Archive for February, 2005

Flash Interface for Fiction

Here is a list of some of the current projects hosted by a very interesting website called Digital Fiction .

  • Book of Waste
    Short experimental/interactive fiction imposed against a series of anonymous objects, buildings and animated landscapes. Compelling wasted tales with full motion video backgrounds.
  • The Diary of Anne Sykes
    An unfinished, chaotic mix of sculpted paper scribblings, childhood memories and fragments of a poisoned relationship from imaginary author Anne Sykes.
  • Inside: A Journal of Dreams
    Living alone and secluded, an elderly man keeps a surreal record of his dreams as he is slowly poisoned by his gas fire leaking carbon monoxide.

Continue Reading

The goal is to kick ass.

Jason Kottke started a website, kottke.org. That was a while ago, and since then the site has become perhaps one of the most popular weblogs out there. Now, kottke has made a startling announcement, in a recent post entitled, Doing kottke.org as a full-time job. Kottke says, “I recently quit my web design gig and — as of today — will be working on kottke.org as my full-time job.”

Color me jealous. Maybe I wouldn’t want to do it online, although that would be nice, but I sure would like to quit this night job and write all day long for a living. I guess I gotta pay my dues first, and that’s alright, I guess. Naturally, I’m curious about how he plans to pull of this stunt, and stay in the city, and keep his high speed internet, etc.

After a brief manifesto of reasons why he feels his decision to follow his own path is the right one, Kottke scored major points in my book when he said he’s also going to blog without advertising.

Like I said above, there’s got to be a way to support media that doesn’t involve advertising. But more than that, I don’t want to disrupt the relationship dynamic we’ve got going here. There are currently two parties involved with kottke.org: me and the collective you. Advertising introduces a third party. In my experience, the third wheel of advertising often works to unbalance the relationship in favor of either the author or the readers (usually in favor of the author). If ads were involved, I might feel the need to change what or how I write to appease advertisers. I might write to increase pageviews and earn more revenue. I could fill pages with ads, earning more revenue but making the content more difficult to read or pushing some content off the page entirely. You could block advertising and deny me needed revenue.

None of that is appealing to me. If I’m writing, you’re reading, I’m responding to what you’ve got to say about my writing, and we’re mixin’ it up in the comments, why do we need a middleman? Why not keep that dynamic intact if we can?

Kottke intends to fund his endeavors thanks to the support of those he would call “micropatrons” in the hopes that if a lot of people donate a little bit, then he can make it work. I suspect this will be augmented by freelance work. In fact, this whole stunt could be just another version of going freelance, depending on how it turns out, but lets hope for the best, shall we?

I thought it was interesting that Kottke linked to a shared philosophy of sorts, that being the “mission statement” of the company that runs a really nice piece of software called flickr. The company, Ludicorp, defines itself this way.

Our “corporate philosophy” has an excellent summary in the following passage from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997):

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

The goal is to kick ass.

Google Goofs!

One more than one occasion, I have spoken out in favor of Google. Google can be generally described, in words from a recent posting by web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman, as having been “a good corporate citizen and outstanding netizen for so long that one wants to give the company the benefit of the doubt.” What’s this about a doubt?

Somewhat suspect practices, that’s what. Zeldman describes a new feature of Google’s toolbar software, called Autolink:

For instance, if your company’s site includes a street address, a link to Google?s map service will magically sprout from your page. Likewise, a book’s ISBN number will trigger a link to an Amazon page selling that book. The BBC and CNET cite additional examples.

That sounds great to me, but I guess I’m one of those people they call an “early adopter” when it comes to new technology. I might be like a cowboy who will “push buttons first and ask questions later”, which is why I enjoy reading responsible media commentary by people like Zeldman, who observes:

Critics point out that with this technology Google is doing the very thing Microsoft tried to do in 2001. See Chris Kaminski’s “Much Ado About Smart Tags” (A List Apart 22 July 2001) if you missed that drama. Kaminski cited three problems with smart tags:

  1. Per Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal, Smart Tags enabled Microsoft to “edit any page on the web without the author’s knowledge.”
  2. They extended Microsoft’s monopoly power into new markets, giving the Redmond giant the power to decide which non-Operating System companies would live and which would die. (Companies Microsoft’s Smart Tags division partnered with would live; their competitors would eat worms.)
  3. Not least, Smart Tags were “amenable to nefarious uses, such as covert user tracking” (Chris Kaminski in ALA, paraphrasing Dan Gillmor).

If you are concerned about this, and would liek to take matters into your own hands, Zeldman offers some solutions. For those, you should read his article, Protect your site from Google?s new toolbar

Time to Go

They taught us to argue
Never whether to win or to resolve
Nor anything about the difference
And now it’s time to go.

We tasted spirits
The kind kept in bottles, left on shelves.
No feeling but fun, no thoughts, only words,
And now it’s time to go.

We tried our voices,
In quantity and volume rivaling
The real spirits are still shelved
And now it’s time to go.

Drowned in the loud

Too many times,
There’s too many people,
And I can’t hear,
So I’m silent,
Drowned in the loud.

She’s laughing out there,
Where it’s too hard to hear,
Too easy not to listen,
And she’s dancing,
Or whirling somehow.

Too many times,
She wants to know –
But its too loud.
She can’t ask,
And so, she doesn’t.

So, why do I come,
If it isn’t any fun?
Well, it was fun
The first time,
And she does dance well.

Out there, where
It is too hard to hear,
Too easy not to listen.
Too many times,
I give up and go in.

Electric artificial drums
Keep the beat all night.
They never stop for water.
I dance and I sweat.
I get hot; I get hotter.

I feel my blood
Behind my eyes
Mouths move without talking
Tongues wrap around each other
Foot steps without walking.

Too many times,
My tongue’s alone,
The only tongue in my mouth
My lips are closed.
I haven’t done my dance.

Oh, but I have been moving
Out in the crowd
Frotage! Frotage!
Big beautiful bouncing body parts,
Drowned in the loud.

The one I want, she’s gone.
She likes it too loud to listen.
She likes lots of attention.
She likes freedom from possession.
I only like conversation.

Maybe I move well.
Maybe I’m tall,
But I’ve got eyes on me,
If not ears.
I’m dancing after all.

Waiting for the Song Worth Dancing

I wait, but it doesn’t come.
I’m like a good dancer
Cursed with bad music
Waiting for the song worth dancing
But for all I know that’s wrong
It’s the one you dance with,
Not the song.

I count breaths while I wait
Just to pass the time
But it doesn’t come.
I’m like an old drinker
Lost for a companion
In the back, in the dark,
Drinking straight gin.
If only I had a friend
Then this party would begin
But for all I know the party’s outside
The life you have is the one you make
Or else you wait, and I wait
But it doesn’t come.

“the paradox of antimaterialism”

From a review in Disinformation, a very-frequent-read of mine:

the marketers are merely doing what they’ve been doing for nearly four decades: profiting off the twitchy, urgent need to be hip, cool, ahead of the pack, and, most importantly, to adhere to the countercultural ideal of “thinking different” (e.g., Apple computer) or “breaking all the rules” (e.g., Vans shoes).

To elaborate on the Apple example. Isn’t it ironic that people make the “conscious” choice to support Apple, rather than some huge multimillion dollar corperation? It strikes me as preferring Pepsi over Coke, in some ways. Of course, Pepsi tastes better.

‘They call this “the paradox of antimaterialism” — namely, that anti-materialist values have become one of the biggest moneymakers of consumer capitalism. “Cool people like to see themselves as radicals, subversives who refuse to conform to accepted ways of doing things,” Heath and Potter write.

The book review in the L.A. weekly did well to point out that there is a certain “Leftist critique of the Left” at play here.

Heath and Potter maintained that growing [organic vegetables] or buying ["yuppie food"] does not really strike a blow against consumerism; it just creates a market for more expensive vegetables — thus exacerbating competitive consumption rather than reducing it.

And then there’s the argument that even this argument is just the trendy, aristocratic kind of argument to make if you’re some kind of cynical-hipster (cynister?)

Enough! Let’s start over here. Is there anyone, anywhere, who is examining the efficacy of the Left in more interesting and worthwhile ways?

Links to Friends

Check it out, some friends of mine:

I’m trying to keep up with the sudden influx of blogs written by people I know. I thought, for a while, that I was a lone blogger in my social circle, but not anymore. For some reason I’ll never understand, the people my age in my close-knit little hometown are addicted to online social networking, MySpace for example. For file sharing purposes, this makes perfect sense, but for blogging? MySpace makes crappy blogs. I guess they’re like kindergarden art projects, they look about as aesthetically pleasing, but if they’re made by someone you love, well, you want to tack it up on the fridge or someplace where you’ll see it often.

The problem is, the MySpace blogs are so crappy that they don’t even syndicate. In order to keep up with my friends, I have to:

  1. remember the web address.
  2. visit each address one after another

if I want to know whats going on. I prefer to read all the blogs I read at once, thanks to feed reading software.

The upside of all this is that I have been forced to begin the arduous task of cleaning out my wordpress links’s list — the list you see on Codex’s links page.

If you’re not on the list, and you want to be, post a comment here!

Remember the “index” Page?

Khaled Abou Alfa, author of Broken Kode, is the designer of Manji, which is the template used on this very website. In a recent post, Khaled muses about something

I’m just going to try and tweak the index page. It’s probably going to have more in common with Pixelsurgeon or Crown Dozen, than a typical blog, but I guess that’s where my thoughts are heading right now.

Funny, that’s where my thoughts have been headed right now also. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with, considering how much I love his “just the content ma’am” approach to the template design. I’d like to see how that will mesh with an index page, a real, good old fashioned index page.

Surely you remember index pages, back before blogs, when webpages had those things that resembled cover pages (“splash pages” they were sometimes called) At their best, these pages acted like a table of contents, giving readers a clear view of just what’s going on here anyway. I think that’s a lot more of a user fiendly way to present content than to simply drop them down on a blog, like so many soldiers in alien enemy territory.

Barring begging or bribery, this will probably be my last posting for a little while. I’m up to my ears in a few creative projects right now, only one of them being a way to use the ideas mentioned above.

Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne daguerreotype

There is no remoteness of life and thought, no heremetically sealed seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

I noticed an announcement from the Project Gutenberg that they have digitized the complete works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. A quick check with their search engine provided an extensive list of writings by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The bad news is that a little bit more looking turned up Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne Listed by date of publication in book form and that list looks to be more complete.

The good news is that, with these two links, you should have the complete works of Nathaniel Hawthorne available for you to read electronically and for free. For even more options, check out the Google Books catalog.

Steal This Book

Steal This Book

STEAL THIS BOOK by Abbie Hoffman is something of a handbook for survival in America, well, non-corperate survival. I think it is an absolute crying shame that this book has not been kept current. I actually did steal that book, but you don’t have to. It has been graciously provided online by the good people at Black Market Press

From an Amazon book review:

The first chapter on how to get free stuff is brilliant. Some ideas in order to gain free service or items area so ironic, you’d probably not think of it yourself. In section two, Hoffman describes how to take action against oppression and what to prepare for. Bomb making, first aid, and the introduction to new common sense is delivered straight from the mind of Hoffman. The third section is the shortest, but if you happen to live in the big urban and metropolitan areas, it locates address and phone numbers on where to get free stuff in a more specific sense overall toward the book.

First, the question that seems to plague so many of the people in my generation: “what the hell happened to our parents’ generation!” I was about to express a similar concern, with the lament that no one ever took up the work begun by someone like Abbie Hoffman and ran with it. What happened? Well, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as was Kennedy, I’m sure these two events represent a conscious effort on the part of SOMEONE out there to enforce a counter-action to the revolutionary events of the time. I will not however allow that generation, or ours, to get off that easily.

Maybe they took too many drugs, maybe they capitulated to the middle class standards that they had railed so hard against, maybe they fell in love with money. Maybe they got scared. Maybe they got tired. Maybe they hope their kids will fix it. Maybe they were wrong. Who knows. It is sad that the largest and best-educated generation our country has ever seen was so close to making a complete change in the way of theings, and then they copped out. But that is all it is, a cop out, and it continues to be.

Ghandi said “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The second notion that caught my eye is a rahter rediculous one, that we are evolving. Bullshit we’re evolving! Evolution requires two things in order to operate, the first thing is the passage of huge amounts of time, so that the notion that the human race has been capable of any significant evolution since the 1960′s is a difficult notion to swallow.

Secondly, evolution requires natural selection, survival of the fittest, and this is a very rude thing to say, but even the least fit survive: its an unfortuante side effect of the wonderful human capacity to love everyone. From a human point of view, all people have a right to life. From nature’s point of view, only the fit have a right to survive. Evolution no longer applies to human beings.

Little Kid Picture

Dylan, age 4.5

That’s what I looked like when I was four-and-a-half years old… I remember I wanted to look at the picture book, and the photographer got mad at me because it was only a prop. none of the other children wanted to fool with that book, he said.

Stage Beauty

The first time I saw this story in a theater, it was a play about the theater. Now, its a movie about actors. Its an enjoyable movie, not only because Claire Danes “plays” a bad actress. Actually, she plays the first actress to ever grace the British stage.

The story is taken from an account in one of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who was fortunate enough to witness the Last “female stage beauty”, that is, a man who plays a woman on stage.

Like I said, the screenplay was taken from a script, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which was performed as part of an early season of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, in my hometown of Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs, photo by Annie Leibowitz

This is a “fan page” for William S. Burroughs. It contains a brief description followed by a series of links for anyone interested in William S. Burroughs, his sordid life, or his prolific writings. This page was created to help remedy the fact that Google’s search for the Author’s name provides, first of all, a website that is not, by it own admission “comprehensive or very up to date ”
Continue Reading

Returning to Shepherdstown

Going back home isn’t always what its cracked up to be, but it sure beats being homeless.

I have returned to my hometown of Shepherdstown, West Virginia, to seek some part-time fame, and some full-time fortune. In fact, all I do anymore is work and sleep. I began typing this during a stolen moment at work, still recovering from the sleep, and I am afraid that the stolen moment ahs ended.

When the Fall Semester ended at Maryville College this year, so did the lion’s share of my college education. I did the fitting thing to do for every unemployed, bewildered, postgraduate, middle-class, caucasian; I moved back in with my parents. I’m too old, and too free-spirited to live at home, but I’m doing it anyway. I’ve spent that last few years of my life getting drilled in one way or another on the finer points of seeking a calling life, rather than consigning oneself to drudgery. Now, in order to finance those lessons, I must consign myself to drudgery. Its a sick irony, really. (but this isn’t about work)

My home town of Shepherdstown, West Virginia is difficult to write about. Its such a very small place, in its mindset, I mean its cliquish, or close-knit. Everyone, it seems, who is here, is still here, and has always been here, and might die here. That’s changing though. Everyone born here who dies here will see it change from a rual place into exurbia. All they want to do is bitch about it. After all, “running them out on a rail” isn’t very politically correct anymore, although it is wanted, I suspect.

The part of this place that is home to me is the bohemian part, a dwindling one, to be sure, but still very much a community. Working nights, its a struggle to make it to the thursday evening poetry readings, the friday night jam sessions, the snowed-in art openings … this is all pretension, in a way, because, well, isn’t this West Virginia, after all? Who do these hicks, these, “outsider-artists” think they are, anyway?

Well, if you have to ask, then fuck you. That’s right, you can shove that weekend edition of the Washington Post straight up your ass and go back home where you’re scared to look the pedestrians in the eye. And for christ’s sake don’t fucking move here. It’s your fault that I can’t afford to live here, and wouldn’t want to. (This isn’t a rant either. Sorry about the cussing. I try not to.)

What I like about the climate here is that people simply follow their calling. It might be cheap, half assed, but it beats the hell out of bitching about not doing it. What I don’t like about the climate here is that I feel somehow out of place. I don’t feel like I belong. I’ve been gone for too long. I probably won’t stay very long, and why? I’m not comfortable with the idea of dying here. I’m called elsewhere, I guess, and that’s about as specific as I can be.