What an eventful morning.

Dropped off Udo to have his oil changed and his fluids looked at, 8 am. Was told there'd be a couple hours wait due to previous jobs in queue, thought "fine, I can go kill a couple hours."

Went to the hospital and got coffee and read some of Michael Palin's diaries until pharmacy opened; moseyed on up to pharmacy to collect refill on happy pills #2. Much droll amusement regarding fact that they were charging me $380-some for 90 days worth of bupropion HCl. Pharmacist: *:0 face* "You don't ordinarily pay that much, right?" Me, sputtering: "....No. In fact I think my last copay on this scrip was $0."

One call to prescription insurance lady later we have a laugh to find that the pharmacy's new computer system has magically charged me for the name brand rather than the generic, a total of $500-some before insurance. Several pharmacists gather around the computer terminal and push buttons in a hopeful sort of way, and eventually they get it right and send me away with a $0 copay. And possibly a mild heart attack.

Back to hospital to kill another hour before wandering back to mechanics' and inquiring after Udo; found they'd actually not done him yet. They were extremely apologetic (despite fact they'd originally quoted me a couple of hours wait) and took him right away. I double-checked with them that they knew he took stupid picky special oil and they said oh yes, we see a lot of VWs here, and proceeded to put him up on the lift and get on with it.

(Cars look so forlorn with their wheels dangling like that.)

Maybe 20 minutes later they hand me my keys, having checked all the fluids as well as doing the oil, for a grand total of $27.00. And then as I'm leaving they say "oh and here's our gift to you, have a wonderful holiday" and hand me a little tin of danish butter cookies.

There are not enough :3s in the world.

Then I get back into Udo and the guy's moved the seat, of course, and I find I have considerable difficulty getting it to lock back into place so I can reach the pedals. Eventually I get it feeling sort of solid and head home. As I'm coming down Lombard in front of the nursing school the seat comes loose from its moorings and slides glibly backward, causing me to have a much bigger heart attack and clutch desperately at the wheel to stop from losing control altogether. Managed not to stall or grind gears, and drove the rest of the way home holding myself and the driver's seat steady by clinging to the wheel.

Of course once parked he seemed to be happy to lock his seat back properly but Jesus motherhumping Christ there is nothing quite like that boneless feeling of total loss of control. Now I know how the poor dude felt who wrecked that cherry 69 Mustang Mach 1 on my parents' street: he was in a wheelchair and drove the van via hand controls, and his wheelchair came unmoored and he was totally unable to stop the van sliding backward and crushing a bunch of other cars. Thank fortune nobody was behind me and it was a relatively flat bit of road.

Anyway, oil change sorted, now on to worrying about something else, such as how the fuck to clean this pigsty without engaging local crackheads to carry away all the bits of paper and bandaid wrappers and ciggie packets and orphan socks and so on.

brief thought:

1) Nobody likes to pay taxes.

2) However, taxes fund public services like road-building, emergency services, schools, etc.

3) If you cut taxes, these things will no longer be funded.

4) The amount of tax $$ each individual will save will not be sufficient to offset the damage caused by shutting down public services.

5) Water is wet, bears shit in the woods, the pope wears a dress.

Republicans are behaving exactly like three-year-olds in mid-public-tantrum.

I wish I weren't cross-eyed in photographs

Just got the video from Park's institutional advancement office featuring the spot I recorded for them some weeks ago. Not as awful as I'd feared but still the dreaded leftward slide of the right eye. It never happens when I'm looking at myself, but when I'm looking at a camera.

Sigh.

Another thing

about electronic publishing is that it's moved the bar for the concept of "being published" quite a long way from where it was at the beginning of the internet age. I can remember when having your OWN WEB PAGE was really impressive, and I think I considered stuff like The Misanthropic Bitch's essays "published" as they were online and readable by anybody who wanted to look for them.

Then there was Livejournal and the beginning of the massive burgeoning concept of online RP and interactive storytelling: and after that everyone had a blog, not just people with something important to say, and now with Facebook everyone in the universe is constantly publishing themselves, sometimes several times a day.

Which means that "being published" has retreated entirely to the realm of the printed word and the online lit journal. What I'm doing here is not publishing so much as rambling, and I'm getting nothing back from it but the satisfaction of doing the rambling itself.

final project paper

Done that.

I think it'd be rather lovely to continue this project outside of class, and potentially have other people interested in contributing. I started off thinking that it'd be nothing more than comedy, but it's made me think.

also it's allowed me to get all re-interested in trains. I went back to the B&O museum yesterday, and some of the pictures I took are really rather good. For example finger-painted graffiti in the iridescent patina on an old C&O Kanawha's tender; bizarre constructions on the outside of a Mallet 2-6-6-2's firebox; and patterns of iridescence on the curved surface of a cylinder.

I love steam.

Got another article up. Almost done, just some LTEs and maybe a widget transfer or two. I want to do Marxist crit but it's so utterly, utterly out of date these days.

Today at Goodwill while I tried on a tweed suit that I think is rather wonderfully tasteless there was an extremely Jerry Springer altercation between two other patrons--or a patron and an employee, I couldn't make out which, being in the changing-room. I wasn't going to go out there while the one lady was shrieking at the top of her voice "KEEP YO HANDS OFFA ME. IMA BEAT YOUR ASS. IMA BEAT YOUR ASS. I AINT PLAYIN IMA BEAT YOUR ASS," etc.

I wasn't able to determine what exactly she'd done or had done to her that threw her into such a frothing rage, but there was something almost refreshing about the violent outburst.

In other news I think I want to do a series of science poems.

If a couple of Tudor dukes and a heap of French revolutionaries were on IRC

7:57:08 PM lanterne_attorney: with English intelligence like this I feel so much better about the chances of the war.
7:57:16 PM jeaninthebath: ya rly
7:57:29 PM Suffolk: What war?
7:58:17 PM jeaninthebath: awwww
7:58:36 PM jeaninthebath: Saint-Just can explian everything cant you Saint-Just
7:59:09 PM lanterne_attorney: He's probably busy reading about Sparta. with one hand
8:01:41 PM Suffolk: COCKES
8:01:44 PM Suffolk: COCKES
8:01:45 PM jeaninthebath: yes, yes cockes
8:01:48 PM Suffolk: COCKES
8:01:52 PM jeaninthebath: we get it
8:01:56 PM Suffolk: lolle you like cockes
8:02:04 PM Suffolk: you get them a lot i wager
8:02:24 PM jeaninthebath: yes I gobble them by the basketful each day
8:02:30 PM jeaninthebath: om nom nom
8:02:42 PM fabre: lol. with cinnamon sugar on top and rainbow sprinkles?
8:02:51 PM jeaninthebath: oh wait, no, that's not me. that's someone else entirely.
8:03:10 PM lanterne_attorney: You were thinking of my cousin saint-just.
8:03:23 PM jeaninthebath: I always make that mistake
8:03:46 PM jeaninthebath: he probably doesn't put cinnamon sugar on them, that would not be spartan
8:04:14 PM fabre: does he cape people to death? and wear leather panties?
8:04:28 PM jeaninthebath: i do not wish to know about his panties
8:05:25 PM Suffolk: How do you cape a man to death?
8:05:41 PM Suffolk: Ys it some French weapon?
8:06:29 PM jeaninthebath: yes. it is a very deadly weapon
8:06:39 PM jeaninthebath: we destroyed the english with it last war
8:07:24 PM fabre: it's hilarious, i'll link you just a sec
8:07:35 PM jeaninthebath: This will be goatse
8:07:40 PM jeaninthebath: callin it
8:11:35 PM lanterne_attorney: Well, -is- it goatse?
8:11:48 PM Suffolk: what ys goatse?
8:12:00 PM jeaninthebath: camille, show him
8:12:11 PM Suffolk: also, lolle, there is no e in goats.
8:12:30 PM lanterne_attorney: no no, Marat, i defer to you.
8:12:41 PM jeaninthebath: christ i cannot believe this a setup like this comes along once in a goddamn lifetime *links to goatse*
8:13:26 PM Suffolk: asdfhjlkhle
8:13:43 PM Suffolk: gette me a rinse of water and vinegar for mine braine
8:13:47 PM jeaninthebath: i'd forgotten this feeling, camille. it's like the first breath of spring

apollo 13

Here is the thing, and the whole of the thing:

Months before a crane dropped gravity, and then
within this little metal sphere
heat baked beyond proportion, took away

a little plastic, that enthralled a world:

days out from earth, in mariners’ unmeasured night, earth-shadow, hundred-thousand miles from home,

one spark meant mostly death, on any mindful bettor’s slate.

“We’ve had a problem,” and four words
brought an entire generation to its books,
slide-rules and vacuum tubes and duct tape and crossed fingers
and brains pushed together till escapes were found.

Splashdown from prayers’ arc, and TV tropes:

here’s where the grizzled heroes in their sweat-stained garb come from,
three men who by all rights should be frozen, breathless, dead,
hearts beating, smiling for the crowd, teeth glinting: ting.

Hellfire in a confined space
had eaten their precursors, and perhaps
had Russian Secrecy lifted its skirts and told a tale
it might have spared them, but: here is the deal,
they’re heroes. And perhaps these slide rules made it up:

three lives for deaths, a worldwide smile, hands clasped.

For once and only once a whole globe listened,

watched,

mouthed invocations, held hands, wanted, cared,
and technicolor splashdown meant the world
had done it, done the right sums, brought them home.

For once that home

meant earthrise, from the soft grey-dusted moon,
Blue Marble, earthshine, pale blue dot, our world.

The men whose slide-rules saved those lives are dead.
No one remembers
whose hands made the models, did the calculations, reappraised
when every cold equation equaled death. No one recalls
just how it was when one whole globe cried in affirmative,
dozens of languages, no words at all required,
they brought them home.

Today we do not bother to recall their names.

What will it take to hold this world
enraptured? Can it still be done?
Perhaps Mars landings, or Karellen’s voice,
a monolith, a tripod?

There will come soft rains, said the dying house.

Prepare for loss of signal.

All dressed up and somewhere to go

So my friend James is in town for the holiday and we're going out tonight for drinks and dinner.

I met James through my last college boyfriend, Mark: we got to be fast friends throughout my junior and senior years, and when I graduated we still hung out sometimes until he moved out West. James is one of those people who has James Luck. He can be in an accident that completely totals all vehicles involved and walk away with no injuries. He can find incredibly lucrative jobs that let him do whatever he wants. He is James and the world parts before him.

We have an interesting history. It's one that takes a lot more introspection than I can muster at the moment, but one I think might be worthy of writing down, one day. Some of the moments I remember from my times with James are still among the best of my life.

(Summer between junior and senior years of undergrad: I came back from six weeks' study abroad in my old home of Oxford and guess who was waiting for me in the airport, along with my boyfriend and a bunch of other dear ones. Later, he (they) took me out to dinner at the Papermoon Diner.)

He let me drive his Porsche once, and he came up with the timeless phrase of "slipping [individual] the wang" which I still can't help giggling stupidly at. "Did you slip her the wang?" he'd ask with a leer. Oh, James.

It'll be interesting to see how he's changed, or not changed, and it'll be lovely to see him again. On the whole yesterday and today have been truly and honestly days to give thanks for--thanks for my family, whom I love very dearly, and thanks for my friends.

TEASER

So I found the Campbell's Book of How to Commit Atrocities in the Kitchen with Soup and scanned the most egregious of offenders.

Here is a teaser for what lies ahead:

CHEDDAR CHEESE SOUP BROWNIES.

Further sociological investigations

So I've asked a few honest-to-goodness males what the hell is up with this other guy, and the consensus seems to be: he is a creep, run the hell away. Which is all well and good only I need to have class with him Wednesdays for the rest of the semester. Hopefully we won't have to have much contact.

Cate, if you're reading this, please save me a seat on your side of the poetry room.

Also, on the way to class I passed a protest or demonstration or some damn thing clogging up the other side of MLK and now I wonder what they were protesting, because I was too busy, y'know, DRIVING, to get much gawking done.

I'm not going to miss this semester for anything other than the classes, which have been unalloyed awesome. The whole rest of the time that wasn't spent in class was a huge annoying pain in the ass. At least I am currently still employed!

Jubilation and frustration

YES. Source material has arrived. I can spend time today and the rest of this week pounding out articles.

It's not as intellectually satisfying as, say, back-engineering explanations for Transformers physiology, or working out a system of fictitious (meta)physics for Hell, but it's a lot of fun nonetheless.

In other news, I do so wish that when I said things like "I do not go out on dates," "I don't date," "I'm not interested in dating or relationships," and "I need my weekend time alone," people would actually understand that this applies to them.

I've tried the CZ engagement ring with my faux-wedding band. I've tried coldly offensive incomprehension. I've tried honest discussion. I've tried plain old not answering emails. It doesn't seem to get through.

I'm not issuing a challenge to every dingbat who thinks they want to go to bed with me--and I am in no way saying that everybody wants to go to bed with me, but those who do fail to understand that it's not going to happen--I am telling them honestly that no, I appreciate the thought, but they really ought not to bother.

I've tried saying it through class assignments. I've tried saying it out loud in discussion. I've tried saying it face to face and I've tried saying it in emails:

I AM BETTER OFF ALONE.

Sigh. I'm not from this planet.

I am a terrible person and a Bad Blogger. This is partly because holy shit work and partly because a lot of the things I should like to write about should not be seen by the delicate eyes of professors and classmates. That's what other sites are for.

But since I'm feeling guilty, here is an update on the final project. I'm really, really enjoying this. After some initial flailing I've got into the proper rhythm of writing fictitious scientific/scholarly articles again--it really is like riding a bicycle--and as soon as my source material arrives from Barnes & Noble I should be able to provide a lot more content for the site.

Coming up with the name was the most difficult part. Once I had that--tractive effort is a measure of how hard the locomotive is working--everything else fell into place, and I was happy to find that Wordpress' blogging interface is pretty much intuitive. You don't have as much scope as you would on Blogger or LJ to screw with your layouts, but if you have patience with it you can sort of coax it into doing what you like. The whole process of getting the framework of the site set up involved a TON of minor changes and view-blogs and minor changes and view-blogs and so on, so most of the hits on the site so far are from me checking to see if a tiny adjustment has made any change.

I love steam engines because they make absolute sense. They are purely analogue. They are physics in motion. There's no incomprehensible electronic interference, no scram logic, nothing that happens in magic boxes with LEDs on the side: everything in a steam locomotive is just plain physics.

(I would so, so love to drive one of these things. So much.)

abandoned things

I love derelict, abandoned, and ruined things. If I weren't such a complete and utter coward I should love to run around abandoned buildings and take photographs of fascinating things the owners left behind. I'm allergic to being charged with trespassing, unfortunately, which leaves me extremely happy when I come upon something in the public domain that's worth investigation.

Such as this.

Was walking along the Gunpowder South trail in the Hereford area of Gunpowder Falls state park this afternoon and came upon this lovely carcass. From what I can tell it's a mid-30s Dodge or Plymouth (based on grille, body shape, and dash) but that's as far as I can get without writing down serial numbers, which I couldn't do because it was getting late and I hadn't got any idea where on the block to look for one.

It's got a flathead six that looks to me like the sort you'd find in mid-thirties Chrysler Corporation models, and an adorable one-barrel carb that is obviously made out of some magical space-age material as it has not oxidized all to hell like the rest of the car. I really, really wanted this carburetor. I really, really couldn't have it.

Taking pictures of the interior with a point-and-shoot necessitated flash, which meant that I scared a little grey mouse with white feet (LIGHTNING OMG!) that I thought really rivalled the carb for adorability.

I'm still trying to get the year and marque pinned down and also to find out how the hell it got there. It's located on the floodplain of the river a long way away from any remains of decent roads. Why is it there and why was it left to decay?

Bonus river shot.

saturn v (first stage)

It seems all one piece.
One bright white pencil, checkered black,
larger than large in xenon floods:
already alien.

Around its base machines and men swarm.
Daylight finds its steeple first,
impartial light slides down its length,
strikes diamonds from the snow that cases it. Mist flows.

When it begins it seems so slow a rise.

Pillows of flame support it, cradling. Lazily
this spire decides to wake up after all, and
grumbling, shakes umbilicals away.

five F-1 engines take slide-rule sums tipped with people
tiny, dwarfed by their machine,

thrust them forty-two miles up the sky
in not quite three hot minutes,
gobbling four million
four hundred thousand pounds of go.

What must it be
to be the cupped hands underneath a nation’s boot
to light a candle
(that will in some days and two hundred thousand miles
warm the dead face of a distant mythic disc)
to wrench a stack of parts and men
four hundred feet per second out from gravity’s dark womb,
to thrust conquistadors toward their unknown shore?

but it is just those hands that make a step,
the first step.

First stage: not three minutes gone, and spent. It does not let go:
rejected by its successor, eight little thrusts, it’s spurned.
and now the living stack is on its way, past max-Q,
rebelling from the oldest mother anyone can know.

Five guttered engines,
vast and scorched, ablated, mouthless,
still silent in the airless dark, go cold:

what’s left of their force lifts S-1C still,
introduces solitude.

Without the others it describes an arc
(already slide-ruled, predetermined, months before)
higher and higher, till all the world shines blue.

It seems so slow a rise.

Sixty-eight miles up, not fast enough to slip its bonds, it reaches apogee
before it is called home.

Is it pride that crystallizes
on those white flanks, as they fall?
does it know that in its death
it makes possible a life?

The ocean rises to receive its shell. Water is kind.
Embraced and cradled, it is drowned to sleep.

Four days later its journey is complete:
man sets his bootprint
on another world.

narcissism

God, I love Apple. I love Apple so good. My previous MacBook didn't come with Photo Booth but Megatron the MBPro does, and it is just a hoot. You can have yourself andywarholized:



or you can be in fake pencils:



or you can be in high-contrast grainy webcam style:




When I was growing up this sort of thing was utterly sci-fi. You couldn't put pictures on the internets unless you had some awesomely fast modem that'd do like 56K and even then they were mostly low-res .gifs. These days shit is instantly public. In many ways I'm awfully grateful to have got through the bullied-child stage in a pre-internet world.

No, it's not okay to steal people's writing

This post was originally put up on the SA forums.

Story goes like this: Author Monica Gaudio wrote a piece on the historical development of apple pie for a specific website, which mentioned that content was copyrighted.

Gaudio was then informed by a friend that Cooks Source Magazine had printed her article without a) permission, b) notification, or c) credit. edit: they did apparently "credit" her but also made several edits to the copy without consulting her.

Gaudio contacted Cooks Source to ask what the fuck, and was fobbed off with what is probably the most :smug: reply ever (excerpted):

"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"

This rapidly went viral from Gaudio's LJ post to Facebook and Twitter, and over the course of Thursday more and more evidence that Cooks Source and editor Judith Griggs basically sourced all their content from other people's intellectual property.

Links:

Gaudio's LJ entry

Another LJ entry concerning the issue, which spread to other platforms

a pretty comprehensive compendium of data on this clusterfuck

Cooks Source on Facebook, being overrun by commenters

I think this is a pretty good example of the astonishing power of social media via the internet to fuck someone's shit up. Like a lot of the /b/ vs. Terrible People instances--that dreadful woman who posted amusing photoshops of a dying child, for example--it really illustrates how dangerous it is to show your true colors on the internet.

Discuss.

(second edit: Apparently Ms. Judith Griggs is not just breathtakingly ignorant and incompetent as an editor, she also couldn't handle being a town selectman. I can't so far find incontrovertible proof that this is the same Judith Griggs but it jolly well looks like her.)

Thursday drivel

This is c&p verbatim from a newsletter published by the School of Social Work's Promise Heights program (which is a Good Thing on its own merits, but jesus christ).

Dear Friends of Promise Heights:

The University of Maryland, Baltimore and faith based and non-profit organizations have formed a unique partnership to improve educational, health, and developmental outcomes for children and youth by creating a holistic, community-centered education continuum that serves child and families living in Upton/Druid Heights communities of West Baltimore – Promise Heights. By joining forces, this partnership will level the playing field for socioeconomically disadvantaged children by developing and implementing a long term strategic plan that incorporates evidence-based elements of nationally recognized best practice models and will build on the strengths, assets, and knowledge of local stakeholders.

Setting aside the glaring grammatical and punctuation errors, can anyone diagram that last sentence? It's got two "By [doing X], Y" phrases referring to one another and it's reached buzzword saturation point. Any more buzzwords added to this sentence will just fall right off again, unable to go into solution.

What I don't understand is why they think this is in any way a good or pleasant or interesting or inviting way to explain what they do. Even if people can follow the tortuous path through their sentence construction and work out from context what some of the more improbable phrases mean, why would they want to? It puts everybody off. It's utterly distasteful and makes me itch.

SSW is so earnest about Doing Good Things For The Community, because it's sort of their purpose, but they go about it so breathtakingly wrong-headedly. Watching them try to get funding is sort of like watching a turtle try to have sex with a sneaker: it's so ludicrous it's funny, but it's also very sad.

so, chocolate.

This is one of those things where I'm not cool enough to like the Sophisticated Thing. It's like, I don't know, Victorian/Edwardian lit. I honestly do not like Trollope because reading him makes me feel like I am reading the court minutes of some impossibly dull technical disagreement while being repeatedly hit on the forehead with a teaspoon. I honestly do not like Jane Austen because reading her makes me feel as if I am reading the briefs of some impossibly dull technical disagreement re. marital disputes, or possibly Potential Discourtesy. I am not awesome enough to enjoy these works of literature.

I am also not awesome enough to enjoy dark chocolate.

Dark chocolate is just dandy in things. Pain au chocolat is way better with dark than milk chocolate. Similarly, chocolate chips for things like cookies, brownies, or cake are much more effective when they're dark, because the sweetness of the matrix containing them makes up for the bitterness of the chocolate, and the sharp flavor goes much further. I've even had good results making ghetto Mexican Chocolate per sixties cookbooks with melted dark chocolate chips. But for eating?

No.

Cadbury's Dairy Milk, the real thing, not the knockoff you can buy stateside under the sold-out "Cadbury" marque, is to me the acme and delight of milk chocolates everywhere. Lindt's Excellence Extra Creamy Super Awesome Kawaii Milk is absolutely delectable but it tastes much more like honey than chocolate. Guylian's milk/white/praline fruits de mer are certainly worth committing felonies for but they don't compare to the real thing. Dairy Milk is chocolate heaven.

And I do feel chastised and disenfranchised when I see all these chichi chocolate bars in grocery shops and CVS. 60% Cacao. 67% Cacao. 80% LOCK UP YO WIVES, LOCK UP YO CHILDREN Cacao. 95% OH MY GOD THIS SHIT IS GOING CRITICAL Cacao. It all tastes like the astonishing disappointment we experienced as children when we opened up the Hershey's Cocoa tin and stuck a moistened finger into the rich and wonderful-smelling powder: bitter as ashes, bitter as aloes.

Maybe one day I will become cool enough to like Classic Literature and dark chocolate. For now, I cling to my Dickens and my Dairy Milk, and the rest of you can go screw.

iMovie is a nice chunk of technology and I approve of it. I am definitely, but definitely, not cut out to be a film editor. Or director. Maybe a storyboard artist, but if so then I need to get a lot faster with my pencils.

I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it lets me record voiceover audio, which means that all the trouble I went to in recording mpg files of me narrating was unnecessary, but hey. The MacBook Pro has quite a snazzy little mic. Had to screw around a lot with the ducking levels and am still not happy with it, but eh, it's at least coherent and you can understand it, and the pics are reasonably good-looking.

Enjoyed watching bits of the Rally For Sanity yesterday online. Christ, I can remember when 28.8 was FAST INTERNET. Did I really do online chat with graphics back in those days? It's hard to believe, but I remember having lots of conversations with a chap calling himself Methodin Madness, in a chat room consisting of a (bad) CGI beach/deck/promenade, in the persona of a white-haired black-eyed woman who went by something utterly abysmal like "Aevanis."

Looks like it'll be the BS Tower. I've just recorded a bunch of clips of me narrating. Question: Can I extract the sound files from the .mpg and use that?

God, I wish I knew everything already. Decided agin Summerland due to having to request a huge horrible number of copyright permissions from the guy who's done the biggest investigation into the concept so far. BS Tower I can do with mostly my own pix and hope that basic fair-use will cover the rest.

tweet this

Cate and I are PARTNERS! for the looking-at-forms-of-electronic-publishing project, and we're working with Twitter. I've had a couple of twitter accounts over the past year or so, and just started up one for Jean-Paul Marat to accompany my Joseph Bazalgette twitter. I have one of my own now, though, @alientaxpayer.

Cate's idea is to use Twitter as an actual real-time interactive literary tool to create a story, or a narrative, or a conversation--not just between us two students but with as many people as we can get to join in. It's kind of the 2010 equivalent of those stories where you take the sentence the previous person wrote and write your sentence in response/continuation.

So, videos.

I'm not one of Nature's videographers, and I'm certainly not one of Nature's narrators or on-screen talent. For the most part I think my video project is going to be pretty much entirely a slideshow, maybe with some stock footage, because I know perfectly well I won't be able to get the quality of video I'd find acceptable with my dinky little PowerShot's movie feature--and I don't have access to professional-grade cameras or someone who knows how to use them.

I think I'd like to do either something like a video version of one of my essay entries about the Earhart disappearance/Gantenbrink's door/the search for Andrew Irvine or a little mini-history-lesson on something like the Bromo-Seltzer tower (as a companion piece to the essay on the tower in November's UB Post).

I'd really like to do a tiny documentarylet on the two Pajarito Site accidents, Daghlian and Slotin, or something on the Summerland disaster...wait. Summerland might actually work, on account of I have a lot of the pictures and I know a ton about it based on my research--and I can probably find some really brief news footage of the actual conflagration. Maybe I'll be focusing on that. BS Tower is a good fall-back as I've got some of the work on it done already.

i was a teenage phone psychic

Actually I was a twenty-something phone psychic and it only lasted a week or so because jesus christ was that unbearably depressing. At least with the UB Post horoscopes I don't have to worry about people believing the tripe I come up with.

Oh wait. Yes I do.

A Concerned Reader wrote to me after the inaugural horoscope column to complain about my characterization of Aquarius. I had explained that, contrary to expectations, Aquarians aren't all about crystals and homeotherapy and moxibustion and indigo children and similar, and suggested that if people with this sign wanted to indulge in new-age rubbish they ought to pretend to be Pisces instead, as Pisces are supposed to be bigga-time practitioners of woo.

I'm not entirely sure which is more disturbing, a) that she apparently didn't twig that the entire goddamn column was a send-up of newspaper astrology in the first place, or b) she takes her astrological sign seriously enough to complain when she feels it is misrepresented.

It's harder than you might think to make up horoscopes. They're all basically the same: this (day, week, month) you will find yourself challenged by (some conjunction of planets, stars, etc) in your (career, love life, finances), plus (other conjunction of planets, stars, etc) will give you much-needed support in making decisions about (career, love life, finances) but you could easily be led astray by (conjunction, etc) so you should not make any important decisions while (planet) is (in location). The trouble is making them interesting.

Sigh. Oh, well. At least I have some fun articles in the next issue.

So, food.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a household run by people who had spent their college years in de facto poverty: it meant that both my mother and father had a lot of experience making meals for very little money that would feed them for several days and still taste of something worth eating.

We didn't go by cookbooks, in my house, except for things like sponge pudding or particular baked goods that required exact measurements to turn out right. I learned to cook basic food without needing a recipe, and how much is enough of this herb and that herb to throw into a dish by watching my parents--and by trial and error. Living on my own, cooking is a bit more complicated than it would be for more than one person: ingredients need to be bought in the right proportion and stored until needed, whereas in a household of three or more you don't need to worry about aliquoting your veg or bread or whatever into freezer-ready bits so it won't spoil before you can use it.

I've spent some time looking at cookbooks from the Lurid Vintage era of cookery, and what strikes me most obviously about them is that almost every meat recipe contains sugar. Here's a representative but fictitious example:

Polynesian South-Of-The-Border Cheesy Meat Roast Bake

Mix one pound of ground beef with half a pound of Velveeta (if using real cheese, add half a cup of vegetable oil and three drops of yellow food coloring). Add 1 one-pound can of pineapple tidbits, drained (reserve syrup). Mix in one cup packed brown sugar, half a cup of vinegar, two cloves, one quarter teaspoon of black pepper, and one can sweetened condensed milk. Mix to emulsify.

Grease a pyrex baking dish sufficient to hold the contents and pour in your meat batter. Bake at 350 for 2 hours or until pretty much done. 10 minutes before removing from oven, pour syrup from pineapple bits over meat and replace in oven to glaze. Garnish with radish roses. Your family will love it!

It's most obvious in the dishes made from pig--almost nothing pig-related in the fifties, sixties, or seventies was included in recipes without honey, brown sugar, molasses, more honey, or fruit syrup of some description. It's an interesting sociological point when you think of what you might say today if someone offered you Ham With Nectarines or Piquant Meat Ring (containing half a pound of refined sugar).

Tonight, for example, I had ghetto caprese salad consisting of chopped cherry tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cubes with a dressing of olive oil, salt*, black pepper, and basil. Followed by a chicken breast butterflied and stuffed with tarragon and marjoram and baked with garlic and onion. Neither of these dishes contained any form of sugar other than that included naturally with the tomatoes, and surprisingly enough I did not miss it. Perhaps the era of sweetened meatloaf has passed.

We can hope.

*okay so it was pink himalayan salt but don't judge me, that shit is amazing

privilege

One thing I've learned over my years of being female, human, and existing in the world is that privilege is seldom actually recognized by the privileged.

Example: [heterosexual white middle-class person] complains about [members of group they don't belong to] being "oversensitive" or just "looking for a reason to cry sexism/racism/classism/whateverism."

Until you have been a member of the group discriminated against, you don't get to state what is and is not prejudice against that group. And I'm not even going to touch male privilege here: it's so utterly endemic and ingrained in our culture that pointing it out is like pointing out that water falls from the sky when it is raining.

You see, privilege is something you don't realize you have if you have it. Here are some rather eye-opening studies of the idea of privilege: Unpacking the Knapsack: White Privilege and Unpacking the Knapsack II: Straight Privilege. And because I know it's a lot of work to click links and read, here's some telling points from each. Can you say this and mean it?

White Privilege

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing a person of my race.

If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.

Straight Privilege

I am not asked to think about why I am straight.

Nobody calls me straight with maliciousness.

I can be open about my sexual orientation without worrying about my job.

I can walk in public with my significant other and not have people double-take or stare.

I can choose to not think politically about my sexual orientation.

Because of my sexual orientation, I do not need to worry that people will harass me.

People don't ask why I made my choice of sexual orientation.

People don't ask why I made my choice to be public about my sexual orientation.

I do not have to fear revealing my sexual orientation to friends or family. It's assumed.

My sexual orientation was never associated with a closet.

People of my gender do not try to convince me to change my sexual orientation.

I don't have to defend my heterosexuality.

I can easily find a religious community that will not exclude me for being heterosexual.

I can be pretty sure that my roomate, hallmates and classmates will be comfortable with my sexual orientation.

If I pick up a magazine, watch TV, or play music, I can be certain my sexual orientation will be represented.

When I talk about my heterosexuality (such as in a joke or talking about my relationships), I will not be accused of pushing my sexual orientation onto others.

I do not have to fear that if my family or friends find out about my sexual orientation there will be economic, emotional, physical or psychological consequences.

I did not grow up with games that attack my sexual orientation (IE fag tag or smear the queer).

I am not accused of being abused, warped or psychologically confused because of my sexual orientation.

I can go home from most meetings, classes, and conversations without feeling excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped or feared because of my sexual orientation.

I am never asked to speak for everyone who is heterosexual.


If you're a member of the majority and you don't bother to think about these things, think about them to the point where you actually become aware of your privilege informing everything you do, you do not get to tell any other group of people who do not share your privilege that they are being oversensitive or just need to suck it up and get on with life.

Done it.

http://home.ubalt.edu/students/UB13J07/unfoundisland.html

I have no idea why it took me so long to realize that I needed the eventual URL in order to make links that linked to something other than my USB drive or my home computer. It's tricky. I'm sure there's a better way to do it than the one I did, which I shall detail in the rewritten paper.

Welp.

EDIT: Ok, I know what the problem is. Oy. Ignore the stuff below.




I've got all the files for the site uploaded to my H drive, but (surprise of surprises) none of it seems to work. Much of it gives me 404 errors and when you go to the actual URL for my webspace you get the directory folder I created on the H drive to insert all my files into, but you don't get any actual, y'know, FILES.

I've been fighting with this all day and I'm starting to lose stability. At least I have all the files for the site, all the links work when previewed in Firefox, and it doesn't look as awful as I feared it would. Still can't do anything at all with the bg image/image map issue, and there's no adorable little animation on the home page when you hover over any of the links, because--again--they're image maps. And you can't do image maps on a bg image, you have to do them on an inline image, and I do not feel like using Flash to get round this.

All the websites I've found that suggest they know how to get round the issues I've come up against have this adorably coy way of showing you the code: they show you the snippets of CSS, but then when you go to the live example and ask it to show you source code, they don't actually show you their style sheet. Just the HTML. Which does not help.

Looks like I'll be handing in the flash drive. It is just so infuriating not knowing where to start troubleshooting something like this.

There's a very great deal of information in the site. The home page links to 4 main categories, each of which has at least four or five individual content pages, each of which link back to the homepage AND the about AND the bio. If I could just get it running, it'd be less embarrassingly inadequate.

Also there's not a lot of graphics involved. I'm going to hope that the header/footer/link .jpgs count as graphics.

public service announcement

There are many little annoying grammar and spelling mistakes people on the internet make over and over again, and for the most part I can skim over them with some concentration and effort. Some of them just jump out and grab the gaze and snag it, unignorable, unmitigated, excruciating. Such as this:

a women

STOP DOING THIS.

Would you write "a men"? No. Because "men" is plural of "man." Just as "women" with an E is plural of "woman" with an A. They are in no way the same thing. They are disparate. They are not synonymous. They are discrete. Ils ne sont pas la meme chose. STOP DOING THIS.

of the day's positives, these

1) got drinks paid for by a charming and cocksure young lad I've spoken to before with whom I had a vivid and interesting conversation touching on, among other things, childfreedom, and was astonished that after bingoing me with "you're so smart you are totally the type of person who should breed" we got on to an honest and interesting discussion in which he did not mansplain to me excessively and did, in fact, agree that he had not thought some aspects of the issue through completely

2) at class, explained my problem with getting bg images to scale in css to both profs, and had both of them get to the point I was on Sunday where we were annoyed enough that it wasn't working to go keep looking for solutions on the internet, so now there's three of us looking for the answer instead of just me. also? this class is the definition of awesome.

3) got books signed by Mark Doty at his reading, <3 <3 <3

4) got home without incident, after Udo's little flailing I DON'T WANT TO GO INTO GEAR ON THE ENTRANCE RAMP TO 295 moment on Sunday afternoon I am paranoid that I am somehow awful enough at driving a manual transmission that I am capable of comprehensively fucking up a clutch without realizing it within three months, so it's nice to get from point A to point B without AAA. It would also be nice to have that lovely fleeting sense of NOT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT MY CAR back, but not poppy nor mandragora nor all the soothing syrups, etc.

5) ROOF DID NOT LEAK DESPITE RAINS TODAY

6) earlier, landlord caught me on way to class and asked after roof; I said that it looked bone-fucking-dry when I stopped in before class to put on jeans and grab school bag, and he thanked me prettily again for the triple midnight trash-bag offensive, plus volunteered that he'd just put out more anti-rat without me even having to ask him nicely

On the whole, net positive.

did you just mansplain that to me?

I'm lucky in a lot of senses in that I don't actually have to put up with tons of overt sexism on a day-to-day basis. I have to deal with EY EY EY EY EY EY BABY EY YOU IM TALKINTAYOU EY while I walk to and from work, but after years of this shit you just learn to blank it out as white noise. (I've never worked out what it is Men Who Yell actually expect me to do. Do they think that hollering EY BAYBEE is some sort of breathtakingly erotic mating call?)

I do, however, have to contend with a more insidious form of sexism all the goddamn time, and that is mansplanation. It's not "explaining while male," as piqued men tend to insist: it's explaining [to someone who probably knows a shitload more than the explainer about the subject but happens to be female]. Mansplainers like to explain things to women who know them already but just need the masculine point of view because their small hysterical brains are incapable of comprehending the situation rationally. Here's the progression:

MALE: Something's wrong with my [car, computer, phone].

FEMALE: Looks like it's [specific issue].

MALE: *totally ignores female* Something's wrong with my [car, computer, phone].

FEMALE: Why don't you check for [specific issue]?

MALE: Something's wrong with my [car, computer, phone]. I'll ask Male Colleague about it.

--time passes--

MALE: Male Colleague totally fixed my [car, computer, phone]! He figured out that it was [specific issue].

FEMALE: That's what I suggested you look at in the first place.

MALE: No, but Male Colleague said it was [specific issue]. You see, [proceeds to explain specific issue in excruciating and generally inaccurate detail].

FEMALE: ...


Doesn't matter how many degrees the woman has. She got da boobies, therefore she is incapable of coming to the same conclusions as a male, and also it's just generous of the male to explain things to her cause, you know, she just isn't going to get it on her own.

Mansplaining is a fact of life. These days I find it risible, and call mansplainers out on their bullshit, but when I was younger I totally found myself questioning and second-guessing things I damn well knew to be accurate simply because some dickweed suggested I didn't know what I was talking about.

For the men: Stop to think before you launch into full-on EXPLAINING THINGS mode. Does the person to whom you are about to explain things possibly already know these things? Could she by chance have studied the field in question? Might she not be asking for your input on this subject at this time?

For the women: As soon as a guy starts mansplaining something to you, lose interest. Check your watch, fish out your phone, talk to your neighbor, talk to the waitress. When he says some variant on "hey I'm talking to you," look at him with a sweet smile and tell him you were waiting for him to stop mansplaining, and that you will be very happy to talk to him when he's finished with that.

fighting with technology

I'm going to win. I'm going to win despite the fact that you can't float a table with text in the cells over an image map. For the most part this won't be a problem as the image maps will be limited to the main section pages and the home page, but it's dashed irritating when I'm trying to add links in a footer that happens to be part of the same background image.

So I'll be cheating. And borrowing code from a page that DOES what I want to do, so that I can make my page do that same thing. I've had to separate out the unfoundisland header and footer, and it'll probably look okay with those as individual images, but I'd really like to be able to float the bubble-chamber shot behind the text in the various story/essay/whatever pages.

I don't want to have to resort to wordpress, so I'll be stealing css from, say, this blog. I want the header to remain fixed and active as a link while the text in the middle section scrolls up past it. Then I need to work out how to make the footer also fixed while the middle section moves.

God, this is annoying being at work and away from dreamweaver. I need a USB mouse for my macbook--the one that came with my tablet all those years ago is really not sensitive enough to be satisfactory. (Maybe I can borrow a spare mouse from work.)

*twitches* *wants to be making websites, dammit*

It's rather frightening but exhilarating to think that I will finally be able to put my stuff up on the web without having to do it through LJ or IJ or Blogger. The issue being, of course, why would anybody visit the site in the first place: how to draw traffic to my site?

But I'm really liking the way the graphics are turning out. I'm going to be using image maps for pretty much all the pages of the site. So far it looks like this:

HOME PAGE links to:

"About," "Bio," and "Email" in the footer;
"Stories"
"Non-Euclidean Food"
"What Went Wrong"
"Essays on the state of things"
"Links"

"Stories" page links to:
HOME PAGE (header)
Individual story pages
"About," "Bio," and "Email" in the footer

Etc, etc. All of them have the contact info and the link back to the home page.

If I can manage it there's going to be tiny animation on mouseover for the individual links on the four main subpages--a tiny square graphic would fade into existence and then out again when the cursor was removed from the link.

I really hope this works.

Worshipping a brand

Among the many traits with which I was not born is Enjoying, Understanding, and Tolerating Organized Sport. I really cannot think of a single analogous phenomenon I actually like, either. The lengths to which people will go to support their preferred sports teams boggles me, especially since individual players can move from team to team and therefore the actual makeup of any given team is not guaranteed. People seem to like [the idea of] team X rather than the specific members of team X.

Reduced to its essentials, pretty much all team sport can be defined as "a group of people, typically male, who get paid obscene amounts of money for running around after an object of no intrinsic value." Step back several centuries and instead of this definition we have "a group of males engaged in mock warfare with one another," which is a lot more entertaining. I'd so watch jousting on ESPN, or single combat with claymore, mace, or shortsword. It's the very real danger of being killed that makes these activities a) interesting and b) worth doing in the first place, unlike running around after a ball. It's perhaps worth noting that I would totally watch American football if the ball exploded on touching the ground, or if the losing team didn't get paid. That'd be a lot more fun, and I'd mind a great deal less about the utter traffic clusterfuck caused by people attending the games.

On the telly this morning I saw the apotheosis of all sports-team obsessions. Perky Anchorperson Joel D. Smith was on location at the home of a family who have apparently taken the Baltimore Ravens as their lord and savior. Not only were the rooms of their house painted lurid purple with white and black trim, their furniture was dyed to match, their curtains were made of Ravens-logo print cotton, and the remote for their massive wall-mounted Ravens-watching television had been spraypainted purple and plastered with Ravens logo stickers. It didn't end there, either. Outside the house was parked a white Hummer with purple Ravens vinyl cling decals all over the bodywork and windows. The center brake light had been hidden behind another cling decal of the Ravens logo's eyeballs, so that when the brake was pressed, these eyes lit up red. The alloy rims had also been customized with Ravens logos. It was without a doubt the second most revolting assault on the concept of taste I've ever seen (the first being the house close to my parents' home whose owners think neon orange plastic palm trees are the height of sophistication).

What astonishes me is not so much the determination and the money that had gone into ruining an otherwise acceptable house and a godawful vehicle, but the absolute and slavish devotion to [concept of team] over all else. These people had committed their lives to the worship and magnification of a logo.

We can, of course, take the lateral step of pointing out that worship of a symbol is basically what Christianity is all about, but that can of worms is for a different blog. But it got me thinking about the power of symbols to transcend the medium in which they are portrayed: it didn't matter that the purple-painted walls and logo-print curtains looked hideous, what mattered was that they referenced that holy symbol in the first place. I do not doubt that if a sports team were to have a logo depicting a naked mole-rat there would be families who insisted on plastering naked-mole-rat logos all over their house, car, kids, and dog.

Can anyone who doesn't lack the Appreciating Organized Sport gene explain to me why it's so important to tell everyone that you like [concept of] Team X? Does it confer benefits other than the pride of having spent money on making everybody know you really, really, really, really, really like the Ravens?

It's official.

I have removed 10 mL of staples from No Longer Employed At This Institution's "filing."

Here is how a normal person attaches related documents:

1) Stack documents neatly one atop the other
2) Insert one staple at top left corner

Here is how this individual attached related documents (and "related" in this case is used loosely: some of the bits of paper I found are for an entirely different fundraising campaign):

1) Stack documents in a staggered fashion so that the one on the bottom protrudes above the top of the next page up. Points for stacking three or more documents in this fashion. Do not forget to scribble indecipherable hieratic all over each document in red pen, and then highlight random sections of your scribble.
2) Staple each layer individually down the left-hand side of the stack, as well as at the top of each individual piece of paper, so that you achieve a sort of puff-pastry cliff of paper peppered with staples.

It's like a book! A little book of crazy.

The staples I removed from these lumps of inefficiency fill a 10 mL beaker to the top.

Graphics and design elements

Again, I'd have to say that the graphics of the site would be very simple and almost entirely limited to the navigational links. I'd like, perhaps, to have a very very faint background image on the individual category pages (stories, essays, etc) in the same color range as the main text. Not opaque enough to distract from the links themselves, just to give it some more visual interest. And I have to admit I'd like, not require, there to be a tiny bit of animation when one mouses over a link in the individual category pages--just as simple and self-contained as the dock in OSX expanding when you mouse over a particular icon, only rather than expanding that selected area, it would fade in a background graphic and then fade it out again as soon as the mouse was moved.

If I had ImageReady I could so make a gif of this. That really takes me back, I haven't made animated icons since about 2006.

The graphic itself would be something like the bubble-chamber shot I used in my mockup. Something beautiful and not immediately representative of anything specific: people who know what it is would go "oh, that's a bubble-chamber shot" and people who didn't would go "oh, that's a cool bunch of scribbles and spiral lines." Obviously I would need to make sure that I secured the appropriate rights to use whatever image ends up being on the page, and for that reason it's unlikely to actually be the bubble-chamber shot, but I'll keep looking. I can of course create an abstracted version of the image--fanart, if you will--which would be my intellectual property to mess with as I chose.

The site I'm envisioning has very few graphics that are not text-based, which is a new direction for me. As you can see in the background of this blog I tend to go in for dense multilayered collage-type images, text and picture and layer effects all mishmashed together to provide an overall effect or experience. With Unfound Island I'd really like to let the text stand on its own. I'm rather happy with the way the mockups came out, even if I had no access to Overused Font #1 (Zapfino). Probably turned out better that I had to use High Tower Text instead of Trajan-and-Zapfino, my general go-to font pairing.

(I cannot wait for Typography.)

Also--the poem from which I snagged the blog title is worth a look in and of itself. I copypasta it here for the sake of general edification. Think of the site's subtitle as "lost in time, and lost in space."

I

But most beautiful of all is the Un-found Island:
The one that the King of Spain got from his cousin
the King of Portugal with the royal seal
And the papal edict written in Gothic Latin.

The Young Prince set sail for the fabulous kingdom,
He saw the Fortunate Isles: Iunonia, Gorgo, Hera
And the Sea of Sargasso and the Sea of Darkness
While looking for that island...but the island wasn't there.

In vain the big-bellied galleons with swollen sails,
The caravels in vain put up their rigging:
Despite the papal guarantee, the island disappeared
And Portugal and Spain are looking for her still.

II

The island exists. Appearing now and then in the distance
Between Tenerife and Palma, veiled in mystery:
"....the Un-found Island!" the wise Canarymen
from Picco high above the Teyde point it out to the foreigner.

The pirates' ancient maps make mention of her:
"How to Find It Island," "Wandering Island"--
It is the charmed island that slips through the seas;
Sometimes the navigators see her nearby...

They graze with their prows that happy shore:
Amid flowers no one has ever seen the highest palm trees sway,
The heavenly forest, thick and alive, sends forth its fragrant odors,
The cardamom tree is crying, the rubber trees are oozing...

She is noticed first by her perfume, as a courtesan is,
The Un-found Island...but, if the pilot goes toward her,
Quickly she disappears, like a mirage,
Tinting herself with blue, the colour of faraway.

--Guido Gozzano

Navigation

This overlaps for me with the graphics/design elements part of the page. The design of the page and the navigation thereof are, at least for what I have in mind, inescapably intertwined.

I've been messing about in Photoshop and came up with a really basic mockup of what I think I'd like the site to look like. Here's the home page: clean, really basic, and while it's not necessarily as obvious and transparent what the categories represent, here's the hovertext I'd add.

Each of those categories is a link to a separate sub-page. Here's a mockup of what you'd get to if you clicked the "Stories" link: the little tiny bubble-chamber graphic would appear under each story title if you hovered over it. I don't know if there's a way to do that without using Flash. If not, then I'd make the text viewable without Flash as opposed to giving non-Flash users the PLEASE DOWNLOAD THIS PLUGIN alt-text. (It's worth noting that I borrowed the bubble-chamber shot and would almost certainly have to create a different image of my own so as not to be infringing copyrights left right and center.)

And here is an individual story page. The text would appear in a new frame under the Unfound Island/stories header, with no outlines or background, so that the text would appear to scroll up without the background of the page moving.

Based on my really really simple understanding of HTML from several years ago, the splash page would have to be an image map or something, wouldn't it? I really need to get into Dreamweaver and see how it tells me to do things. The point is that I like navigation that is very very simple and very very clear: you would not have to name a link "This Link" because it would be named for the contents of the page you would get to if you clicked that link. No unnecessary Click Here To View, and as little animation as possible.

So, content.

If we want to look at this experiment from a writerly standpoint I suppose I ought to be considering how to present myself As A Writer to whoever ends up looking at the site. The problem here--and it's not limited to blogging, it's a general issue I have to deal with in real life as well as online--is that I prefer to present [interesting topic] by writing about it, rather than going "look at me write, see my writing, I put words together in sentences of such scintillating brilliance that all must applaud my genius, oh and I happen to be writing about [interesting topic]."

I draw pictures but I don't consider myself An Artist; that implies having A Vision and Conveying that vision Through My Artwork (or just Work, depending on who you're bragging to). I write articles but I don't consider myself A Writer so much as Someone who Writes About Interesting Things.

I think the way to reconcile the fact that I am in fact A Writer of some little capability with my preference to focus on the subject material and not the medium by which I present it is by compartmentalizing. Whatever site I end up creating is most likely going to include a bunch of subsites, one of them offering a selection of articles about disasters (the real motivation behind creating What Went Wrong), another presenting little fiction vignettes, another perhaps poetry, another making fun of hideous retro cookbooks, and so on. I'm not just one sort of writer: I'd feel dishonest, or disingenuous, making a site about only one little aspect of what I do with words.

Oh, and for those who're interested, "theriac" and "mithridate" are ancient compounds of various unpleasant substances thought to offer an antidote to poisonous bites. King Mithridates of Pontus (119-63 BC) is said to have been somewhat of an amateur toxicologist, experimenting on prisoners (and himself) with various poisons, until he came up with a substance he claimed to be a sovereign antidote for all sorts of venomous bites. (See A.E. Housman's Shropshire Lad for a wry take on Mithridates' experiments.) The Greeks then stole his idea and put together a gluey alexipharmic treacle called "theriac" which stayed in the pharmacopoeia until about 1884. I like the words because they're wonderful words and a delight to pronounce, and also because they're perfect examples of how the hell did we as a species survive into the twenty-first century?

Page envy

What I really want to do with the internet is....perhaps a more legitimate version of what I already do with the internet, i.e. blither on it. But blither in a more structured and organized fashion about specific topics, with really nice graphics and simple navigation.

Over the past eight years or so I've been messing about with LiveJournal layouts. These days with the Russians in charge I use LJ less and less, but I still have a number of friends on there and check it fairly regularly. I've done some of what I consider to be my best design work for LJ backgrounds for the various journals and communities I've created over the years. What I've been working toward is basically a splash page effect, with a background image that doesn't scroll, over which text is laid with limited outlines. The idea is of words that have some connection with the image over which they float, words hanging in a void that allows them to be read but also allows them to be seen through to what lies behind them.

Almost all of my designs have interlaced text and image. I'm a fan of text that doesn't necessarily need to be read so much as observed, letters and words as visual objects rather than as encoders of specific meaning. The background of this blog includes: the ruined Union Carbide plant at Bhopal, laboratory glassware, and several of the user icons I've made over the years for my accounts at LJ.

Since I don't know anything about web design other than really really basic HTML tags (and now a couple of CSS shortcuts) I am forced to rely on a site like Blogger or Wordpress to do the hard work of constructing the actual website for me, while having to manipulate preexisting settings to get the effects I wanted in the first place. It would be nice if I could build my own site from the ground up, on my own domain--and have the convenience of plugging into Blogger's extant network of sites and people to draw traffic to my page.

An example of the kind of site I'd like to be able to create is James Lileks' lileks.com. This is the home of the original Gallery of Regrettable Food, Interior Desecrators, and Mommy Knows Worst, now all available in book form (subtext: I WANT A BOOK DEAL, INTERNET, PLEASE CAN I HAVE A BOOK DEAL), as well as the Institute of Official Cheer. What Lileks does is dig up interesting, amusing, horrific, and remarkable bits of popular culture in recent history--and present them to the modern eye with amused and gentle satire. He's the man behind the trend of Horrible Retro Food Blogging, which I've jumped on myself with the Non-Euclidean Food entries over at What Went Wrong.

His site is always changing its graphics, but its design is consistent: news and navigation on the front page and sub-navigation through links at the bottom of the individual series (back, home, forward).

What I really want, I suppose, is to make a site so fascinating with content so addictive that people will be willing to buy a book version of it.

CYOA

There's a lot of these on the SA forums, which are in no way worksafe--I particularly love the one that gave rise to the :smith: smiley--but I'd not come across the CYOA wiki before. I think this is an absolutely wonderful idea and way to take advantage of what the internet allows; it's an open-forum roleplay that doesn't require you to app characters or follow a canon.

Superdickery is fantastic. I've always loved the Superdickery website (http://superdickery.com/) and have wasted many a lunch hour snickering at Superman's behavior. This lets me choose what he does next!

EDIT: Might be worth linking my other blog on here, which is a lot funnier and has pictures of vintage food and also disaster areas on it. Here's What Went Wrong.

Someone is wrong on the internet

and I am hopping mad about it. I spend a lot of my time hopping mad about people being wrong on the internet, but I'm trying to wean myself off it with my doctor's help.

Herewith I present to you the Official Website of Best-Selling Author Dan Brown. Mr. Brown is perhaps best known for his work in the field of cryptosymbological fantasy, and has made a very great deal of money off his opus The Da Vinci Code and its sequel Angels and Demons. In Mr. Brown's fiction, a lot of emphasis is placed on technologies that purportedly exist in the real world. As he does, in fact, write fiction, I can accept that he gets things wildly wrong in his books. On his website, however, he presents them as fact.

Setting this aside for a moment, here's why I don't like his website. It's utterly predictable. It's all over Flash; it has cutesy little animations of books sliding around on a bookshelf and a dramatic ray of sunlight spearing in from the right side of the screen, as if a mysterious door has been opened somewhere near the Spotlight button. The quality of the illustration/animation is pretty much early-nineties Disney background paintings--I'm pretty sure I saw that bust somewhere in Ariel's cave of knick-knacks.

Navigation is reasonably simple, through a series of links to the left of the main animation frame, and clicking on any of them opens a submenu of links which then show up in the frame itself.

I give him credit for at least keeping the theme consistent and not embedding MIDI files, but it's still a smug self-indulgent site which I think would have been a lot more interesting if it were done with some more imagination. For example if he really wanted to use Flash he could have had his links be all scrambled up in some mysterious code or symbol or something and then have them rearrange themselves into the name of the link whenever someone moused over them. Still annoying but at least more fun to watch.

What I really detest is the fact that he is lying to you. Right there on his webpage as if it ain't no thang. He is lying to you about his "Bizarre Facts."

Here, for example, he tells people that a mysterious chapel somewhere in England contains an unbreakable cipher carved into its ceiling which nobody has ever been able to work out, and also it has a great big mysterious vault space underneath it which the chapel isn't letting anyone dig into.

Meet the Rosslyn Hoax website, which debunks all of Brown's assertions one by one.

Or here, he claims that the X-33 a) exists as a manned craft and is b) capable of flight at Mach 15 (in the novel, at 60,000 feet, which is not going to work cause of air friction).

In the real world, the X-33/VentureStar project was cancelled in 2001 over issues with the composition of its fuel tanks; after several failures the project was nixed and in fact was never even manned. It was a collaboration between NASA and Lockheed Martin, not Boeing as Dan Brown implies in his book. And the purpose of the project in the first place was not to ferry cryptosymbology professors around the world so much as to replace the Space Shuttle on its retirement.

And finally, here he suggests that antimatter can be used to create bombs of incredible destructive power and that it can be measured in "droplets." There are not enough fail macros in the whole of the internet to explain why this is wrong, so I'll just let CERN's rather weary FAQ page do it for me:

Can we make antimatter bombs?

No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.

Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.

Literary Journals and why Flash is overrated

I am not a particularly good reader of literary journals, in that for the most part my tastes are thoroughly unsophisticated and easily sated by big fat mainstream paperbacks. Having written that, I have to add that within the general category of "mainstream paperbacks" I'm a hell of a snob and won't touch Stephenie Meyer with a ten-foot clown pole. (I hate what she's done to vampires. Rice was bad enough: now it's Sweet Valley High in Transylvania.)

Which is to say that I don't have a hell of a lot of ideas as to what makes an excellent online literary journal, and whether the writing published in said journal is avant-garde in a good way or avant-garde in a calculatedly cynical and opaque way. So I'm at somewhat of a disadvantage in terms of rating journals.

I have, however, found one I like: Tarpaulin Sky. The site design is refreshingly simple, with a homepage offering links to the journal itself, online-only content, and to the press (which sells trade paperbacks). It's an open, clean, bright design that doesn't require the viewer to sit through annoying Flash intros or look for a sitemap to find what they're in search of.

However, the archive of past issues does feature a tiresome interactive design for issue 16 of Tarpaulin Sky (Trickhouse Vol. 5). Not only does the animation of the little doors opening and the names of contributors coming out take too long, it's also visually reminiscent of that age in web design which featured little animated gifs and lurid tiled background images. This design is credited to Artist Website Service, unlike the main Tarpaulin Sky site which is designed by the publisher Christian Peet. It's very obvious that they have different aesthetics. Tarpaulin Sky looks to me as if it's almost all in Adobe Garamond, whereas Artist Website Service uses...TNR. Not as bad as Papyrus or God forbid Comic Sans, but still unimaginative and generic.

I would, if I were providing my considered opinion to the people behind Tarpaulin Sky, add rollover/hover text to the links which don't necessarily make immediate sense (Chronic Content and Acute Issues, for example) and move the extremely annoying Share This widget to the bottom of each frame or layer instead of having it right by the button to close the layer.

Small digression here and then I'll wrap this up: FLASH IS VERY EASILY OVERUSED. It's a great tool and it offers a ton of powerful effects that can make websites more interactive and informative, but on the whole I think it's at its best when providing embedded video rather than unavoidable entry animations or this sort of tiresome PowerPoint-style graphics. Colella Photography has a site that's pretty much everything I dislike about Flash. The bouncy menu and the little animations when you roll over each menu item; the cheap-looking graphics; the total waste of real estate; and, of course, the fact that if you haven't got the Flash plugin because it makes your browser unstable, you are not going to get to view any of the site content.

Up next: the leaders of the French Revolution and a couple of Tudor dukes locate the internet; a godawful writer's site; choose-your-own-adventure; and What I'd Like to Be Able to Do.

Old news.

One of the things I intend to misuse this particular forum for is complaining bitterly about the rest of the world's inability to use basic English. I'm aware that my privilege is showing and that this, like one's slip, is not something to be desired; but so very many people use text-based communications these days and if you cannot be bothered to follow basic tenets of a language I feel justified in writing snotty articles about you. Admittedly bowdlerized because hey, this is an actual class.

Here, for example, is a piece dating from May 08 regarding the word "bouillon":

***

Dried-up chicken stock formed into cubes is chicken bouillon, not bullion. In fact, stock based on anything reduced into cube (or even goo in a jar) form is bouillon base.

Bullion is quite different. Bullion is precious metals in bulk form. Gold bars are bullion. Chunks o' platinum, also bullion. Stock cubes are bouillon and pronounced as such, bwee-yohn with a silent N. It's French, you doinks. It's bloody simple, and it's such a common mistake it really makes me wonder if some famous American chef went so far into the ghetto as to use bouillon base in a recipe and tell people it was pronounced bull-ee-onn. Because if they did, they deserve to be braised. Slowly.

Consommé is not exactly the same as bouillon. Bouillon is a stock. It is from the French verb bouiller, to boil, and is generally produced from simmering mirepoix (onions, carrots, and celery) and herbs with a chunk of some animal bone/flesh in water for some time. Apparently bouillon is the name for a soup in Haiti as well, but in general terms if one is going to be using bouillon in US/Anglo cookery one is going to be using reconstituted stock. And reconstituted stock is not, expensive as it may be, precious goddamn metal.

Learn this. It is as simple as women/woman or their/they're/their. And it makes you look exactly as stupid when you screw it up.

***

To be more proactive and adhere more fully to the spirit of the class, let's have a look at Peter Watts's site, www.rifters.com. Watts is a sci-fi author who does the unimaginable: he posts, or at least in the past has posted, his actual novels for free online. You can read at least parts of his works on rifters.com and I encourage you to get the dead-tree version out of the library because reading on paper really is an experience that differs qualitatively from online; but if nothing else, you can at least get a sense of what he does and how he does it from his site.

I'm running Firefox 3.6.8 on OSX 10.6.3 on a 13-inch screen and the site appears at first misleadingly disorganized: the homepage is black with a single interactive graphic in the middle, review quotes for Watts's work along the top edge, a new-content link at the bottom left, and the following message at the bottom right:

This site is best viewed at a screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater.

Sad, misguided users of Internet Explorer take note:
Javascript must be enabled for these pages to work properly.
Java adds a couple of cool bells and whistles, too.

Content © Peter Watts, 1999-2008

Now, he ought to've updated the copyright data, but I like his style here: he directly addresses one browser's shortcomings and explains what plugins/scripts are necessary for the site to display correctly. If I were Watts I would stick a navbar across the top of the page and move the accolades to the bottom, as they are a little offputting; but what I really love about this site is the interactive graphic. Back in my last job I was tapped to provide a Youthful Point of View for the people responsible for redoing the institute's website, and at that time graphics that contained areas that linked to other sites/pages were known as image maps: I don't know if this is still the case, but Watts's main graphic appears to be an image map, in that you can hover over the various items and it offers you a link to the individual pages.

The graphic shows you at least two sets of data at once: a) the names and organizational relationships of his novels, and b) the dates at which each of them are purported to take place as well as those dates' relation to the current world. His first book, Starfish, is set in 2020; its subsequent and related books Maelstrom and Behemoth take place in 2051 and 2056 respectively. Another work of his, unrelated to the Starfishverse, is listed separately: Blindsight, set in 2082. All of these individual items are linked to the "real world" site/item, which offers you a menu of links to Watts's current and previous works, data about him and his projects, and his linkfarm/blogroll as well as credits for various works. At the bottom of the real world page is an animated graphic of the Earth from orbit, just as it might appear from a spaceship in one of Watts's worlds; above this, in the blackness of what is implied to be space, is the following information:

Your world, and welcome to it.

The rest of this site is a fantasy, albeit not a very pleasant one. This is reality. From here you can look down and watch the lights going out; if you squint, you'll even see the twinkling of firestorms along the west coast. I leave it to you to decide whether the real world is any sort of improvement.

They say I have to keep the site fresh, that you need to be lured back with new content. There's not much I can add to the other pages—how do you update a world that hasn't even happened yet?—but here, in the present, I can drop the pretense and indulge in some of that self-aggrandising tub-thumping we authors are supposed to practise in the name of "self-promotion". So here, for what it's worth, am I: links to biography and blurbs, to credits, to late-breaking news and opinion.

If it's fresh content you're after, keep an eye on these links. In the meantime, take a load off, look down from geosynch, and watch the world turn inexorably to shit.

It's happening way faster than it did in the books.

He's an edgy guy but he isn't whacking you over the head with OMG I AM EDGY CHECK ME OUT. He's just quietly pointing out the shortcomings of the universe in a way that brings to mind interactive graphics in sci-fi movies. You can imagine HAL 9000 offering up data in this format, or any of the interactive computer systems in post-Clarke sci-fi.

More than anything, though, Watts's site reflects Watts's fiction. The same voice that wrote about the self-aggrandising tub-thumping of authors is the voice that makes his novels so desperately appealing and readable. He's true to his own oeuvre even while presenting that oeuvre. It's rare to find an author's site so thoroughly consistent with the author's work.

There's going to be something interesting here, I promise.

At some point. Not at the moment, as I am entirely and utterly uninspired except inasmuch as it is awesome that Hyperbole and a Half is listed as a reference in the syllabus.

Also I am awfully, awfully grateful not to be expected to know InDesign perfectly tonight.