#experimental publishing

Subtitle Spectrograms (v1.0)

A new tool-in-progress for turning .srt subtitle files into visual forms — each film leaving behind a kind of spectral residue.

For Melancholia I’ve tested seven different renderers:

ASCII noise grid

Base64 fragment field

Density scan

Bitmap poster rows

Radial timeline

Chaotic signature (Lorenz / butterfly)

Strata waveform

Each one maps the rhythms of time, text, and silence in different ways: from tight lattices to dissolving orbits, from faint whispers to overloaded storms. They’re not “spectrograms” in the strict audio sense — more like misheard timelines, where words collapse into shapes and patterns.

The long-term aim is to find a filter that produces a unique signature for each film: something irreducible, distinct, impossible to fake. For now, these first seven are both experiments and echoes — ways of watching a film through its own captions.

On Sale Now: 

The Sleeping Seer by Morgan Blue Malory

What IS this?? We call it Modern Fantasy, because, yes, it's fantasy, and at 758 pages it definitely qualifies as a Big Fat Fantasy--but you can check your fantasy book assumptions at the door. Divided between present-day Philadelphia and locations harder to quantify, this tale features siblings Luke and Ellie, the last survivors of an ancient line of seers, an all-women gang of street racers, and a society of people who might or might not be human. There are no supernatural creatures and no quest: just a story that demands you come prepared to question your assumptions, buckle up and hang on...and plan to stay up reading, because you won't be able to put this one down. You should have seen people try to talk to me while I was reading this for the first time.

But don't just listen to me. Kirkus says, "[This ambitious tale weaves an intricate tapestry." I say you won't know what you're missing until you experience it.

As of this writing, the Kindle version is available on Amazon, but they haven't picked up the print version yet. We're still working on getting the Read Free section of the site set up, but we hope to have it available in the next few days. We'll update things here when it's ready.

For now, read more about The Sleeping Seer on our website.

Ezra’s New Role: Scan, Interpret, Print.

Today saw the debut of python3 ezra_scan.py — a new way for Ezra (The Interpreter) to process and output meaning, one barcode at a time.

Using the Eyoyo 1D/2D barcode scanner, a scanned ISBN, UPC, or QR code is instantly cross-checked against a local CSV log of titles and captions. If it finds a match, Ezra prints a thermal label via The Misrecogniser (Zebra QLn420) — complete with title, code, shelf location, and a short interpretative caption. If no match exists, Ezra responds with a glitchy [SCAN ERROR], a kind of negative-space annotation in itself.

It’s another layer to the Second Copy app workflow, but in this mode Ezra doesn’t need a phone — just scanner, CSV, and printer. It’s also an odd mirror of my own warehouse receiving/picker role: scanner in one hand, mobile Wi-Fi/Bluetooth printer in the other, generating movement and dispatch labels. Here, though, the labels are less about stock movement and more about meaning control — another autobiographical glitch folded into The Interpreter’s expanding self-portrait.

Like the rest of Ezra’s functions, this is modular. More entries can be added to the CSV over time; the captions can mutate; the outputs could trigger other devices. The system’s simplicity hides its potential: a warehouse of thought, indexed and retrievable at the pull of a trigger.

// the process sigil — a compass, a contradiction, a map to home.

This is the sigil of Process Zine. A personal index card. A schematic. A lived philosophy.

At first glance, it’s simple: arrows, type, glyphs. But every part of this diagram holds something deeper — a system of opposites, a soft machine for navigating art, deafness, glitch, memory, and meaning.

At the centre: a dot. A node. A self. From this, four currents flow:

[ PARADOX ] — the source field. Every project, every word, every misheard caption begins here. Light vs dark. Deaf vs hearing. Analogue vs digital. Not problems to solve, but tensions to live inside.

[ ELSEWISE ] ← • → [ GLITCH LAB ] Home and work. Found and broken. A lived-in collection of objects and memory (Elsewise) meets the mechanised distortion of signal and sense (Glitch Lab). One curates decay. The other manufactures it.

[ PROCESS ZINE ] The publishing vessel. A zine, a community, a map of miscommunication. What flows in from paradox, Elsewise, and glitch emerges here as black and white pages, captioned images, stories, noise.

[ SIGNAL // NOISE ] The debut frequency. Edition zero. The first test transmission. A theme, an album, a glitchy breath in the space between signal and silence.

There’s a lot of anecdotal data suggesting that books made available for free sell more copies than those whose publishers closely guard access. We think this is because such books become the growing medium for communities of readers and story-lovers, who share great reads in every way they can--and because people are generally disposed to reciprocate the gift of a story that touches them with the gift of support in whatever way works for them. Whether that means buying a copy of a book they loved for themselves or as a gift, putting money in an online “tip jar” or a Patreon or Kickstarter fund, or helping spread the word about the book, that return gift not only supports the author and helps the publisher keep the lights on, but it also creates the kind of connection between author and audience that both readers and writers crave.

Books, especially big, thick books, are getting increasingly expensive. We think it’s vitally important that readers don’t get shut out of reading because there isn’t room in their budgets to pay full cover price—particularly since there are so many ways of supporting authors that don’t require big outlays of cash. Likewise, we believe that giving emerging authors opportunities to build readerships is an important aspect of developing their careers, and letting people taste before they buy will only benefit everyone.

When you read one of our books on our website, it helps to support the author by raising her profile with search engines; ads on the read-for-free pages help to defray publishing costs, which in turn means the author gets paid more and faster. Naturally we hope that, if you love the book, you’ll buy it in print—which also supports the author, and has the added benefit of giving you (or the recipient of your gift) a better reading experience. Our print books are beautifully designed, and they contain story extramatter that’s not available in the read-for-free versions. But if your budget won’t allow that, you can also support the author in other ways: by buying some of the cool merch related to the book, or dropping a little something in her tip jar; by spreading the word to others who might love the book too (we’ll be building handy links for sharing on the book pages and read-online areas); by asking your library to buy the book, which will allow even more people to find out about it.

If you enjoy what you read on our site, we hope you’ll join our community by signing up for the newsletter, “Liking” us on Facebook, or following us in other social media places. We hope you enjoy hanging out with us as we create and share great stories with like-minded people. Most of all, we hope you’re as inspired by the books we publish as we are.

We're still building the Free Reads section of the site. If you'd like to be notified when new content goes live, you can join our newsletter.

CITY COOK BOOK

City Cook Book is a collection of initiatives enhancing public spaces by bringing people together through food culture. Through a ‘Publish It Yourself’ strategy, City Cook Book allows to print all or part of its content in a coherent manner creating an open customized publication. City Cook Book is a non-profit initiative developed by Claudia Sánchez and Íñigo Cornago.