Biography for Baycon

Gracious, I'm a Guest at Baycon.

I blame dpaxson and pentaclemoon and, if there's blame leftover, hilarypoet should probably get some.

( Bio text behind the cut )

Idunna... 10?

The next issue of Idunna to be available will be...10.

No, no, we're not renumbering from scratch or anything--this is actually from way back in the early days of the (Ring of) Troth.

Back when we didn't know how to spell the name of our own kindred.

No, it's true! For some time, we went about as the Hrafnir kindred, as our pet Scandinavian Studies guy of the time (who shall remain safely anonymous, at least by my hand) told us that that was how one pluralized the word hrafn--raven. It was fixed in speech by the time I turned up in 1997 and had been for years, but the kindred banner still had it wrong way 'round until much later (how much later shall remain also a mystery, at least by my hand).

But! Now in most glorious Soviet Revisionist style, the Shope's Office has retroactively fixed our ancient typo. It's rather important here, actually, as one William Bainbridge includes, wholesale, an early version of the script to a certain rite for which we are now (in)famous. It's interesting to see how things have changed over the years...

To say nothing of the quality of the thing. The illos are line art, which I mean literally: drawn on the master by the Shope of the time, Dianne Luark Ross. There are a couple tracings of old carvings, which were pasted up with--wait for it--paste.

Some of that original flavor will be lost in translation, I'm afraid--such is the price of progress.

Could I have just taken the scans and slapped them into a PDF long ago? Yep. But it would have been a collection of pictures of words, not a collection of words: the text would not have been searchable or copyable into other documents with naught but a mousewave, and it would have lovingly preserved every smudge of the original photocopying process.

This will be a cleaner, and more readily usable, resource--bringing these old issues back into the light is something we work on in our idle moments 'round here at the Shope's Office.

Yeah, we have those sometimes. Surprising, wot?

But I'm just the last step! I couldn't have gotten far without standing on someone's shoulders!

Thanks are assuredly due to gnowun for his work in scanning everything, and to Gary Penzler for proofreading the mishmash that Adobe Acrobat made of OCRing those pages. Gary wants Idunna 11, gods bless 'im, and I'll be packaging that up for his diligent attention soon enough. He doesn't know that 11 is when Idunna got a new editor. The new editor was reasonably familiar with LaTeX, and had a great fondness for Fraktur. Oh, and dropcaps. Every paragraph has a dropcap in Fraktur.

It's just as well Gary didn't particularly want me to do an OCR run--Fraktur, dropcaps, Saxon English, the usual soupçla;on of loanwords...well, between them the any OCR program I've tried spews the pea soup.

Gary wanted to know what he could do for the Troth that didn't require spending money and could be done in a stay-at-home dad's offhand moments on antiquated equipment.

Allow me to cackle madly...and think of a favorite book.

-- Lorrie