I could do not to leap out of my seat and yell "I volunteer as tribute!" Instead I tweeted at her that I would be happy to make the certificates. Then I went up to her after the speeches were done and volunteered in person, giving her my card. I also probably sounded like a blithering idiot, as I was busy thinking "Your speech gave me all the feels! And that's a good thing and I want you to know that, but my feels are my problem, not yours, and I don't want to make you do any emotional labor over me having feelings!" So I blubbered out something about wanting to volunteer, even though I know that maybe as a straight, white, ciswoman I might not be the best one for the job, or possibly not the right art style, but I wanted to volunteer and here's my card and now I am going to cry and ruin my makeup. (The above photo was taken before said crying took place.)

I have not had a con affect me this much since my first con at Arisia 2011. As then, I did not come home the same person, and I cannot wait to come back next year. I met loads of wonderful people and got to spend time with the wonderful friends who brought me along saying "This is the con you share with the people you love!" None of what I wrote truly captures the effect of the experience.

A+ Will definitely repeat.

Furious

By Terri

This blog post is full of spoilers for the most recent issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers. This is a monthly comic that is expected to play out over the course of the next year and is not directly connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Ready for the spoilers and the fury? Here we go.

Well, they've gone and done it again. In the name of drama and selling comic books, Marvel has let Nick Spencer retcon Captain America into a lifelong HYDRA sleeper agent. That's right, the man created by Jews to punch Hitler in the face and shame the US for our lack of involvement in Europe in WWII has been secretly a Nazi all along! Psych!

As has been pointed out by other writers, I understand that "mysteriously evil all along, but don't worry we'll fix it" twists are common common book tropes.* I understand that Cap won't be evil forever. And Captain America isn't even really evil. I have been reliably informed that Red Skull is implanting false memories and/or reality has been warped by the tesseract which is now embodied as a young girl. So the character that the MCU has taught me to love,** who stands up as the image of what America should be has now been warped beyond recognition by outside powers. Which, yes, has happened before.*** Superman's been evil, **** as have any number of good characters in the history of comics. Retcons and massive plot twists and life model decoys and secretly a clone and on and on and on. But something is different about this. 

Most of what's bothering both me and Ariela has already been well articulated by others.  Ursula Vernon had a detailed rant on twitter and Jessica Plummer wrote an article for PANELS that sum up both parts of what bother us. Ursula writes about the nature of heroes and what stories we want to hear from them. Plummer talks about retconning a character created by Jews in response to Nazis as having been a Nazi all along. They've said it better than I realistically can, and you should read their words.

As Jewish geek content creators, we feel that this is spitting in the faces of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Which brings me to the point that Heidi MacDonald made. Yes, Kirby drew Cap saluting to Hitler while being controlled by Red Skull. But that was a choice Kirby made, and it was resolved quickly. It didn't rewrite the entire history of the character for however long this story plays out. We feel that this was a shameless ploy and publicity stunt it could have been done in many other ways that didn't require the erasure of all that Captain America has ever meant to those he has stood up for.

And lastly, for those counseling us to "let the story play out" and to "not judge a 240 page book by the first 40 pages" - you mean to tell me that you've never once picked up a book and put it down after flipping through the first chapter? You've never found a doorstop size novel offensive before you've gotten through 20 some odd pages? I have. I've taken books back to the library before finishing them. I never did make it through the first season of Game of Thrones. I've returned audiobooks before finishing them. Books have not left the bookstore after I've decided they didn't need to come home with me. That's my right as a media consumer  - I can decide what I find offensive and choose not to read or endorse it.

*I also think that they're lazy tropes, but they're part of the comic book landscape and thus are valid in and of themselves.

**Yes, I'm more of a movie fan than a strict comics fan. That doesn't invalidate my position one teensy bit.

***I'll get to the Heidi MacDonald point in a minute. 

****I really shouldn't bring Superman up in this discussion, as it will cause me to go off on an even longer rant about stripping the Jewish roots from comic book characters and why Zac Snyder shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a comic book franchise with a camera and script... Oh look, I've done that. Maybe another time.