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0.122883 | <urn:uuid:69ae0119-435c-4ada-9288-293469844c2f> | en | 0.952688 | ibnlive » Movies » Masand
'Bajatey Raho' review: Alas, it could've been so much better
Rajeev Masand,CNN-IBN
Aug 02, 2013 at 11:45pm IST
Cast: Dolly Ahluwalia, Ravi Kissen, Tusshar Kapoor, Ranvir Shorey, Brijendra Kala, Vishakha Singh, Vinay Pathak
Director: Shashant Shah
Fine actors can make poor films just a little bit easier to endure. Nowhere is that more evident than in a film like 'Bajatey Raho'. This comedy, directed by 'Challo Dilli''s Shashant Shah has a harebrained plot with so many holes, you could shoot footballs through them. But the film's brisk pace and its terrific ensemble cast are exactly the ointment required to help with the pain.
Mummyji ('Vicky Donor''s Dolly Ahluwalia) assembles a team of allies to avenge the death of her bank manager husband who was wrongly framed in a fraud masterminded by his corrupt boss Sabharwal (Ravi Kissen). Her son Sukhi (Tusshar Kapoor), his friend Ballu (Ranvir Shorey), Sukhi's girlfriend Manpreet (Vishakha Singh), and a close family friend Mintoo (Vinay Pathak) assist her in coming up with a series of scenarios to rob Sabharwal, so they can repay the very people he swindled using her husband. They resort to everything from sting operations and false raids, to romantic enticements and elaborate cons in their grand plan to serve comeuppance to their offender.
It's not a wildly inventive premise, and the cons are pulled off a little too conveniently. The climax too is a melodramatic mess that could set off a migraine. And yet it's hard not to root for the gang when you have such endearing characters. Tusshar Kapoor's Sukhi is an earnest cable guy who ironically hangs on to his fair business principles even as he's involved in this revenge plan. Sukhi is assisted by a smart kid nicknamed Kabootar (Hussan Saad), who helps the gang with all their tech requirements. But no one deserves more praise than Brijendra Kala who nails it as Sabharwal's trusted assistant Bagga, always ready with an SMS joke, bringing both laughs and a lump in your throat with his pitch-perfect performance.
Ranvir Shorey and Vinay Pathak get lesser screen time to do their shtick, yet neither disappoints in limited scenes. It's Dolly Ahluwalia, however, who steals the film as the feisty Punjabi matriarch, determined to deliver payback. Long after the film loses steam, she remains the best thing on screen.
'Bajatey Raho' isn't particularly clever; in fact it reeks of lazy writing. But given the poor standard of recent Bollywood comedies, it's far from unwatchable. I'm going with two-and-a-half out of five. Alas, it could've been so much better.
Rating: 2.5/5
Write your review and win prizes
Gaurav Rai, Gurgaon
What's your reaction to 'Bajatey Raho'?
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0.04185 | <urn:uuid:65200997-04df-42c2-b99b-0fbcda6a70e4> | en | 0.949919 | Now updated: Ramadan calendar -
asked 102 Fozia%20Mohammed's gravatar image
fouzia usually child develops bladder control by age of 7 .. boys usually late ..but treatment is started if it persists even after 10 yrs of age .there is also family history positive means a parent, sibling, or other family member has had the same issue. common causes apart from being in a stressful state ...are 1. small urinary bladder 2. Some children affected by bed wetting have what's known as over-active bladder syndrome. This is where the muscles that control the bladder go into spasm, leading to the involuntary passing of urine.
3.repeated urinary tract infection (ask her if she experience burning while passing urine . with any history of fever ) 4. some cases of bed wetting, it may be that the child’s body doesn't produce enough of a hormone that regulates urine production, called vasopressin. This means their kidneys produce too much urine for their bladder to cope with.5.early onset diabetes ..also called type one diabetes seen in young age is also associated with increase frequency of passing urine 6. constipation is also a cause but of course she needs to be examined by a doctor ,few tests to be carried out ,start of treatment and she ll be fine inshaALLAH .role of family support very important .and she needs to know nothing is wrong with her .no need to hide or be shy ..changing life style helps a lot in such case which i already explained
answered 302 devori's gravatar image
Jazakallah Khair for the information :)
(Apr 15 at 07:12) Fozia Mohammed Fozia%20Mohammed's gravatar image
**Salam .. bed wetting apart from few pathological reasons ...the most common is psychological issues . bed wetting can sometimes occur during a stressful event in a young person’s life. Conflict at home or school may cause to have nightly accidents. The birth of a sibling, moving to a new home, or another change in routine can be stressful to children and may trigger bed wetting incidents. Talk to her about how she is feeling. Understanding and compassion can help her feel better about her situation, which can put an end to bed wetting in many cases as you mentioned she is afraid of her mother .and mother is of the type who scold and beat her .. some one should talk to the mother too ... it even depends she is having this problem for how long ??? from beginning ??if so mother must know .if it has started now ask her about her fluid intake routine ..ask her to limit fluid intake from evening ..ask her to cut down tea and caffeine as they are diuretics .i.e. increase urine output ...she can maintain a voiding chart ... that is go to toilet every 2-3 hours and maintain a schedule ... and should empty her bladder before going to bed ...ask her to do this ., observe the result INSHA ALLAH she will feel better...and please assure her that there is NOTHING wrong in her ..nothing to be embarrassed about .....
answered 302 devori's gravatar image
Walekumsalam,She have this problem from the beginning.. when she was a kid her mom thought that maybe because of her age this all is happening.. but now she is 14..and still all this.. Anywayz Jazakallah Khair For your Information..!! :)
(Apr 14 at 12:20) Fozia Mohammed Fozia%20Mohammed's gravatar image
holy cow, an intelligent answer from a muslim. nothing about magic words or such. devori, could you please go answer nur888, the poor girl is carrying around...well you will find out.
fozia, she is right. not only scheduling and tracking her bathroonm breaks, but if this isn't a nightly occurance, she needs to review what has happened that day. in fact it would be best to keep a diary of everyday. as devori says psychological causes are most common, especial at such an age. you say her mother beats her. this may acctually be the cause. or not getting attention from her mother may triger it.
(Apr 14 at 12:39) mikejm4 mikejm4's gravatar image
abused children often develop a conflagerated sense of love. they may actually see the abuse as a sign of parental love, and then subconsciously seek it out. wetting the bed may be a cry for attention, even if that attention only manifests itself in an abusive nature. strange but true.
but ruling out the physical is usually the first order of business. does she have a gynecologist?
(Apr 14 at 12:45) mikejm4 mikejm4's gravatar image
Well Said..!! No.. She don't
(Apr 14 at 13:10) Fozia Mohammed Fozia%20Mohammed's gravatar image
any medical resources at school? do y'all have school nurses where you are? don't know what else to say. obviously you have internet access, i just googled, bedwetting teenage girl an a bunch of stuff came up. of course sometimes so much information can be contradicting and confusing. goodluck to ya.
(Apr 14 at 13:29) mikejm4 mikejm4's gravatar image
Thanks for everything..!! :)
(Apr 14 at 15:16) Fozia Mohammed Fozia%20Mohammed's gravatar image
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Asked: Apr 13 at 13:51
Seen: 450 times
Last updated: Apr 15 at 07:12
©1998-2013 Publications and Research. All Rights Reserved. | http://islam.com/questions/29979/how-do-i-help-her?sort=newest | dclm-gs1-414305528 | false | false | {
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0.367588 | <urn:uuid:aca6d35b-dd9d-4206-83b0-84f9f367dbd2> | en | 0.866233 | cerca qualsiasi parola, ad esempio blumpkin:
2 definitions by Ozzie69
When you try to text Brosif to your best friend and T9word decides it doesn't want to. T9word instead thinks you mean "armpie."
Input text: What's up Brosif?
T9word reads: What's up Armpie?
You: Well I guess that's what I really meant to text...
di Ozzie69 13 settembre 2010
Guy comment: Hey yo girl!
di Ozzie69 30 ottobre 2010 | http://it.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=Ozzie69 | dclm-gs1-414315528 | false | false | {
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0.914431 | <urn:uuid:30a50160-7032-410c-a239-b8bd1ff68dda> | en | 0.891908 |
NEWTON, Ask A Scientist!
Name: Danny
Status: student
Age: 30s
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: 1999
Will a magnifying glass under water magnify more or less? Please explain why or why not.
Less. A magnifying glass works by refracting light, and the angle through which the light is refracted depends on the amount the index of refraction changes at the interface between the lens and whatever the lens is immersed in. The refractive index of water is greater than that of air, and less than that of glass.
Tim Mooney
Hi Danny,
A magnifying glass works by causing the path of the light passing through it to bend. How much it bends (and thus the focal length) depends on the change in refractive index as the light enters and leaves the magnifying glass. The index of refraction of air is 1.0 and the index of refraction of a typical glass is about 1.4 (a difference of 0.4 for light passing from air to glass). You can find the index of refraction of water and other substances in the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics at your library. It can also be found in many science text books.
Greg Bradburn
P.S. The larger the change in refractive index, the shorter the focal length. The shorter the focal length, the greater the magnifying power of the lens.
Sounds like a homework question to me. Especially with the "why or why not." So, I'll answer the "why or why not" and leave you to answer the question.
The magnification by a magnifying glass depends on the amount that light is bent when it crosses from the surrounding medium (air or water in the case of your problem) into the glass, and then when it goes back into the surrounding medium on the other side. Generally, the more the bending, the greater the magnification. So, the question comes down to how much bending there is in either case (the surrounding medium is water or is air). The important relation here is Snell's law of refraction: (sin i/sin r) = (V1/V2), where i is the angle of incidence, r is the angle of refraction, V1 is the velocity of the wave (light) in the first medium (air or water), and V2 is the velocituy of the wave in the second medium (glass). So, to answer this question qualitatively, you need to know the relative velocities of light in air, water, and glass.
Richard Barrans Jr., Ph.D.
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0.116504 | <urn:uuid:03a95474-61f2-4f40-b251-76740c145667> | en | 0.796797 | zoek een woord op, zoals bukkake:
When someone always comes up with an injury just before a big race, sporting event, etc.
Well, he is not going to run the 5k today. He is songbirding again about his sore calves. What a douche.
door Hank Kerchief 3 april 2011 | http://nl.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=songbirding | dclm-gs1-415335528 | false | false | {
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0.023412 | <urn:uuid:50a213d6-d0db-43fe-8494-c6acc7722288> | en | 0.983858 | How Biting an Olive Pit Resulted in Two Years of Agony for Dennis Kucinich
Photo: J.D. Pooley/Getty Images
Apparently Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich has now settled his lawsuit with the operators of the congressional cafeteria after biting into an olive pit hidden within one of their wraps in 2008. But in order to let his supporters know that his cause was just, he detailed, in a sometimes gross e-mail, how that olive pit caused a chain reaction that wouldn't be resolved for nearly two years:
When I bit into the olive pit, (unbeknown to me at the time), upon impact the tooth split in half, vertically through the crown and the tooth, below the level of the bone. Externally there was no evidence of a break. This was not about aesthetics. The internal structure of the tooth was rendered nonrestorable. Although the pain was excruciating, I shook it off and I went right back to work.
Kucinich Settles in Olive Pit Incident [Weigel/Slate] | http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2011/01/how_biting_into_an_olive_pit_s.html | dclm-gs1-415415528 | false | false | {
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0.027747 | <urn:uuid:0cb66748-3192-4d1a-8b84-24c502da6a07> | en | 0.978898 | For the movie "The Social Network," composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were challenged to score a film with a complex emotional range but little action, only a whiff of violence and no traditional love story: It's about starting a business that manufactures nothing. No major character, including Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is fully formed in the film, because "The Social Network" is populated by narcissistic youths who lack empathy, honor and an adult worldview.
Trent Reznor performs during the Music Openair Festival in Switzerland. in June, 2009. Associated Press
Tune In: Music from the 'The Social Network'
Hand Cover Bruise
A Familar Taste
In the Hall of the Mountain King
Despite these obstacles, the movie pulses with skittish tension, dry wit and bipolar energy, all of which is intensified by the music of Mr. Reznor, who's best known as the founder of Nine Inch Nails, and Mr. Ross, who's worked behind the scenes on several NIN albums. At times, the score seems to provide commentary and, ultimately, a moral judgment about the characters' activities and missing values. (It's available as a digital download for $5 at Mr. Reznor's
Mr. Reznor originally declined director David Fincher's invitation to score "The Social Network." He'd just gotten married and was coming off a long, grueling NIN tour. "My life has two modes. One is sitting around writing and contemplating or building things. The other is execution mode. It takes a while to switch from one to the other," the 45-year-old Mr. Reznor said by phone last week. "I read the script, but what was nagging me was the idea of committing the next year of my life to it. I told David, 'I don't think I can give you my best work.'"
But as he began to cool down from the tour, Mr. Reznor had second thoughts. "I realized I'd screwed up. I'd let him down," he said. When he called the director to apologize, Mr. Fincher told him he was still eager to have him. Mr. Reznor contacted Mr. Ross, who had recently scored the Hughes Brothers' "The Book of Eli," starring Denzel Washington. The duo already had several projects they planned to work on, including How to Destroy Angels—featuring Mr. Reznor's wife, Mariqueen Maandig—and some new NIN music. But a film score presented Mr. Reznor with the kind of challenge he relishes.
"Here was my strategy," he explained. "I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy.
"My music, I hope, takes 100% of your concentration," he added. "I know how to do that. But here this music we were creating wasn't intended to be in the forefront." Mr. Reznor found precedent for the right approach in how he and Mr. Ross had created the long-form instrumental piece "Ghosts I-IV," a NIN album he called "soundtracks for daydreams" that has no narrative pull-through.
For "The Social Network," Mr. Reznor said, "We wanted something a bit more Tangerine Dream than Debussy," mentioning the influential German electronic group. "I started thinking about something synthetic for Zuckerberg, his choices, his path."
The music that emerged created an ambience, he said, one that was "sometimes chilly, sometimes warm, but always spoiling around the edges." The duo decided to place an acoustic piano amid a sea of synthetic sounds. In the film's first Reznor-Ross piece, individual notes on piano ring against what might be a rattling wire. Foreboding bass notes enter, as does a sound that could be the wind or a cry. But the tender piano prevails, and we've entered a complicated environment fraught with danger and human folly. Or, as Mr. Reznor describes it, "The piece communicates tension, vulnerability, sadness and something unpleasant."
Even before the Reznor-Ross score begins, Mr. Fincher subtly signals the role of the film's music as judge and commentator, rather than supporting and intensifying on-screen action with minimal opinion. When we first meet Mark, he's in a bar with a poised and witty date he insults repeatedly, both willfully and through his lack of social grace. His date soon ditches him, but not before defining Mark with a biting, one-word insult. As Mark retreats to his blog to seek revenge, in the background pounds the White Stripes' "Ball & Biscuit," with its lyric, "And right now you could care less about me, but soon enough you will care by the time I'm done."
At the film's end, we hear the Beatles' "Baby, You're a Rich Man," with the lines, "How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?" and "You keep all your money in a big brown bag behind a zoo." As he sings, John Lennon seems to mock Mark and his blithe, unsavory partner Sean Parker. The soundtrack also contains Bob Marley's "Crazy Baldheads," with its lyric, "Here comes the con man, coming with this con plan," and the Dead Kennedys "California Uber Alles," with the line "Zen fascists will control you."
Though Mr. Reznor didn't discuss the other tunes on the film's soundtrack with Mr. Fincher, he said he wasn't surprised the director found that level of detail in them. "Nothing David does is accidental."
For the composer, "The Social Network" assignment wasn't without its complications: Mr. Reznor said it took him and Mr. Ross "three seven-day weeks of 12-hour days" to get the right tone for their just-short-of-silly adaptation of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King," which accompanies a frantic sequence at a Henley Royal Regatta on the Thames. "That was David's idea," Mr. Reznor said. "Never in my normal life would I think of covering that track."
Still, for all the score's icy abrasiveness and reflected aggression, the repeated piano motif suggests a trace of sympathy for Mark.
"I don't know the real Mark Zuckerberg," Mr. Reznor said, "but I understand that character. The act of creation at any cost, I can relate to. The pursuit of my vision of Nine Inch Nails caused betrayals and cost me friendships. But the goal was No. 1. Now as an adult I think I would've done those things differently."
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0.020005 | <urn:uuid:4404d3e1-9389-4096-801e-5a2f76a3dc13> | en | 0.960096 | Vocabulary Builder
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Vocabulary Word
Word: wrath
Definition: anger; fury
Sentences Containing 'wrath'
/ Now you 'bout to feel the wrath of a menace.
A second movie, "Wrath of the Spider Queen" was also released in 2007.
As head steward to the King and Queen, Khayman was forced to rape the twin witches Maharet and Mekare after the witches incurred Akasha's wrath.
At the end of the First Age, the War of Wrath destroyed Beleriand and most of it fell into the sea, taking the western part of the Great East Road with it.
Batman goes to Wrath's lover, Grayle Hudson, in order to ask her about the villain's return.
Before the breaking of Beleriand in the War of Wrath, the Great East Road was the longest road in Middle-earth.
Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature of her wrath the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing her and both highly commended it.
By stirring up rebellion in Amalfi and Salerno against Guaimar, he earned the wrath of Guaimar's son and successor, Gisulf II.
Caroline really attracts the wrath of Sue after she starts to fall in love with Mac.
During the Greater Wrath, Temmes area was largely destroyed.
Fearing his wife's wrath, he calls Stan over to help him clean up.
He also appeared in the Wrath segment of "The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins", and in the small role of Cavendish in the James Bond film "Moonraker".
He and Nightwing later find out from her and from Gordon's secret police files that it was the Wrath's sidekick, Elliot Caldwell, who was donning his mentor's costume and was behind the killings.
He suspects that The Wrath, who he thought was dead, has returned after five years, and that he continues his vendetta against law enforcement and Commissioner Gordon.
He was killed by Beorn, where it says: "Swiftly he returned, and his wrath was redoubled, so that nothing could withstand him, and no weapon seemed to bite upon him.
Her hope had been to avert the wrath of Heaven from a House that had long been hateful to the suffering many.
Horner is best known for his scoring of the films "Titanic", "Apollo 13", "Braveheart", "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", and "Aliens".
Howling with wrath, the brothers Hamdir and Sörli ride over a misty mountain.
Initially the movement faced the wrath of liquor contractors and their political patrons.
Metlar turns his wrath on Shore, who just barely manages to escape.
On April 11, 2009 at "Ninety-Nine", Omega picked up his first victory in PWG by defeating Davey Richards after a Croyt's Wrath.
On the one hand, a number of them called Louis XV a "criminal" who would suffer God's wrath.
Only those who keep the faith shall escape the wrath of the Metallian...
Prometheus, however, out of pity stole it for them shortly after, incurring the further wrath of Zeus.
Ramesh finds the culprit and keeps a tight leash on everything happening in the office, thereby earning the wrath of the industrialist's relatives.
she cried, with her clenched hand, quivering as if it only wanted a weapon to stab the object of her wrath.
Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh!
The "Later Annals" are the final version of the War of Wrath in this form.
The agnostic Aitken liked to tease the Methodist Bennett, whose fiery temper contrasted with Aitken's ability to turn away wrath with a joke.
The name "Asmodai" is believed to derive from Avestan language "*aēšma-daēva", where "aēšma" means "wrath", and "daēva" signifies "demon".
The new Wrath is overwhelmed by the amount of teamwork and trust the heroes have, not having the same partnership with his cruel mentor, and is defeated and sent to Blackgate Penitentiary.
The offender needs pity, not wrath; those who must needs be corrected, should be treated with tact and gentleness; and one must be always ready to learn better.
The three songs on the EP are re-recordings from the "Wrath of the Tyrant" demo.
The trick at Mecone or Mekone was an event in Greek mythology in which Prometheus tricked Zeus for mankind's benefit, and thus incurred his wrath.
Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time.
There are several musical adaptations taken from the War of Wrath: References.
Throughout this phase the union faced the wrath of the powerful mining and labour contractors.
Thus no sudden wrath will betray you into unreasonable conduct, nor will you behave harshly by irritating another.
Unaware of Magneto's incapacitation, Cortez attempted to shield himself from his former master's wrath by kidnapping Magneto's granddaughter Luna.
When King Solomon returned, Asmodai fled from his wrath.
When the news of the execution reached Elizabeth she was extremely indignant, and her wrath was chiefly directed against Davison, who, she asserted, had disobeyed her instructions not to part with the warrant.
While the "daēva" Aēšma is thus Zoroastrianism's demon of wrath and is also well attested as such, the compound "aēšma-daēva" is not attested in scripture.
Words from the first verse gave John Steinbeck's wife Carol Steinbeck the title of his 1939 masterpiece "The Grapes of Wrath".
More Vocab Words
::: antiseptic - substance that prevents infection in a wound; ADJ.
::: clientele - body of customers
::: exasperate - vex; annoy or make angry (by testing the patience)
::: discompose - disturb the composure of; confuse
::: serrated - having a sawtoothed edge; Ex. serrated leaf
::: paraphrase - restate a passage in one's own words while retaining thought of author; N: restatement of a text in other words
::: harbinger - forerunner (which foreshadows what is to come)
::: superimpose - place over something else
::: veracious - (of a person) truthful | http://paperrater.com/vocab_builder/show/wrath | dclm-gs1-415585528 | false | false | {
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0.077384 | <urn:uuid:3ac3762d-344f-40e5-bf05-b1c60179e20a> | en | 0.974318 | Friday, 19 August 2011
The Book of the blog, and why I'm not going on Big Brother.
I don't normally like to do this sort of thing, but the good people at Pluto Press have reminded me that unless I get off my tiny backside and actually tell people about this book of columns we've got coming out, nobody will buy it, and then they won't get any money. Which would be sad, because they're wonderful people, and they made me two separate cups of tea when I went to see them at the office.
So, here it is: The Book of This Blog. Titled, after some wrangling and a great deal of imaginative endeavor, Penny Red. It has a stonking cover design by This is Star, a New York artist and model whose inkwork makes me moist and excited. Warren Ellis has written a lovely foreword, which makes my inner fangirl vibrate with glee. Some of the actual words inside don't make me cringe too much on re-reading, either, although they undoubtedly will in five years' time. You can pre-order it here, and if you do, as the good people at Pluto Press remind me, not only do you get it much cheaper, you get free stuff, like extra books.
From the website, it appears that I'm going to be signing some copies as well. That sort of thing makes me nervous; it's been very flattering when people have asked me to sign Meat Market in recent weeks, but it all feels rather ridiculous. I may swan around like some kind of proper writer, but my signature still looks like an eleven year old girl's - it has TWO stars in it, and it used to be a heart and a star until two years ago when I got laughed at by a bank clerk. Similarly, I may act all casual about being asked to go on the telly and give my opinion on things, but I can't watch the clips back afterwards without doing that thing where you half-close your eyes and bite down hard on the side of your fist. Despite what a miniature army of trolls seems to think, all I ever wanted was to write useful words for a living.
It is this that lay behind my decision not to go on Big Brother.
Yes, I was asked to audition for Celebrity Big Brother. It was a few months ago, now. It took me a whole twelve hours to decide no, partly because - coming clean for a moment - I've always loved that mad bloody show, and I've wondered for at least ten years what it would be like to be on it. Hell, of course, but then I'm the sort of person who'd wander around hell with recording equipment asking people how they felt about the whole thing. There's even a chance that weeks of constant public surveillance might not leave me curled weeping in the middle of a day-glo floor, muttering about the Society of the Spectacle and trying to peel myself like a satsuma.
After turning over in my mind every possible way in which going on Big Brother might not be the worst idea in the entire world, I finally hit on the insurmountable counter-argument: the one where this isn't all a fucking joke, and I'm not a fucking cartoon character, and I actually have some serious things to say. I don't like playing the media game. I don't like doing the self-publicising that every freelancer has, to some extent, to engage in. I actually believe in something bigger than myself, and I like to think that the people who read this blog do, too.
There is a banality at play in the British press - and I mean the entire glorious sweep of it, from the Observer Review to Big Brother - that makes me more uncomfortable the more of it I discover. It's a banality that's inimical to the sort of reasoned, sensible debate we desperately need in these nervous times. It's not about celebrity culture, and it's not about 24-hour news cycles, though it has something to do with both, and it infects everything. It's about speed of turnover, a dull hunger for comment, the privileging of celebrity above content when it comes to argument, a culture that would rather watch people unravel than listen to their ideas, a culture that would rather bitch and carp spitefully amongst itself than actually try to change the world. Millions of words have been expended on the riots that swept our cities two weeks ago, and almost none of that analysis has been measured or persuasive enough to prevent the enormous, frightening right-wing backlash that's been permitted to happen on this angsty little island. The best overviews so far have come from outside Britain, like yesterday's explosive New York Times editorial.
There's a fight going on for the soul of decency in this country, and it's a fight that's obscured by gossip and bogged down by banality, and when you're just a person sitting in her bedroom, letting cups of tea go cold whilst you try to write useful things, that banality can feel insurmountable. Fortunately, I have some complete bastards for friends who do things like yell "LOOK, it's TV's own Laurie Penny!" when I come back from the loo. One of the most dangerous things a person can ever do is take themselves seriously. As long as I have those reprobates around, it's not a danger over which I'm losing much sleep.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Panic on the streets of London.
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0.029514 | <urn:uuid:0a482c31-2e70-43b8-a8dc-78e5168149cd> | en | 0.963014 | Photo Listings
Here is a collective list of composition and lighting arrangement examples in photography; all photographs are my production unless otherwise specified:
Ch. 3
• Focal Point
• Framing
• Rule of third
• leading line
• Horizon line
• Positive and negative space
• Sense of scale
• Color
• Patterns and textures
• Close-ups
• Layering
• Point of view
• Break the rules
• Awareness of light
• The quality of light
• Direction of light
• Color of light
• Bright light situations
• Low light situations
• Fog and haze
I do not own this photo, it is a photo that I have taken from the internet:
• The nature of artificial light
• Range of light
• Exposure challenge
• Changing the white balance
Composition of photography using Legos
So there may be a relatively simplistic answer as to why I have decided to show what I have been learning in my visual and cultural design class @ NDSU through the use of Legos… It is awesome. (PERIOD). No explanation needed. As a class we played with Legos; Best day ever!
The goal behind showing some of these images is to truly explain some of the mundane composition elements through a playful, yet creative manner.
First off I have to say one more time how awesome it was to get to play with legos in an upper level english class at college. The world would be a better place if people could learn through Legos… Just saying.
Rule of Thirds
The first piece that I want to look at is the rule of thirds, and if you know any photographer, and ask them what the rule of thirds is they will explain that it is a grid that splits up the image into nine sections. It is how the human eye naturally likes to weigh visual imagery. Below is an example of the rule of thirds:
In this image of an arbitrary Lego dude going over what would and should look like rapids, or cuffs for winter choppers (leather mittens) is split up by a grid system. If you look closely to how the subject is laid out, there is a comfortable composition because the image lines up with the normally invisible rule of thirds. The grid layout helps the mind obtain the idea of this one-thirds orthogonal plane that exists from the viewfinder to the brain.
One does not always have to take photographs in the rue of thirds, but it is very appealing to the onlooker.
Focal Point
The focal point is the spot where the image is most in focus. This becomes controlled by the camera body and its processor. The aperture function helps to dictate how grand or how minuscule a focal point will be. Sometimes there are foreground layers before a focal point, and sometimes there are not.
The example below has what was the main subject-now-the-unfocussed-foreground switched with what was the background-and-now-focal-point (yeah I feel there is a better way to express that idea too!):
In this case the first orange cone is the focal point, and the once was lego dude becomes the layering in the foreground.
Point of View
The last piece of composition I want to touch on is that of the way each individual photographer gets their angle. It does not matter how, one does it as long as they just do. The point of view is the scripted story that tells the viewer how you saw a scene play out, and then in that split second capture it with one quick snap of the shutter. It can tell a unique story that has never been told, or an angle that has never been seen, as long as you make it your own then it is your point of view.
In the end there are a lot more parts and pieces to this thing called composition, but for the taste which was given, it will not quench the interest or desire to learn more. Hopefully it will just merely stifle the curiosity long enough for one to go mettle and play around with these three concepts. Then once these are etched and engrained the next set of composition is just waiting to be discovered.
Here is a fun image to let your mind wander on, giving dynamically the edge to what was static.
Photo Essay Analysis
Photo credit goes to New York Times and the story of God’s Light Show, I did not take this photo;
There is a story being told here deep between the gutters of the images on the webpage for New York Times. It goes beyond what the writer’s intentions were, and lingers deeper than any written literature tends to do.
It is the idea of a photo essay; For this analysis the photo essay of God’s Light Show will be critiqued:
[ link to Slideshow ;
Link to article: ]
In this case the photo essay takes a news story-esque approach because that is the intention, it is a news story; a feature story to be exact, but what could have been done to create a photo essay would have been stunning by integrating this content into an interactive piece. Because it was a news story it becomes slightly a turn off in my opinion as a photo essay, only because there are so many other creative outlets that should have been taken. The one thing that catches my attention is the photos themselves, which is exactly what a photo essay should do. When the slideshow first comes up, it creates a desire for closure with the stunning light imagery involving the sky, stars and other natural and beautiful phenomena.
The question is asked how do all of these photos relate, and what is the fixation on them? They are sharp, crisp and tell a story of their own; each one does. It draws the reader’s attention in and makes them want to read the story behind the photos. And unfortunately the story is good, but leaves room for improvement: it deals with one’s fixation towards the lights of the sky as well as the small towns that make it relevant to the writer. But it is done in a way that leaves the audience questioning why this is important to me. If more creativity had been channeled, I believe a multimedia piece could have helped close the gap of closure in the way the content is implemented and presented.
This photo essay by design is very simplistic, almost too simplistic to the point where if you had removed the slideshow the story would still remain. I think the dilemma is that a true photo essay should be one where if you remove the words and leave the images the story should still remain.
The image-to-word relation is really poor, and critically rightfully so, the goal of this photo essay was not to create an interactive page, although it deserves one. It was to add content that would be loosely called supplementary to suck the readers in. But it could have been so much better if the interactive element was there. I believe a whole webpage could have been developed, and it would have spoken even more strongly about the aggregated content.
Ambiguity & Closure
In all honesty one of the most beneficial things I have learned from McCloud’s book Understanding Comics would be that in order for an audience to be captivated with a visual it needs to have these two items, (along with a few other, but the emphasis will be on these two):
Ambiguity allows a person to see themselves within the comic or image, as though they could live in an alternative existence through the pages of that comic book or visual. By making the face of a character in the comic more vague (lacking detail), there is a creation of ambiguity so that the reader then begins to imagine what it would be like to be the character inside that creative endeavor. Or by making the photograph abstract it causes the viewer to interpret and discern what the image is trying to portray. This gives the reader a desire to finish the story, or continue to look on at the design. It also causes the reader to fill in the gaps mentally, by creating the scenarios in the “gutters” (the white space between the comic panes). That is called closure.
By creating a need for closure the human brain fills in the details that are missing. Such as the photo above: there is not a definitive answer to what it may be. It could be a hole in the floor (strange flooring), but none-the-less it could be a window to a barn or shed. When in reality it is the access panel to a grain conveyer. But if I had not told you that there would still be that ambiguity that would allow anyone to look on and try to create closure by solving the mystery of the image (there is a reason we become upset with the person defining the image if it does not turn out to be what we thought it was: it involves someone else taking our perception and distorting it, but this is a topic for another time). By creating a desire for closure through ambiguity it draws the readers attention and captivates their imagination! That is why I believe it is so important to design something that intrigues the audience, and will try to capture there innovative imagination.
No one will ever see that image the same way I do. They will not scan it with there eyes and notice the oxidization melting into the muted semi-glossy grey tin, that has hues of blue. And if they see what I just explained, it is through my description that has tainted their imagination from creating their own individual interpretation!
It is as simple as that; in order to induce a hunger for creativity there must be:
Closure & Ambiguity!
[Is there a reason I flipped the two words around from the beginning? You tell me...]
McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics: The invisible art (pp…). New York: HarperPerennial.
Time and Closure
I think it is an understated experience that while one reads through the pages of a comic or comic book the concept of closure and time are crucial. How the writer portrays it cannot be significantly determined by the writer, whereas the reader is deemed the “master of time” or the curator of what goes on outside of the panels. It is an incredible concept that the reader has such power inside the “Gutter” (the empty space between comic panels of what might be considered a frame).
Another neat thing that can be interpreted in the gutter of a comic is the use of all five senses. The brain can fill that closure where visual cues have no control of what is going on. It is an intense thing to think about and will radically change the way I use closure in communication pieces as well as graphics and images.
I want to compare the gutter to the space outside the focal point in a photo, or the blank space of a graphic piece. My intentions will be to understand how I can give the viewer of my rendering that limitless power, and yet not make it so lucid that I cannot relay a message or keep the focus on a subject or promulgated idea.
In order to incorporate and implement this idea, I believe I will have to work on studying what makes something ambiguous enough that in between two pieces or thoughts it can give power to someone’s imagination, yet be able to convey a message as I deem necessary.
This daunting task will be one that can serve me well in the years to come just by advancing my angles, the way I look at things for the composition and how I can have this phenomena occur in the innovation that is to come.
Below is an example of an image that requires closure because the foreground and background are blurred due to the short depth of field caused by shooting a low aperture. The mind still completes what this image is and determines the importance of the background and foreground and decides whether or not it is an appealing image. By creating this closure I still give the reader a piece of mind that in fact it is more than likely what it looks to be, but there is the possibility that it is something other than grass or a bridge.
My Visual Instigation for a Semster of Innovation
A new semester means new smells, faces, classes and above all else new chances to change the static into the dynamic through visual cultivation of innovation! This may be a little out there, but remember without a push an object indefinitely stays in a fixed static stance, motionless with no real direction!
brick wall with sun gleeming off of the surface
Does this give you a different view? because it should!
Take a deep breath, step to the edge and lets plunge downward towards this helix of creativity in communication through imagery! Our backs are no longer against the wall, but our nose is most definitely pressed against it to get a different view of this world!
Goals for this semester:
1. Be most creative in all of my endeavors; no exceptions!
I want to push my graphics, imagery and photography to levels I never knew existed! I want to see things in such a unique way it scares me! I want to push the envelope in my writing and write dangerously! This is the beauty of rhetoric. There are no limitations, only the constraints that I set upon myself will hold me back. I want to thrust the blinders outward and be able to see the whole picture. If I can accomplish this then I know not only have I learned something, but I am refining my talents which excites me beyond measure!
2. I want to strive to bring out the best in everyone who comes into contact with my rhetoric!
I am not blind nor do I want to be because I know there are people more talented then myself, and I want to be a catalyst for those who will surpass me. I am not running a race or competing with others, because I have the perfect match to always strive to do better then. that is me! I want to find my value in the God I serve and the destructive course of always bettering myself! I want to be bent on pushing myself to the next level!
3. These gifts are not mine, but they were given to me by the Father, so how dare I resist in worshiping Him with them!
I will strive to praise Him in everything I do! Uttering every last breadth to the beauty that Thou canst do!
4. I intend on learning something from myself and something from others this year!
If I can be passionate about someone else’s desires and goals I can learn a little about myself and a lot about seeing life through other’s eyes, which in the end will open doors and new angles for my own obsession!
These are just a few of the goals that come to mind! I am sure there are a plethora of other goals, but this is a very good start! I am so excited for this semester so please join me as we once again take the static and turn it dynamic!
Bison vs. Cobbers
This gentleman was taken aback by the bluntness of the question of whether or not he exceeded the age of 40.
A former Concordia Cobber by trade, Paul Wraalstad now works for NDSU as the Director of Operations in the Memorial Union.
After working for Concordia for over 10 years as the Director of Student Programming, this Norwegian decided to grow hooves and loose the husk with the new challenges that would come from trading campuses.
ProfileWhen asked what his favorite thing about working at NDSU, his response, “seeing all the great events put on by students.”
He said that events are a large enhancement to the college experience, and that the Memorial Union functions very differently then Concordia’s did in that way.
Some of his responsibilities at NDSU include making sure everything is prepared and ready for events. He makes sure the set up of tables, chairs and podiums are exactly the way they need to be.
One of his favorite events to tailor for is the Fashion and Design FABO event, because he enjoys seeing the students work.
Wraalstad said he did not always know he was going to be a Director for event set up, when he started in college he wanted to be a music teacher, but shortly switched to psychology.
What he currently does wasn’t “ever on the list of things that came up on my career profile,” he said. But he enjoys the fact that he aides in helping students understand how great the programs at NDSU are.
He said that NDSU is a really cool place for the students if they take advantage of it.
Paul Wraalstad is 43 years of age, and has not lost any of his zeal for making students college experience stand out.
If It Sparks Action, Then Success Has Occured
If this next picture makes you feel hungry, my job as an artist has been accomplished!
The goal behind any work of art should be to incur action or persuade emotion through the use of senses! If the image below starts to make you hungry, then I feel I have shown a compelling enough image to successfully accomplish my goal!
If you have experienced any pains of hunger because of this photo, I am glad you are a normal human being. If not you may be a robot…
In all seriousness the reason art is impacting is because it can effect the five senses in one way or another. It can be persuasive in the way it recalls memories attached to the image. The only reason this is tantalizing is because you have tasted or seen all elements of this picture, the fries, the philly cheese steak! it is all memory recall that causes the salivating. But because it makes you feel something, it is an excellent piece of art!
Look Again
The mind is a powerful thing. It can render before the computer can, it will create before something can be published or printed. All of that can be done in just a blink of an eye. Have you ever thought how blessed we are to be able to mimic creation, through creative endeavors?
The Ever Creative God is the father of true beauty! God created us with intelligence and preferences. We were given life to worship the creator by reflecting the beauty he has sewn into our hearts outwardly. We truly establish just how grand a scale of things He had implemented through our rendition of worship and creativity.
There is so much beauty to be had if we just look around and see. Next time you think something is not beautiful; look again because the ultimate artist may have created that essence as perfect as it needs to be!
Sometimes we cast things aside with out seeing the true beauty. And in all honesty this is as convicting for me as I hope it is for you. I say that to truly change the way we look at at things. If we can see the beauty in the creation from the King, then we can worship with all our heart.
So I implore you, before you give up on something, before you give in on quitting… look again! | http://pmphotography.areavoices.com/ | dclm-gs1-415835528 | false | false | {
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0.022759 | <urn:uuid:7cc22fa0-e88c-4fc5-9541-45615fc943f2> | en | 0.958784 | Pregnancy Week by Week
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How Can I Decrease Baby's SIDS Risk?
SIDS is so scary! What can I do to help prevent it?
The Bump Expert
Every parent knows about SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). It's rare, but probably a parent's worst nightmare. By definition, SIDS has no known cause -- and a very small percent of babies do die during sleep in their first year for no apparent reason. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that nearly 2,500 babies die from SIDS each year in the US. The best way to decrease your baby's risk is to always keep him in a safe environment, including when he's sleeping... which he does a lot!
Lay baby on his back to sleep
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends putting babies to sleep on their backs. Studies show that more babies die when put to sleep on their stomach. We don't totally understand why this is, but it's simply a fact that babies are safer on their backs. Tummy time is fine when babies are awake (and important for exercise and development), but not for unsupervised sleep.
Get a good crib and firm mattress
Make sure your crib complies with current safety standards and has a firm mattress and well-fitting sheet.
Avoid fluffy bedding – including bumpers
You may think bumper pads are cute, but the AAP recommends against using them at all. While bumpers seem like a way to keep baby safe, studies found that they can suffocate, entrap and even strangle babies during sleep. There's also no evidence that says bumpers prevent injuries. Basically, stay away from anything that your baby could get trapped under when he wiggles around.
Take everything out of the crib
Don't worry about using special pillows and equipment to make your baby comfy -- he's just fine flat on his back. Never cover your baby's head with a blanket, avoid loose-fitting PJ's, and keep cuddly toys, blankets, pillows and stuffed animals out of the crib. If you want to use a light blanket to swaddle, that’s fine, but nothing else should be in the crib.
Same room, different bed
While you may want to cuddle with baby at night, this isn’t the best idea. Bed-sharing can expose your baby to additional risks, such as suffocation, asphyxia, entrapment, falls and strangulation, since the situation does not meet sleep safety standards. One study found that 13 percent of the surveyed SIDs victims died while bed-sharing. Another found that though breastfeeding helps reduce baby's SIDS risk, co-sleeping does not. The AAP does recommend room-sharing, where baby sleeps in the same room but on a separate surface. There is evidence that this arrangement decreases the risk of SIDS by as much as 50 percent, since a parent can keep a closer eye on baby.
Turn down the temp
Don't let baby get overheated -- he's just fine covered with a light blanket or a sleep sack. Studies show that heated bedrooms increase SIDS risk by about 4.5 percent, compared to non-heated rooms. Keep the room between 65 and 70 degrees to keep baby comfortable and safe.
Don’t smoke
Be sure to place the crib somewhere smoke-free. In fact, keeping baby away from smoke in general is a good idea – especially when they're still in the womb. Researchers have found that smoking during pregnancy nearly doubles the chance of SIDS for babies.
Seats are for sitting
SIDS used to be called "crib death," so some parents mistakenly believe that putting their baby to sleep on a bed, couch or bassinet will prevent it. This is a myth -- an approved crib is the safest place for a baby.
Even if baby falls asleep in the car seat or stroller, it’s best to transfer them to a crib (yes, even if you’re risking waking them up) if they’ll be asleep for a while. Because babies have poor head control, sleeping while sitting up might increase the risk of upper airway obstruction and oxygen desaturation.
Reducing your baby's risk of SIDS doesn’t have to cost money -- it's just about attention to details. Remember -- even though SIDS is rare, when it's your baby, you’ll want to do everything you can to prevent this from happening.
Dr. Vicki Papadeas
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0.051695 | <urn:uuid:b555d29e-47d1-4635-b26c-a32a37cde072> | en | 0.978194 | Quotes by Irving Layton
Get quotes of the day
How do you feel today? I feel ...
Irving Layton OC (March 12, 1912 January 4, 2006) was a Canadian poet.
Add to my favourites Get these quotes on a PDF
Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.
Progress of a marriage: There was a time when you couldn't make me happy. Now the time has come when you can make me unhappy.
My neighbor doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied.
God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.
When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.
If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets. | http://quotationsbook.com/quotes/author/4268/ | dclm-gs1-416045528 | false | false | {
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0.026439 | <urn:uuid:80e90162-9f4f-4b6b-81c0-9c81ee769efd> | en | 0.974452 | “Tangled Roots” by Marianne K. Martin— Looking Back
tangled rootsMartin, Marianne K. “Tangled Roots”, Bywater Books, 2014.
Looking Back
Amos Lassen
One of the authors I always look forward to reading is Marianne Martin and she never disappoints. “Tangled Roots”, her new book, is quite a story. We meet Addy Grayson, now an old woman who has lived through a great deal. During the Civil War, she was at the mercy of Sherman; her lover was murdered and she has had to live as a widowed woman in the South where, unfortunately people openly talk about their biases. Addy was lucky that she did not lose her land or her family and she has held on to her secrets. It’s a different world now and Addy is raising her grandchildren in it and she is not sure that she will make it through. The novel is set in 1916 and while the country is not as advanced as it is today, for Addy it is plenty modern. She knows of the fears that her granddaughter Anna faces.
Anna and Nessie, her best friend have dreamed of getting jobs and making enough money to go away to college, learn a career and making a difference in the world. They have actually dared to love each other at a time in history when that was the love that dared not speak its name. Looking at the south at that time, dreams like theirs were forbidden.
Anna is the daughter of very comfortable white landowners. She has everything going for her and her father expected her to marry well. It was also expected of and demanded by her by the society of the time. Nessie, on the other hand, came from a family who had been slaves prior to the Civil War and she is expected to keep her land and protect her family.
This is a story about having the right to choose and Martin brings us these two women and shows how they come to terms with the times and love each other regardless of the circumstances. As girls, the two were constant companions and as the world was turning upside down with the somewhat newly freed slave population and overt racism and restrictions on women, they grew to love each other. They had to face unbelievable and unacceptable choices which determine how their relationship was going to last. Interracial relationships were heavily frowned upon as were partnerships of two people of the same sex. Anna and Nessie have to find a way to deal with a Southern community that is all too eager to destroy what they have. They can only love each other secretly. They are forced to live according to the way others think they should.
Marianne Martin writes of their passion for each other and as she does, we get a look at how it was back then and there is no comparison to the way we live now. It was a world based on stereotypes and we all know that a stereotype is a commonly held lie. Martin has created two wonderful characters here and they manage to stay strong in what they believe even though the times will not let their love bloom. We get to know both Nessie and Anna and they seem to be very, very real. I believe that many of us have forgotten how things once were for same/sex couples and this is a brutal reminder. What is really interesting here is how Martin brings to civil rights issues together—race and sexuality and then writes about them with carefully chosen beautiful language. She does the same with the emotions of the characters and I found myself swept up in the story—so much so that I did not stop reading until I finished the book.
“Wicked Reflection” by Hank Edwards—A Nameless Threat
wicked reflection
Edwards, Hank. “Wicked Reflection”, Wilde City Press, 2014.
A Nameless Threat
Amos Lassen
Kirk Stanford dreamt about the day when he will be able to buy his own home but when that finally happened there were a few surprises. As soon as he moved in, strange occurrences took place. Suddenly there were messages on the mirror in steam and he was warned about an unnamed threat. Someone was also trying to break into the house trying to find something yet Kirk has no idea what it is.
Kirk and Damon, his boyfriend, checked into the history of the house and they learned that the former owner was murdered and there were threatening letters written to him by someone named Sam. When the person who tried to break in several times returned one more time, Kirk and Damon realized that they might be murdered before they ever learn the truth about the mystery.
I have read Hank Edwards several times and I always enjoy his work and while this is not the first paranormal mystery he has written, I am going to say that it is his best. Just as Kirk and Damon wonder about what is going on, so did I and I had no hints or clues how to solve the mystery. This is one spooky read. This is also a romance and if you have read Edwards before, you know that he is a fine romance writer. Kirk and Damon share their love with the reader.
Kirk did not know that his new house came with a resident ghost. When he saw the messages on the mirror, Kirk was not sure whether he was being warned or being threatened. Then he learns that his neighbor caught someone trying to break into the house and chased him away. Is into wonder that Kirk was beginning to have misgivings?
The next thing was the appearance of a private eye and with that the mirror messages became more cryptic. Kirk really has nowhere to turn except to Damon and the two of them soon are fighting to stay alive and wondering if the ghost could save them. At this point, my summary ends because if I were to continue, I might spoil a “fun” read.
One of the aspects of Hank Edward’s writing that I have always liked in the way he builds his characters. The seem so real that we can imagine them into the room with us. We watch as the strong Kirk of the beginning becomes a shattered person as the novel continues. Just as he is pulled into what is going on, so are the readers and at times we are not sure if Kirk (and Damon) will survive.
There was no way for me to guess what was to happen and so I read the story very quickly sitting on the edge of my seat.
“(A)SEXUAL”— No Sex Please
asexual poster
No Sex Please
Amos Lassen
Let’s face it—we live in a sex-obsessed world and because of that there are many stereotypes and misconceptions, and a lack of social or scientific research about asexuals; people who experience no sexual attraction. They are struggling to claim their identity. This documentary, “(A)sexual”, looks at the two words “No thanks” as a legitimate sexual preference. We have a community that challenges current paradigms and understandings of human sexuality. Over the last few years we have seen a huge growth in enlightenment and understanding of human sexuality and sexual preference. There have been huge strides in technology and these have resulted in people being able to find communities with similar taste and attractions and this has opened our minds on morality, sexuality, and personal relationships. David Jay is a good-looking young man in his 20’s who told his parents that the was asexual and then he built a network of support and information about others who feel the same way.
The definition of an asexual person is one who is not sexually attracted to either the opposite sex or their same gender. Most of the people who express themselves as such have no desire to go along with society’s expectations of them and have no sexual intercourse at all. The film looks at the usual assumptions that are thrown around about this group of people and then invalidates them. There is no proof that they were abused as children or that they are impotent, inexperienced, scared, just out of a bad relationship or just physically incapable. David Jay tells us that asexuality is not a choice one makes as it is in one’s make up just like being gay is.
David Jay’s story is fascinating and I do not think that I have ever been so challenged by a movie as I was watching his story. I have never really thought about the impact of a sexual relationship in creating intimacy in a relationship or about the challenges that are faced with sex and the electricity and energy it creates and it becomes clear that our behavioral attributes are part of relationships.
His group is called AVEN (Asexual Visibility Education Network) and it was started in San Francisco to give the group some visibility, and they chose to participate in the Gay Pride March. Dan Savage the witty Sex Therapist says that perhaps LGBT should be changed to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Genderqueer, Questioning Women, etc., etc. and now a group wants to add asexual. Neither to Savage or to me does this makes any sense at all. Why would asexuals want to join the Pride march, one that celebrates all the freedoms that gay people have fought hard just to be able to have the sex they want when what they want is the right not to have any sex at all?
A problem I had here was that throughout the film there were constant comparisons of asexuality with homosexuality and the only thing that they share in common is that they are both considered to be deviant from what society considers as its norm (whatever that means). Then there is the problem of understanding romance without sexual intimacy.
David Jay explains that he has devised a strategy for evaluating and building relationships known as ‘the three Ts': time (the amount of time you dedicate to a person), touch (physical or verbal expressions of feelings) and talk (clearly communicating expectations for the relationship). Then it kind of made sense— an asexual can date, fall in love and even marry (as they did during this film) without wanting to have sex with their partner.
At the end of the film David is interviewed two years later. AVEN is still growing strong, but David has had a major re-think. It’s not that he wants to have sex BUT now aged 29 he has come to the conclusion that the fulfilling relationship that he so craves with one person can only be complete and reach intimacy if he has sex. Including this last interview and seeing this very earnest young man struggle with reality of his beliefs didn’t make us doubt how sincere he is but it certainly is confusing. left me more than confused than him.
“THE DREAM CHILDREN”— Finding Meaning in a Superficial World
the dream children
“The Dream Children”
Finding Meaning in a Superficial World
Amos Lassen
Steven Evans (Graeme Squires) is an Australian TV personality but he lives a life of superficiality. The sad thing is that he created this himself and now he wants to find some meaning in his life. He has been materialistic and the fact that he is a known celebrity puts him in a special category. The only time that Steven feels that he gets away from his world is when he goes to the ocean where he has meaningless sexual encounters. Steven does have a partner, Alex, (Nicholas Gunn) who decides that it is time for them to become fathers but Steven is reluctant. However that soon changed when he finds the situation to be filled with love and he soon feels a very strong bond to his new family.
the dream
That changes, however, when an unexpected visitor arrives and a series of events pushes Steven and his family into a situation of loneliness, grief and self-destruction. As a celebrity, Steven was is very hot and in demand and both men and women love him. He has a secret that only Alex, his biggest fan knows and partner knows. However, Steven knows that if he wants to continue in his career, he must remain in the closet totally.
Because of having to deceive everyone both Alex and Steven are not happy and they search for ways to deal with this. Steven does so by having anonymous sex with strangers and Alex throws himself completely into his project of building a new home for himself and Steven on the beach. Then at a meeting with his architect, Alex changes the house design to include a nursery. This throws Steven off but once he eventually realizes that Alex is really serious about starting a family, he slowly accepts it.
There is one problem though. At the time the film takes place (early 2000’s), gay adoption was not yet legal in Australia and neither was gay marriage. Alex met a very pregnant young woman, Nerine, who is having a hard time financially and does not want to keep her baby. He and Steven are willing to pay for it and Nerine, while apprehensive of giving her baby to two gay men, agrees to sell them her child. They name him Sammy and he becomes an integral part of their lives.
the dream2
We get a sense of the happiness that has come the two men until a couple of years later when Nerine turns up at their home with a very rough companion and Steven’s and Alex’s world is turned upside down.
The film is directed by Rob Chuter, a noted Australian director and he chose not to downplay the passion about the subject matter, and he reminds us of how very difficult some situations were, and still are, for same sex couples. The two leads are both excellent and buff enough to participate in naked sensual lovemaking scenes, but that they are both very talented well-known Australian actors. Make sure you have tissues handy; there is a lot of emotion in the film.
“THE WAY HE LOOKS”— Opens Nationwide on November 7, 2014
Starring Ghilherme Lobo, Fabio Audi and Tess Amorim
Opens Nationwide on November 7, 2014
View Trailer
YouTube Trailer: http://youtu.be/rcb0VnB2vnQ
Vimeo Trailer: https://vimeo.com/104667446
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize and Teddy Award, Berlin International Film Festival
Winner, Audience Award, Frameline Film Festival
Winner, Audience Award, Outfest
Winner, Audience Award for Best Feature, NewFest
Set against the music of Belle and Sebastian, Daniel Ribeiro’s coming of age tale, THE WAY HE LOOKS is a fun and tender story about friendship and the complications of young love. Leo is a blind teenager who’s fed up with his overprotective mother and the bullies at school. Looking to assert his independence, he decides to study abroad to the dismay of his best friend, Giovana. When Gabriel, the new kid in town, teams with Leo on a school project, new feelings blossom in him that make him reconsider his plans. Meanwhile, Giovana, grows jealous of this new found companionship as tensions mount between her and Leo.
96 Minutes • Drama • Not Rated • In Portuguese with English Subtitles
“BEAUTIFUL BY NIGHT”– Older drag performers in San Francisco— A New Documentary
“Beautiful By Night”
Older drag performers in San Francisco
“Beautiful By Night” by James Hosking is a 30-minute documentary that focuses on three older drag entertainers at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It’s an intimate look at Olivia Hart, Collette LeGrande, and Donna Personna.
Starting out with how they transform themselves from middle-aged men into lip-syncing divas, it then follows them to Aunt Charlie’s for their evening performance. It’s a great look at people who are still holding to the drag ideas of the past, before the sharp and rather arch performers of today took over. It’s a perhaps more ramshackle style but it has warmth.
“A Gathering Storm” by Jameson Currier– Gay in the South
a gathering storm
Currier, Jameson. “A Gathering Storm”, Chelsea Station, 2014.
Gay in the South
Amos Lassen
When I learned that Jameson Currier’s new book was about a young gay man in the South, I was very anxious to read it. First, Currier never disappoints and is a writer that I look forward to reading. Secondly while I live in the North now, I will always be a son of the South. Currier gives us the story of a hate crime in the South that was inspired by real events.
The novel is set in a small and unnamed town, the home of a university, somewhere in the South. Danny is a student at the school and one Monday night right after school began, he met two guys, Rick and A.J. in a local bar and the three left together. Danny did not come—he was left to die after he had been savagely beaten and tied to a fence. He was found until the next day and in addition to his wounds he suffered from exposure and was taken to the hospital. It did not take long for the news to spread and soon the town was deluged with media people and the news spread quickly to the entire country. I am sure that this story sounds familiar to many who remember what happened to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming and there are other similarities as well but what struck me the most was that Currier actually began this book some ten years ago before the Internet was quite as popular or fast as it is today and I will write of that a bit later. Currier does tell us in his introduction that the Shepard case was the initial inspiration for this book.
The novel opens with the crime that indeed resembles the Shepard scenario and then two different stories that come together follow. One of the stories deals with how the crime affected the people in the college town and the other relates what went on during Danny’s lost day of life. As we read we become aware of the way Danny’s story changes during the week and we see how is community deals with the story, how it is viewed by the media and by the others as they understand the story and then use it for whatever purpose they might have.
I want to be clear in that this is not just another telling of Danny’s story—it is much more. We hear from Danny’s family and his friends, by those who perpetrated the crime, by some of Danny’s schoolmates at the university and by those who were affected by the crime even though they had never made Danny. We get details that we might not otherwise had known. For me, this is what makes this book special—Currier tells us about how the community was affected immediately afterwards and what in the community allowed it happen in the first place. Because the community was small, there were secrets that might otherwise have never come out and the myth of life in a small town falls apart.
The effect of technology certainly played an important part in the news getting out. Moving ahead to today when we get news almost immediately, we can only imagine how this would be handled. Perhaps the greatest difference would be how something that was a big news story one day becomes almost forgotten two days later when another story takes it place. We see something else here and this is how the news of the crime affected individuals and the way that they reacted to it.
I remember all too well how we reacted to the Shepard case and then little by little the picture changed but not right away. When I lived in New Orleans I was friendly with two guys from Laramie who told me a completely different version of what happened to Matthew Shepard that was far from what everyone else heard. Then in the last two years, another book was written that reinforced the story that I heard but the author came under severe reprimand for having published what he did because it was at odds with the “accepted” hate crime interpretation. Jameson Currier shares with us in his “Author’s Note” that he indeed did research to write this novel and further reminds us that this is a work of fiction. Details have been changed and we certainly get a much more emotional read than if this had been nonfiction. There is a lot to be experienced here and Currier tells his story with style, grace and his traditionally beautiful prose and this is a story we need to hear, fiction or otherwise.
What is important to note is that even though Currier set his book in the South, it could have happened anywhere. Currier organized the book so that chapters go back and forth between the story of what happened to Danny and what happened afterwards. Danny knew and accepted that he was gay but he was dismayed that it would be impossible to find romantic love in his small town and it would be just as hard to be out about his sexuality.
Currier chose the present tense for the story and that makes it so very real for the reader. He also looks at the lives of A.J. and Rick and this adds something new to the story.
This is not an easy read but then it is never easy to read about hate. Yet this is something that we must be aware of so that if it happens again, we know how to deal with it. Some of it is very hard to read and that it why it has taken me so long to sit down and write about it. Death is permanent and we do not want to see anyone wind up that way because of unnecessary hatred.
“The Golem of Hollywood” by Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman— A Supernatural Mystery
Kellerman, Jonathan and Jesse. “The Golem of Hollywood”,
Putnam Adult, 2014.
A Supernatural Mystery
Amos Lassen
The story of the Golem of Prague seems to be a story that will last forever—each new generation is taken with it. The Golem was a creature fashioned by a sixteenth-century rabbi to protect his congregation and it is now lying dormant in the garret of a synagogue or so was thought. It appears that the Golem is no longer.
When detective Jacob Lev awakes one morning, he is confused and befuddled. He thinks that he picked up a beautiful girl in a bar the night before but he can’t really remember anything more about it and she is suddenly gone before he realizes it or has a chance to ask a question. This is but a minor mystery when we consider his new case. He is sent to investigate a murder scene high up in the Hollywood hills. He has received a new assignment to a Special Projects squad, one he did not know ever existed. No body could be found and all that was there was a head, unidentified, on the floor of the house. Burned into the wooden kitchen counter was the word “justice” written in Hebrew.
This case will take Lev on quite a journey—Los Angeles, other parts of America, London and Prague and it will test all that he has learned and believed. Jonathan and Jesse Kellermans (father and son) give us a book that is part mystery, part folklore, part fantasy, and part biblical history lesson. There are parallel stories and we meet the following characters: Jacob Lev, a discredited alcoholic former LAPD detective, busted to traffic patrol, the family of Cain and Abel, Jacob’s father Sam, rabbinic and Kabala scholar who is dealing with the memory of Jacob’s bi-polar (schizophrenic) artistic mother, a mysterious faction of the LAPD, calling themselves “Special Projects,” that mysteriously enlists Lev to solve a bizarre case and then there are giant bugs, the Golem of Prague and Rabbi Loeb/Loew who created the Golem back in 1580
Lev is given a credit card, a computer, some forensic assistance, and instructions to solve the case. As he moves to begin his investigation so does the Cain and Abel family. Lev travels though Hollywood, to Prague and beyond, hunting down the perpetrator(s) of the crimes and the mysteries behind them. Actually solving the crime is no problem—it is how Lev solves it. The story begins in the present and we learn that Lev had once been a religious Orthodox Jew who is now an agnostic. Because of his religious background he is put on the case and then the action of the story moves back in time to the Bible and to the story of Cain and Abel. In fact the entire book moves back and forth in time.
There are chapters about Lev, his police work and personal life and then there is the Biblical story and then there is the story of the 16th century Jewish mystic, the Maharal of Prague, and his legendary golem. It does help if you know some of the Jewish background but it is not really necessary.
So we have these story lines going on and eventually they merge but much later. Lev’s story is straightforward and cleverly printed on white paper while the biblical story of Cain and Abel is printed on pages with a tint. In this way, it is possible, but not recommended, to read each story separately.
The Detective Lev story is presented to the reader on white pages. The story of Cain & Abel story comes to us on white paper which has a kind of misty tint to the pages. If you wanted, you could read the stories separately because the white pages stand out clearly from the tinted pages.
The two stories take place in cultures which are entirely different from each other and which are separated by thousands of years. Both are excellent reads with great dialogue, plot and characters. Then we add the Golem story which does not come together with the others until the very end. There were moments when I admired the ambition of the authors but then were also moments when I felt that this had to be one of the most ludicrous books I have ever read. Here we meet a cop who at 31 one years old is washed up in his career, has been married and divorced twice, a Harvard dropout and a drinker. But he is also a Jew, albeit a lapsed one and we do not find too many Jewish cops (in California anyway). Because of this, he gets a special assignment and our story begins. And this is also where I stop summarizing and chide you to get a copy and have a great time reading this book.
“Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism” by Judith Butler— Judith Butler Has Her Say and Falls from the Ivory Tower
parting ways
Butler, Judith. “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism” (New Directions in Critical Theory), Columbia University Press, 2012.
Judith Butler Has Her Say and Falls from the Ivory Tower
Amos Lassen
Judith Butler was one of my heroes when I was both a graduate and undergraduate student. But then Butler took a turn and lost many who loved and respected her. I am so reminded of what happened to Hannah Arendt and how she was left alone after having done so much academically. Butler, however, is a much more serious case. She is a critic of political Zionism and she maintains that it uses illegitimate state violence, promotes nationalism (dud!) and state-sponsored racism. She looks at various thinkers— Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish and then gives her new political ethic which while indeed political is not in any way ethical. She has decided to dispute Israel’s claim to represent the Jewish people. She tries to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She then “ promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality”.
She looks back at the arguments of Zionist thinkers and disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her new political ethic rests on a vision of “cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism”. Her ideas are drawn from Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish and form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought while derived in part from Jewish resources are always in relation to the non-Jew.
Butler looks the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. Further she revisits and affirms Edward Said’s late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler presents a startling suggestion: “Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy”. It seems that her purpose is to intervene in the current political discourse and give her own Jewish concern about the state of Israel and how it relates to the “other”. She says that it is possible to develop a perspective on Israel/Palestine that is not Zionist and therefore it is easier to assert resistance to the Zionist movement as a Jewish value. In doing so, Butler question what it means to be Jewish and we see that she has no idea of an answer to that question—although she thinks she does.
In effect what Butler does here is attack Israel and its policies as it has been since the country’s birth. It is very clear that she has adopted to Arab narrative and she accuses Israel of state – violence, willful dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs. What she does not do is put the conflict in proper historical context. She does not even try to look at Israel’s efforts of peace with her neighbors. She also does not consider the constant and repeated that Israel has suffered from those who wish to destroy the country (and at all costs). I am quite sure that Butler derived some happiness with the latest attacks by Hamas against Israel. Hamas clearly states that it wants to see all Jews wiped off the face of the earth and that would also include Butler herself. She says that the constant threat is minimal yet she does not argue for the expulsion of the Jews of Israel as other anti-Zionists do. Her preference is for one-state solution and she believes that if that were to happen, then social equality would prevail and become the rule. As I look at America today from my home in Massachusetts, one of the states that does maintain some semblance of social equality, I think about those Americans living in Arkansas and Mississippi who have never experienced any kind of equality much less social.
Butler here relies on Jewish thinkers of the past Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and Walter Benjamin to explain this concept. Two of the other thinkers she relies upon, Edward Said and Mohammed Darwish want to see the State of Israel gone. as sources for her thought. Her thought, along with theirs, delegitimizes the Jewish state.
She also goes back to Hannah Arendt but she needs a refresher course on her. Arendt worked to send refugees in France to Israel , and told her great friend Mary McCarthy before the Six- Day War that the one public tragedy which would cause her greatest pain was destruction of Israel. Interesting that she would not include this but then it goes against her thinking. Has she also forgotten that Arendt was vilified by Jews after her thoughts on Eichmann were made public? Of course Butler has Sarah Schulman on her side but Schulman is little more than a nasty voice from an anti-Semitic Jew. Schulman always needs a cause and this year’s is Palestine—next year she may rail against breakfast cereal—the cause makes no difference but Schulman must rabble rouse about something otherwise she loses reason to exist.
Butler has distorted the thought of some Jewish intellectuals but she has done something even worse— she sides with and defends the enemies of Israel at the time that Israel’s existence is in great danger with the existence of the universal against the country. What is interesting is that she, like Schulman, holds on the being Jewish while other Jews of the radical left have abandoned their religion. This, for me, is the most offensive thing of all.
Butler (and her advocate Schulman) are totally ignorant of the history of the Jewish people and their relation to the land. She does not let any facts hinder what she has to say or her agenda which is fiction. There was never a Palestinian Arab nation in the Middle East. She ignores that.
Butler is an obvious Jewish anti-Semite. Here this is not a name but a disease. She cannot see reality and. comes across as being somewhat mentally off. Israel cannot be separated from the Jewish people.
Trying the “separate” Israel from the Jewish people has been tried before and it has failed miserably before. What I do not understand is why Butler and her kind feel they have to espouse what they think here in the United States. Would they not be more comfortable in Gaza where there are many like them? For Schulman that would be an impossibility as she is an out lesbian and we are all aware at how Islam deals with sexual “deviants”. Butler is protected here in America and she can say whatever she wants.
I do not understand how American universities hire these people and allow them to spew their hatred. These are the minds that will teach future generations of Americans—we can only hope, that for once, they do not listen. Is it wrong to hope that she would part ways with us like her title suggests?
Below is some biographical information about Judith Butler—such a wonderful mind that is used for no gain.
“Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University and was recently awarded the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities. Her many books include The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (with Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West); Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak); and Is Critique Secular? (with Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Wendy Brown)”.
“Homosexuality and Masturbation Refuted” by Prof WA Liebenberg— WTF???????
homosexuality and masturbation refuted
Liebenberg, WA Prof. “Homosexuality and Masturbation Refuted”, Amazon Digital Services, Inc.. 2014
Amos Lassen
We live in a world where anyone who wants to write a book about anything can do so and Amazon will sell it. How this piece of trash ever got published I will never know nor will I understand. Let me give you the blurb in the author’s own words:
“Most homosexuals and their heterosexual supporters argue that homosexuality is an inborn condition, and one, moreover, that is no less valid than heterosexuality. They maintain that to discriminate in any way against a person because of his or her sexual orientation is the moral equivalent of discrimination against a person on the basis of colour or religion; that is to say, “rubbish” plain and simple. Jewish law also clearly prohibits male masturbation.” (Does anyone see any connection between these ideas?).
“I keep hearing people say that YHWH hates sin but loves the sinner. Is it really what the Bible teaches? There are of course plenty verses in the Bible about how God hates the sinner. (Where are they?) It is mind boggling how quick Christians can ‘select’ certain verses of the Old Covenant and then leave the rest out which as they say “does not apply anymore”…” (Can you give examples?)
“The study proves: (says who?)
• Sexual relations/acts between homosexuals are clearly forbidden by the Torah. Such acts are condemned in the strongest possible terms, as abhorrent. (They are? Chapter and verse please—at least he spelled abhorrent correctly).
• The sin of sexual relations/acts between homosexuals is punishable by death by YHWH’s standard. (It is? Chapter and verse please)
• Homosexuals and pro-gay church leaders grossly misinterpret Scriptures concerning the relationship between Jonathan and David to promote homosexuality in the Bible. (They do?)
• Masturbation is forbidden in the Bible. (Chapter and verse please—what is written here seems to be part of the author’s masturbatory fantasy).
• YHWH hates the wicked and sin. (Define “wisked and sin” as YHWH [who?] does).
Brace yourself, this booklet will challenge you!” (I am not challenged but I am amazed at your stupidity, however).
Yes indeed—you will be challenged—I am challenged to find the jackass who wrote this book and tell him a thing or two. I have no idea what Torah he looked at but it was not the one I read everyday. I have never read such garbage in my life and this man claims to be a professor? Why am I even bothering with this poor excuse of humanity? He is a lonely turd sitting on the toilet of his own life.
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0.026659 | <urn:uuid:e67d94e7-f559-4bc0-abfc-09ba0063803b> | en | 0.897957 | On this page:
• Wiki organization challenge – thinking out loud
• Wiki information architecture thoughts
• Information gardening tasks
Wiki organization challenge – thinking out loud
Here are a few options I’m considering:
Wiki information architecture thoughts
Even though a wiki is a free-form, unstructured, organic information repository, it needs to be organized so that users don’t get overwhelmed by information. So, how do you organize information on a wiki?
Wikipatterns is a great site for people and adoption patterns, but it doesn’t give tips on how to organize the information. So here are some tips to help you organize your wiki:
Visual identity
A banner, customized colour scheme, and a sidebar may seem unnecessary. When you’re creating lots of pages, it’s a pain to copy-and-paste the template. But a visual identity for your wiki helps people recognize when they’re looking at one of its pages and it gives them a consistent way to navigate to the major parts of your site. Tip: If your wiki allows you to include other wiki pages, put template segments on separate pages and then include them. This saves you from editing hundreds of pages whenever your navigation menu changes.
Write the homepage content for a general audience instead of for specialized roles. Provide information about your team and about the wiki. Save the detailed links for other navigation pages that are linked to from the homepage. Link to other resources people might find useful, too.
Multiple navigation pages
Create multiple ways to navigate through the same information space. For example, if project managers need to access certain kinds of information quickly, create a page for them with shortcuts to the resources they need.
Contact information
Always have a contact person for the wiki. Encourage people to edit the wiki themselves if they feel comfortable, but provide a way for them to contact someone else with changes or new resources if they’re not comfortable working with the wiki themselves.
Related resources and the big picture
Link to other resources your team or community uses (other websites, file repositories, Lotus Notes teamrooms, communities, etc.). Show the big picture: when do people use the wiki, and when do people use other resources? What’s stored where?
If you need to store information that doesn’t have a proper home yet, have a area on your wiki where you can store snippets that are still being worked on. That way, the rough drafts don’t confuse people browsing through the rest of the wiki. Use this space to store administrivia about the wiki as well, such as snippets for the sidebar.
Handling information requests
When people ask you for information that’s on the wiki, ask them where they looked for it and what they searched for. After you send them the resource, build the missing links so that people can find it easily.
Duplicate information
If you need to copy and paste information instead of including it, pick one place where the latest information will be, and provide links to that place when you paste the information into other pages. This will help you resolve conflicts in the future. If you can, provide backlinks to where the information has been copied, so that you know where you need to update it.
Document what you need to do in order to update the wiki, where things are, and how information is organized. This helps you teach other people how to use the wiki.
Automatic lists
Many wikis can automatically list the children of a page, pages in a given category, or pages with a given label. Use this feature to save you from manually updating lists of pages.
Pretty vs. editable
Pretty layouts tend to be difficult to edit without breaking. Simple layouts tend to be plain. Depending on your target audience, decide where your wiki will be. Do you expect lots of participation? Keep the page layout simple and avoid advanced macros. Do you work with a finicky group that will only use polished resources? Invest in styling, and accept that you might be the only one adding to the wiki.
Internal vs. external links
When linking to other pages in the wiki, try to use internal wiki links instead of copying and pasting the URLs. Most wikis indicate external links with icons. If you use internal wiki links, you avoid the visual clutter and show people that they can expect to have the same navigation when they click through.
There are more things to share, but this braindump is a good start! Have you come across something like this (preferably with more detail)? I’d love to learn from what other people are doing.
Information gardening tasks
A large part of my work involves capturing and organizing information. It takes a surprising lot of time and thought. Here are some of the things I do:
• Capture and file information, relevant mail, work in progress, final output, etc.
• Help people find information and improve the findability along the way
• Create and refine navigation (links, new pages, etc.)
• Move information from private spaces to public spaces
• Facilitate and summarize online discussions
• Coach people on tool use and answer support questions
• Document and refine processes
• Set up communities, discussions, and other sub-sites
• Recommend processes and improvements
• Correct obsolete links and assets
I do that across multiple tools (Wikis, Communities, TeamRooms, Activities, e-mail), with a team of mixed early, mainstream and late adopters and changing communities of learners.
I think of this as information gardening. I can’t architect a beautiful information structure from the beginning. I don’t know what the final result will look like. All I can do is support, organize, water, tie, and prune. I have to find out what paths people use, then pave them to make finding things a little easier.
It’s not easy. It’s less engaging or measurable than programming, where you can track your progress by the defects you close and the features you build. But it creates a lot of value and helps scale up the effect of our group’s work. Why do I do it?
• I’m building an example of how social computing can support a team.
• I’m learning more about emergent information architecture.
• I’m developing and documenting practices that other people might find useful.
How am I learning about this? Mostly through inspiration, practice, and reflection. I collect examples of well-organized wikis and I talk to other teams who use combinations of tools. I handle my team members’ requests and questions, and I think about how we can organize things better.
If you want your team to get more value out of social tools and knowledge sharing, you’ll probably need someone doing work like this.
Anyone else doing this? Want to share notes? | http://sachachua.com/blog/tag/information/?order=desc | dclm-gs1-416175528 | false | false | {
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0.02194 | <urn:uuid:0d9c24e5-ffa4-427a-bcaf-531d8a6e07e5> | en | 0.933031 | Corral virtual server backup
The popularity of VMware virtual servers has grown significantly in the last few years, prompting questions about how to back them up. In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems, W. Curtis Preston writes about the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods of protecting virtual server data.
This excerpt from W. Curtis Preston's new book Backup & Recovery describes the three different ways to back up a VMware server, and the pros and cons of each method.
There are several ways to back up VMware servers depending on whether the servers are running VMware Server or VMware ESX Server. In this excerpt from his new book Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems, W. Curtis Preston writes about the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods. Preston also tells how to use bare-metal recovery to migrate to VMware, and how he turned 25 very old physical servers into "one very nice VMware server."
Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems
by W. Curtis Preston
ISBN: 0-596-10246-1
Copyright 2007 O'Reilly Media Inc.
Used with the permission of O'Reilly Media Inc.
Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media at
The popularity of VMware virtual servers has grown significantly in the last few years, prompting questions on how to back them up. First, we'll describe the architecture of VMware and follow that with a discussion of how to back it up.
VMware architecture
VMware currently comes in two basic flavors, VMware Server and VMware ESX Server. VMware Server is a free version of VMware that offers basic virtual server capabilities and runs inside Linux or Windows. Each virtual machine is represented as a series of files in a subdirectory of a standard filesystem that you specify; the subdirectory carries the name of the virtual machine. For example, if you've chosen to store your virtual machines in /vmachines, and you have a virtual host called Windows 2000, its files will be located in /vmachines/Windows 2000.
While VMware Server runs inside standard Linux or Windows, VMware ESX Server uses a custom Linux kernel and a custom filesystem, VMFS, to store virtual machine files. You can also store virtual machine files on raw disk partitions. Neither the raw disk partitions nor files in a VMFS filesystem can be accessed by all backup commands, so you probably need to back them up in a special way.
VMware backups
When backing up a VMware machine, you have to back up the operating system of the VMware server (known as the service console on ESX systems) and the VMware application itself. You also need to back up each virtual machine's files. However, you cannot simply back up the virtual machine files or raw disks with a standard backup program. The virtual disks are constantly open and changing while the virtual machines are running and you will not receive a consistent backup of them. Even open file agents won't necessarily work properly if the virtual machines are gigabytes in size. You therefore have three options for backing up virtual machines running inside VMware:
• Back up virtual machines as physical machines.
• Back up virtual files while virtual machines are suspended.
• Use VMware's built-in tools to copy a running virtual machine's files.
Back up virtual machines as physical machines
This is, of course, the easy method. Simply pretend that each virtual machine is a physical machine, and back it up as such. This method has both advantages and disadvantages.
Tip: If you use this method, don't forget to exclude the virtual machine files when you're backing up the VMware Server or ESX service console.
The first advantage of this method is that you can use the same backup system as the rest of your data center. Just because the machines are virtual doesn't mean you have to treat them as such. This simplifies your backup system. It also allows you to take advantage of full and incremental backups. Unless your backup software is able to perform subfile incremental backups, the other two methods perform full backups every day because the entire virtual machine is represented by a single file that will certainly change every day. Finally, it allows you to back up the systems live.
The disadvantage is that you have to configure backups for each virtual machine. Some may prefer to configure one backup for the entire VMware server. If you're using a commercial backup software package, this also increases your cost because you must buy a license for each virtual machine. A final disadvantage is that you also need to configure a bare-metal recovery backup for each virtual machine. Each of the other two methods won't need such a backup because restoring the virtual machine is all that's needed to perform its bare-metal recovery.
Back up suspended virtual machine files
If you can afford the downtime for each virtual machine, all you have to do is suspend a virtual machine prior to backing up its files. You can then back up the virtual machine files using your favorite backup program because the files won't be open or changing during your backup. The suspend function in VMware works just the same as on your laptop (and some servers). The current memory image and running processes are saved to a file that is then accessed when you power it on, causing all running processes to resume where they left off just before you suspended the machine.
You can now back up the virtual files using any method you choose. After backups have completed, you can restart the machine with the following command:
Using bare-metal recovery to migrate to VMware
One of the really nice things about using VMware (or other virtual server solutions) is that you don't have to worry about bare-metal recovery of the virtual servers. As long as you can get them to not change during a backup, all you have to do is back up their files.
1. I used the alt-boot full image method to create an image of the entire /dev/hda hard drive to an NFS mount on the new VMware server. (These images were typically 4GB to 10GB. They were old servers!)
2. I used VMware to create a virtual machine specifying a virtual IDE hard drive that was much bigger than the original, usually about 20GB or 40GB.
4. I booted the virtual machine into Knoppix using the virtual Knoppix CD.
6. I "removed" the Knoppix CD by changing the symbolic link to point to an ISO image of a nonbootable CD and rebooted the virtual server.
8. I installed VMware tools into each virtual machine, which made their video and other drivers much happier.
With 4GB of RAM and a 3.5GHz dual-core processor, I can run about eight virtual servers at a time without swapping. I typically only need a few at a time, and what's important is that I have Exchange 2000, SQL Server X, or XYZ x.x running; they don't need to run that fast. (That's how I was able to get by with those old servers for so long.) Each virtual server can have access to either one of the Fibre Channel cards or SCSI cards, which gives them access to every physical and virtual tape drive in the lab. They will also have more CPU, disk, and RAM than they ever had in their old machine. (I can even temporarily give any of them the entire 3.5GHz processor and almost all of the 4GB of RAM if I need to, and I don't have to swap chips or open up any CPU thermal compound to do it!)
I also get to have hundreds of virtual servers and not have any logistical or cooling issues, since each server only represents 20GB–50GB of space on the hard drive. I can have a Windows 2000 server running no special apps, one running Exchange 5, one running SQL Server 7, a server running Windows 2003 with no special apps, one with Exchange 2000, and one running Windows Vista. I could have servers running every distribution of Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris x86--and all of the applications those servers support. I think you get the point. I've got enough space for about 300 virtual server combinations like that. It boggles the mind.
This was first published in June 2007
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0.053299 | <urn:uuid:0cc6ad9c-867e-4af5-987e-8ff2b064576f> | en | 0.894491 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
• WinXP VM on ESXi v4.1 infrastructure system, accessible via vSphere thick client and RDP
• WinXP client (i.e. my laptop) with a device connected to the serial port
How do I get the VM to talk to the device connected to my local system?
Already tried: - Ensuring that all boxes are checked in the "Local Resources" tab on RDC client, trying it and running it as is (it did not appear to 'just work')
share|improve this question
What makes you think you can? – Chopper3 Apr 6 '13 at 19:28
1 Answer 1
Serial Ports over RDP requires RDP v7.0 (mstsc.exe 6.1 or newer). It is natively available in Win7and Server 2008R2, and WinXP's client can be upgraded.
share|improve this answer
Thanks for the info! So that takes care of the client. What about the host WinXP that I'm connecting to? – Dan Coates Apr 7 '13 at 6:45
Your Answer
| http://serverfault.com/questions/496876/getting-vm-on-esxi-to-use-com-ports-on-local-thin-client | dclm-gs1-416395528 | false | false | {
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0.130406 | <urn:uuid:40640a75-ab6a-4282-893b-667cd8eb322d> | en | 0.935029 | potraži bilo koju reč, kao na primer ebola-head:
3 definitions by dpwupam
(verb) being lazing. used to say you are being lazing but of course that takes too much time and effort so you just say you are "lazing".
tom: dude why don't you change your profile pic, you've had it for three years!
john: dude... I'm lazing right now. Go away.
po dpwupam Август 25, 2011
Joe: Wow, it still feels like it night.
James: You guys!!! It's the evenmorn!!
po dpwupam Јун 7, 2011
after coming back from a long trip, or summer vacation for students, and your handwriting is absolutely horrible. It takes around a week to get rid of summer hand.
Teacher: Jimmy, what the hell is this.
Jimmy: It's my essay, Mrs. Shliken
Teacher: This is ridiculous, I can't even read it.
Jimmy: Well i'm sorry Mrs. Shliken, I'm suffering from severe summer hand. I havn't written a word all summer!
po dpwupam Август 24, 2010 | http://sr.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=dpwupam | dclm-gs1-416665528 | false | false | {
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0.030723 | <urn:uuid:297acc11-e2c6-4e0c-b55e-f05d5443064a> | en | 0.752735 | potraži bilo koju reč, kao na primer ebola-head:
To feel wasted, not of self, totally gone.
Not related to Patrick Swayze
Today, Ricardo went to a party and got schwazy.
Alysha never had a purple drank before and got schwazy.
Edwin ran a mile and got schwazy.
po skurrrtttt Април 4, 2010 | http://sr.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schwazy | dclm-gs1-416675528 | false | false | {
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0.494768 | <urn:uuid:979c0831-9dbf-4536-9bfb-b2147da269b9> | en | 0.90396 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
Learning how to use the Java PlayFrameWork and it talks about how you can do asynchronous server programming - by that I mean, if a result takes a long time to produce, you can return a promise of a result - informing the browser that a result will be returned.
Can I ask what in HTTP terms this does and how browsers commonly deal with it?
Also, can a result promise be returned to an AJAX call?
share|improve this question
Not sure if it will help but checkout a screencast I did that explains Reactive (Async + Non-Blocking) with Play Framework: jamesward.com/2013/10/30/… – James Ward Jan 1 at 18:29
1 Answer 1
up vote 0 down vote accepted
Nothing is returned to the browser before HTTP response is created by server. This asynchronicity is purely inside Play application and is invisible from client. It's a bit complicated to explain here. This could help you to understand what's going on: http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.x/ThreadPools
If you'd like to learn more, take a look at Akka (Play is based on it): http://akka.io/ or I can also recommend perfect course: https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive
To answer your second question, yes of course you can handle AJAX requests asynchronously as well.
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Your Answer
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0.302121 | <urn:uuid:b3840111-8f90-4c9f-ad33-8b6ce3251607> | en | 0.803648 | Take the 2-minute tour ×
I've got a UIButton that, when selected, shouldn't change state when being touched. The default behaviour is for it to be in UIControlStateHighlighted while being touched, and this is making me angry.
share|improve this question
8 Answers 8
up vote 89 down vote accepted
In IB you can uncheck "highlight adjusts image"
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Any chance you know what the programmatic version of this would be? Right now I've got it working hackishly by making it disabled, and dressing it up as being selected. – kbanman Feb 17 '10 at 6:50
uibutton.adjustsImageWhenHighlighted = NO; – Haydn Feb 20 '10 at 3:53
Also make sure the button type is set to CUSTOM. (As Mosib Asad mentioned in another answer) – Vlad Lego Jul 30 at 16:04
This will work for you:
[button setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"button_image"] forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[button setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"button_image_selected"] forState:UIControlStateSelected];
[button setBackgroundImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"button_image_selected"] forState:UIControlStateSelected | UIControlStateHighlighted];
3rd line is the trick here...
This works the same for setting image/backgroundImage
share|improve this answer
This works perfect for me. The adjustsImageWhenHighlighted property of UIButton seems to affect only the background image. – Michael Thiel May 7 '12 at 15:30
Be aware, that if do decide to assign an image to the 'disabled state', you do not call setBackgroundImage. Instead, you should do the following [button setImage:image forState:UIControlStateDisabled]; Also also be aware, that as is mentioned in this thread, the adjustsImageWhenHighlighted UIButton property only effects the background image. – HamasN Jul 22 '13 at 5:58
adjustsImageWhenHighlighted = NO;
share|improve this answer
button.adjustsImageWhenDisabled = NO;
is equally useful for having your own appearance of a disabled button.
share|improve this answer
In addition to above answer of unchecking "highlight adjusts image" in IB, make sure that button type is set CUSTOM.
share|improve this answer
Depending on what changes from the default to the highlighted state of the button, you can call a couple of methods to set them to what you need. So if the image changes you can do
[myButton setImage:[myButton imageForState:UIControlStateNormal] forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
If the text changes you can do
[myButton setTitle:[myButton titleForState:UIControlStateNormal] forState:UIControlStateHighlighted];
other similar functions:
- (void)setTitleColor:(UIColor *)color forState:(UIControlState)state
- (void)setTitleShadowColor:(UIColor *)color forState:(UIControlState)state
share|improve this answer
setTitleColor is all i needed to disable highlight on uibutton's text – atulkhatri Sep 3 at 17:48
OK here's an easy solution if this works for you, after a week of banging my head on this it finally occurred to me to just set highlighted=NO for the 1st line of the IBAction method for the TouchUpInside or TouchDown, or whatever works. For me it was fine on the TouchUpInside.
-(IBAction)selfDismiss:(id)sender {
self.btnImage.highlighted = NO;
etc, etc, etc.
share|improve this answer
avoid to set UIButton's Line Break to Clip, use instead the standard Truncate Middle
enter image description here
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Your Answer
| http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2259905/how-to-disable-the-highlight-control-state-of-a-uibutton/2259919 | dclm-gs1-416735528 | false | false | {
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0.042681 | <urn:uuid:f21f2479-45e9-4477-9f15-de3ab6368101> | en | 0.964124 | Anna wakes up in a vast and mysterious undersea temple with amnesia. By unlocking the enchanted Imperial Relics she must rediscover her own lost identity and the forbidden secrets of Dark Empress before it’s too late.
User reviews: Mostly Positive (24 reviews)
Release Date: Feb 21, 2010
Popular user-defined tags for this product:
Buy Empress Of The Deep
About This Game
A beautiful young woman wakes up in a vast and mysterious undersea temple complex, not knowing who or where she is. She soon learns that she has been frozen in a death-like slumber in a secret crypt for over a century. Now she must escape the crypt and explore the ancient underwater chambers to unravel the mystery. Use your Hidden Object and puzzle-solving skills to help Anna unlock the enchanted Royal Relics, reveal the terrible secrets of the Dark Empress, and piece together her own shocking identity … before its too late! Along the way she encounters strange and mysterious characters. But who truly wants to help her? And who wants her dead? The fate of humanity lies in her hands.
Features :
• Over 140 breathtaking scenes in a vast undersea temple and cloud city.
• Immersive locations, fantastic story and unique object hunting and mini-games.
• Meet mysterious characters to gain vital clues. Who can you trust? Who will deceive?
• Stop the Evil Empress from destroying the underwater world.
• Escape to the utopian city in the clouds.
System Requirements
• OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
• Processor: 1.0 GHz
• Memory: 512 MB RAM
• Graphics: DirectX compatible video card
• DirectX: Version 8.1
• Hard Drive: 200 MB available space
Helpful customer reviews
23 of 30 people (77%) found this review helpful
3.2 hrs on record
It's not uncommon to see hidden object games (hence referred to as HOGs) riffing off other games for their source material in order to continue to the ever constant stream of releases with little in the way of originality. In terms of Empress of the Deep that comes in the form of an unapologetic retelling of Bioshock, as told through the eyes of someone who skimmed a synopsis of its plot and then asked a fifth grader to rewrite it based off the most prominent themes and moments.
A mysterious voice on the radio, a creepy girl asking for help, all taking place in an underwater city meant to be the last bastion of humanity. I'm not entirely opposed to casual games trying to do their own version of something I've already seen, and in some cases find it hilarious the way the developers get around the fact they are making a game on a much smaller scale and budget, but EotD is so painfully written and voiced that it just feels insulting. The plot is contrived to the very last moment, with boneheaded characters that constantly feel the need to reexplain the simplistic plot to you through painfully voiced dialog. The voice actors sound incredibly bored the entire time, and almost seem to be missing the correct tone on purpose as never once does a characters reflection actually fit with what they say. It's hamfisted and forgettable, making it even more obvious that little attention was payed to writing anything half decent for what was likely seen as casual shovelware by the publisher.
I'd be able to forgive the horrendous narrative if the object finding was itself enjoyable, but it's hard to have fun when you're locked at a resolution so low that it's near impossible to make anything out from the background. More often than not I was simply guessing at what I was clicking on, as objects are blurry to the point of being invisible, which really kills the entire point of this sort of game. The handful of logic puzzles inserted among the traditional HOG gameplay are a nice touch, but are so easy they feel like throwaway additions.
I might seem rather down on Empress of the Deep, but it's not that it's especially bad for what a lot of people consider a HOG to be; it's that with an influx of excellent ones like Angelica Weaver and The Twin Vaccines, this sort of halfbaked mediocrity is no longer what we should expect from the genre. It deserves better, and that quality is out there hidden among all the fluff. If you've already devoured the other HOGs in your near vicinity you could do a lot worse, but that doesn't change Empress of the Deep from being a wholly lackluster experience that's better left forgotten (and perhaps chucked into the ocean for irony's sake).
Posted: May 26
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11 of 14 people (79%) found this review helpful
2.3 hrs on record
Surprising little gem of a casual game. It's an adventure/hidden object mix, which has become quite common, but leans more on its adventure side than hidden object, and instead of heaping in hidden object scenes every few steps, includes a selection of different kinds of puzzles, some of which were fairly unique. The hidden object portion is the standard fare you'd expect, perhaps even a slight bit sub-par with the amount of objects I felt I was squinting to make out (even with a hint, some were still unrecognizable in my opinion).
The adventure portion, however, more than made up for it. It won't shine in the way a full-fledged adventure game would, but as a casual title, it can be clever with the sorts of puzzles it throws at the player and gives a decent number of rooms to explore. This, though, leads to some backtracking, some of which is particularly unnecessary. Without spoiling anything, the ending makes you revisit nearly every screen to click a single object on each, which was a rather bland way of padding the already short game length.
The narrative is decent, but nothing groundbreaking. You'll see any major plot points coming a mile away, but it still gets the job done and gives you a reason to wander the game world. It's also fully voiced, and the actors do well enough a majority of the time.
One thing to point out is it ends with a "To be continued." It does complete its own self-contained story at least, and the next part is available on Steam.
Lastly, it clocks in at a measly two hours. It's worth the ride for fans of the genre, but only on sale. (As of writing this, it's 50 cents, and that's a steal :) ).
Posted: May 14
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5 of 5 people (100%) found this review helpful
7.2 hrs on record
This hidden object game is a slightly different flavor than the normal variety. It is very puzzle oriented and the puzzles come with no directions. However, if you're familiar with these types of games, you should be able to figure everything out. The story is very cryptic but that actually helps the whole feel of the game, which I liked very much. For an older game, the graphics are quite nice. The hidden object areas are a bit blurry but not bad enough to stump me for long. Even though the game is dated, it DOES have voice acting - sometimes good, sometimes not so much, but always interesting. One thing I absolutely love about Empress of the Deep is that once you've finished everything there is to do in an area, an "Area Cleared" Star appears. You never have to worry about coming back to that area to find or do something else. And it gives a nice sense of accomplishment. I wish more hidden object/puzzle games incorporated that feature. The whole game has a very surreal feel to it. It's not a long game but I enjoyed every minute of it. There are also two sequels to this game that continue the story, if you're curious about what happens next. Because of the length of the games, I'd recommend trying to find them on sale. But they're good enough that I'm currently replaying them all. If you like a game with an intriguing atmosphere and plenty of puzzles, check this out!
Posted: October 7
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6 of 8 people (75%) found this review helpful
2.1 hrs on record
Got the game for 50 cents and brought me 2 hours of playtime. Game got full voice acting,interesting and fun puzzles(though some of them are hard to understand what you need to do),and mediocre story. Also there is a marker to tell you if you completed an area or not(completing means you completed the puzzle in there or found a " hidden" item). Puzzle varies with mostly hidden objects but also there are complete a picture,find the difference,find X amount of Y,light an object and such so you gonna have some fun. But also game got some stuff that really annoyed me at the end like misplaced sound effects,annoying movement(to pass through every area till you get to the desirable one) and some puzzles were designed really well and could make you rage a bit.
Overall if you get this cheap - $0.5-1 it will be worth it.
Posted: May 14
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1 of 1 people (100%) found this review helpful
2.6 hrs on record
While some puzzles are pretty decent, the hidden object part is simply horrible. Most of the scenes represent a primordial soup where you have no choice but to blindly poke around hoping to catch something. No fun in that.
You can't really expect much from a budget HOG in terms of narrative, but many developers at least try to spice up the usual boredom in some or another way. Not the case here, unfortunately. You get all the thickness of undiluted tedium you can get, with no real bonuses to cheer up your miserable in-game existence.
I surely will think twice before buying anything else done by Gogii Games in the future, even if it goes only for half a dollar on a sale, and I suggest you do the same.
Posted: September 20
Was this review helpful? Yes No | http://store.steampowered.com/app/299150/?snr=1_230_233__103 | dclm-gs1-416755528 | false | false | {
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0.849193 | <urn:uuid:bcd02ae7-1a3f-4dd2-90ea-6bef17a00091> | en | 0.742984 | Kolla upp vilket ord som helst, t.ex. eiffel tower:
3 definitions by Muhaha
Someone who bums out of a party or other occasion altogether, or leaves early after pretending not to pike.
Oh gee mij, you're such a piker! ;-)
av muhaha 13 mars 2003
The best way to kick someone in the nuts.
Goddamnit, I swar, I'm gonna kick yah, squar, in the nuts...
av muhaha 13 mars 2003
this word is said when either
A) You are mad
B) You made a mistake
av Muhaha 30 juni 2004 | http://sv.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=Muhaha | dclm-gs1-416815528 | false | false | {
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0.043117 | <urn:uuid:de164801-5642-4b54-99d1-699163dfc43b> | en | 0.958521 | Remember How Brittany Murphy Died of 'Natural Causes'? Well, About That ...
Heartbreaking 35
brittany murphyRemember back in 2009 when Clueless actress Brittany Murphy died and the world let out a collective Whaaa?! I mean, for an otherwise healthy 32-year-old to drop dead of pneumonia always seemed a little odd to me; for her 39-year-old husband, Simon Monjack, to drop dead of the same thing five months later seemed a lot odd.
Sure, people made a big fuss about her allegedly eating disordered past and (also alleged) drug abuse, but Murphy categorically denied both -- and neither would explain why her otherwise healthy husband got taken out by the same (curable) ailment shortly thereafter.
Anyway, I'm not the only one who was dissatisfied with the official explanation for Murphy's death. Her dad, Angelo Bertolotti, has been crying foul play from Day One -- and now it seems he might have a valid case.
Because the coroner initially refused to test for poisoning, Bertolotti had hair, blood, and tissue samples from both Murphy and Monjack tested independently ... and the lab report reads like the script of a Hollywood suspense/thriller:
Ten (10) of the heavy metals evaluated were detected at levels higher that the WHO [The World Health Organization] high levels ... If we were to eliminate the possibility of a simultaneous accidental heavy metals exposure to the sample donor then the only logical explanation would be an exposure to these metals (toxins) administered by a third party perpetrator with likely criminal intent.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. WHAT?! And it gets weirder: Toxic heavy metal exposure is usually caused by ingestion of rat poison, and both Murphy and Monjack were exhibiting symptoms of heavy metal poisoning before their deaths (symptoms can include headache, dizziness, gastrointestinal, neurological, respiratory, or dermal symptoms such as abdominal cramps, tremors, tachycardia, sweating, disorientation, coughing, wheezing, congestion, and pneumonia). Seems like all signs point to ... murder?! Which, if that's the case, the next logical and extremely important question is ... whodunit?!
Conspiracy theories abound, of course; some insist Murphy and Monjack were taken out by the Department of Homeland Security because of their support/involvement with national security whistleblower and filmmaker Julia Davis; others say her death was an Illuminati sacrifice. The second idea is harder to swallow, but the first? Depending on your level of distrust in the government, it seems almost plausible.
Either way, one thing seems clear: Brittany Murphy did NOT die of natural causes. Which is both incredibly scary and sad.
What do you think killed Brittany Murphy?
Image via S Pakhrin/Flickr
celebrity death
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Elaine Cox
husband wacked her..then killed himself same solved...
Ember Weyenberg
I thought I read that it was toxic mold in the home that caused both of them, then later Brit's mom, to die of pneumonia?
MamaT... MamaTo2b2g
Her mom didn't die. She's still alive.
Eddie... EddiesMama1983
Elaine, that's a horrible thing to say!
Curiousor and curiousor
elle7777 elle7777
nikabear nikabear
I have always thought that Brittany's mom had something to do with it!!!
Tina Berg
I bet her mother did it... she was living with Brittany and also with Brittany's husband when they died. She probably wanted the money
IHear... IHeartCake
The medical examiner has a lot of explaining to do. I always assumed they just didn't want to reveal the real cause of death because it was something with a lot of stigma attached, but to not run toxicology tests... explain, please!
1-10 of 35 comments 1234 Last | http://thestir.cafemom.com/entertainment/164274/remember_how_brittany_murphy_died?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cafemom%2Fthestir%2Fentertainment+%28The+Stir+By+CafeMom%3A+Entertainment%29 | dclm-gs1-417015528 | false | false | {
"keywords": "pneumonia"
} | false | {
"score": 0,
"triggered_passage": -1
} | false |
0.220976 | <urn:uuid:d4302eca-f1cc-4e84-9f31-fa537b5fe14b> | en | 0.917322 | [Docs] [txt|pdf]
Obsoleted by: 62
Network Working Group Dave Walden
Request for Comments: 61 Bolt Beranek and Newman
July 17, 1970
A Note on Interprocess Communication
in a Resource Sharing Computer Network
The attached note is a draft of a study I am still working on. It
may be of general interest to network participants.
Walden [Page 1]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
Interprocess Communication
in a
Resource Sharing Computer Network
autonomous, independent computer systems, interconnected so as to
permit each computer system to utilize all of the resources of each
other computer system. That is, a program running in one computer
system should be able to call on the resources of the other computer
systems much as it would normally call a subroutine." This
definition of a network and the desirability of such a network is
expounded upon by Roberts and Wessler in [1].
The actual act of resource sharing can be performed in two ways: in a
pairwise ad hoc manner between all pairs of computer systems in the
network or according to a systematic network wide standard. This
paper develops one possible network wide system for resource sharing.
I believe it is natural to think of resources as being associated
with processes [2] and therefore view the fundamental problem of
resource sharing to be the problem of interprocess communication. I
also share with Carr, Crocker, and Cerf [3] the view that
interprocess communication over a network is a subcase of general
interprocess communication in a multiprogrammed environment.
These views pervade this study and have led to a two part study.
First, a model for a time-sharing system having capabilities
particularly suitable for enabling interprocess communication is
constructed. Next, it is shown that these capabilities can be easily
used in a generalized manner which permits interprocess communication
between processes distributed over a computer network.
This note contains ideas based on many sources. Particularly
ARPA Network [1][3][4] by W. Crowther of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
(BBN) and S. Crocker of UCLA; 2) Ackerman and Plummer's paper on the
MIT PDP-1 time sharing system [5]; and 3) discussion with R. Kahn of
BBN about Host protocol, message control, and routing for the ARPA
the system described herein, and I am therefore responsible for any
inconsistencies or bugs in this system.
It must be emphasized that this note does not represent an official
BBN position on Host protocol for the ARPA Computer Network.
Walden [Page 2]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
This section describes a model time-sharing system which I think is
particularly suitable for performing interprocess communication. The
basic structure of this model time-sharing system is not original
The model time-sharing system has two pieces: the monitor and the
processes. The monitor performs several functions, including
switching control from process to process as appropriate (e.g., when
a process has used "enough" time or when an interrupt occurs),
managing core and the swapping medium, controlling the passing of
creating processes, caring for sleeping processes, etc.
The processes perform most of the functions normally thought of as
being supervisor functions in a time-sharing system (system
processes) as well as the normal user functions (user processes). A
typical system process is the disc handler or the file system. For
efficiency reasons it may be useful to think of system processes as
being locked in core.
A process can call on the monitor to perform several functions: start
another, equal, autonomous process (i.e., load a program or find a
copy of a program somewhere that can be shared, start it, and pass it
some initial parameters); halt the running process; put the current
process to sleep pending a specified event; send a message to a
specified process; become available to receive a message from a
specified process; become available to receive a message from any
process; send a message to a process able to receive from any
process; and request a unique number. There undoubtedly should also
be other monitor functions. It is left as an exercise to the reader
to provide these functions -- most can.
I will not concern myself with protection considerations here, but
instead will assume all of the processes are "good" processes which
never make any mistakes. If the reader needs a protection structure
to keep in mind while he reads this note, the _capability_ system
described in [5][6][7][8] should be satisfying.
We now look a little closer at the eight operations listed above that
a process can ask the monitor to perform.
Walden [Page 3]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
START. This operation starts another process. It has two
parameters -- some kind of identification for the program that is to
be loaded and a parameter list for that program. Once the program
is loaded, it is started at its given entry point and passed its
parameter list in some well known manner. The process will continue
to exist until it halts itself.
HALT. This operation puts the currently running process to sleep
pending the completion of some event. The operation has one
parameter, the event to be waited for. Sample events are arrival of
a hardware interrupt, arrival of a message from another process, etc.
The process is restarted at the instruction after the SLEEP command.
The monitor never unilaterally puts a process to sleep except when
the process overflows its quantum.
RECEIVE. This operation allows another process to send a message to
this process. The operation has four parameters: the port (defined
below) awaiting the message, the port a message will be accepted
from, a specification of the buffer available to receive the message,
and a location of transfer to when the transmission is complete. [In
other words, an interrupt location. Any message port may be used to
allow interrupts, event channels, etc. The user programs what he
SEND. This operation sends a message to some other process. [I
suppose a process could also send a message to itself.] It has four
parameters: a port to send the message to, the port the message is
being sent from, the message, and a location to transfer to when the
transmission is complete.
RECEIVE ANY. This operation allows any process to send a message to
this process. The operation has four parameters: the port awaiting
the message, the buffer available to receive the message, a location
to transfer to when the message is received, and a location where the
port which sent the message may be noted.
same four parameters as SEND. The necessity for this operation will
be discussed below.
UNIQUE. This operation obtains a unique number from the monitor.
A _port_ is a particular data path to or from a process. All ports
have an associated unique number which is used to identify the port.
Ports are used in transmitting messages from one process to another
in the following fashion. Consider two processes, A and B, wishing
to communicate. Process A executes a RECEIVE at port N from port M.
Walden [Page 4]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
up the port numbers and transfers the message from process B to
operation. Just how the processes come by the correct port numbers
with which to communicate with other processes is not the concern of
the monitor -- this problem is left to the processes.
An example. Suppose that our model time-sharing system is
initialized to have several processes always running. Additionally,
these permanent processes have some universally known and permanently
assigned ports. [Or perhaps there is only one permanently known port
which belongs to a directory-process which keeps a table of
permanent-process/well-known-port associations.] Suppose that two of
the permanently running processes are the logger-process and the
starts running, it puts itself to sleep awaiting an interrupt from
the hardware teletype scanner. The logger-process initially puts
via well-known permanent SEND and RECEIVE ports. The teletype-
scanner-process keeps a table indexed by teletype number containing
in each entry a port to send characters from that teletype to, and a
port at which to receive characters for that teletype. If a
that the logger-process is known to have a RECEIVE pending for.
[Actually, the scanner process could always use the same pair of port
numbers for a particular teletype as long as they were passed on to
only one copy of the executive at a time.] The scanner-process also
characters and all future characters from this teletype to the port
scanner-process probably also passes a second pair of unique numbers
to the logger-process for it to use for teletype output and does a
RECEIVE using these numbers. The logger-process when it receives the
message from the scanner-process, starts up a copy of what SDS 940
TSS [12] users call the executive (that program which prints file
directories, tells who is on other teletypes, runs subsystems, etc.)
and passes this copy of the executive, the port numbers so this
executive-process can also do its in's and out's to the teletype
to communicate with the user before it passes them on to the
Walden [Page 5]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
_Port numbers_ are often passed among processes. More rarely, a port
is transferred to another process. It is crucial that once a process
transfers a _port_ to some other process that the first process no
The protected object system of [8] is one such mechanism. [Of
really no need for two port numbers to be specified before a
transmission can take place. The fact that a process knows an
existing RECEIVE port number is prima facie evidence of the process'
right to send to that port. The difference between RECEIVE and
this approach would clearly be preferable to the one described here
if it was possible to assume all of the autonomous time-sharing
system in a network would adopt this protection mechanism. If this
assumption cannot be made, it seems more practical to require both
port numbers.]
Note that somewhere in the monitor there must be a table of port
numbers associated with processes and restart locations. The table
entries are cleared after each SEND/RECEIVE match is made. Also note
that if a process is running (perhaps asleep), and has RECEIVE ANY
that process without going through loggers or any of that. This is
obviously essential within a local time-sharing system and seems very
to be reached.
executed. If a proper RECEIVE is not executed for some time the SEND
A RECEIVE ANY never times out, but may be taken back. A SEND FROM
ANY message is always sent immediately and will be discarded if a
the SEND and RECEIVE are matched up ever overflows, a process
originating a further SEND or RECEIVE is notified just as if the SEND
or RECEIVE timed out.
Generally, well known, permanently assigned ports are used via
be used for starting processes going and consequently little data
will be sent via them.
Walden [Page 6]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
Still another example, this time a demonstration of the use of the
SENDs and RECEIVEs. Eventually the user types RUN FORTRAN and the
and passes to FORTRAN as start up parameters the two ports the
executive was using to talk to the teletype. FORTRAN is of course
expecting these parameters and does SENDs and RECEIVEs to these ports
to discover what input and output files the user wants to use.
FORTRAN types INPUT FILE? to the user who responds F001. FORTRAN
then sends a message to the file-system-process which is asleep
message also contains a pair of ports that the file-system-process
for input, makes some entries in its open file tables, and sends a
message back to FORTRAN which contains the ports which FORTRAN can
file. When the compilation is complete, FORTRAN returns the teletype
port numbers back to the executive which has been asleep waiting for
system-process goes back to sleep when it has nothing else to do.
[The reader should have noticed by now that I do not like to think of
knows it is being used simultaneously by many other processes and
consciously multiplexes among the users or delays service to users
until it can get around to them.]
Again, the file-system-process can keep a small collection of port
to return the port numbers when they are done with them. Of course,
when this collection of port numbers has eventually dribbled away,
Note that when two processes wish to communicate they set up the
convenient manner. For instance, they can exchange port numbers or
one process can pick all the port numbers and instruct the other
process which to use. Of course, in a particular implementation of a
restrict the processes' execution of SENDs and RECEIVEs and might
forbid arbitrary passing around of port numbers, requiring instead
these functions.
Walden [Page 7]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
Flow control is provided in this system by the simple method of never
starting a SEND from one process until a RECEIVE is executed by the
receiver. Of course, interprocess messages may be sent back and
forth suggesting that a process stop sending or that space be
allocated, etc.
The system described in the previous section easily generalizes to
allow interprocess communication between processes at geographically
different locations as, for example, within a computer network.
Consider first a simple configuration of processes distributed around
autonomous time-sharing system. A rather large, smart computer
should be thought of as an extension of the monitor of each time-
sharing system in the network.
It should be obvious to the reader that if the Network Controller is
ANY, and UNIQUE and that if all of the monitors in all of the time-
sharing systems in the network do not perform these operations
themselves but rather ask the Network Controller to perform these
operations for them, then we have solved the problem of interprocess
communication between remote processes. We have no further change to
The reason everything continues to work when we postulate the
existence of the Network Controller is that the Network Controller
can keep track of which RECEIVEs have been executed and which SENDs
model time-sharing system. A networkwide port numbering scheme is
which site) a particular port is at a particular time.
center point making it necessary to distribute the functions
performed by the Network Controller among the network nodes. In the
and conveniently distribute the functions performed by the star
Network Controller among the many network sites and still enable
general interprocess communication between remote processes.
described above to adapt them for use in a distributed network. To
RECEIVE is added a parameter specifying a site to which the RECEIVE
Walden [Page 8]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
is to be sent. To SEND FROM ANY and SEND is added a site to send the
RECEIVE ANY have added the provision for obtain the source site of
process executing the SEND. At this site, called the rendezvous
transmission is allowed to take place to the site from whence the
RECEIVE came.
A RECEIVE ANY never leaves its originating site and therein lies the
necessity for SEND FROM ANY. It must be possible to send a message
RECEIVE at the sending site. Of course, it would be possible to
construct the system so the SEND/RECEIVE rendezvous takes place at
the RECEIVE site and eliminate the SEND FROM ANY operation, but in my
judgment the ability to block a normal SEND transmission at the
source site more than makes up for the added complexity.
Somewhere at each site a rendezvous table is kept. This table
contains an entry for each unmatched SEND or RECEIVE received at that
match takes place or perhaps when the transmission is complete. As
in the similar table kept in the model time-sharing system, SEND and
RECEIVE entries are timed out if unmatched for too long and the
originator is notified. RECEIVE ANY entries are cleared from the
table when a fulfilling message arrives.
The final change necessary to distribute the Network Controller
distribute via its UNIQUE operation. I'll discuss this topic further
To make it clear to the reader how the distributed Network Controller
numbers, etc. are only exemplary and are not a standard specified as
part of the system.
Suppose there are two sites in the network: K and L. Process A at
a RECEIVE ANY pending at port M.
Walden [Page 9]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
SITE K SITE L
________ ________
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
| Process A | | Process B |
| | | |
| | | |
\ / \ /
\ / \ port M /
\________/ \____^___/
RECEIVE ANY
and sends messages using the SEND FROM ANY operation from port N to
port M. The message contains two port numbers and instructions for
process B to SEND messages to process A to port P from port Q. Site
K's site number is appended to this message along with the message's
SEND port N.
SITE K SITE L
________ ________
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
| Process A | | Process B |
| | | |
| | | |
\ / \ /
\ port N /--->SEND FROM --->\ port M /
\________/ ANY \________/
to port M, site L
containing K, N, P, & Q
specifies the rendezvous site to be site L.
Walden [Page 10]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
SITE K SITE L
________ R ________
/ \ e / \
/ \ n T/ \
/ \ d a \
| | e b Process B |
| Process A | z l |
| | v e |
\ / o \ /
\ port P / RECEIVE ---> u \ /
\________/ MESSAGE s \________/
to site L
containing P, Q, & K
SITE K SITE L
________ R ________
/ \ e / \
/ \ n T/ \
/ \ d a \
| | e b Process B |
| Process A | z l |
| | v e |
\ / o \ /
\ port P / u <--- port Q /
\________/ SEND s \________/
to site L
containing P & Q
A rendezvous is made, the rendezvous table entry is cleared, and the
(and conceivably the SEND port number) are appended to the messages
of the transmission for the edification of the receiving process.
Walden [Page 11]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
SITE K SITE L
________ ________
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
| Process A | | Process B |
| | | |
| | | |
\ port P / \ port Q /
\ / <---- transmission <---- \ /
\________/ to port T, site K \________/
containing data and L
port M.
Note that there is only one important control message in this system
Host/Host protocol message in [3]. This control message is the
RECEIVE message. There are two other possible intersite control
rendezvous site is not the SEND site.
Of course there must also be a standard format for messages between
ports. For example, the following:
Walden [Page 12]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
| rendezvous site | | destination site| | source site |
| RECEIVE port | | RECEIVE port | | RECEIVE port |
| SEND port | | SEND port | | SEND port |
| | | source port | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| data | | data | | data |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
transmitted transmitted received
by SEND by Network by RECEIVE
process Controller process
Note: for a SEND FROM ANY message, the rendezvous site is the
destination site.
In the model time-sharing system it was possible to pass a port from
process to process. This is still possible with a distributed
Network Controller. [The reader unconvinced of the utility of port
passing is directed to read the section on reconnection in [11].]
Remember that for a message to be sent from one process to another, a
parameter of appropriate operations. The RECEIVE process thinks it
is the SEND site and the SEND process normally thinks it is the SEND
site also. Since once a SEND and a RECEIVE rendezvous, the
RECEIVE using these same old port numbers and rendezvous site
Walden [Page 13]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
slightly harder for a SEND port to move. However, if it does, the
original rendezvous site number are passed to the new site. The
process at the new SEND site specifies the old rendezvous site with
table at that site is cleared, the rendezvous site number for the
SEND message is changed to the site which originated the SEND message
and both the SEND and RECEIVE messages are sent to the new SEND site
SEND and RECEIVE then meet again at the new rendezvous site and
transmissions contain the source site number, further RECEIVEs will
this special manipulation must take place because a SEND message is
received at a site which did not originate the SEND message.
Everything is so easily changed because there are no permanent
connections to break and move as in the once proposed reconnection
scheme for the ARPA network [10][11] that is, connections only exist
fleetingly in the system described here and can therefore be remade
other's port numbers and have some clue where they each are.
Of course, all of this could have been done by the processes sending
messages back and forth announcing any potential moves and the new
site numbers.
Walden [Page 14]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
[1] L. Roberts and B. Wessler, Computer Network Development to
achieve Resource Sharing, Proceedings 1970 SJCC.
[2] V. Vyssotsky, F. F. Corbato, and R. Graham, Structure of the
MULTICS Supervisor, Proceedings 1965 FJCC.
[3] C. Carr, S. Crocker, and V. Cerf, Host/Host Communication
Protocol in the ARPA Network, Proceedings 1970 SJCC.
[4] F. Heart, et al, The Interface Message Processor for the ARPA
Computer Network, Proceedings 1970 SJCC.
[5] W. Ackerman and W. Plummer, An Implementation of Multi-
processing Computer System, Proceedings Gatlinburg Symposium on
Operating System Principles.
[6] J. Dennis and E. Van Horn, Programming Semantics for
Multiprogramming Computation, Proceedings of the San Dimes
Conference on Programming Language and Pragmatics.
[7] B. Lampson, Dynamic Protection Structures, Proceedings FJCC
[8] B. Lampson, An Overview of the CAL Time-Sharing System, Computer
Center, University of Calif., Berkeley.
[9] P. Hansen, The Nucleus of a Multiprogramming System, CACM, April
[10] S. Crocker, ARPA Network Working Group Note #36.
[11] J. Postel and S. Crocker, ARPA Network Working Group Note #48.
[12] B. Lampson, 940 Lectures.
Walden [Page 15]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
Only one resource sharing computer network currently exists, the
aforementioned ARPA network. In this Appendix, I hope to show that
the system that was described in this note can be applied to the ARPA
network. A significant body of work exists on interprocess
communication within the ARPA network. This work comes in several
almost distinct pieces: the Host/IMP protocol, IMP/IMP protocol, and
the Host/Host protocol. I assume familiarity with this work in the
subsequent discussion. [See references [1][3][4][10][11];
Specifications for the Inter-connection of a Host to an IMP, BBN
Report No. 1822; and ARPA Network Working Group Notes #37, 38, 39,
42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 56, 59.]
In the ARPA network, the IMP's have sole responsibility for correctly
transmitting bits from one site to another. The Hosts have sole
responsibility for making interprocess connections. Both the Host
and IMP are concerned and take a little responsibility for flow
control and message sequencing. Application of the interprocess
communication system I have described leads me to different
allocation of responsibility. The IMP still continues to correctly
move bits from one site to another, but the Network Controller also
the processes running in the Hosts although perhaps they use
mechanisms provided by the IMPs.
UNIQUE operations in slightly altered forms for the Hosts and also
maintain the rendezvous tables including moving of SEND ports when
It is perhaps easiest to step through the five operations again.
number, the rendezvous site, and a buffer specification=20 (e.g.,
start and end, beginning and length). The SEND is sent to the
rendezvous site, normally the local site. When the matching RECEIVE
arrives, the Host is notified of the RECEIVE port of the just arrived
receive message. This port number is sufficient to identify the
SENDing process although a given time-sharing system may have to keep
internal tables mapping this port number into useful internal process
identifiers. Simultaneously, the IMP will begin to ask the Host for
specific chunks of the data buffer. These chunks will be sent off to
the destination as the IMP's RFNM control allows. If a RFNM is not
received for too long, implying a message has been lost in the
network, the Host is asked for the same chunk of data again [which
also allows messages to be completely thrown away by the IMP network
Walden [Page 16]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
if that should ever be useful], but the Host has the option to abort
the transmission at this time. While a transmission is taking place,
the Host may ask the IMP to perform other operations including other
transmission is noted and the SEND becomes active as soon as the
first transmission is complete. A third identical SEND results in an
error message to the Host. If a SEND times out, an error is returned
rendezvous site, and a buffer description. The RECEIVE message is
sent to the rendezvous site. When chunks of a transmission arrive
for the RECEIVE port they are passed to the Host along with RECEIVE
the Host where to put the data in its input buffer. When the last of
the Host can then detect this. A second RECEIVE over the same port
pair is allowed. A third results in an error message to the Host.
The mechanism described in this and the previous paragraphs allows a
pair of processes to always have both a transmission in progress and
specified buffer, thus providing complete flow control. (It is
conceivable that the RECEIVE message could allocate a piece of
network bandwidth while making its network traverse to the rendezvous
descriptor. This works the same as RECEIVE but assumes the local
site to be the rendezvous site.
destination site, and a buffer descriptor. The IMP requests and
non-existent port is discarded at the destination site.
RFNM's are tied to the transmission of a particular chunk of buffer
just as acknowledgments are now tied to packets and they perform the
same function. If the Hosts allow the IMPs to reassemble buffers in
the Hosts by the IMP telling the Host where it should put a buffer
chunk as described above, chunks of a single buffer can be
transmitted in parallel and several RFNMs can be outstanding
simultaneously. Packet reassembly is still done in the IMPs.
A final operation must be provided by the IMP -- the UNIQUE
operation. There are many ways to maintain unique numbers and three
are presented here. The first possibility is for the Hosts to ask
the IMPs for the unique numbers originally and then guarantee the
Walden [Page 17]
RFC 61 Interprocess Communication in a Computer Network July 1970
integrity of any unique numbers currently owned by local processes
and programs using whatever means the Host has at its disposal. In
this case the IMPs would provide a method for a unique number to be
sent from one host to another and would vouch for the number's
identity at the new site.
The second method is to simply give the unique numbers to the
processes that are using them, depending on the non-malicious
accident should happen, the two passwords (SEND and RECEIVE ports)
that are required to initiate a transmission. If the unique numbers
32 bits) there is little danger.
numbers and the individual time-sharing systems guarantee the
integrity of these identification bits. Thus a process, while not
so-called virtual net concept suggested by W. Crowther [3].
Random Contents. Putting these operations in the IMP requires the
times as is currently being done in the ARPA Network. The IMPs can
stop a specific host transmission (by not asking for the next chunk
for a while) if that should seem necessary to alleviate congestion
problems in the communications subnet. And the IMP might know the
site and warn the Host to wake up a process shortly before it becomes
imminent that a message for that process will be arriving.
[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ]
[ into the online RFC archives by Katsunori Tanaka 4/99 ]
Walden [Page 18]
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"keywords": "transmission, assembly"
} | false | null | false |
0.025267 | <urn:uuid:9d1bdaec-297f-4121-a625-8c32b89472c1> | en | 0.964086 | Ann Coulter
Liberal love lasts just long enough to get the job done. The most famous instance of a Republican taking advice from Democrats occurred when former President Bush broke his pledge and raised taxes. The instant Bush capitulated, a staffer at the DNC hit a stopwatch and, for one hour, liberals showered Bush with affection. Maureen Dowd, then-reporter for The New York Times, compared Bush to Eisenhower and gushed he had dropped "the slash-and-burn approach" and was "trying to take a moderate, bipartisan approach."
But as Friedrich Schiller wrote, "Once the Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go." Having tricked the dolt into raising taxes, liberals soon turned on Bush with a vengeance. No longer a bipartisan Eisenhoweresque statesman, Bush became merely an impediment to the Democrats getting a real tax-raiser like Bill Clinton in the White House. Soon Dowd was describing Bush as one of the "elite males in possession of large fortunes" who lacked "empathy with middle-class and poor Americans hurt by a recession."
Liberals even taunted Bush for being so unprincipled as to raise taxes. Dowd said of Bush: "Will he learn the power of fixed principles in leadership, or will he continue to engage in waffling and expedient stances on issues like abortion, civil rights and taxes?"
Never, in the history of the Democratic Party, have they taken advice from us. I thought the Democrats should run Dennis Kucinich for president. I even promised them that a lot of Republicans would vote for a Kucinich-Sharpton ticket! But I didn't see any Democrats taking my advice. Of course, Democrats have never had to face the sound chamber of an all-conservative media. (They will in my gulag.)
We don't have to adopt all the Democrats' traits ? incessant lying, utter shamelessness, criminal behavior and lots of crying ? but Republicans need to tattoo this truism on their arms: It's never a good idea to take advice from your enemies. | http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2004/07/22/never_trust_a_liberal_over_3/page/2 | dclm-gs1-417065528 | false | false | {
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0.019207 | <urn:uuid:a90f6ed3-b27d-49a9-bef8-eb143e01a98d> | en | 0.935803 | Florida Hotels
Although the sun continually shines, the surf continually rolls and you're never faced with a boring moment in Florida, there comes a point every night when it's time to call it a day. Believe it or not, where you lay your head at night can have a significant effect on how you view your overall vacation. Nobody wants to spend the entire day enjoying themselves, only to come back to a lousy, rat-trap hotel room in the evening. That's why one of the most important decisions you can make on your vacation is in which Florida hotel you're going to stay. Luckily, Florida hotels come in all types -- from the luxuriously opulent to comfortable, budget-conscious accommodations.
Luxury Florida Hotels
It doesn't matter where you plan on staying in Florida, you can find the type of living you're accustomed to. If you're visiting Orlando, Florida to enjoy the magic at Disneyworld, then plan a stay at Disney's Polynesian Resort. Completely decadent, the 853-room resort gives each guest the experience of staying on a South Pacific tropical island. With pure white-sand beaches, the Nanea Volcano Pool and its own marina, guests may actually find it difficult to leave. Rooms begin around $330 per night.
Guests planning to stay in Palm Beach certainly have their work cut out for them. With The Breakers Hotel and the Ritz Carlton Palm Beach each branding five-star luxury, it can prove a pleasantly difficult decision. The Breakers offer 560 rooms of fine Italian Renaissance-styled appointments, all gorgeously set on 140 acres of heavenly oceanfront property. Plus, it has the distinction of being one of the nation's most legendary resorts. With rooms starting around $289 per night, it's a hugely popular Florida hotel. Likewise, the Ritz Carlton Palm Beach offers uncompromised convenience and refinement. With 270 rooms, starting around $249 per night, guests can enjoy a multitude of activities and services like the spa, outdoor pool, golf, tennis and so much more.
The Daytona 500 draws thousands of guests to Florida each year. If you're one of the lucky ones, then make your reservations early if you want to ensure a room at the glorious Shores Resort and Spa. Ideally situated on a small stretch of island, the 212-room hotel offers a cozy, cottage ambiance where personal service is paramount. With amenities including watersport rentals, full-service spa and outdoor tiki bar, you'll quickly realize what a bargain this stunning Florida hotel is at only $119 per night.
Budget-Conscious Florida Hotels
There are many value-priced hotels across Florida. In fact, the northernmost region is filled with them. A fine example is the St. Augustine Beachfront Resort, located near the oldest city in the United States. It's nicely situated right on the beach, and each of the 147 rooms makes a tranquil escape from the hustle and bustle of Florida beaches and popular attractions. The best part is, the comfort, serenity and beachside view will only set you back $79 per night.
Florida is also home to many charming Inns, where guests can enjoy comfort and quality for a fraction of the cost of a hotel. The Avalon Waterfront Inn, located in Fort Lauderdale offers 70 rooms of varying sizes. The rooms begin around $60 per night, and come with a host of amenities like free wireless Internet and a free continental breakfast. There's even a place for a beachside barbeque.
Believe it or not, affordable accommodations can even be found in a cosmopolitan city like Miami. The Continental Hotel South Beach is located right on the oceanfront in the Art Deco District. With 249 rooms starting around $79 per night, you may feel like you've hit the jackpot! Only five blocks from Miami's hottest nightclubs, Skybar and Delano, you can party like it's 1999 and not have to worry about getting lost.
These are just a sampling of the variety in Florida hotels. While these hotels range from the sublime to simplistic, you can expect the accommodations to run the gamut in Florida. Utilize the Internet to find the ideal Florida hotel to compliment exactly the type of experience you're looking for in the Sunshine State.
Portions copyright 2010 wCities, DiscoverOurTown.com and Northstar Travel Media LLC. | http://travel.aol.com/articles/florida-hotels | dclm-gs1-417115528 | false | false | {
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0.082214 | <urn:uuid:89e980c7-a285-43d6-9818-b49516ae9f6c> | en | 0.862571 |
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0.041247 | <urn:uuid:58077aa5-1659-4d79-b3ef-03d63f89ab27> | en | 0.818462 | Version 4 (modified by radix, 7 years ago) (diff)
wording in IFilePathConsumer.consumeFrom
{{wrongtitle|title=Asynchronous File I/O}}
Twisted has no API for asynchronous file I/O. It oughtta.
def FilePath.openAsynchronously()
@return: AsynchronousFileIOLayer.
def, start=0, end=None) """ @param consumer: IFilePathConsumer provider. @param start: The byte offset into the file at which to start producing. @param end: The byte offset into the file at which to stop producing, or None to indicate the end of the file. @return: None """
def AsynchronousFileIOLayer.write(producer, start=0) """ @param producer: IFilePathProducer provider. Its produceTo method will be called. @param start: The byte offset into the file at which to start writing. [what about appending?] @return: None. """
interface IFilePathConsumer: """ A consumer of data. Code which calls methods on this interface should call consumeFrom(p), followed by zero or more calls to write(d), followed by finished(r). Implementors should expect such. """ def consumeFrom(producerRegulator): """ Get ready to receive data. @param producerRegulator: The provider of L{IProducerRegulator} which can be used to control the production of data. """
def write(data): """ Handle incoming data. """
def finished(reason): """ @param reason: An instance of L{Failure} or None. If it's None then everything's great. Otherwise it's a failure describing the problem. """
interface IFilePathProducer: """ A thing what has data to send. """ def produceTo(consumer): """ Start sending data to the given consumer. @param consumer: The IFilePathConsumer to which data should be sent. An appopriate L{IProducerRegulator} must be created and passed to the consumer's L{consumeFrom
Open Issues
Should produceTo and consumeFrom return Deferreds? If they do, it is important to note this means there will be duplicate completion notifications between the deferred and the .finished method. The order these are called in should perhaps be well-defined.
What about appending to a file? Should there be a special value passable as the 'start' parameter to write to indicate that the file should be appended to?
The astute reader will notice that this is actually a redesign of the producer/consumer framework. | http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Specification/AsynchronousFileInputOutput?version=4 | dclm-gs1-417205528 | false | false | {
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0.415733 | <urn:uuid:f6bbabc0-dcc2-4f69-a38b-78226295ef87> | en | 0.796089 | Directory News Site Map Home
Jepson eFlora
Key to families | Table of families and genera
Perennial herb, subshrub. Stem: repeatedly forked, decumbent to erect. Leaf: generally petioled. Inflorescence: branches ending in umbel-like cluster or solitary flowers; bracts 5(9), ± fused (or not) into calyx-like, bell- to saucer-shaped involucre; flowers in 1 involucre 1–16, generally not blooming together; flowers cleistogamous or not. Flower: radial or ± bilateral; perianth funnel- to bell-shaped, lobes 5; stamens 3–5, generally exserted; stigma ± spheric, generally exserted. Fruit: ± round to club-shaped; ribs or angles 0, 5, 10; wings 0.
± 60 species: America, Himalayas. (Latin: wonderful) [Spellenberg 2003 FNANM 4:40–57] Flowers open in evening, close in morning; species intergrade, taxonomy unsettled.
Key to Mirabilis
1. Fruit < 3 mm wide, ribs 5, strong, generally with prominent warts or coarse wrinkles between; involucre enlarged, brown, papery in fruit
2. Leaf petioled, lanceolate or wider
3. Involucre in flower hairy throughout on outside, in fruit generally < 8 mm ..... M. albida
3' Involucre in flower short-hairy at base, glabrous on lobes, in fruit 10–15 mm ..... [M. nyctaginea]
2' Leaf ± sessile, linear to narrowly lanceolate
4. Perianth bright red, 3–4 × length of involucre in flower ..... M. coccinea
4' Perianth pale pink to magenta, ± 2 × length of involucre in flower ..... M. linearis var. linearis
1' Fruit often > 3 mm wide, ribs or angles 0, 5, 10, moderate to inconspicuous, sometimes with low wrinkles or warts between; involucre little changed in fruit
5. Involucre 3–16-flowered, bracts > 15 mm, free to fused
6. Perianth ± 15 mm, bell-shaped; bracts 15–30 mm, free to ± 1/2 fused ..... M. alipes
6' Perianth 40–60 mm, funnel-shaped; bracts > 22 mm, > 1/2 fused
7. Fruit bluntly 5-angled ..... M. greenei
7' Fruit not angled, often with 10 lines or low ribs ..... M. multiflora
8. Fruit faintly warty, ribs generally inconspicuous, gelatinous when wet ..... var. glandulosa
8' Fruit ± smooth, with 10 slender, tan, sometimes raised ribs, generally alternating with 10 brown, often interrupted lines, not gelatinous when wet ..... var. pubescens
5' Involucre 1(2)-flowered, bracts < 15 mm, fused
9. Perianth 30–50 mm; fruit with 5 blunt ribs, ± wrinkled or warty between ..... M. jalapa var. jalapa
9' Perianth < 15 mm; fruit unmarked or with generally 10 obscure lines, ± wrinkled or warty between or not
10. Involucre 8–13 mm, lobes > tube, narrowly lanceolate; perianth ± white; leaves ascending ..... M. tenuiloba
10' Involucre 3–7 mm, lobes < tube, ± ovate; perianth white to magenta; leaves widely spreading ..... M. laevis
11. Perianth pink to purple-red (white); leaf puberulent or glandular-hairy ..... var. crassifolia
11' Perianth white (pale pink); leaf generally ± glandular-hairy
12. Fruit ± spheric, generally with 5–10 visible lines; stems, leaves with short, reflexed hairs, generally also ± glandular-hairy ..... var. retrorsa
12' Fruit generally ± ovoid, generally with 0 visible lines, rarely 5–10 barely visible lines; stems, leaves glandular-hairy ..... var. villosa
| http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/get_IJM.pl?key=8789 | dclm-gs1-417235528 | false | false | {
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0.031406 | <urn:uuid:758c5667-0186-4eba-ae3b-cde2b2a52dd4> | en | 0.969332 | Highlighting forgotten, neglected, abandoned, forsaken, unrecognized, unacknowledged, overshadowed, out-of-fashion, under-translated writers. Has no one read your books? You are in good company.
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Posts tagged Australia
Australian Writers No One Reads: George Egerton
The second in a series of guest posts by James Morrison on Australian writers. James blogs as Caustic Cover Critic and publishes fine forgotten books under his Whisky Priest imprint.
Nobody reads George Egerton (born Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859-1945). Born in Melbourne, and raised there, in New Zealand and Chile, she later claimed Ireland as her spiritual home. Early plans to become an artist were halted by the death of her mother: instead she trained as a nurse, and then eloped to Norway with a violently alcoholic bigamist, living there until he wisely died two years later. But it was in Scandinavia that her writing began to blossom—she was fascinated by Strindberg and Ibsen, and became both the lover and the first English-language translator of Knut Hamsun.
Egerton was an early contributor to The Yellow Book, and her first story collection, Keynotes, was a scandalous success. Punch lampooned her as “Borgia Smudgiton.” A leading and active exponent of the ‘New Woman’ lifestyle, Egerton (“Chav” to her friends, numerous lovers and various husbands) was especially good at rich, vivid and sometimes purple prose.
Ironically enough it was domesticity that ruined her talent. When she settled down as a wife and mother, her prose and popularity collapsed. Though she wrote plays to the end of her life, Egerton never recaptured the successes of her first two short books of stories.
From “Virgin Soil,” in her second collection, Discords, a new bride is being told the facts of life by her mother:
The bridegroom is waiting in the hall; with a trifle of impatience he is tracing the pattern of the linoleum with the point of his umbrella. He curbs it and laughs, showing his strong white teeth at the remark of his best man; then compares the time by his hunter with the clock on the stairs. He is florid, bright-eyed, loose-lipped, inclined to stoutness, but kept in good condition; his hair is crisp, curly, slightly grey; his ears peculiar, pointed at their tops like a faun’s. He looks very big and well-dressed, and, when he smiles, affable enough.
Upstairs a young girl, with the suns of seventeen summers on her brown head, is lying with her face hidden on her mother’s shoulder; she is sobbing with great childish sobs, regardless of reddened eyes and the tears that have splashed on the silk of her grey, going-away gown.
(photo via NYPL)
Australian Writers No One Reads: Peter Kocan
cartoon by Chris Grosz
No one outside Australia reads Peter Kocan, and even in Australia his past often overshadows his literary achievements. In 1966, when Kocan was a 19-year-old factory worker, his history of mental illness came to a head with a determination to be remembered for murdering someone important. He chose Arthur Calwell, leader of Labor, the more left-leaning of Australia’s two main political parties, who was campaigning in the run-up to a federal election.
Calwell had just finished addressing a Sydney rally against conscription for the war in Vietnam, and was leaving in his car. When Kocan approached him Calwell began to wind down his window, assuming the young man was a well-wisher. Instead, Kocan produced a gun and pulled the trigger.
newspaper photograph
Australian politics and crime novelist Shane Maloney writes:
The bullet, fired from a sawn-off rifle, shatters the window of [Calwell’s] car, spattering him with broken glass and bullet fragments. His would-be assassin drops the gun and runs away. He is chased, caught and overpowered without further incident. […] The Opposition leader, in shock and bleeding from the face, has narrowly escaped death. Deflected on impact with the window, the bullet has lodged in the lapel of his coat. The gunman is declared criminally insane, sentenced to life imprisonment and incarcerated in a psychiatric prison. His victim sends him a letter of forgiveness and returns to the election campaign, in which national security is a major issue. When Labor is thrashed at the polls, he is compelled to cede the leadership to his younger, charismatic deputy. […]In the asylum, a fellow inmate introduced [Kocan] to the works of Rupert Brooke. He began to study literature, philosophy and history, and to write poetry. Two of his collections were published while he was still locked up, and his subsequent work draws on his experience of psychosis and imprisonment. [via]
"The shooting logic was in the air at the time," Kocan has explained, referring to the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem, John F. Kennedy, Hendrik Verwoerd and Malcolm X. "Unfortunately, we are creatures who pick up on what’s around. If it had been a different era, my actions may have been different. Insofar as I had any thoughts about what would happen after the shooting,I assumed I’d be cut down in a hail of bullets."
Released in 1976, Kocan continued to write poetry, and also began writing a fictionalised version of his life in the brilliant novellas The Treatment (1980), The Cure (1983) and the novel Fresh Fields (2004). These books have earned him numerous awards, including two from the News South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and one from the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards—all premiers who belonged to Calwell’s Labor Party.
The Social Workers (a poem by Peter Kocan)
Hyenas will encourage a stampede
To see which ailing zebra falls behind.
They’re nature’s social workers, and inclined
To feel most altruistic when they feed.
Top image: Chris Grosz cartoon
Newspaper photograph from CC Mosman Library, New South Wales
Photo of Peter Kocan by Vincent Long
"Words were not the servants of life, but life, rather, was the slave of words." — Patrick White (whom no one reads), Voss
(Image: Sidney Nolan’s cover design.) | http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/tagged/Australia | dclm-gs1-417585528 | false | false | {
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FC Copenhagen confirm CL progression with 2-0 win over Dnipro [Official Highlights]
After a 0-0 draw in the first leg, FC Copenhagen confirmed their Champions League progress with a 2-0 win over Dnipro.
There were goals in each half from Andreas Cornelius and Bashkim Kadri to seal the win.
FC Copenhagen will be keen to see who they face in the final Champions League qualification round before the group stages.
To top | http://www.101greatgoals.com/goals/fc-copenhagen-confirm-cl-progression-with-2-0-win-over-dnipro-official-highlights/ | dclm-gs1-417595528 | false | false | {
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0.04596 | <urn:uuid:c4e51127-d8f5-4aad-83da-c21c442b69f5> | en | 0.977533 | Milwaukee residents forced to abide by the 4-inch rule
CREATED Feb 27, 2013
• Print
• Video by
MILWAUKEE - The clean-up from this week’s winter storm is far from over. A snow emergency was put into effect in Milwaukee Wednesday night.
Milwaukee made it through all last winter without a snow emergency. But the owners of cars still out on the streets may not make it through the night. They have less than one hour to move them from a Milwaukee street before the city comes by with a tow truck.
In the parking lot of Milwaukee’s Cass Street school, it's a kind of reunion. Neighbors who haven't seen each other in years are seeking refuge from a snow emergency.
"This is clean, I have a place to park, and know I'll be able to get out in the morning,” said Tracey Sheasby.
Sheasby sees a bright side to parking two blocks from her house, because there are plenty of downsides to not playing by the snow parking rules.
Simon Alcarac is doing it right. He is digging out and sending his car off to school.
"I prefer to go walk two blocks, three blocks than pay $200 to get it out,” said Alcarac.
It may be a pain, but at least it's a rare pain, and one Tracey Sheasby can live with, at least for one night.
If you live on a four-inch rule street, parking is limited to one side only, and the signs will tell you where. Violators there won't be towed, just ticketed, unlike cars on the snow emergency route. | http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/193723501.html | dclm-gs1-417625528 | false | false | {
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0.034712 | <urn:uuid:3affd011-2bee-45b2-becb-54dc53ebdb0c> | en | 0.881789 | Methods Of Note Taking
A. Cornell Note-Taking System
1. Draw a line down your paper 2 1/2 inches from the left side to create a 2 1/2 inch margin for noting key words and a 6-inch area on the right for sentence summaries.
2. Record your notes in the 6-inch area on the right side of your paper during class. Use your own words and make sure you have included the main ideas and significant supporting details. Be brief.
3. Review your summary sentences and underline key words. Write these key words in the column on the left side of your paper. These words can be used to stimulate your memory of the material for later study.
4. The Cornell method can be used for taking notes on classroom lectures or textbooks. The following chart explains the procedure and gives a visual display of the results.
Class Notes The Cornell Method
The following example applies the Cornell Method of note-taking to a lecture on the circulatory system. Notice the use of the sentence summaries and the addition of the highlighted key words.
Circulatory System
Circulatory System Note Taking
B. Mapping
Mapping is a visual system of condensing material to show relationships and importance. A map is a diagram of the major points, with their significant sub-points, that support a topic. The purpose of mapping as an organizing strategy is to improve memory by grouping material in a highly visual way.
How to Map
The following steps describe the procedure to use in mapping:
1. Draw a circle or a box in the middle of a page, and in it write the subject or topic of the material or lecture.
2. Determine the main ideas that support the subject and write them on the lines radiating from the central circle or box.
3. Determine the significant details and write them on lines attached to each main idea. The number of details you include will depend on the material and your purpose.
Maps are not restricted to any one pattern, but can be formed in a variety of creative shapes as the following diagrams illustrate:
Shape Illustration Note Taking
The following diagram illustrates how the lecture on the circulatory system could be mapped. Notice how the visual display emphasizes the groups of ideas supporting the topic.
Circulatory System Chart Note Nating
C. Outline
• Start main points at the margin.
• Indent secondary and supporting details.
• Further indent major subgroups.
• Definitions, for example, should always start at the margin.
• When a list of terms is presented, the heading should also start at the margin.
• Each item in the series should be set in slightly from the margin.
• Examples, too, should be indented under the point they illustrate.
• When the lecturer moves from one idea to another, show this shift with white space by skipping a line or two. | http://www.alextech.org/en/CollegeServices/SupportServices/StudySkills/LectureNoteTaking/MethodsOfNoteTaking.aspx | dclm-gs1-417745528 | false | false | {
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0.081755 | <urn:uuid:6a77e973-b0cb-4c5f-be38-1e27573893d7> | en | 0.82334 | Important information
Cubes Slide HD
Cubes Slide HD
• App Store Info
Cubes Slide is a 3D sliding puzzle with a set of 6 beautiful photo slides and the option to create more slides using photos from your photo library or taken by the built-in camera.
Hustle your slide easy, normal or hard and play it in a 3x3 or a 4x4 3D-grid and when things get too tough, just hit rewind and your slide will be restored.
* 3D rotating slide cube.
* Easy finger moves to handle the slide.
* Choose between a 3×3 or a 4×4 3D-grid.
* Different hustle modes.
* Rewind option to restore your slide.
* Play in portrait or landscape mode.
* Create slides using photos from your photo library or taken by the built-in camera.
* Option to create random slides.
* Retina support.
Cubes Slide, the 3D sliding puzzle game, also available for iPhone and iPod touch.
Follow us on Twitter @7one7three
What's New in Version 1.1.2
Minor fix.
| http://www.appspy.com/app/628370/cubes-slide-hd | dclm-gs1-417855528 | false | false | {
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0.026437 | <urn:uuid:aeb65a20-eb66-4f5a-96f6-fd4052201f92> | en | 0.943841 | Free Shipping on Orders Over $50*
Clip in, go faster
Dive headlong into the clipless world with the Shimano SH-M087G Shoes buckled firmly to your feet. The M087G features a synthetic leather rand mesh upper for three-season comfort, and a molded rubber outsole for excellent grip in almost all conditions. A combination of traditional hook-and-loop straps and Shimano’s Micro-Adjust buckle let you dial in the fit and support you need. Reflective hits on the heel keep you visible to motorists, and two-hole cleat compatibility gives you a wide range of pedal options.
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Unanswered Question
Are Shimano SH-mo76 shoes water proof?
Are Shimano SH-mo76 shoes water proof?
Unanswered Question
So I have had 48s of these for a while now...
So I have had 48s of these for a while now for road and MTBing, they are fine on the trails but after 20 miles on the road my outer arch absolutely is killing me. Is the pain in that location telling of a fit issue? Too small?
And one thing I have always wondered: how tight to you close a cycling shoe? I'm not sure if the pain is from being too loose or too tight.
4 5
Good, up to about 2 hours
These shoes are awesome for commuting, spin class, and short MTB rides. They're comfortable, wide, and reasonably stiff. They're not so awesome once you pass the two hour mark. After that, they seem to head downhill, fast. The thin insole takes its toll on your feet, and you start to feel the recesses in the plastic underneath. Awhile later, you feel the bolt holes for your cleats, and by the time you're at around 4 hours, everything hurts.
Basically, these are badass entry-level shoes, but if you ride a lot, you'll want something a little nicer.
5 5
Great multi-purpose shoe
So far I'm loving these shoes. They were comfortable from the first ride. Stiff platform. Excellent power transfer for an MTB shoe. The ratcheting strap keeps the heel planted. No blisters, soreness, or hot spots.
I ride both MTB and road and I wanted one set of shoes for both. The logical choice was SPD. I have a set of Shimano PD-M540 XC pedals on the MTB and Shimano PD-A520 touring pedals on the road bike. These shoes offer smooth engagement and release with both sets of pedals. Engagement is slightly more difficult on the touring pedals but they have a slight platform so that's to be expected.
Overall I'm very pleased with my purchase.
5 5
Shimano SH-M087G "It's the shoe's"
I've been riding in my spin classes with my shoes for a few weeks now! They are the best! Lots of control, very stable! I feel like I can ride for hours (back to back spin classes every week). If your looking for a shoe.....This is the 1!
5 5
Sizing info for great entry level shoe
FYI, a 50=14(US), 51=15, and 52=16. Those are different than standard EU sizes--I found out the hard way and had to exchange one pair for a bigger size since there's no sizing chart on this page for these shoes. Shoes are great, BTW. Flexible enough to hike a bike if you have to (with an aggressive tread to boot), but stiff enough to give you some extra oomph.
5 5
I like this shoe.
This is my first clip-less pedaling shoe. I got the 45 wide, which fits my foot well. The shoe is fairly stiff (especially compared to a walking shoe) and transmits force to the pedal very well. These shoes are quite comfy. The velcro straps and rachet buckles are easy to engage and easy to adjust. Soles give good traction on slippery ground. Plus, the price is good and these were on sale! I would highly recommend them as an enty-level shoe.
hello I wonder if you send bike shoes for...
hello I wonder if you send bike shoes for Brazil.Obrigado
Responded on
We sure can. Just add the item(s) to your cart and fill out the necessary shipping information to get an accurate shipping quote.
Is 21oz the total weight of a pair or each...
Is 21oz the total weight of a pair or each shoe?
Responded on
Josh is correct. The 21 oz is the weight of an individual shoe. So combined they are 42 oz! Not bad eh?
5 5
Performance for a great price
With all the features of our high end shoes, these have been turning heads at only $115. It has all the necessities- a stiff fiberglass sole, anatomical velcro straps and a buckle, and an aggressive outsole. | http://www.backcountry.com/shimano-sh-m086l-cycling-shoe-mens | dclm-gs1-418025528 | false | false | {
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0.033508 | <urn:uuid:606f45b5-faa8-4642-aea0-652113c978f7> | en | 0.964218 | Report: Obamacare Signups Dogged by Data Flaws
WASHINGTON (AP) — Many of the 8 million Americans signed up under the new health care law now have to clear up questions about their personal information that could affect their coverage.
A government watchdog said Tuesday the Obama administration faces a huge task resolving these "inconsistencies" and in some cases didn't follow its own procedures for verifying eligibility.
The inspector general's inquiry was requested by congressional Republicans as a condition of ending the budget standoff that partially shut down the government last fall. Republicans say they are concerned that people who are not legally entitled to the law's government-subsidized health insurance could nonetheless be getting it.
"This report is one more example of just how flawed the president's health care law is," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement. "Whatever one's opinion of Obamacare, the American public deserves to know that their tax dollars are allocated appropriately and that public officials take their responsibility to accurately and faithfully apply the laws enacted by Congress seriously."
The inspector general stopped short of drawing sweeping conclusions.
"Inconsistencies do not necessarily indicate that an applicant provided inaccurate information ... or is receiving financial assistance through insurance affordability programs inappropriately," the report said.
In a written response, Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner said the administration concurs with the recommendations and is working on a plan, calling the problems "not surprising."
The inspector general also found that:
—Early on, the government's eligibility system was "not fully operational." As a consequence, even if a consumer supplied the appropriate documentation, officials were not able to close the case.
—The federal insurance exchange didn't always verify Social Security numbers through the Social Security Administration, as required by its own internal safeguards. The California marketplace didn't always verify citizenship and legal presence through Homeland Security.
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From Our Partners | http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/01/Report--Health-law-sign-ups-dogged-by-data-flaws | dclm-gs1-418345528 | false | false | {
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0.169379 | <urn:uuid:59ad529c-d6b3-4db6-84ca-5791f5bf8ff2> | en | 0.975072 |
Full Question
Matthew 27:5 says that Judas hanged himself, while Peter says in Acts 1:18 that he fell and was disemboweled. How can we reconcile what appears to be an apparent contradiction?
There are two possible ways to reconcile the verses:
1. Luke’s purpose in Acts may have been simply to report what Peter said at a point in time when the apostles’ information on Judas’s death may well have been sketchy. After some of the Temple priests converted (cf. Acts 6:7), they may have given further details on Judas’s death that were later incorporated into the Gospel accounts.
2. It is also possible that after Judas hanged himself the rope broke and he fell onto rocks that disemboweled him postmortem. Matthew’s emphasis then would have been Judas’s actions in taking his own life, while Peter’s emphasis was on what happened to him after his suicide.
Catholic Answers Staff | http://www.catholic.com/quickquestions/how-do-we-explain-the-conflicting-accounts-of-judas-death-in-matthew-and-acts | dclm-gs1-418535528 | false | false | {
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0.205648 | <urn:uuid:2f59dc37-ba26-48ea-9698-8018a020a3f5> | en | 0.946434 | Michael Boroniec: Spatial Spirals, 2013
What began with teapots and a single spiral, has evolved into a series of vases that vary in form, degree of expansion, and number of coils. Each vessel is wheel thrown then deconstructed. This process reveals aspects of the vase that most rarely encounter. Within the walls, maker’s marks become evident and contribute to the texture. The resultant ribbon effect, reminiscent of a wheel trimming, lends fragility, elegance, and motion to a medium generally perceived as hard and heavy. This emphasizes a resistance of gravity, allowing negative space to unravel and become part of the form. The result is a body of sculptural objects, resembling and born of functional vessels. | http://www.ceramicsnow.org/tagged/Michael-Boroniec-Ceramics | dclm-gs1-418615528 | false | false | {
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0.11358 | <urn:uuid:4c140bf9-3e23-450d-a8cc-c6d7244b6381> | en | 0.964904 | How bear expert Lynn Rogers went from scientific pioneer to pariah
The renowned biologist is in the midst of a stand-off with the DNR
How bear expert Lynn Rogers went from scientific pioneer to pariah
The Northwoods Research Center sits at the end of a long, gravel path, lined by a backdrop of white pine ascending to the sky.
Tall grass climbs the vinyl siding of the three-story building, which is covered in spider webs and mosquitoes. At the center of it all is a 400-pound black bear, licking its chops and waiting patiently on the front porch like an overgrown dog.
Biologist Lynn Rogers bursts through the front door, smile on his face and bag of hazelnuts in hand, ready to satiate the massive animal. Soon, more bears arrive. But Rogers has his eyes set on one: the giant known as Big Harry.
Naomi Lees-Maiberg
Lynn Rogers checks the vital signs of a black bear near the Northwoods Research Center
Rogers and Harry engage in a kind of dance. He lures it in with a few hazelnuts. The creature is reticent at first. But when it realizes its reward, it walks gently toward Rogers, focused, never looking at the man's leathery face.
"Come on, bear," he calls out in a rough growl. "Stand up. All the way, bear."
Harry raises his paws and stands on his hind legs. It's only like this, seeing him tower over the humans around him, that one can truly appreciate the size and power of the beast. The bear grabs the nuts from Rogers's hand, scooping them tenderly with its tongue. Rogers plucks a comb from his pocket, strokes the bear's back, and laughs.
His command of the giant is impressive. You'd swear he could tell it to sit or stay and it would obey. There's an animal instinct at play here, a pure empathy.
"I think [Rogers] probably has a better gut understanding of black bear behavior — of how they communicate — in ways that other people just can't," says Roger Powell, a bear biologist at North Carolina State. "Man, I wish I could understand bears the way he does."
Yet this isn't some sideshow act. It's Rogers's way of showing people that these animals aren't to be feared. His methods are certainly unusual, but so is Rogers.
No biology textbook will tell you to feed a bear by hand or follow it through the woods for up to 24 hours a day. These are techniques years in development, built by going against what the world told him and sticking with his gut.
It's this very stubbornness and desire to part ways with status-quo science that's turned Rogers into a tainted figure, transforming him from one of the most influential bear biologists in history to a pariah of the state.
EVEN WHEN ROGERS IS AWAY FROM bears, his mind never strays too far. His speech is littered with anecdotes about the one he saved, the one hit by a car, the one that recently gave birth. His stories begin in one place and then careen elsewhere. There's just so much to say and only so much time.
But when the subject turns to his fight with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Rogers's eyes narrow. His voice, normally a low growl, sharpens with anger.
"They just want to get rid of you," he says. "And they'll build a case — any case — to do that."
Before the controversy, before the hand feeding, the radical techniques, and the residents of Eagles Nest, Minnesota, turning against him, Rogers was just a student. He spent the summer of 1968 moving nuisance bears from one place to the next in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The job was monotonous. Get a call. Drive. Tranquilize. Move bear. Repeat.
Then he met Albert Erickson, a University of Minnesota professor and early bear expert. Rogers never left his side, pestering Erickson with question after question. What do bears do when they're not causing a nuisance? Where do they live? How do they move?
"And he said, 'Nobody knows the answers to those questions. Nobody's studied those,'" Rogers says. "'But you can help me answer them.' And he invited me to be his graduate student."
Erickson was one of the first biologists to capture bears and tag them. Through him, Rogers was able to use radio telemetry, a new technique employing GPS collars to track a bear's movement. Rogers used these techniques to follow them from birth through death, studying where they went for food, how they hibernated and reproduced. By the time he published his graduate thesis in 1978, Rogers was beginning to answer those questions. At the time, bears were mostly studied when caught, not in the wild. He was beginning to show the world their never-before-seen life.
"What that research does, and what my research did and what his did, is generate more questions than answers," says John Beecham, a retired bear biologist from Idaho. "All of these studies from the '80s, '90s, and 2000s are just built on that early work."
Back then, the public approach to bears, likely initiated by a bureaucrat somewhere, wasn't really working. Wildlife officials would tag them and remove them from campgrounds and neighborhoods, only to see them return.
To this day, the majority of bear scientists still agree with these approaches. They say bears may not be out to kill you, but they're unpredictable.
Next Page »
My Voice Nation Help
I took the field course in 2014. I learned so much and continue to share the education and knowledge that Dr. Lynn Rogers taught me about black bears. If bears make a person nervous, then why do they choose to live in bear country. I am looking forward to coming back in 2015 to continue my education with Dr. Rogers.
Where did you come up with the "Northwoods Research Center" name? Do you mean the North American Bear Center or Wildlife Research Institute?
Really, I'm surprised.
I find is sad that the narrow minded critics of Dr Rogers work are so bent on perpetuating the fearmongering about Black Bears. Many leaders in their fields including Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall have been criticized by those with different perspectives about a subject but in the end those taking a path less travelled provide more valuable discoveries than all their critics combined!
Dr Rogers has put Minnesota on the world stage and created a wonderful opportunity for hundreds of thousands who would never have had the chance to learn about the 'true nature' of Black Bears.
Too bad egos and fear trump common sense. The world is a better place for humans and bears due to his work.
@imson2tex "Northwoods Research Center" is what the sign says on the driveway up to the WRI.
@mdherbst @imson2tex
I am referencing this location: I'm looking at the Google map photo right now and it says "North American Bear Center Daily 10-5" at this address: 1926 Minnesota 169, Ely, MN 55731Phone:(218) 365-7879 and I believe you are referencing the WRI field station which is 14 miles west of Ely.
That is the discrepancy. Thank you! | http://www.citypages.com/2014-08-20/news/how-bear-expert-lynn-rogers-went-from-scientific-pioneer-to-pariah/ | dclm-gs1-418705528 | false | false | {
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0.817749 | <urn:uuid:0f252544-ed08-49de-8457-0ae14c1d09da> | en | 0.969026 | Just after that non-exchange was a question from Jennifer Vaughn, an anchor at WMUR, the local ABC affiliate, and another co-host. Her question was succinct, the kind that would seem to demand a yes or no response.
“The treasury department says the United States will hit its credit limit on August 2. Do you believe that we will ultimately have to raise the debt ceiling?” she asked Governor Romney.
“I believe we will not raise the debt ceiling unless the president finally, finally, is wiling to be a leader on issues that the American people care about,” Romney began his sidestepping response.
Vaughn made a second attempt: “Governor, what happens if you don’t raise it? What happens then? Is it ok not to?”
“Well, what happens if we continue to spend, time and time again, year and year again, more money than you take in?” was Romney’s second artful dodge.
Again, straightforwardly pointing out that the fact went unanswered could have done wonders. Something like: “Governor, you didn’t answer my question: what I’m asking is if you believe the US will eventually have to raise the debt ceiling, or do you favor default?”
So, despite King’s plea at the top of the proceedings, the candidates declined to answer the questions as they were asked.
For debate veterans, that’s certainly not a surprise—it’s the normal state of affairs. And that’s the way it will stay until debate moderators learn to stick up for themselves, their questions, and the voters by pointing out when candidates just brush by.
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0.119068 | <urn:uuid:032c804a-c928-42fd-8422-e798aeb89109> | en | 0.983356 | OAKLAND — Nearly 1,000 people filled the street in front of Oakland City Hall on Thursday evening. They gathered to vent, pray, and ask how a Los Angeles jury could find Johannes Mehserle, a white former BART police officer, guilty of involuntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Oscar Grant III, an unarmed, 22-year-old black man from Hayward, in the back.
At first, the crowd was electric, but not volatile. To respond with violence would dishonor Grant's memory, they said. Hundreds of Oakland police officers watched and endured taunts, spits and rocks from a small group that tried, but failed, to incite other demonstrators. The officers, to their credit, did not retaliate.
But something happened when the sky darkened. And once again, Oakland made national headlines for all the wrong reasons. The earlier images of peaceful assembly were quickly exchanged for video of smashed windows, looters with boxes of shoes, and fires in trash bins.
From the Dec. 16, 1773, Boston Tea Party protest that helped found our nation to the 1960s
civil rights marches in the South, history has shown that it doesn't take much for rallies to escalate into trouble, whether it's the protesters or the police who spark the violence.
But the agitators who spurred the window-smashing rampage through downtown Oakland last year and again last week had their own agenda, and it did not involve justice for Grant.
As business owners boarded up their windows and surveyed the wreckage of their stores Friday morning, Oakland police confirmed that all but 19 of the 78 people arrested for parole violations, arson, property damage or failure to disperse came from outside Oakland. In fact, 19 live outside the Bay Area and 12 were from other states.
So why were they here? Is it no longer possible to stage a demonstration or protest without outsiders showing up to cause trouble?
Robin Einhorn, a professor of history at UC Berkeley, said little has changed since the 18th century, when colonists demonstrated against taxation without representation. It didn't take much to turn a peaceful demonstration into an ugly scene.
"Anything can cause crowds to go haywire," Einhorn said. "In 1886, Chicago, it was the Haymarket riots. It started with a peaceful demonstration. The mayor was there, it was all good and he goes home. Then somebody, they don't know who, threw a bomb at police."
The ensuing riots sparked by that action lasted days and resulted in the deaths of six police officers. Several anarchists were hanged, even though the authorities were never sure who threw the bomb.
"People were watching speeches — of course, it might have been incited through rabble-rousing speeches — but the point is, anything can cause something to become violent," Einhorn said. "This is not a new thing."
Incessantly texting
What has changed is the way people far and wide find out about events. Many people today predominantly communicate via social networks, YouTube, text messages and e-mail.
On Thursday, people in the Oakland crowd were incessantly texting, and hooligans who smashed store windows were stopping to snap photos and record videos of themselves to share with their friends.
Michael Walker, a member of the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant, one of the groups that organized Thursday night's post-verdict rally at 14th Street and Broadway, called the peaceful gathering of young and old "monumental." He didn't condone the property damage, but he wasn't surprised that a small group of agitators was later able to excite some in the crowd, given the involuntary manslaughter verdict Mehserle received.
"People are emotional, agitated, so they are easy to influence. It doesn't take much to egg things on," he said.
"If there are large groups and if there are some who want to be (contrary), no matter how few, they will do what they intend to do," he added.
Oakland Councilmember Larry Reid was at the rally, standing near a couple of young men who said they had driven all day from Oregon to be there. They were wearing red and blue bandannas and were weighed down by heavy backpacks, clues that police used to identify members of anarchist groups that sparked the vandalism, Reid said.
As the much of the crowd started to leave before dark, he saw one of the men throw a bottle with liquid in it at the window of a Walgreens pharmacy, but the plate glass did not break.
"There were people who were there to take advantage of the situation, who were hellbent on destruction," Reid said. "There certainly were agitators who came into our city and incited some of the young Oakland folks to engage in some of the same activities they engaged in."
'A long time to recover'
Once people get caught up in the emotions of the protest, they often don't think about the consequences, Reid said. He watched that happen in his own neighborhood in Cincinnati in April 1968.
"When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, there were riots all over the country," he said. "(African-Americans) have a tendency to destroy our own communities and it takes such a long time to recover."
That didn't happen in black communities in Oakland and San Francisco back then, largely because the Black Panther Party went to the communities and urged people to stay calm, said Billy X Jennings, the party's historian.
"The Black Panther Party did not believe in rioting," Jennings said. "It was formed after the Watts riots (in Los Angeles) and most of the destruction happened in the black community. So one of the first party policies was to forget mass rioting in the streets because it is so unorganized and properties and homes are destroyed."
He said he's not against anarchy, but some groups advocate destruction, regardless of the situation.
"Some people might have been bent on revenge and destruction, but that's not the way you do it, because it's short-lived and misguided," Jennings said. "You might think you are striking a blow against the system, but you might be destroying some small-businessperson's livelihood. Just because you are mad at the system doesn't give you the right to tear up property."
'Wild, ruffian behavior'
Paul Cobb, publisher of the Oakland Post newspaper, was a student when he joined King on the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama in March 1965. He is amazed by what now goes on at demonstrations in Oakland, and how a few outsiders can hijack a cause for their own enjoyment. They care nothing about Grant, they just want to get on TV so their friends can see them smashing things up, he said.
"The nature of the protest hasn't changed, but the people who are organizing have changed," Cobb said. "In the '60s it was usually clergy, or community leaders. They didn't need to destroy anything, they wanted to peacefully assemble.
"The people who (cause trouble in Oakland) are poachers. They say, 'Hey let's go have some fun, let's hustle this black protest and show our friends how we can really (expletive) things up.' There's a lot of wild, ruffian behavior."
Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums said he was proud of the peaceful actions of most Oakland citizens and the way police conducted themselves in the hours after the verdict was announced. But he said that such openness allowed some people to exploit the situation.
Walker, of the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant, said such trade-offs are to be expected, and he said the police were smart to contain it to a small area and let it play out.
"The stuff that happened later aside, what we were able to do between the hours of 4 and 8:30 was monumental," Walker said. "More than 1,000 people flooded the streets "... young and old alike, regardless of generational barriers. We can come together as people and force change." | http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_15488051?source=rss | dclm-gs1-418985528 | false | false | {
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0.037929 | <urn:uuid:f3a760a8-c6c7-4bdf-bccc-8d98a56057ae> | en | 0.96165 | Dolores boat builder keeps West's classic dories alive
Pioneers' whitewater craft resurfaces with modern improvements, composite construction
Andy Hutchinson has his dory stored for the winter.
A master craftsman and Grand Canyon guide, Hutchinson's humble and casual demeanor masks his enthusiastic life passion for building custom dories and piloting them through river country.
"In 1982, I was on a beach at Nankoweap Canyon when I first saw a flotilla of these classic boats coming down the Colorado River," Hutchinson, 57, recalls. "It was like the heavens called down to me, and I've been obsessed ever since."
"Dories are the inverse of rafts, so they turn easily with a stroke of the oar, but they do not bounce of rocks very well, so you carry a good-size repair kit, or better yet miss the rocks!" Hutchinson said. "What's nice too is that they're like giant coolers with lots of compartments to take everything along."
Hutchinson's shop phone rings with the details of current and upcoming boat projects, part orders, and river-trip beta.
Dories are made with different materials than in the past, he explains, but they stay true to their original architectural designs. A combination of a fiberglass composite core, and overlapping, marine-grade hardwood panels, make up the modern frame. An "I-Beam" stitching technique reinforces the corners and joints.
The entire boat and hull are further strengthened with layers of additional fiberglass sheets that are "wetted down" with a resin. The concoction literally melts into the specialized wood panels and then cures.
"It is really strong and creates a solid seal," Hutchinson said. "The interior storage holds, the trim, seating, oar locks, and accessories are a lot of custom carpentry."
In older dories, the hull and frame were mostly built with wood planks secured with a rib-cage of lateral supports. But repairs after a crash were much tougher, often requiring several sections to be taken apart and rebuilt on the river.
"The newer composite construction does not require the ribs, and it is just as durable, more lightweight, and much easier to repair," Hutchinson said. "They have the same precision on the water. Loaded with people and gear they have impressive stability in rapids."
Dories float like a cork over towering wave rapids, and then slice down like a scimitar through the troughs, holes, and whirlpools of whitewater. The sleek oar boats have plenty of room for passengers, who don't paddle but are essential for balancing the boat through rough water.
"On a river trips, we have a long training session showing them how to lean into the rapid, take a bite of it, and not flinch backwards because it is so cold. It's just water," Hutchinson says. "With dories, the passenger plays a role using their weight to lean at the right moment to help the oarsman maneuver."
A tactic he knows well. In 2010, Hutchinson reached 100-plus rowing trips down the Grand Canyon. Also an expert kayaker, he won the FibArk down river kayak race on the Arkansas River in 1989 and was a member of the U.S. Mens K-1 Wildwater team Pre-world Championships in France.
Retro dories with their modern construction are expensive, but will last a good boater a lifetime.
Just the materials cost $6,000, and Hutchinson puts approximately 300 hours into building each one. When not guiding on the Colorado River, he's built 25 on his own, and been involved in an additional 70 to 80 dory projects.
In addition to whitewater models, specialized driftboat dories for fishing are also built by order at the Dolores shop. Dories are usually powered by oars, but they can be easily fitted with an outboard motor.
Local boater Scott Spear is contributing labor costs on his new dory, which he plans to name "Dolores" before its maiden voyage on the Green River in April.
"I love the craftsmanship and lines of them," he said. "Dories have a more pioneering feel, and because they are wood, there is more consequence for foul moves. I've only rowed one once. Helping to build it teaches me how to make repairs in case I smash into something."
High Desert Dories also does boat repairs for any type of water craft including canoes, rafts, kayaks and, of course, dories. Hutchinson also does historic boat restoration, boat remodels, and boat design.
Visit the High Desert Dories website at or give Andy a call at (970) 882-3448.
Sam Green/Dolores Star Andy Hutchinson spreads fiberglass over the bottom of a dory he's workin
Andy Hutchinson, of High Desert Dories, pilots his custom dory through Cataract Canyon on the Colorado River. Enlargephoto
Courtesy Photo
| http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20140129/DS03/140129805/0/FRONTPAGE/Dolores-boat-builder-keeps-West's-classic-dories-alive | dclm-gs1-419065528 | false | false | {
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0.129551 | <urn:uuid:f7efc5ff-c13d-4933-94b2-94a1be65d5a7> | en | 0.922926 | Definitions for old frisian
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word old frisian
Princeton's WordNet
1. Old Frisian(noun)
the Frisian language until the 16th century; the Germanic language of ancient Frisia
1. Old Frisian(ProperNoun)
Language akin to English spoken on the North Sea coast of modern Netherlands and Germany before 1650.
1. Old Frisian
Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Weser on the European North Sea coast. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland also spoke Old Frisian but no medieval texts of this area are known. The language of the earlier inhabitants of the region between the Zuiderzee and Ems River is attested in only a few personal names and place-names. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian, spoken from the 16th to the 19th century. In the early Middle Ages, Frisia stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the Weser River, in northern Germany. At the time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. This region is referred to as Greater Frisia or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage. However by 1300, their territory had been pushed back to the Zuiderzee, and the Frisian language survives along the coast only as a substrate. The people from what are today northern Germany and Denmark who settled in England from about 400 onwards came from the same regions and spoke more or less the same language as the people who lived in Frisia. Hence, a close relationship exists between Old Frisian and Old English.
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0.099527 | <urn:uuid:49ec85dd-5c10-4e99-8357-cc474249c929> | en | 0.957067 | DENVER—Passengers on an American Airlines flight from Seattle to Miami are back on their way after the plane made an emergency landing in Denver.
American Airlines spokeswoman Dori Alavarez says the Boeing 757 landed safely early Friday with 183 passengers after the crew reported the smell of smoke in the cockpit.
Alvarez says maintenance crews determined the plane was safe to fly and it took off about three hours later. | http://www.denverpost.com/airlines/ci_23509709/american-airlines-flight-makes-emergency-landing | dclm-gs1-419445528 | false | false | {
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0.171574 | <urn:uuid:e644c580-b6dc-4fbf-a908-15a2cf3e6fbb> | en | 0.928489 | How To Make A Laser Camera Trigger For Under $2
Shooting a bullet in mid air requires a special type of detector to ‘catch’ the bullet in mid air. Usually, a special sensor called a ‘gate sensor’ is used. The trick is a gate sensor is that it can calculate the speed of the bullet and ‘nail’ the shot at the right time. Those are not trivial to build.
This is why I was pleasantly surprised when I got this tutorial from Matt Kane who managed to build a bullet catching circuit for under $2.
Matt used a phototransistor along with a red laser to build cheapass bullet detector with the entire cost of the build being under $2:
First up is the laser itself. The main decision here is visible or infrared. Using a visible laser has the major drawback of showing up in your photos, but it has several benefits that outweigh that. First, they’re cheap and easy to buy. Second, if you’ve ever tried to align an infrared laser then you’ll appreciate being able to see the beam. Finally, visible lasers are a lot safer. You could accidentally shine an infrared laser into your eye without triggering your blink reflex, which is a recipe for toasted retinas…
The final bill of materials. Prices via Octopart.
• TRS1: 3.5mm jack socket. Switchcraft 35RAPC4BHN2. $0.88 from Arrow.
• Q1: Phototransistor. Vishay TEPT4400. $0.25 from Avnet
• U1: Optocoupler. Vishay 4N35. $0.30 from Allied
• R1: Resistor 68Ω
• R2: Resistor 4.7KΩ
Total price $1.44 (plus a few pennies for the resistors)
This works quite well and Matt did mange to catch a few bullets mid flight.
Head over to to read the entire tutorial. | http://www.diyphotography.net/make-laser-camera-trigger-2/ | dclm-gs1-419515528 | false | false | {
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0.051711 | <urn:uuid:6cd8e5f7-6ab9-4d1c-85c9-100380e35626> | en | 0.947606 | I Will Not Shot in RAW
Started May 19, 2013 | Discussions thread
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Re: RAW is not Future Proof...
In reply to Marco Nero, May 21, 2013
Marco Nero wrote:
JJ Rodin wrote:
This is a fundamental answer for ALL the raw vs jpeg questions:
With 'raw' you will have the entire sensor data to use if not NOW, then in the future!
Think of the future, not just now!!
Ah, I'm not soiling for a JPEG Vs RAW argument but I'd like to raise a few observations for those interested in the (apparently ongoing) JPEG Vs RAW debate.
To quote another website: "Having so many different versions of raw files out on the market today could doom the file type(s) to obsolescence. Unfortunately, this could also mean the loss of millions of photographs, as standards and manufacturers change, and most of these varieties of raw files can no longer be read by the machines and applications of the near-future. It is possible that the camera and photo industry will one day soon come to an agreement on a standard raw file format, and have that standard established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). There also exists the possibility that Adobe’s .DNG format can play a role in becoming the common format for raw files."
Many point out that UNLESS you open and convert all your RAW files NOW, you may find someday that you will never be able to open them again because RAW is not "Future Proof".
Any camera with RAW support by Adobe still has RAW support. There is zero reason to believe any version of raw file will be dropped, and should it be dropped conversion to DNG or even TIFF is extremely simple. People who didn't convert their D30 files back 13 years ago still have the same support. Once a file has been supported there is no motivation to drop support....it's there in the algorithm and it's cheaper to keep it for fifty years than remove it. Maybe in a hundred years support will dwindle, but I'd bet there will always be a program that will translate RAWs of any type into a modern format before it becomes impossible to view them. Remember, JPEG was designed specifically for a time period when memory was extremely expensive. The fact that it is an open format is a nice benefit, but it was designed to get rid of data that wasn't being used at that very moment.
Ten years ago I would argue that RAW would be the superior file for capturing certain types of images but not now.
What we are trying to do is capture what we can see with our eyes... using a digital camera. Our eyes have more Dynamic Range than any camera available today although
And while JPEG is great at showing us enough to make our senses happy for the moment, it does not contain all of the original levels that would make further alterations equally pleasing to the eye. The highlight headroom and ability to make white balance and other changes without worry of posterization or clipping is a very important and meaningful property of RAW.
With cameras producing accurate JPEG images that closely resemble what we see, there's no need to worry about "what might be lost" if you choose not to photograph in RAW. If your JPEG is missing information, you'll know about it because your images will be lacking in some way visually. If you can't tell, then you won't miss anything shooting in JPEG.
Until you want to edit. Then you'll notice very quickly. The amount of breathing room is noticeable and much more comfortable. Getting the sharpening and white balance just the way you want it can even be a matter of taste that changes in time. Having a perfectly preserved raw piece of prime meat means you don't have to worry in the future when your tastes have changed from cooking it medium to having piece or rare meat. You can have both.
Technically speaking, a RAW image is simply a filetype and is NOT a photograph or even an Image file. The scary thing about RAW is that each camera manufacturer has its own propriety native RAW File and camera software from one manufacturer will often not be able to read RAW files from another camera brand. In the past Adobe and other software companies have elected to completely discontinue access and service to some of the now defunct types of RAW files. It has happened before so we know it may happen again. How many times do we see threads by people here complaining that their version of Photoshop or Lightroom doesn't support the RAW files from their new camera? Eventually, these companies will allow you to access your camera's RAW files but you need to wait for RAW pluggins and conversion software to become available first.
And what's scary about JPEG is it was designed during a time when the prime concern was taking an image and compressing it to the point that it could still display the image within the realm of human perception exactly as it was encoded upon capture. Levels within the original data could still be used and extracted for a visually noticeable change in shadows, highlight, gamma curve, tone curve, or even white balance and without any worry about working within a set of levels that had already been thinned out, a.k.a. deleted forever.
JPEG and TIF, on the other hand, are considered to be "universal" image formats. Sure, JPEG is a lossy file that is compressed... but most people saving a RAW file to work on it later will use PSD (Photoshop Document) or TIF (Tagged Image Format) to store their "works in progress" for archiving processes.
There are over 254 types of RAW image format files in existence with many of them being subset formats of the same type. RAW may even be abandoned some day and there's ample evident to support this hypothesis. So be careful in the format you choose to save, use or capture your images in.
Where? What RAW files have lost support? Who has hinted at removing support? Nobody. Windows had updated codecs to view all RAW file types that they can get. The only RAW files not supported are those held by companies that refuse to share, which are few and far between. Those are typically medium format users and they have their own issues to deal with. That is an extremely small subset of the market and I'm sure they will convert to TIFF to have a universal format.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with capturing or storing your photographs as RAW files. But it would be prudent to edit every single picture and convert them all into TIFs if you are trying to archive your photography. Plenty of photographers believe they need to shoot RAW but don't know how to make the most of converting their files. Even less people have the correctly calibrated professional monitors or the eye and professional skills to manipulate their images correctly in the first place. On such people, shooting in RAW is almost certainly a waste of time.
Nothing wrong? But it's uncooked? We didn't have the master chef Digic cook it for us! It won't work for much longer! It's too big! We can't even see all the data it contains at this very instant despite being able to extract it later! People who can't edit today or afford a great monitor and calibrating hardware today might in a few years. How wonderful it would be to know they'll have files that will take advantage of their newly found wealth! Professional skills are not required to edit RAW no more than it is required to edit JPEG, although RAW is much more forgiving in those processes. A RAW converter can pump out the camera-quality JPEG in an instant and further manipulation can easily improve upon those results with a little practice and a little education.
Today's JPEG Engines from the modern Canon digital cameras make the most of the RAW information before converting the image into a JPEG image file. All that Dynamic Range and subtle detail hidden in shadows and highlights is carefully extracted and introduced into the final image. The modern camera's Image Processor is much more capable than the collective skills of the vast majority of budding photography enthusiasts out there.
Not the subtle detail hidden in the many, many levels deleted by the JPEG encoder. 14-bit versus 8-bit is a significant and quantifiable difference in the levels the file can hold. And those budding photographers don't need you to tell them how untalened they currently are nor how hopeless it is that they might one day be decent at post processing an image. You have so little faith in yourself that you need to project that on them? Or is it you have such a strong sense of superiority that you finding it unnecessary means everyone else should also?
Enjoy your photography, no matter what format you shoot in.
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Color scheme? Blue / Yellow | http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/51504777 | dclm-gs1-419585528 | false | false | {
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0.023687 | <urn:uuid:8d7152ad-cdb7-4d5c-9160-c84986cadc4d> | en | 0.883296 | Electronic Book Review - aarseth http://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/aarseth en The Contour of a Contour http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/tropical <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/dave-ciccoricco">Dave Ciccoricco</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-06-13</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>One “is no longer maintaining a public online presence” (as if you could ever really be “present” on the Web). The other blogs away like it’s going out of style (and some can only hope). <cite class="note" id="note_1">The first time I used the word <span class="lightEmphasis">blog</span> I was walking through a park long ago and I needed a word to describe what I had just stepped in. At their worst, weblogs promise to be reality television’s revenge on literature; <a class="internal" href="/thread/electropoetics/serial">at their best</a>, they are a digital art form that promises to keep us extraordinarily human. I intend to keep my mind open. And my shoes clean.</cite> I’m referring here to Michael Joyce and Mark Bernstein, two of the most instrumental figures in what Joyce himself once described as the “earnest, even heroic” project of bringing together the “disparate concerns of scientist and humanist - without sacrificing their particularity” (<span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 7). Indeed, though Joyce’s own writing insists that he has not “retreated from the hypertextual,” he has at least retreated from hypertext’s most monstrous incarnation - the World Wide Web. And in the more nebulous realm of things “hypertextual,” Joyce, by his own cryptic admission, has said that he “no longer find[s] satisfying factors in its shifting features” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 3). His aversion to the WWW and its “empty room rhetoric” (52) is of course no secret; and the image of a pile of stones effectively marking his online absence is suggestive, though I can only guess what it’s supposed to suggest. <cite id="note_2">In <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> (233) and in <span class="booktitle">Twilight, A Symphony</span> Joyce invokes the following fragment, “Atom recalling granule, granule stone, stone the great mountain, mountain the first home.” If nothing else, then, the diminutive stone mountain on his Not Home Page suggests something of a recalling or returning. Whether he intends to return home to “his storytelling roots” (as the dust jacket of his recent print novel suggests) or just home for the day is a question best left to amateur prophets; probing his personal motivations, similarly, is best left to the “biographiles.”</cite> Meanwhile, somewhere behind Eastgate Systems’ enduring stone-front archway - and a decade is an eternity in the flickering cosmos of the computer screen - Bernstein continues to match minds and machinery for the networked masses.</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/sculpture.jpg" alt="rock pile image" width="147" height="149" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Joyce’s sculpture</span></p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/newArch.gif" alt="archway image" width="199" height="149" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Eastgate’s archway - design by Stephen Cohen, registered trademark of Eastgate Systems, Inc.</span></p> <p>The more I look at these rock piles the more they look like rock piles, which is only to say that I want to see them both as cairns. Cairns are collections of stones that serve as landmarks or memorials commonly found on trails that are otherwise difficult to follow. Eastgate’s archway is a landmark in the young history of electronic publishing. Some would agree that it is also a memorial to soon-to-be updated or outdated institutions of print.</p> <p>Joyce’s cairn might be a memorial and a landmark as well. The message that accompanies the image on the WWW, voiced in the third-person (” <a class="outbound" href="http://iberia.vassar.edu/~mijoyce"><span class="lightEmphasis">Michael Joyce</span> is no longer…</a> “), has the not unintended effect of someone else placing the stones in Joyce’s absence, as a memorial to an author abandoning his electronic art. Those who think this reading does not bode well for the patron saint of hypertext fiction had best get the revisionism underway. Nonetheless, whether Joyce is writing of the shores of the Great Lakes or the mountains of the Hudson River Valley, he has always found a certain solace in stone, and it would make sense for him to be the artist “behind” the sculpture; that is, the one who “places” it there, the presence marking its own absence. This reading makes the cairn more landmark than memorial, and we can imagine a pathway that continues, and perhaps cycles, beyond. Either way, we can say without elegy that Joyce has marked out a path for others to follow.</p> <p>But in this essay I will not seek the path to either the stone sculpture or the stone gate. Instead, in light of the divergence they symbolize, I will trace a path - or more specifically, a contour - between the two. The story goes something like this: A scientist and an artist create a trope to understand the qualitative experience of electronic texts. They call it Contour. They each take the trope in different directions, into markedly different contexts, and it undergoes its own series of transformations. Has their subsequent work atomized the concept of hypertextual Contour, or has the work somehow created the concept’s own foundation? In terms of our media ecology and our own cognition, where can we locate the notion of Contour now, and where is the path headed?</p> <p>I will not attempt to widen the rift between science and art or mobilize a rhetoric of reconciliation that ultimately reveals only how “disparate” are the fundamental concerns of the scientist and the humanist. Both Bernstein and Joyce - <span class="lightEmphasis">self-described</span> scientist and artist respectively - work toward an understanding of literature, a literature that is increasingly electronic. Therefore, their discipline by definition results from a border crossing and marks a return, in spirit, to a much older connotation of technology (from the Greek, techne = art/skill) as an already artistic pursuit. Rather the intention here is to sustain (or recuperate) a viable way of reading texts that transcend or defy or frustrate our expectations of reading, a practical and pedagogically sound way of understanding the “text beyond the text.”</p> <h2>Constructing Contours</h2> <p>In an effort to better describe the experience of reading “large and complex” hypertexts, Joyce co-authored “Contours of Constructive Hypertexts” with Mark Bernstein and David Levine for the ACM Hypertext conference in 1992. As with books, “small” and “large” are relative dimensions, but from a systems design point of view, a small hypertext often becomes a large one when it crosses a design threshold. These thresholds present themselves in the form of material constraints, such as how many nodes in an overview map “fit” on a single screen (without interminable scrolling) and without, say, sacrificing legibility of their titles. At the same time, these material constraints are always related to cognitive constraints - our own perceptual thresholds. These thresholds tell us to consider as small a hypertext we can read in an hour. A large one could take weeks or more.</p> <p>Much of the theory of hypertext grew out of the phenomenology of the hyperlink - its typologies, poetics, pragmatics, and so on. This emphasis revealed, among most early theorists, an understanding of the link as the fundamentally “new” element of digital literature and the single most observable element in a confined “locality” - that of [node-link-node]. From this localized understanding, theorists built a bottom-up rhetoric of pathways and semantic neighborhoods that cohered for many in Jim Rosenberg’s (1996) description of a hypertext “episode.” The authors of the 1992 article were looking to represent structure beyond both the local node-link-node and what we can call the regional episode, which is still confined to “all or part of a trail or path” (“Structure” 23). <span class="lightEmphasis">Large</span>, to them, referred to something not easily visualized in “static, graph-theoretic measures” (“Contours” 161), namely boxes and lines with directional arrows that tend to fit neatly on a page or a screen. But the authors also take on two subjects at once that are not necessarily related: large hypertexts and hypertexts that are not <span class="lightEmphasis">fixed</span>. Hence, they wanted to visualize not only hypertexts that were inconceivably big, but also those that were conceivably borderless.</p> <p>In “Contours of Constructive Hypertexts,” Bernstein, Joyce, and Levine state, “the structures of meaning or <span class="lightEmphasis">contours</span> we observe in current hypertext fiction and scholarship do not appear to reside in static structures, but rather in the complex and dynamic perceptions of the engaged reader” (161). A lot hinges on this statement regarding not so much what they observe but where they observe it. Surveying a new field of possibility in search, not surprisingly, of hypertextual difference, the authors demarcate a territory unique to hypertext literature. They do so carefully, however, noting that their form of Contour <span class="lightEmphasis">does not appear</span> to reside in static structures (read: the literature of print). But given the intense efforts to mine the art that prefigures network culture in light of the now common understanding that the “hypertextual” is by no means exclusively digital, we can justify a renewed consideration of one particular hypertextual theory as applied to specific works of art. Is the hypertextual Contour, for example, bound up in analyses peculiar to electronic art forms?</p> <p>We know that their Contour traces its own source back to a static medium. The authors “borrow the terms depth and contour from the painter’s vocabulary to describe a similar sense of form which the reader gains as she reads” (164). Even though they work off the early hypertextual ideal that “hypertext dissolves the distinction between readers and writers” (164), their analogy specifically aligns the perception of a painting (by an implied viewer) with the perception of a text (by an implied reader-writer). The analogy emphasizes the visual qualities of hypertext by placing it in the interpretive tradition of <span class="lightEmphasis">ut pictura poesis</span> (as with painting, so in poetry). But their reliance here on <span class="lightEmphasis">audience</span> perception is a slightly confusing gesture given their focus on the Contours of <span class="lightEmphasis">constructive</span> hypertexts, which - by Joyce’s own well-known elaborations - are all about process rather than product. The depth and contour that emerge <span class="lightEmphasis">to the painter</span> (simultaneously her own audience) as she paints might have been an even more appropriate parallel.</p> <p>But at the time the dichotomy of constructive and exploratory was still relatively unfamiliar, and though Joyce introduces the concept as early as 1988 (in “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts,” and republished in <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span>), the collaborative 1992 essay implies that the concept itself was something of a construction site. For example, the description of constructive hypertext as “a foundation for what does not exist” (166) follows a broader one that defines it as “the text rewritten by the act of choice” (165). True, the authors refer explicitly to a hypertext that is “open to change and addition and revision” (166). But any hypertext is open to change in the sense that no two readings are assembled in the same way, and any hypertext fundamentally involves an unfamiliar dynamics of selection. Thus, literary theorists, especially those entrenched in theories of reader-response, intuitively saw this choice making as an act of “inscription” - the text re-written by the reader. Those touting the “empowered” hypertext reader were especially quick to conflate the reader’s ability to, on the one hand, <span class="lightEmphasis">change</span> specific nodes or add new ones and, on the other hand, <span class="lightEmphasis">arrange</span> or assemble their order as a necessary function of reading. Contour <span class="lightEmphasis">could</span> describe a user’s experience of an extant hypertext, and so the concept was adopted primarily as a way of reading despite its origins in more writerly theories of constructive hypertext. In fact, some readers reflexively borrow Joyce’s concept of Contour to review his fiction (see, for example, Robert Siegle’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.thebluemoon.com/4/siegle.html">review</a> of <span class="booktitle">Twilight, a Symphony</span>).</p> <p>Other factors pried Contour away from its purely “constructive” roots. For all its promise, constructive hypertext - like any theoretical model of “becoming” - paradoxically enacts a self-defeating discourse: the more you describe - or inscribe - it, the more you risk pre-programming or pre-empting its future forms and uses. Constructive hypertext, after all, demands a de-territorialized landscape, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari. Theorists, more importantly, had to avoid filling this metaphysical void with the promise of technology per se, for technology, ironically, threatened to become the <span class="lightEmphasis">new center</span> of the liberatory, de-centered discourse that it claimed to effect.</p> <p>Either way, it was not long before structures for what was yet to exist started to fill themselves in and, well…exist (“Every well-designed exploratory hypertext proceeds from a constructive hypertext…” <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 44). And it was not long before there was a structure for everything that could ever possibly want to exist (or so it seemed). We call it the Web, and even though it was both large and unfixed, it was definitely not what Joyce had in mind: “The truth is I don’t enjoy the web very much…the truth is that the web puts me at a loss and I do not exactly know why” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 51). But on the Web or not, the architecture of a “city of text” awaited description - a description at once fluid and concrete.</p> <h2>Tangibly Conceptual Contours</h2> <p>As a theory of reading, Contour arises from a particular experience of a given text and finds a coherent form, or rather a procession of transient forms. Articulating Contour, however, demands a turn of phrase (“trope” is from the Greek <span class="lightEmphasis">tropos</span> meaning “turn”), for the procession of transient forms wants to be simultaneously tangible and conceptual. For Stuart Moulthrop, “the contour is real but virtual” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/shadow_of_info.html">The Shadow of an Informand</a>” [38]). For Jim Rosenberg, Contour “concerns the geography” of what he calls the hypertext episode, and he too resorts to a turn of phrase when he defines the episode as “simply whatever group of actemes coheres in the reader’s mind as a tangible entity” (“Structure” 23). So the intent is to articulate something co-extensive with object and event, but ultimately something that is very much there - in the mind. We might see it as an indispensable cartographic convention in the creation of a cognitive map. At the same time, geometrical planes necessarily become planes of the tail-spinning variety when we force them into the free-floating topology of network space - regardless of whether our network is digital or entirely conceptual. Thus (as with any conceptual understanding) so much is lost in translation when this representation is mapped onto anything static. Any such representation remains just as inert on the screen as on the page.</p> <p>Contour became an axis of orientation for early hypertextualists. It inscribed something of an ephemeral terra firma, curving through not only individual hypertext readings but also through a middle-ground hypertextual criticism. Joyce, of course, realized that the task was not to steady the foundation but rather to find new means of measuring the movement: “Previously stable horizons across my psychic landscape gave way to dizzying patterns of successive contours, each of which was most assuredly real, each of which did not last.” Contour derives force from its ability to mediate. Two years before his own “structure of hypertext activity” (1996) took shape, Rosenberg asked, “Can we describe the contour as the attempt to resolve disjunctive experience into conjunctive resonance?” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.well.com/user/jer/NNHI.html">Navigating Nowhere</a>” 2). And Moulthrop’s analogy between Contour and his own notion of the “informand” (“the momentary structures of coherence and possibility apparent to the reader as she interacts with the structure” [29]) reinforces the concept’s medial quality. Simply stated, Moulthrop’s informand, like a Contour, is an “object-event.” That it <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> an object in space and <span class="lightEmphasis">becomes</span> an event in time signals a convergence, in Joyce’s own phrase, of the “space of memory and the time of narrative experience” (<span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 159-171). Hence, as spatial object and temporal event, Contour can also be said to mediate the vertiginous polemic of space and time.</p> <p>Early on, however, Contour was used most simply as a new measure of reading, or of movement - again in the realm of the “tangible conceptual.” As both noun and verb, it suggests not only how hypertextual Contours emerge when reading, but also how the reader’s selections actively shape or <span class="lightEmphasis">contour</span> the hypertext. And in the years that followed the 1992 paper, two of its authors would shape the notion of Contour itself in different ways. Bernstein’s Contour would arc toward the operational, the instrumental, the unambiguous. Joyce’s would arc toward the poetic, and the erotic.</p> <h2>Contour of Two Minds</h2> <p>Joyce writes extensively about Contour in <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> (1995), specifically in the third and final section, “Contours: Hypertext Poetics.” If we can understand Contour only in its liquid state, then Joyce’s definitions are equally fluid:</p> <p class="longQuotation">Contours are the shape of what we think we see as we see it but that we know we have seen only after we move over them, and new contours of our own shape themselves over what they have left us. They are, in short, what happens as we go… (207)</p> <p>Later in the same essay, other definitions coalesce: “Contour is one expression of the perceptible form of a constantly changing text, made by any of its readers or writers at a given point in its reading or writing” (214). In a formulation that he would later call his “most discrete” and one that “suffers from its fixity” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 167), Joyce breaks the concept into a potentiality of component parts, namely:</p> <p class="longQuotation">Its constituent elements include the current state of the text at hand, the perceived intentions and interactions of previous writers and readers that led to the text at hand, and those interactions with the text that the current reader or writer sees as leading from it. (214)</p> <p>We can emphasize his repetition of the “text at hand,” for the phrase anticipates the trope’s next semantic accretion: the Contour as caress. “Contours are discovered sensually,” he wrote in 1995. But Joyce waited until his next book of theoretical narratives to explain what he meant.</p> <h2>Contour’s Othermindedness</h2> <p>In his introduction, Joyce resolves to continue “grounding our experience of the emergence of network culture in the body” (4) and it is clear that the writings of Hélène Cixous (who contributes an Afterword for his <span class="booktitle">Moral Tales and Meditations</span> published a year later in 2001) have had a hand in shaping both Joyce’s theoretical narratives and, more specifically, his notion of hypertextual Contour. Indeed, readers can look to Joyce for what was the most visible emergence of an erotics of hypertext.</p> <p>Though Joyce readily admits at one point that he “honestly believe[s] hypertextuality is about sexuality,” he elaborates only obliquely, musing on a notably gendered excerpt from Vannevar Bush (1945) that seems to him so much like a “comic love story between man and machine” (219). Joyce does not set out to do with literary hypertext what Roland Barthes does with his “text of Bliss” (Barthes uses <span class="lightEmphasis">contour</span> at one point in his <span class="booktitle">Pleasure of the Text</span> to link our physical body to the body of the text, describing a medial “body of bliss” that “consists solely of erotic relations” [16]). The two articulate different, even incompatible, textual pleasures. Barthes’ <span class="foreignWord">jouissance</span> calls up a rapturous, climactic, or even violent bliss in which cultural codes and forms are fractured or transgressed. Joyce, by contrast, invokes Contour to feel the forms we create but cannot see: “I had in mind…the sense of a lover’s caress in which the form expresses itself in successiveness without necessarily any fixation” (167). Both seek a pleasure devoid of intention - from the text as it exists, not as it intends. But Joyce plays more to the tune of the never-ending story in that, unlike Barthes, the pleasure of his text comes without necessarily any climax, from a succession more stable and sustained.</p> <p>Even if some theorists had hoped to parade a more virile brand of hypertextual eroticism, this tack might have been noticeably premature. At the time, hypertext theory was awkwardly re-positioning itself after striking a staunchly antithetical pose toward the linear tradition and its “missionary position of reading.” <cite id="note_3">The phrase belongs to Sven Birkerts who uses it to describe what he sees as the privileged way of reading (<span class="booktitle">Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age</span>. Faber and Faber Ltd., 1996).</cite> Nonetheless, it was the same school of early hypertext theory that, despite its commendable efforts in placing hypertext in plain view of education, theory, and literature, generated easily some of the least sexy terminology for the new medium. This was achieved in part by referring to the building blocks of hypertext as “chunks.” True, “lexia” sounds “sexier” (the two words rhyme in England, Australia, and New Zealand) but a hasty and ultimately untidy union of hypertext theory and post-structuralist theory made it difficult for that term to endure. Other notable attempts at forging a sexually attractive terminology followed, and Nick Montfort offers an example as decent as any in his <a class="internal" href="../electropoetics/cyberdebates">review</a> of Espen Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. In a section he subtitles “Hot, ergodic cybertext,” Monfort writes, ” <span class="lightEmphasis">Ergodics</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">cybertext</span> provoke curiosity. Aarseth attracts the reading eye by using one neologism each for title and subtitle. He has also selected terms that sound somewhat similar to the words <span class="lightEmphasis">erotics</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">cybersex</span>.” Although we can never know for sure with such claims, sometimes we only see what we desire.</p> <p>Joyce distances himself from the erotics of the virtual as well. Despite all of its free-floating evocations, virtual reality traces the movements of the body to fixed coordinates on what is essentially a three-dimensional Cartesian grid. As Heidi Tikka explains, “In the VR-space the abstracted vision becomes associated with a pointing gesture, moving the user forward in a constant state of erection” (Tikka, cited in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 101). “Instead of this ceremony of erection,” Joyce writes, “I have…characterized hypertext in terms of contour” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 101). But more generally, the insistence on grounding the experience of hypertext in the body served to counter-balance the notion of hypertext as metaphor for the human mind or - in the strong reading - an externalized embodiment of our own neural networks. In the latter, of course, the only thing that is embodied is our brain. In line with Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, and other patriarchs of hypertext invested in augmenting human memory and intelligence, J. David Bolter, Joyce’s colleague and co-creator of Storyspace, adopts the metaphoric reading in <span class="booktitle">Writing Space</span> (1991) when he describes computers as “a new metaphor for the human mind and for our culture’s collective mentality” (11). In <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span>, Joyce explicitly states that he shares this vision (57). Also, in the same work, he is guilty at times of claiming too much in the way of “externalizing” creativity when referring to the Storyspace overviews. It is a claim that J. Yellowlees Douglas takes even further by calling the software overviews themselves “cognitive maps,” a move that draws a footnoted rebuke from Rosenberg, who calls the equation a “serious confusion” (“Structure” 26). Storyspace eventually introduced curves to the lines of its directed graphs, but these contours have little to do with the Contours Joyce would find “not in the text, the author, or the reader, but rather those moments that express relationships among them in the form of reader as writer” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 26). Joyce adds, “its figure for me…is the body…the curve we read in the caress” (44).</p> <p>At the same time, if he eroticizes the hypertextual body in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>, then Joyce’s metaphors remain skin-deep (“Skin is screen,” he says in one of his narrative refrains [93]). Harpold, like Joyce, wished to ground the experience of electronic art forms in the body; but unlike Joyce, he was not content to glean an intuitive apprehension of depth by caressing surfaces. In fact, moving from a Bahktinian reading of the “grotesque body,” he employs metaphors that are gastrointestinal rather than erotic: “Imagining the texture of the stuff that moves in your gut is, I think, an appropriate beginning for thinking about the texture of the space defined by the anatomy of an electronic text.” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/grotesque_corpus.html">The Grotesque Corpus</a>”). Again, hypertext becomes an externalization, but only of what we had for lunch. Did someone mention something about chunks?</p> <h2>Over-arching Contours</h2> <p>If “hypertext is, before anything else, a visual form” (<span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span> 19), Contour articulates its visualization. (In fact, partly because of the visual quality implicit in the word <span class="lightEmphasis">contour</span>, the concept persists whereas something more opaque, for example, Moulthrop’s “informand,” does not). Joyce says that the visual form of electronic texts “may include” the following: [1] “the apparent content of the text at hand,” [2] “its explicit or available design,” or [3] “implicit and dynamic designs” such as “patterns, juxtapositions, or recurrences within the text or abstractions situated outside the text” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 22). A Contour <span class="lightEmphasis">may</span> contain these things. And it may not. It may - to quote this candy bar wrapper here - contain traces of peanuts. But a failure to list its component parts does not make it any less palatable as a theoretical idea. After all, we perceive Contour only by gestalt, and any gestalt perception fails to present itself as a coherent whole through a summation of its constituent parts.</p> <p>But when we begin to consider also those “abstractions situated outside” of the text, we approach a more comprehensive phenomenology of reading. Indeed, Joyce’s later articulations of Contour gesture not simply toward one observable element of a manifold system, or one moment that affords its articulation, but rather toward a demonstration of a system in itself. In an “Intermezzo” piece in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>, for instance, the Contour becomes nothing short of an encompassing - albeit multiple - totality: it is “how the forms of things mean,…the totality of the work” (130). Therefore, if a hypothetical graph of the history of Contour is level and steady when it describes a de-territorialized “space of inscription for a reader,” then it undoubtedly spikes when it becomes, for Joyce, a space for the “real”: “What you cannot describe but you can only see is the inverse of the simulacrum, the real for which there is no fixed representation, or what…I’ve [previously] called the contour” (128). Setting aside what his notion of Contour includes, we might ask instead: what doesn’t it include? At what point does an array of smooth Contours become a tangled mess?</p> <h2>Bernstein’s Patterns</h2> <p>It is a question Mark Bernstein, upon presenting his “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/">Patterns of Hypertext</a> ” in 1998, does not have to ask. In fact, Bernstein takes the trope along what seems like an opposing trajectory, engaging in a pragmatic pinning down of sorts while his colleague revels in poly-semantics. Citing continued calls for structured hypertext in what was by then more clearly a defamiliarized rather than an intrinsically disorienting medium (much to Bernstein’s own credit), he aimed to devise “an appropriate vocabulary” that would allow us “to discern and discuss patterns in hypertexts that may otherwise seem an impenetrable tangle or arbitrary morass” (1). “The problem,” according to Bernstein, “is not that the hypertexts lack structure but rather that we lack words to describe it.”</p> <p>His “structural vocabulary” identified ten patterns, including the hypertextual Cycle, in which “a reader returns to a previously-visited node and eventually departs along a new path” (2). The Cycle gives rise to an assortment of other rhetorical or literary effects that arise from the experience of textual recurrence, repetition, or refrain. But Bernstein’s emphasis is not rhetorical; instead, it’s exacting and literal. Strictly speaking, Contour in “Patterns” is something other than a trope, since it is intended as part of a new vocabulary with a singular connotation, as opposed to an “existing” word that assumes new ones. Contour, here, is an effect of Cycle. More specifically, a plurality of Cycles produces Contour: it is “formed where cycles impinge on each other” and allow “free movement within and between the paths defined by each cycle” (3).</p> <p>Affording Contour an unambiguous role allows Bernstein to represent it in a static graphic image. More ideogram than graph, it looks like this:</p> <p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/Contour.gif" alt="pattern image" width="64" height="64" /></span></p> <p>Bernstein employs these patterns in the service of an earlier - and perhaps too early abandoned - project of “providing a richer vocabulary of local structure” (2). And we can recall that in the 1992 article the authors put faith in static representations to “facilitate understanding of local hypertext structure” (161). Bernstein, then, both stabilizes and localizes the concept of Contour in “Patterns.”</p> <p>Nevertheless, the Contours described by Bernstein and Joyce are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their two trajectories can be said to intersect in the service of a theoretical discourse that seeks to articulate the paradoxical stability and dynamism of the electronic text. It is the same discursive role Moulthrop considers over a decade earlier: “A rhetorical theory of the contour <span class="lightEmphasis">augmented</span>, perhaps, by a practical technique of contour representation and navigation could yield an important shift in our understanding of hypertext [my emphasis]” (Informand [44]). Hence, we can compute a pattern of Contour in the local, without impinging on the expansive conceptual domain of Joyce’s poetics. Bernstein’s Contour works as a ground to Joyce’s figure. Both, however, are rooted in a ground that moves, not only in the rhetorical sense of shifting discourse, but also in a material sense, with regard to software systems.</p> <p>In “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.markbernstein.org/talks/HT01.html">Card Shark and Thespis</a>: exotic tools for hypertext narrative,” Bernstein takes sufficient note of this shifting movement when he asks, “Are the properties of hypertext fiction…intrinsic to hypertext, or do they arise from the idiosyncrasies of specific systems?” (41). He sets out to test this hypothesis by building not a “better system,” but rather a “strange system that might let us step back from Storyspace and the Web in order to gain a better perspective” (41). It is more likely that such a perspective will be possible only after another system, ideally created by someone other than Eastgate, pervades the artistic community to the same degree as Storyspace has. In the meantime, criticisms leveled at either Eastgate or its systems (what some have referred to as the “Church of Hypertext”) accomplish little when they fail to imagine a material alternative let alone build one.</p> <p>Bernstein applies the same logic of perspective to the work of others. In a review of Rebecca Blood’s <span class="booktitle">Weblog Handbook</span>, he writes, “While Blood is fascinated by the social and hypertextual structures that bind the Web, she has no interest in software or in the ways particular tools may shape weblogs and weblog clusters” (“<a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/WeblogHandbook.html">A Romantic View of Weblogs</a>”). With regard to Storyspace, Bernstein sees potential and limits concurrently: “Conventional node-link views like Storyspace and MacWeb represent isolated cycles fairly well but provide little support for visualizing contours created where many cycles intersect” (“Patterns” 13). Furthermore, as Moulthrop notes, “we must understand that the two domains of virtual space, the architectonic space of mapping and the semantic space of conceptual development, do not perfectly correspond” (“Where No Mind Has Gone Before” 206). A poetics of Contour comes into play when visualizing both the complex interstice of cycles Bernstein describes as well as the broader cognitive landscapes of Moulthrop’s semantic space.</p> <h2>Contours of Course</h2> <p>But now that Contour has inscribed the critical landscape with both conceptual breadth and pattern precision, we can ask where it might be headed from here. How does it lend itself to analyses of texts in print? How does it resist such readings? We know that networked narratives are true topologies in that their structure moves; they can be said to make space move (and not necessarily as a literary “work in movement” in the sense of Eco’s Open Work, as Aarseth points out [<span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span> 52-53]). Aside from the odd exceptions - the cards of Marc Saporta or the confetti of William Burroughs - most narratives in print do not share this quality. If we bend back hypertextual tropes to describe pre-digital works in print (such as a novel by James Joyce), or post-digital works of print (such as a novel by Michael Joyce), we do so with this qualification in mind. That is, we need to engage with narrative topology on its own material terms.</p> <p>In a borrowing that is noticeably scientific in nature, Joyce seizes on topology, or “rubber-sheet geometry,” to re-vision his already pliant illustrations. But, for Joyce, it is ultimately the jellyfish that best animates this gelatinous geometry. The movements of a jellyfish (at any or all points we choose to measure) are not determined by what Sanford Kwinter calls the “quantitative subspace (the grid) below it” (cited in <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 23). The jellyfish, moreover, maps the space of which it is itself substantially a part - in the literal sense, as part of the same substance - for the jellyfish forms the water and is a form of it. It illustrates a reflexive flow in topological space. It is the same space that Umberto Eco (1962), also a mentor for Joyce, describes decades prior in a parodic essay concerning the “Paradox of Porta Ludovica,” which is a purported phenomenon of urban space that leaves the inhabitants of Milan in a perpetual state of bewilderment:</p> <p class="longQuotation">It is therefore a topological space, like that of a microbe that chooses as its dwelling place a wad of chewing gum for the period of time…in which the gum is chewed by a being of macroscopic dimensions. (<span class="booktitle">Misreadings</span> 81)</p> <p>And it is the same space that physicist Alan Sokal, who published the infamous “pomo-babble” paper to question the credibility of the inter-disciplinary project, describes in that hoax paper as “ ‘space-time foam’: bubbles of space-time curvature, sharing a complex and ever-changing topology of interconnections” [Sokal published, “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html">Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Theory</a>,” in the journal <span class="journaltitle">Social Text</span> in 1996].</p> <p>Clearly, all three have dramatically different intentions. <cite id="note_4">In the preface to <span class="booktitle">Misreadings</span> Eco writes, “If its aim is true, [parody] simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity” (5). The irony here of course is that Sokal’s parody, though gravely assertive in tone, was designed to disprove nothing other than gravity itself, explaining it away as just another social construction.</cite> Joyce is sincere, Eco is sincere in his parody, and Sokal is none of the above. More specifically, Joyce is sincere in his attempts to visualize topological movement in literature. He wants to describe the act of reading electronic texts as at once systematic and sensual: “Previously I have talked about the qualitative transformations in electronic texts in terms of contours, borrowing a geometric term for what I now think I have always really understood topologically, sensually (as a caress)… (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 22). What these ostensibly diverse methodologies share is an insistence on visualizing complex, physical phenomena.</p> <p>By mentioning Sokal I broach the broader issue of art/science border crossings, when my focus is tracing a literary trope from “static” media to digital media and (conceivably) back again; that is, I’m concerned here with the border of print/digital literature, a border that is to me more familiar but no less suspect. In the two-culture debate, there are compelling arguments on both sides and radically different degrees of borrowing. On one hand there are those “humanists” who search for metaphorical semblances in the language and logic of “science.” On the other hand, there are earnest attempts to find mimetic parallels between the two, using a language that is referential without reservation. Predictably, the most useful border crossings are made by those not seeking to dismantle or destroy one body of knowledge in order to validate another. Nevertheless, as Matt Kirschenbaum makes clear, “information technology will not - not ever - allow communication between the Two Cultures that is totally free of noise… [see “<a class="internal" href="../criticalecologies/technographic">Designing Our Disciplines</a> ” in ebr].</p> <p>With regard to the print/digital divide, Aarseth (<span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>) and others have identified noticeable examples of disjunction or “noise.” This said, if and how we can use hypertextual poetics to theorize works in print depends, as always, on the creativity of individual critics reading individual works, but it should appear to us more interdisciplinary than contradictory. Furthermore, with regard to metaphor, the same noise allows for unexpected synergies; old metaphors acquire new resonance. In “Beyond the Electronic Book: A Critique of Hypertext Rhetoric,” Moulthrop warns of an “absurd regression” resulting from taking a “rhetorics of integration” too far. He notes that “compensatory or reformist rhetorics take the ‘romance’ - or we might say the difference - out of hypertext” (<span class="lightEmphasis">difference</span> is Moulthrop’s word, <span class="lightEmphasis">romance</span> belongs to his source Davida Charney) (294). But Moulthrop’s examples of “too far” do not go far enough. He cites McLuhan, who observed that “rapidly changing societies tend perversely to assign new technologies the work of old, producing oxymorons like ‘televised hearings,’ ‘live recording,’ or ‘electronic book’ ” (294). Clearly, “electronic book” is an oxymoron with which the eponymous review journal is quite comfortable - not despite, but because of the new possibilities such combination allows. To see it otherwise is to ignore the extent to which the “old” rhetorics have informed what follows.</p> <p>With regard to our trope, since Contour emerges through the tracing of an object, it is not only “what happens as we go,” but also what remains when the object is gone. As Robert Siegle writes, “Hypertext can, indeed, stimulate the ‘becomingness’ Joyce celebrates in his theory, but also, just as clearly, hypertext can facilitate retracing the shapes of what tradition and individual talents have left us” (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.thebluemoon.com/4/siegle.html">Twilit Ragas</a>). The conventional wisdom of print has never threatened to occlude the literary creativity of a digital age, and the contours of print literature will continue to inscribe the literature of hypertext. This does not inhibit innovation or postpone the emergence of what Joyce himself has called a “true electronic form” (<span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span> 181). True forms arise whenever creative people see “embodied expression” as transparent intuition rather than contemporary theory.</p> <p>Above all, the Contour aspires (as does this essay) to be nothing more than a site of gathering. It is a trope that forms of and conforms to the spaces in between. That said, Contour itself should be free to weave its way inter-medially, in the space of various disciplines and media. For whatever our artistic or scientific leanings, we can ultimately only work with what we can see - and feel. And I for one, despite the risks, am inclined to swim with the jellyfish.</p> <p style="text-align:center">_________</p> <h2>works cited</h2> <p>Barthes, Roland. <span class="booktitle">The Pleasure of the Text</span>. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday Press, 1980.</p> <p>Bernstein, Mark, Michael Joyce, and David Levine. “Contours of Constructive Hypertexts.” ECHT, 1992 (161-70).</p> <p>Bolter, Jay David. <span class="booktitle">Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing</span>. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1991.</p> <p>Eco, Umberto. <span class="booktitle">Misreadings</span>. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1993.</p> <p>Joyce, Michael. <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.</p> <p>— <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.</p> <p>Moulthrop, Stuart. “Beyond the Electronic Book: A Critique of Hypertext Rhetoric.” New York: ACM Press, 1991.</p> <p>— “Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Ontological Design for Virtual Spaces.” New York: ACM Press, 1994.</p> <p>Rosenberg, Jim. 1996. “The Structure of Hypertext Activity.” New York: ACM Press.</p> <p style="text-align:center">_________</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ciccoricco">ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/dave-ciccoricco">dave ciccoricco</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/mark-bernstein">mark bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/contour">contour</a>, <a href="/tags/cycle">cycle</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/rhetoric">rhetoric</a>, <a href="/tags/trope">trope</a>, <a href="/tags/topology">topology</a>, <a href="/tags/moulthrop">moulthrop</a>, <a href="/tags/informand">informand</a>, <a href="/tags/rosenberg">Rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/episode">episode</a>, <a href="/tags/harpold">Harpold</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/erotic">erotic</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/eco">eco</a>, <a href="/tags/sokal">sokal</a>, <a href="/tags/two-minds">Of Two Minds</a>, <a href="/tags/othermindedness">othermindedness</a>, <a href="/tags/patterns">Patterns</a>, <a href="/tags/constructiv">constructiv</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 862 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com Pervaded by Epistemology http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/blogstyle <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/geniwate">Geniwate</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-04-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>This review is also a reply to earlier <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> reviews by <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Zervos</a> and <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Koskimaa</a>. Introductory descriptions about <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span> are not included. A less linear, more smooth-flowing Flash-based hypertext can be accessed <a class="outbound" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/standalone/electropoetics/geniwateele/haylesrev3.html">here</a> (by those possessing current Flash software).<br /> [Ed.]</p> <h2>themes</h2> <p>In <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>, Hayles wants to create a literary approach which is ‘alert to the importance of materiality in cultural productions’ (page 19). This leads her to develop media-specific analysis (MSA). Now that there are alternatives to print publication, we can no longer ‘ignore the material specificities of the codex book’ (among other types of publication) (page 32). Litcrit should expand to include <a class="thread" href="/thread/imagenarrative">images</a>, for the ‘print-centric view fails to account for all the other signifying components of electronic texts, including sound, animation, motion, video, kinesthetic involvement, and software functionality, among others’ (page 20). One questions that arises is in what sense MSA can be considered a theory of literature, and whether the traditional category of literature is itself implicitly problematised by MSA.</p> <h2>texts discussed</h2> <p>Hayles seeks ‘a mode of critical interrogation alert to the ways in which the medium constructs the work and the work constructs the medium’ (page 6). A book is ‘an artifact whose physical properties and historical usages structure our interactions with it in ways obvious and subtle’ (page 22). For example, the material structure of paper (foregrounded in Tom Phillips’ <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span>), determines how the book is read but also ‘profoundly transforms the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world’ (page 23). This print effect can be compared to an electronic work like Talan Memmott’s <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>. The third work Hayles discusses is <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> by Mark Z Danielewski.</p> <p>Although she argues that all literature is subject to the materiality of its production, Hayles analyzes texts that consciously foreground their materiality; thus, as <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Zervos</a> observes, the texts of interest to MSA are quite narrow, unlike the range of texts that can be accommodated within cybertextual analysis. However cybertext is a structuralist approach, not conceived of for close readings of specific texts. In my opinion, the potential for MSA to broaden critical approaches to textuality beyond ‘media essential’ (<a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/notmetaphor">Eskelinen</a>) disciplines can only be developed if it is released from the shackles of prior disciplines and specific contents.</p> <h2>Lexia to Perplexia</h2> <p>According to Hayles, ‘when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it, it mobilizes reflexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that creation as a physical presence’ (page 25). <a class="internal" href="/imagenarrative/perplex">Lexia to Perplexia</a> by Talan Memmott is a web-based programmed technotext that self-reflexively discusses its relationship with technology and distributed networks. Memmott postulates the co-originary status of subjectivity and electronic technologies (page 49) and describes a process of ‘cyborganization’ in which ‘human subjects [are transformed] into hybrid entities that cannot be thought without the digital inscription apparatus that produces them.’ (page 49) For Hayles, such technotexts ‘play a special role in transforming literary criticism into a material practice, for they make vividly clear that the issue at stake is nothing less than a full-bodied understanding of literature’ (page 26).</p> <h2>lexia hack</h2> <p>Hayles suggests that a difference between <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> and the print texts she discusses (<span class="booktitle">A Humument</span>; <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span>) is the amount of noise that resides on their surface. However, her chosen print texts are also very noisy. Meanwhile, Hayles does not mention the experiential distinctions between reading at a computer versus reading print which <a class="outbound" href="http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/chorus/composition/bernstein/">Bernstein</a> among others mentions. By downplaying differences between the material nature of electronic and print texts, Hayles can put them on the same literary continuum. She thus implicitly refutes those who warned ‘Kaye’ of the equivocal relationship between electronic writing and literature.</p> <p>MSA combines structuralist insights with a more traditional close reading and political, phenomenological, and epistemological tensions result. Meanwhle, as <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Koskimaa</a> points out, Hayles alludes to the ‘highly contested field where allies and enemies sometimes count more than arguments’. Hayles seems to be situating herself above this field, but although she has the grace to avoid the rancour of some others in the field, she is deeply within it. The creation of territory is in general to be mourned; as we are seeing in Iraq, territories require borders, and borders seem to demand either expansionist or defensive strategies.</p> <h2>three areas</h2> <p>Prior to her discussion of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, Hayles describes 3 eras of electronic writing analysis.</p> <p>1. 1980s-1990’s - focused on the link, but the revolutionary claims for such works now appear inflated ‘for they were only beginning to tap into the extraordinary resources offered by electronic environments’ (pages 27-29).</p> <p>2. 2nd generation electronic literature used other software and interfaces than Storyspace which ‘experimented with ways to incorporate narrative with sound, motion, animation, and other software functionalities’ and works that use combinatorial strategies, a computational perspective which ‘kills the literary priest’ (pages 27-28). These are different than technotexts because they don’t pay ‘particular attention to interactions between the materiality of inscription technologies and the inscription they produce’ (page 28).</p> <p>Thus she introduces:</p> <p>3. Media-specific analysis (MSA) ‘insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those EMBODIMENTS interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effect we call literature’ (page 31). All this talk of embodiments reveals one body that is greatly lacking: the human (reader’s) body. Although Hayles acknowledges it elsewhere, it seems we have yet to thoroughly reconceptualize propriocentric relations with revised notions of textuality like MSA in the wake of postmodernism. (Espen Aarseth’s text/machine [Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, page 21] places the operator within the machine, but I suspect that a close analysis of this diagram would throw up conundrums.)</p> <h2>A Humument</h2> <p><span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> by Tom Phillips is an artist’s book inspired by Burroughs’ cutups and applied to an obscure Victorian novel. The original hypertextuality of the novel is compounded by Phillips’ grafting of a second-level hypertextuality. According to Hayles, by re-presenting another book, <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span> reflects on the material production of the novel and in particular on the editorial decisions that novelists make.</p> <h2>House of Leaves</h2> <p><span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> by Mark Z Danielewski concerns media and textual mediation. <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> ultimately becomes a ‘a metaphysical inquiry’ which ‘instantiates the crisis characteristic of post-modernism, in which representation is short-circuited by the realization that there is no reality independent of mediation’ (page 110). In ‘a frenzy of remediation’ <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> consumes other media, but traces of these other media remain which result ‘in a transformed physical and narrative corpus’ (page 112).</p> <h2>MIT Press</h2> <p>Hayles responded to MIT Press’s series of small format books with extensive visual content ‘with excitement, seeing in… [Peter Lunenfeld’s] offer an opportunity to explore the interactions of words with images that had already attracted my attention in electronic media’ (page 143). Several areas needed to be conceptualised: the design, the autobiography, and the relationship to the website.</p> <h2>design</h2> <p>According to the designer, Anne Burdick, ‘In order to create a book that embodies its own critical concepts - a technotext - it is imperative that the design evolves in tandem with the text.’ Hayles wanted to create a book that re-presents itself, over and over. Burdick’s response was to create ‘material metaphors’ that ‘work and rework the body of the codex, amplifying the book’s status as a book.’ Burdick concludes that this approach reveals ‘much about the complex relationship between showing and telling, from the role of context in quotations to the ways in which we read’ (page 140). As <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/playful">Koskimaa</a> comments the combination of quotes from the text and images (for example, page 90, from <span class="booktitle">A Humument</span>) is inspired.</p> <h2>design hack</h2> <p>Burdick wants to facilitate affordance. Underlined capitalised words are ‘amplified entry points into the text’ and graphical elements offer ‘an alternative view of the conceptual terrain of the book’ (page 140). As <a class="outbound" href="http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=36">Thomas</a> points out however, the hypertextual-style underlinings in the book are semantically confusing; highlighting the difference between hardcopy and electronic texts may work against Hayles’ argument for continuity between electronic and print texts. With Zervos, I wondered whether various aspects of this distributed type of materiality foregrounded differences in materiality which Hayles actually seeks to suppress, as part of her project to create a discipline that encompasses them all.</p> <h2>website</h2> <p>One regret of Hayles is that footnotes and bibliography are forced onto the <a class="outbound" href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/">MIT Press website</a> (page 143). The website contains essential academic aspects of the publication. Requires the Flash 6 plugin. Also worth a look is Eric Loyer’s Flash <a class="outbound" href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/">response</a>, commented upon by <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/wrItten">Zervos</a>.</p> <h2>website hack</h2> <p>The website material, in particular the extensive bibliography, is so significant that I had to download and print it. Indeed MIT Press designed it to be printed and inserted in the book. This doesn’t work, because the codex book is not designed for extra material to be slotted in. The alternative is to simultaneously read in two different media, which is not enjoyable. Although Zervos is rather harsh on which is an undeniably interesting experiment in distributed textuality, reading becomes unduly complex, and the reader is confronted by material difference to such an extent that it may indeed work against Hayles’ project</p> <h2>autobiography</h2> <p>Hayles struggled with the autobiographical content that was part of the brief until she hit on the invention of an autobiographical persona, Kaye, which allowed her ‘a means of exuberant engagement’ (page 142).</p> <h2>autobiography hack</h2> <p>As a reader, I found the Kaye persona difficult to form a relationship with. I was constantly trying to judge how literally I should accept Kaye as a description of Hayles. If Kaye is Hayles, then what is the point of Kaye? However, Kaye’s existence makes an eminently readable narrative.</p> <h2>philosophy</h2> <p>Hayles experiments at the edges of language and criticism to situate technotexts in relation to ‘the materiality of the literary artifact’. Issues raised include the role of reader-response (phenomenological) approaches to textual materiality, and the nature of theory itself.</p> <h2>materiality</h2> <p>Materiality…emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies’ (page 33). It ‘depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretative strategies she develops…’ (page 33). We hear about Kaye’s trouble in interpreting these texts because she had been concentrating too hard on reading words: ‘Finally it hit her: the work embedded the verbal narrative in a topographic environment in which word was interwoven with world’ (page 41). Kaye’s physical relationship to these textual topographies remains under-explored, but the introduction of spatial metaphors begs this question.</p> <h2>phenomenology</h2> <p>Kaye’s scientific training may predispose Hayles to treat the text as an objective artefact. MSA pivots around the materiality of the text, and implicit in MSA seems to be the existence of an ideal MSA-inspired reader/critic (that is, Hayles herself). To my more phenomenological mind, the materiality of the text is largely determined by a user’s perception of the material parameters of its production, which cannot be objectively proven.</p> <h2>theory</h2> <p>In one interlude, Hayles ponders the different definitions of theory for the sciences (distillation) and literature (interpretive frameworks) (page 104). Literature can’t renew itself by relying on new phenomena to explore like science can, because it depends on an established canon of lit texts. But lit scholars need noise unlike sciences (page 105). As ‘Kaye’s’ intellectual development took her away from science towards literature, she faced sharp differences in approach, from her own predisposition to ‘solving problems’ to that of ‘investigating problematics’ and increasingly desired to develop the latter approach (page 15).</p> <p>However, at the same time ‘she never abandoned her comitment to precise explanation, feeling that if she really understood something she should be able to explain it to others so it was clear to them’ (page 14). Thus Hayles’ ideal MSA-informed reader, seems to tie in with a pseudo-empiricist world-view: texts are like molecules, available for analysis; if you can’t analyze texts and molecules you undermine the validity of rigorous research in science and in humanities. Epistemology pervades <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>; it remains to be seen whether an MSA can be developed which is more reader/operator-response centered, in which the extent to which material analysis is foregrounded can be a facet of a reader’s interpretation.</p> <h2>ambiguity</h2> <p>Foregrounding materiality is a timely addition to contemporary criticism, but Hayles seeks to do too much - I want ambiguity, a liminal / emergent condition that I don’t want to resolve. My uneasiness with Hayles’ predeliction to over-determine the text is reflected in Aarseth’s belief that ‘cybertexts’ simply are (enjoyably) messy (Aarseth 1997, page 3) (although Aarseth also seems intent on taking some the messiness out with his textonomy).</p> <h2>academy</h2> <p>Hayles’ ‘cultural studies’ style arguments are incomplete in <span class="booktitle">Writing Machines</span>. A cultural studies perspective would discuss the territorialization of critical inquiry itself. For example, is Hayles predisposed to talk about materiality because her meta-project is to develop territory in which ‘electronic writing’ is on a continuum with print literature? A successful synthesis of this putative continuum would be in the interests of a Professor of English and Design / Media Arts.</p> <p>Hayles includes visual media and programmed environments in MSA. Their relationship to ‘literature’ needs much further exploration, and whether this approach can be reconciled with existing disciplines is yet to be demonstrated. Aarseth (1997), to whom Hayles pays scant attention (as both Zervos and Koskimaa point out), suggests an over-arching analytic concept of ‘cybertext’: this seems at least logical. As Eskelinen says ‘Cybertext theory can justify the study of digital and electronic textualities in their own terms, instead of submitting or committing to the traditions of print literature(s)…’ Hayles’ ‘technotext’ is currently too tied to print literature to achieve this level of conceptual independence, although I hesitate in joining Zervos, who believes that one of Hayles’ core problems is her refusal to acknowledge that there is ‘some immaterial quality that is contained in, or produced by, all the actualisations [of poetry]’ beyond a poem’s materiality. This vaguely Romantic transcendentalism assists to create all the aspects of ‘literature’ that I have personally been struggling to escape: the concept of the literary work that justifies copyright (page 31) and the notion of author as indidivual genuis (page 32) being two that Hayles herself mentions.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/anne-burdick">anne burdick</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/mit-press">MIT Press</a>, <a href="/tags/design">design</a>, <a href="/tags/posthuman">posthuman</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/bernstein">bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberdebates">cyberdebates</a>, <a href="/tags/post-human-0">post-human</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 849 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com The Pleasure (and Pain) of Link Poetics http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/pragmatic <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/scott-rettberg">Scott Rettberg</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-01-10</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/electropoetics/linkletters">A Poetics of the Link</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I have followed with great interest the unfolding “cybertext” debate on <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>, frankly relieved that the flow of critical discourse has turned from more banal debates about electronic literature’s basic validity as an art form or its relationship to poststructuralist theory, to more pragmatic questions of taxonomy and epistemology. Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span> (Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) will be a useful reference for years to come because it provides us with a shared language to talk about the computational particularities of different types of electronic texts. Nick Montfort’s <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/cyberdebates">informative review of Aarseth</a>, which provoked reasoned responses by Hayles, Luesebrink, and Rosenberg, suffered from its Oedipal impulse to declare hypertext dead as a result of cybertext’s ascendance. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span> provides a useful terminology for the <span class="lightEmphasis">technical</span> description and categorization of particular types of literature. It does not constitute a scale of aesthetic value. Hayles effectively points out Montfort’s error of elision when she asserts that electronic literature</p> <p class="longQuotation">achieves its power not only through computational operations but also through devices that have traditionally been considered literary, for example originality of expression, construction of plot, use of metaphor and tropes, and characterization through action and narrative voice. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/interspecial">[link to Hayles’ riposte]</a></p> <p>I disagree however with Hayles’s impulse to adopt the neologism “cyber|literature” to foreground the cybertextual properties of electronic literature. Why bifurcate now?</p> <p>Reading Eskelinen’s agonistic dismissal of non-ergodic theories of hypertext that prefaced his recent <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> contribution, <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/notmetaphor">“Cybertext Theory: What an English Professor Should Know Before Trying”</a>, I couldn’t help but think of certain first-person shooter games that require the player to completely annihilate every creature on one “level” before moving on to the next. When Eskelinen suggests “hypertexts should be seen as a subset of cybertexts,” he doesn’t seem to leave open the possibility that hypertexts could be seen as simultaneously belonging to many other sets as well. Theory, like literature, does not ultimately operate a world in which each passing phase obviates the other. I’m more interested in how any given theory can be generative, can help to inform writing and reading practice, than I am in which theorist is having his or her peers for breakfast.</p> <p>There is a reason why I think of and value my youthful experiences of playing Galaga at the arcade, playing Zork on our family’s PC jr., role-playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of neighborhood kids, and hopping my way through many Choose-Your-Own Adventure books, differently from the way that I recollect the first time I sat down with <span class="booktitle">Catch-22</span> or the summer that I made my way through <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span>. If there is a defining flaw of the cybertext debate, it is a failure to take into account the “non-trivial effort” of “mere” interpretation that even lowly works of linear literature require. These crucial efforts of interpretation are further complicated by the additional constraints that cybertexts introduce into writing and reading practice.</p> <p>Both Monfort and Eskelinen are enthusiastic advocates of forms that operate on a different ergodic “level” than simple hypertext. From the standpoint of a purely cybertextual analysis, Montfort’s Interactive Fiction and Eskelinen’s computer games are more complex than click-and-go hypertext. That doesn’t, however, make them any more or less worthy of reading, playing, or for that matter writing about. I recoil from the implicit myth of “progress” that drives any equivocation between technological complexity and literary quality. Any given MUD is more cybertextually complex than the collected works of William Faulkner. The MUD offers community, programmability, and real-time discursive activity, the ability to interact with other intelligences in a virtual space, but it doesn’t come close to delivering a virtual space as fully imagined as Yoknapatawpha County, and it rarely offers a beautiful sentence. The artistic possibilities for multi-user writing environments are vast: MUDs and MOOs offer an environment for constructive and programmable, real-time discourse-driven literature; <cite id="note_1">1. <a class="outbound" href="http://lingua.utdallas.edu">LinguaMOO</a> includes some intriguing literary experiments, such as “plays” that run continually in the MOO. Each interactor in any LinguaMOO also has the ability to provide specific characterization for their MOO identity. Some artists working in electronic literature, including Mez and Alan Sondheim, focus specifically on “performance writing,” literary activity that treats email, IRC, MUDs and MOOs as artistic media in their own right. John Cayley has also moved some of his programmable object poetry from <span class="booktitle">Indra’s Net</span> into MOOspace.</cite> but the creators of these virtual worlds are still fingering at the switches. Hypertext is by no means intrinsically superior to any other form of writing, but in some ways its relative simplicity, its relatively mundane constraints, work to its advantage.</p> <p>Any work of electronic literature involves some form of programming, ranging from the simple tags of HTML hypertext, to the parsers of Infocom language-derived Interactive Fiction, to the algorithmic interpolation of machine-modulated poetry, and beyond. Every program is a set of instructions, a series of constraints introduced into writing and reading practice. Each constraint poses further challenges to both the reader and the writer. Works in the genre of Interactive Fiction, for instance, often tout a “natural language interface” that is in actuality quite the reverse. Readers can supply input using only the extremely limited vocabulary that the author of the Interactive Fiction has defined and typically not revealed to the reader. Readers are asked to immerse themselves in a world where one may pick things up but not caress them, where one may type at but not converse with. In most works of Interactive Fiction, the very puzzle of how to communicate with the text-machine in such a way that it will agree to deliver the next fragment of story subsumes the contemplative activity of interpretation. The reader’s primary charge is to decipher the code of prompts. The satisfactions of most Interactive Fictions are more akin to those of solving a riddle than to those of completing a well-written novel. <cite id="note_2">2. Hats off to Nick Montfort for his efforts to create IF works, such as <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nickm.com/if/winchester.html">Winchester’s Nightmare</a> (1998) and <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nickm.com/if/adverbum.html">Ad Verbum</a> (2000) that do use these riddling constraints to particularly literary ends.</cite></p> <p>Jeff Parker’s <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/cyberdebates">“A Poetics of the Link”</a> refreshingly attempts to liberate the “discourse of the link” from a focus on the link as a metaphor for or a literalization of post-structuralism, to a more pragmatic assessment of the link as a device in reading and writing practices. Parker’s illustrations of the link as a narrative device with various potentialities from his story “A Long Wild Smile,” help to establish that the link can be used as both a “literary unit” and a navigational device. Parker’s practical approach to the link, by “rationalizing linkage,” asks writers to focus consciously on the narrative or poetic usefulness of any decision to insert a link into their creative work.</p> <p>In her <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/multidiscursive">response</a> to Montfort, Luesebrink notes that “it is not the <span class="lightEmphasis">computational</span> function of the link that constitutes the literary value - the link is just a device.” From the perspective of a writer trying to tell a tale, to create a coherent and/or meaningful experience for the reader, the link has both what Parker refers to as its “joys” and its drawbacks as a literary device. I’m interested in exploring some of those drawbacks here, not to discourage the use of hypertext in narrative, but to underscore Parker’s implicit warning to creative writers to think very carefully about the poetic purpose of any moment of linkage. I want to interrogate some of my own writerly anxieties about how the link functions in hypertext fiction. The apparent simplicity of the link belies its complexity, both as an unstable grammatical unit and as an intrusion on typical literary reading practice.</p> <p>I’d like here to pull back a poetic level from the differentiation between typologies of links that convey literary effect, such as Parker’s Emotive, Lateral, Complicating, Temporal, and Portal Links, or poetic uses of the link that I’ve referred to in a different context <cite id="note_3">3. An informal response to an Online Writing Group discussion of the link posted January 6, 1999 and <a class="outbound" href="http://www.unknownhypertext.com/owlhypertext.htm">integrated into The Unknown</a>.</cite> as Referential, Line Break/Double Entendre, Point of View Shifting, Comic Subversion, and Chronological, to focus first on how the link affects reading practice on a more granular level. Because the potential uses of the link are multiple and subjective, dependant on both the author’s intention and the software in which the link is produced, it may be useful to start with a common definition of the link. Here goes:</p> <p>The link, in any hypertext system, is a piece of text or any other media object that the reader may activate. <cite id="note_4">4. Links are typically activated with a mouse click, although many other forms of link activation are in use (i.e. mouseover, stylus movement, voice activation). Landow, Hayles, Aarseth, and others have pointed out that this process of linking is not inherently electronic and that hypertexts exist in many print forms. In a print hypertext such as Cortazar’s <span class="booktitle">Hopscotch</span>, a reader can activate a link by turning to a page specified by the linking device, which can be something as simple as the alternative reading order in <span class="booktitle">Hopscotch</span>, or the simple links, “blatant” in Parker’s terminology, of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.</cite> The reader’s activation of the link “calls” another text, media object, or programmed aspect of the work that in some way changes the text <cite id="note_5">5. Text read here in the widest sense of the word, potentially including image, sound, animation, and aspects of interface design.</cite> delivered by the computer and/or network to the reader’s screen.</p> <p>Parker’s distinction between “functional” and “literary effect” links is problematic because all links are functional in the above-noted way. <cite id="note_6">6. Even the “404 Errors” generated by broken Web links change the surface of the reading experience, albeit in a generally negative way.</cite> The notion of “literary effect” also has its difficulties when moved from the plane of the author’s intention to that of the reader’s interpretation. The creative writer should <span class="lightEmphasis">try</span> to think deterministically of the literary effect of linking, but the intended literary effect will more often than not differ from the consequence that the selection of the link has on the reader’s experience. Parker invokes Harpold’s notion of “the gap,” which bears further examination. The gap is both a physical manifestation of change - the in-between moment of the text after the activation of a link and before the text replacing it has loaded - and a communicative gap between the writer’s intended literary effect and the reader’s reception. As Moulthrop notes:</p> <p>In traversing a semantic space, the link by implication spans or contains that space, if not in its infinite totality then with a kind of cognitive blank check for which there can never be sufficient discursive funds. Links, like words, may be “brokers” of meaning, but they are not honest brokers. As a divingboard into darkness, the link from “space” to the saucer cult invites us to consider an enormous range of possible destinations - from Hubble photography to differential topology to Gene Roddenberry’s “final frontier.” Yet only one possibility is realized, and likely as not it will not be what the reader anticipated.</p> <p>While Parker accurately states that the link is from the writer’s perspective a useful tool to use cunningly and carefully, his assumption that “a link in a hypertext is, from a reader’s perspective, a whole new literary joy” strikes me as overly optimistic. This gap of meaning between the writer’s intention and the reader’s experience is a space of blind negotiation. It is a space of frustration as well as one of play. Readers don’t always react well to a subversion of their expectations. Back in the day when William Gillespie and I were enrolled in David Foster Wallace’s M.A. fiction writing workshop at Illinois State University, which at the time was chock-full of eager young postmodernists striving to subvert the work of their forbears, our discussion often circled back to the ideas - not to familiar workshop dictums about showing vs. telling - but to the problem of “showing off,” and in the process “telling off” the reader. When we youngsters utilized techniques such as nonlinear narrative, disruptive shifts of discourse style mid-story, radical deconstruction of givens of traditional storytelling such as plot, character, and setting etc., Wallace usually reacted in a surprisingly negative, surprisingly conservative way. <cite id="note_7">7. Surprising because his own works, such as <span class="booktitle">Infinite Jest</span>, <span class="booktitle">Girl With Curious Hair</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Broom of the System</span> are masterfully guilty of these pleasurable sins.</cite> Wallace chided us not for writing against the grain of mainstream fiction, but for failing to take into adequate consideration the “pay off” of the <span class="lightEmphasis">work</span>, the “non-trivial effort” that these stories required of the reader. Unconventional writing techniques of any kind constitute a challenge to the reader to surmount the difficulties presented by the text, and also an implicit promise that there will be a moment of satisfaction on the other side of the necessary labor.</p> <p>The link in hypertext represents a similar type of confrontation between the author, the text, and the reader. Poorly chosen links, links that don’t “work,” that don’t “pay off” the reader, are those that fail to meet the reader’s expectation for a sense of connection and causality, or to subvert those expectations in a decipherable way. The reader of the hypertext is not only reading the text, but also the intentions of the linking strategy.</p> <p>Contrary to the assertions of much of its early theory, hypertext doesn’t necessarily liberate the reader as much as it changes the relationship between reader, writer, and text. Readers navigate a given text differently, but in the “explorative” <cite id="note_8">8. <span class="booktitle">In Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics</span> (U of Michigan P, 1995), Michael Joyce distinguishes between “explorative” and “constructive” hypertext - “explorative” hypertext limits the reader to the navigation of a static text via author-selected links, while “constructive” hypertext enables readers to add links and new lexia to the system.</cite> hypertext, the reader’s ability to choose links to follow doesn’t in actuality free readers from the designs of the text’s author. In effect, the reader is simply given a different but nonetheless finite set of choices. In <span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>, Espen Aarseth notes that most hypertexts actually limit a reader’s choices more than the book, which is a “random access” device - the technology of the codex does not require the reader to start at a given page or read in any particular order. Aarseth’s claim is factually accurate, although it fails to acknowledge that readers do the majority of their reading according to a learned set of behaviors. When mystery readers skip to the last page to find out whodunit before finishing the book, they are consciously “cheating,” operating against the implicit code of mystery-reading behavior. The implicit code of reading most types of fiction in codex book format favors starting at the first page and moving to the last. Hypertext readers rarely have such a developed implicit code of behavior to react with or against.</p> <p>A Storyspace hypertext generally provides the reader with choices to move from any given lexia only to those other lexias the author has linked. The link in any case is a predetermined avenue of navigation. Whether the link has been directly chosen by the author, randomly determined by the computer, or determined by navigational choices that the reader has made previously, <cite id="note_9">9. The “guard fields” of Storyspace software and the “conditional links” of Rob Kendall’s Wordcircuits Connections Muse allow for a given link to vary in its effect on the basis of whether or not the reader has visited certain other lexia.</cite> the reader’s agency is always limited to an arbitrary binary choice - “to click or not to click.” Noted electronic literature author <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/transclusion">John Cayley</a> stated in a recent interview that he was uncomfortable with the term “interactive” as it is commonly used to describe writing for programmable network environments. Cayley explained that most works of e-lit are not interactive, but “transactional.” The computer delivers output in response to the reader’s input of the click. The reader is actually making only simple choices about the operation of the text, not eliciting a personalized response from the text or its authors, and not interactively manipulating the work. We transact with the text; we don’t have a dialogue with it. The link is a constraint in the reading process, and in effect a technology of control, rather than one of liberation. While the link enables the reader to make choices that determine how a given text is navigated, the reader does not determine what those choices will be. The limits are imposed by the author and by the program. The text is not “constructed” by the reader, but is rather “navigated” by the reader. The text is structured by the reader’s binary transactions with the hypertext. The text itself functions according to a set of rules determined by the author within the constraints of the program and the interface used to create and deliver the text.</p> <p>To argue that the link is inherently a <a class="thread" href="/thread/wuc">constraint</a>, rather than a liberating device, is not however to say that the reader of any text, in print or electronic format, isn’t already “liberated.” The process of making meaning from a given experience, the act of interpretation, occurs within the reader’s subjective experience. Neither the author nor the text-machine can determine this subjective meaning. The constraint of the link opens a new space of negotiation. While the reader on one level is processing a given “surface” level of text (i.e. following the linear progression of events in a particular “episode,” “scene,” or “lexia” in a hypertext fiction), the link, to an extent, interrupts that cycle of thought, presenting the reader not only with the questions of the surface text: for example “what is happening within this section of imagined world?” or “how does this part of the story relate with the others I’ve read before?”; but also with the questions of the linked text: for example “what will my selection of this link reveal about the section of text I’m reading?” or “will clicking on this link lead me to a more interesting story than the one I’m reading?” or “what am I missing if I don’t click?”</p> <p>Most uses of the link in hypertext narrative tend to work against the kind of developed contemplative storytelling that many of its authors have been trained to appreciate and emulate. No sooner is a reader delivered to a scene or episode than tempted to the egress. Keith Gessen, writing for the somewhat aesthetically conservative audience of <span class="booktitle">The New Republic</span>, notes specifically of some links in <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span>,</p> <p class="longQuotation">These links have the effect of destabilizing the sentence, collapsing its surface, and making it difficult to finish. And yet the raison d’être of the Web, both in its utopian and capitalist manifestations, is the click; to resist the click is to resist the Web itself. And who would want to do a thing like that?</p> <p><a class="outbound" href="http://www.tnr.com/cyberspace/gessen052201.html">Gessen’s observation</a> - painful as it is for me to acknowledge as the very author-unit who chose to insert the links in question - points to another complication creative writers must consider in constructing a hypertext fiction. The link is an entrance, but also an exit. The link is a kind of exotic forbidden fruit hung temptingly from a branch smack dab in the middle of the reader’s current chosen path. The link confronts the reader, distracting from the story at hand, and seductively hinting at the unknown potentiality of the next.</p> <p>The hypertext novel that William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Dirk Stratton, and I co-authored, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.unknownhypertext.com"><span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span></a> , is an encyclopedic hypertext novel about a book tour. <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> bears strong and intentional resemblance to print works in the picaresque tradition, such as Chaucer’s <span class="booktitle">Canterbury Tales</span>, Swift’s <span class="booktitle">Gulliver’s Travels</span>, and Voltaire’s <span class="booktitle">Candide</span>. <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> is an ambitious comedy that includes hundreds of different “scenes,” and parodies multifarious forms of discourse. While each scene is part of the larger narrative, we decided early in the writing process that our measure of the success or failure of any given scene would necessarily be how well it functioned individually, outside of the context of the work as a whole. Since we offer our readers so many means of navigation, so many opportunities to enter and exit a scene at whim, every scene strives to be both a part of a larger whole but more importantly an enclosed, pleasurable reading experience in its own right. Successful scenes in effect work against the links within the text by driving the reader to complete the scene in its entirety before linking. Not all of the scenes in the novel work this way, but that was our intention.</p> <p>One of the distinguishing features of <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> project has been our attempt to present the work not only as an online experience intended for the solitary reader, but also as live performance <cite id="note_10">10. See Montfort, Keller, and Schumate for reviews of <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> in live performance.</cite> in “meatspace.” To that end, we have gone on several “tours,” and presented the work in many venues, ranging from backyard barbeques and Chicago taverns to more formal settings such as the DAC, MLA, AWP, and Hypertext conferences. Our performance is meant to mimic the transactions of the hypertext novel reading experience in this fashion: we typically begin the performance <span class="lightEmphasis">en medias res</span> with a scene that is somehow related specifically to the site in which we are performing the work. <cite id="note_11">11. For instance, at the DAC 1999 conference at Georgia Tech University, we began the reading with the Atlanta scene in which we parody media mogul <a class="outbound" href="http://www.unknownhypertext.com/atlanta.htm">Ted Turner</a>, and at a New York reading whose audience included Barney Rosset, I started with the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.unknownhypertext.com/parismiller.com">Henry Miller scene</a> by way of tribute.</cite> Prior to beginning the reading however, we let the audience know that they themselves have explicit permission to interrupt us, to shout out if they want to follow a link. At every link in the reading, we ring a Pavlovian call bell, a reminder to the audience of their flickering moment of agency. When an audience member shouts out a link, we stop reading, follow the link, switch readers, and start the new scene. Of course, this puts us in an uncomfortable position as authors. On one hand, we want the audience to engage in this transactional behavior, and to instruct us down a path which we otherwise would not have chosen to follow; on the other hand, we feel affection for the scenes as they were individually written and a natural authorial desire to read at least some of them in their entirety. The choosing audience almost invariably favors the interactivity of disruption, the speed of transformation, over the pleasure of closure, even of individual scenes.</p> <p>After the reading, we typically hear two different reactions from members of the audience - someone will come over to tell us how exhilarating it was to be able to react, to control and subvert our “authoritative” reading - and someone else will come up and tell us how frustrating it was that other audience members could not resist the urge to link, preventing us from finishing a particular scene. These two reactions to the live readings of <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> have shaped the way that I think about linking in general. The link is likely pay off for the reader who favors the radical speed and dramatic shifts of hypertext, who focuses on the poetic moment of linkage, but it is however also likely to frustrate the more traditional, and in some ways more patient reader, who takes pleasure in the “tyranny of the author,” and in reading as a contemplative act. <cite id="note_12">12. Through analysis of log files and through correspondence with some of the most devoted fans of <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span>, we’ve learned that while most of our readership is of the impatient variety that flings rapidly from scene to scene, rarely finishing an entire scene, those “repeat visitors” who read the work in more depth tend to slow down, to choose links after reading entire scenes, as their reading of the work progresses.</cite> How does one write a story that satisfies both types of readers? The tension between the two conflicting desires for movement and for contemplation is in a way the central problem of hypertext literature.</p> <p>Hypertext authors should be no less immune to concern about how their audience will react to a give aesthetic choice than any author of print literature. While most of electronic literature’s potential audience has developed hypertextual reading strategies from the experience of surfing the Web, <span class="lightEmphasis">literary hypertext reading</span> is a behavior yet in development. Most of the content of the commercial World Wide Web is intentionally designed for readers to <span class="lightEmphasis">skim</span> and glean information in brief spans of time. Many of the same readers who will blurt out that they “can’t read off of a screen,” when they hear mention of electronic literature have in fact already resituated “non-literary” reading and writing habits, such as keeping abreast of breaking news and corresponding with their peers, onto the network. Literature however, in both its printed and electronic forms, generally privileges contemplation. The challenge for the hypertext author is create work that offers readers both satisfactory poetic performativity <cite id="note_13">13. In <a class="outbound" href="http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/pmc/v012/12.1raley.html">“Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance”</a> (Postmodern Culture 12:1), Rita Raley distinguishes digital from analog hypertext by stressing the performativity of the digital: “both operator and machinic processor are crucial components of the performance of the system. The performance that encompasses user and the machinic system is an interactive one and to some degree collaborative. Further, this performance collapses processing and product, ends and means, input and output, within a system of ‘making’ that is both complex and urgent.”</cite> in linking and the contemplative satisfaction of processing the poem or story as a gestalt - as an “immersive” reading experience. A completely successful hypertext would appeal both to readers interested in the intentional puzzles of linkage, the pleasures of transaction, as well as to readers for whom the link is secondary to the pleasures of the text as a holistic contemplative experience.</p> <p>I’ll make one further observation about linking: McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message applies to linking as well. The medium itself comes laden with constraints on writing and reading practices. The particularity of the linking experience is determined not only by the writer’s and reader’s choices but also by the software and hardware that mediate the writing and reading experiences. The different technologies of linking - the actual programs in which a given hypertext is authored and read - shape and inform the experiences of writing and reading the finished literary work. A link in a print hypertext is different from a link in a Storyspace hypertext is different from a link in an HTML hypertext is different from a link in a Quicktime hypertext is different from a link in a Flash hypertext. Each technology has its own limits and capabilities. Links in Web-based hyperfictions are further complicated by their very situatedness on the network. Web links don’t even necessarily refer to a text that is “inside” the domain of the hypertext itself. The link confronts the reader with an exit to <span class="lightEmphasis">anywhere</span>.</p> <p>I think that Parker’s characterization of the use of the link in early Eastgate hypertexts as being of the “static, associative kind” is unfair. To say this is to fail to acknowledge that the Storyspace authoring environment of hypertexts of note, such as Michael Joyce’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Afternoon.html"><span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span></a> (1987), Stuart Moulthrop’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/VictoryGarden.html"><span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span></a> (1995), and Shelley Jackson’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html"><span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span></a> (1994), <a class="outbound" href="http://www.atlx.comebr/reviews/rev3/landow.html">makes use</a> of a different type of linking technology than that utilized by most authors of second-wave hypertext literature, who typically author in HTML. In Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>, the use of the link is specific to his high modernist project of emotive indeterminacy. The reader’s experience of confusion, of having to revisit and cycle through sections of the text before reaching “central” components of the story that reveal more clearly the tragic circumstances of the protagonist’s car crash, is meant to mimic the distraught and fractured mentality of the narrator.</p> <p>In his <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> riposte to Montfort, <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/enumerable">Rosenberg</a> points out “you will find a great deal of the research in hypertext is going into spatial hypertext.” Both <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span> and <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span> make use of Storyspace’s particular conceptualization of the link as a spatial metaphor. <cite id="note_14">14. In the Storyspace program, authors write in lexia that are assembled in a diagrammatic “map,” which most Eastgate authors make available to the reader of the finished text.</cite> In most Storyspace hypertexts, the metaphor of moving through spaces is visual as well as textual. Any given lexia is “embodied” in a map of the work as a whole. The particularities of the Storyspace software seem to have informed an aesthetic that privileged text-as-image. For instance, one of Robert Arellano’s early hypertext works that involved the history of the bicycle was actually “shaped” like a bicycle in the Storyspace interface. In the “crazy quilt” section of Shelley Jackson’s <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span>, the text itself is visualized and structured as a multicolored quilt. This type of hypertext structure utilizes the link for visual structuring as well as semantic effect. Most Web hypertexts, including “A Long Wild Smile” and <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span>, focus more exclusively on the link as a semantic, conceptual device. <cite id="note_15">15. <span class="booktitle">The Unknown</span> and Robert Arellano’s online hypertext novel <a class="outbound" href="http://www.sunshine69.com"><span class="booktitle">Sunshine 69</span></a> (1996) both include maps as navigational metaphors that readers can use to access certain parts of the story. The map in Storyspace hypertexts is however intrinsic to the text itself, an a priori part of the writing process.</cite> Links in Storyspace hypertexts might seem more awkward than links in HTML hypertexts. <cite id="note_16">16. In his <a class="outbound" href="http://www.eliterature.org/Awards2001/comments-fiction.shtml">comments</a> on the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards, for instance, Fiction Judge Larry McCaffery made honorable mention of <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span>. He praises its “wondrously written and perfectly conceived match of form and content” despite its “somewhat cumbersome reliance on Storyspace software.”</cite> Accessing the different parts of the link interface requires some extra clicking and keystroking unnecessary in HTML hypertexts. The link in these works, however, is certainly no “dumber” or more static than links in HTML works. In fact, in addition to having an accessible visual representation, the link in Storyspace can be conditioned and programmed in ways that the basic HTML link cannot.</p> <p>Parker and others might be forgiven their derision for Storyspace software and the “inmates of the Eastgate school,” as its publisher, Eastgate Systems, <cite id="note_17">17. See Thomas Swiss’s <a class="outbound" href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.1r_swiss.html">“Music and Noise: Marketing Hypertexts”</a> (Postmodern Culture 7:1) for a close reading of Eastgate Systems’ confused brand identity, which conflates elitism with the avant-garde, and literary publishing with selling proprietary software.</cite> often takes a similarly derisive stance to Web-based hypertext. For instance, in <a class="outbound" href="http://www.eastgate.com/ReadingRoom.html">Eastgate’s “Web Reading Room”</a> of sponsored Web projects, the publisher laments that the “limitations of the Web are considerable - especially the difficulty of adapting a Web hypertext to respond to each individual reader, something Storyspace writers (and many others) take for granted.” Eastgate’s statement here falsely suggests that its hypertexts are somehow interactive in a way that web hypertexts are not. The “response” to the individual reader that Storyspace enables consists of another set of constraints on reading practice. The writer, using “guard fields,” can restrict access to certain parts of the work for readers who have not done the necessary work to get to those sections. The program also tracks the reader’s progress through the text, so that readers can pick up where they left off. The reader’s ballyhooed interactivity here consists essentially of the ability to bookmark a page, and perhaps the satisfaction of clicking around long enough to reach the “gated” texts denied to the less persistent reader.</p> <p><span class="booktitle">How</span> magazine reports that the discussion leading up to the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/newebr.htm">database redesign</a> of <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> was guided by the idea of using hypertext to enable its readers and writers to act as literary deejays: “Play the links like a musical instrument. A personal Re-Mix. An Academic Re-Mix. Guest Re-Mixes. Mix-It Yourself.” As we make our stuttering efforts towards describing the language of electronic literature, this appropriation of the discourse of musical culture seems particularly apt. <cite id="note_18">18. John Cayley also makes use of the instrument analogy to describe the performative nature of his writing for programmable network environments. See <a class="outbound" href="http://www.wbez.org/services/od_radec01.htm">WBEZ interview</a>.</cite> The computer is an instrument for the artist, who “arranges” a work of electronic literature within the scale of constraints established by the machine and the software. That interaction in turn produces another instrument, the arranged work of electronic literature, which the reader then “plays” to produce a particular reading of the work itself. Even the introduction of the simple link into this literary instrument produces more “notes” that the composer must figure out how to arrange, and that the reader must figure out how to play. A hypertext novel, with its simple links, might map metaphorically to a relatively simple instrument, such as a flute or a guitar, while a VRML MOO complete with programmed AI avatars might map to something more along the lines of a pipe organ. Symphonies will be written, but before they are realized both writers and readers will need to figure out how to work with the many new instruments at hand.</p> <p>The simple functionality of the link in most Web-based hypertexts probably works to the advantage of hypertext authors who want to reach a wider audience than those able to access the proprietary code of Storyspace. <cite id="note_19">19. Eastgate’s failure to reach a mass audience can be partially attributed to simple economics. Many Eastgate hypertexts cost more than a hardcover book or a two-CD music release. At this writing, Eastgate’s newest titles list for $25 per CD-ROM. Its authoring system runs $295 a license. Eastgates’s competition consists of all of the individual artists who distribute their work for <span class="emphasis">free</span> on the Web. Neither the restricted readership offered by Eastgate nor the free-for-everyone distribution models of the Web present ideal options for authors. Most authors, at this early stage of the field’s development, are however favoring the huge potential audience of the Web over the imprimatur of publishing with Eastgate. There’s a strange inversion here: the “amateur” who goes it alone can typically reach a wider and more diverse readership than the “professional” who takes the more credentialed route. Neither of the two is likely to get a great deal in the way of direct fiscal remuneration for producing electronic literature.</cite> The HTML link is not necessarily a better technology than that of Storyspace, but it is a more accessible one. <cite id="note_20">20. The history of media is replete with examples of “superior” technologies overcome by those that are simply more accessible, for instance the VHS over the Betamax format in video, and most recently MP3 over higher-fidelity digital audio formats.</cite> The linking technology in simple HTML hypertext benefits not from its inherent complexity but instead from its culturally situated <span class="lightEmphasis">familiarity</span>. Readers understand implicitly the basic concept of the link as a connection between one virtual space and another. The Web has by now been around long enough that the “general reader” of the medium is familiar with the three states and basic function of the HTML link. This familiarity, this training in a cultural practice of reading, helps to curb some of the contempt many readers exhibit when first experiencing hypertext’s barbaric incursion into the much-treasured, closely-held domains of fiction and poetry.</p> <p>(Read <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/ecumenical">N. Katherine Hayles’s response</a> to Eskelinen’s User’s Manual.)</p> <p>(Further discussion of electronic literature can be sent to <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>.)</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Some technically inventive approaches to linking</span></p> <p>I include here some examples of hypertexts in which the technology of linking itself is reconsidered. In these cases, the technological choices the authors make about the nature of the link influence the poetic effect of the reader’s transaction with it.</p> <p>Blais, Joline, Keith Frank and Jon Ippolito. <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.three.org/fairetales">Fair e-Tales</a></span> (1999). In retelling the stories of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel, the link functions as a point-of-view shifting device within three inventive javascript interfaces.</p> <p>Cayley, John with Douglas Cape, Wills Morgan, Giles Perring, James Waite and Alex Warwick. <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.z360.com/what">What We Will</a></span> (2001). John Cayley’s recent “interactive drama” collaboration What We Will utilizes the potential of QuickTime interactive movie formats, particularly its photographic panoramas. This is combined with binaural recording in the field and composed soundscapes, which are embedded in the navigable movies. The reader activates links by moving through panoramic photographs and clicking on objects within them.</p> <p>Kendall, Robert. <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://www.wordcircuits.com/clues">Clues</a></span> (2001-Beta Version). Kendall’s Clues urges you to “Play the words. Crack the text. Win the game.” This is one of the first projects to make extensive use of the Wordcircuits Connections Muse developed by Kendall and Jean-Hugues Réty. Connection Muse adds dynamic functionality to HTML texts through a system that tracks the reader’s progress and responds on the fly to changing conditions. It also lets the author create components within the hypertext-paths and sets of nodes - and manipulate these as objects with extractable properties.</p> <p>Moulthrop, Stuart. <span class="booktitle"><a class="outbound" href="http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/HGS">Hegirascope</a></span> (1997). published in New River 3. In Hegirascope, the reader is offered four links per page. The link is recontextualized, however, by the fact that the hypertext is pushing a new page every thirty seconds. If the reader doesn’t select a link, the hypertext will push the reader to another place in the text. The result is a kind of forced urgency to the process of choosing links.</p> <p>Morrisey, Judd with Lori Talley. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.thejewsdaughter.com">“The Jew’s Daughter”</a> (2000). “The Jew’s Daughter” references the traditional idea of the link, with a single blue word on the page. When the reader mouses over the link, however, the page changes of its own accord. The page does not reload or “turn” but instead part of the text on the single page is seamlessly replaced, and the story proceeds in a shifting, fragmentary but ultimately linear way.</p> <p>Rettberg, Scott. <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps51/app_b.html">“The Meddlesome Passenger”</a> Illustrations by Shelley Jackson. (2001-Beta Version). In the “Meddlesome Passenger,” links serve to launch paratexts that comment on and against the central text. The paratexts “speak,” cycle, fade in and fade out, purposefully confronting the reader with their kinetic presence against the relative fixity of the main segments of the fiction. The paratexts underscore the story’s principal focus on a dead author who refuses to be silenced.</p> <p>Sapnar, Megan (Designer). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/index.htm">“Pushkin Translation”</a> (2000). Written by Aleksandr Pushkin. Translated from Russian by Dmitry Brill. Some forms of linkage, such of those in Flash, Shockwave, and Quicktime, accomplish links through the interface itself. In this piece, the reader moves a small window over the Russian version of a poem to see the English version while hearing the Russian. The “linking” here is accomplished by moving a part of the Flash interface.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Works Cited</span></p> <p>Arellano, Robert. “@ltamont” (1994) unpublished Storyspace Hypertext.</p> <p>Cayley, John, Larry McCaffery, and Scott Rettberg. “Electronic Literature: Pushing the Boundaries.” Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ 91.5 FM. Interview by Gretchen Helfritch for Odyssey. Recorded 11/08/01. Once broadcast, it will be available <a class="outbound" href="http://www.wbez.org/services/od_radec01.htm">online in RealAudio</a></p> <p>—. “In the Event of Text.” Interview with Markuu Eskelinen in <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Yearbook 2000</span>. Eskelinen, Markuu and Koskimaa, Markuu, eds. Saarijärvi, Finland: Research Center for Contemporary Culture, 2001. 86-99.</p> <p>Harpold, Terry. “The Contingencies of the Hypertext Link.” First published in <span class="booktitle">Writing on the Edge</span> Spring 1991.</p> <p>Keller, Julia. “Hypertext Novel Offers Easily Accessible Exits.” <span class="booktitle">Chicago Tribune</span> 4 Oct. 1999.</p> <p>Montfort, Nick. “Tome of the Unknown Authors.” <span class="booktitle">Technology Review</span> May/June 2000</p> <p>Moulthrop, Stuart. “Pushing Back: Living and Writing in Broken Space.” <span class="booktitle">Modern Fiction Studies</span> 43:3 (Fall 1997)</p> <p>Parker, Jeff. “A Long Wild Smile.” <span class="booktitle">The Iowa Review Web</span>. (Appeared alternatively in Drunken Boat and the online anthology Jumpin’ at the Diner).</p> <p>Schumate, Michael. “Whatever Happened to the Editors Anyhow?” <span class="booktitle">Hyperizons</span> (Summer 2001)</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/moo">MOO</a>, <a href="/tags/ergodic">ergodic</a>, <a href="/tags/new-media">new media</a>, <a href="/tags/link">link</a>, <a href="/tags/unknown">The Unknown</a>, <a href="/tags/eskelinen">eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/shelley-jackson">shelley jackson</a>, <a href="/tags/montfort">montfort</a>, <a href="/tags/luesebrink">luesebrink</a>, <a href="/tags/unknown">The Unknown</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberdebates">cyberdebates</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 829 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com What Cybertext Theory Can't Do http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/ecumenical <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-02-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates">Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>I didn’t want to write this riposte to Markku Eskelinen’s “Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying,” but I was provoked into it. I didn’t want to write it because I admire Espen Aarseth’s <span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span> (Hopkins, 1997) and think it has made important contributions to the field of electronic textuality, and more generally to our understanding of texts that make the user do nontrivial work to engage them. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/cyberdebates">reviewed by Nick Montfort in ebr 00/01</a>; <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/interspecial">Hayles riPOSTes to Montfort’s review</a> Moreover, I believe that positive contributions to a field are generally more desirable and useful than negative comments. The provocation comes not from Eskelinen’s sarcasm (about which more later). Rather, it derives from the exaggerated claims implicit and often explicit in Eskelinen’s treatment of cybertext theory. Lest this important theoretical tool be inflated beyond its proper scope and so made less useful to the development of the field, I think it is important to set the record straight and be rigorously careful about what cybertext theory cannot do, as well as what it can do. Hence my comments on its limitations.</p> <p>Like all functionalist theories, cybertext theory elides materiality in order to create a template based on function, generally casting a blind eye to how these functions are instantiated in particular media. Cybernetics made much the same move when it reduced complex physiological and biological processes to “functions” and then claimed there were no essential differences between biological organisms and machines, because both carried out the same functions. Despite the frequency with which Aarseth and Eskelinen use the word “material,” in an important sense cybertext theory is very immaterial, for it largely ignores the material differences between, say, computer-generated text, the <span class="booktitle">I Ching</span>, and print novels. Of course the generality it attains by doing so accounts for its power as a theory. But material differences between media do matter, and matter significantly, if one wishes to account for the specificity of reading practices, the responses of users or readers to particular texts, and the nuanced effects that different kinds of texts can achieve. Eskelinen seeks to dismiss such a focus as “essentialist,” but this misses the important point that essentialism is also a generalizing and abstract practice and in this sense has more in common with cybertext theory than it does with media-specific analysis, which seeks to be attentive not only to the specificity of particular media but also to the specificity of different kinds of effects within the same medium.</p> <p>With its emphasis on a theoretical space of semiotic possibilities, cybertext theory is strongest on generating a theoretical heuristic grid with which to understand a wide variety of textual practices. By the same token, however, it is almost powerless to illuminate the possibilities of an individual text, beyond indicating the functions a text employs. It cannot tell us, for example, why or in what sense Michael Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">Afternoon, a story</span> (Eastgate Systems, 1990) succeeds as a narrative fiction, or why one text may be more compelling or memorable to users than another. To ask these questions is inevitably to get into what Eskelinen patronizingly calls a content oriented approach - but is not content, however postmodern, fragmented, contradictory, deconstructive, or elusive it might be, intimately involved in why most users read texts and especially why they return to them time after time?</p> <p>A third limitation of cybertext theory, especially as interpreted by Eskelinen, is mistaking numerosity for analytical power. (Stanislaw Lem had something to say about this in his satire on the “King of the Multitudians” in <span class="booktitle">The Cyberiad</span> [Harvest Books, 1985].) Simply because cybertext theory predicts 576 different combinations, using Aarseth’s scheme for parsing the semiotic components of cybertexts, does not mean that all 576 combinations will be equally interesting or worthwhile. Nor does this number alone indicate the value of the theory, beyond setting up so many pigeonholes to be filled. Equally or more germane is what texts have done with the variables they choose to work with in exploring the nuances, complexities, and pleasures of a given configuration.</p> <p>Another limitation emerges from Eskelinen’s championing of cybertext theory, which is not necessarily a limitation on the theory as such but rather on how he seeks to position it. He consistently opposes cybertext theory to hypertext, as though this were a natural or inevitable opposition. Yet he himself admits that hypertext emerges as a subset of cybertext in cybertext theory, so how can they be opposed? Rather, the “crucial question becomes how to negotiate and renegotiate the relationships between these two literatures: in what terms and whose. It’s also a question of autonomy and authority…” (“Introduction,” para. 4). Precisely. With this revealing admission, his program stands revealed as thoroughly ideological. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/teetering">in ebr (Winter 1995/96) Hayles noted a similar ideological tendency in Diane Greco’s Cyborg</a> Clearly his agenda is to champion cybertext theory as the best theory around and denigrate everything associated with hypertext. Hence the interesting slippages in his article where he is at once trying to throw hypertext off the playing field and also claim it as his own (albeit as a minor star in the firmament of cybertext theory). His slurs against such pioneering figures as George Landow (<span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0</span>, Hopkins, 1998), Jane Yellowlees Douglas (<span class="booktitle">The End of Books, or Books Without End</span>, Michigan, 2001), and Lev Manovich (<span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>, MIT, 2001) ignore the ways in which these theorists have contributed to theories of electronic textuality, including cybertext theory (insofar as it addresses electronic literature along with other kinds of cybertexts). It is easy to see what mistakes earlier writers have made, which later writers are able to avoid partly because they have the work of the pioneers to build on. He also ignores the important on-going work of people who focus on links but seek to use them in innovative and nuanced ways, as detailed for example in Jeff Parker’s article in the same issue, <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/quilted">“A Poetics of the Link”</a>. As a follower of Aarseth, Eskelinen is more dogmatic and ideological than the theorist he has adopted (a well-known phenomenon observed with Marxists who are more dogmatic than Marx, Freudians who are more doctrinaire than Freud, Derridians who are more inflexible and less subtle than Derrida, etc.). Ironically Eskelinin is quick to claim other disciplines want to “colonize” cybertext, while engaging in a rhetoric that in its ideological excesses is as imperialistic as anything I have read in recent years.</p> <p>Which brings me to my final point. Eskelinen claims that one of cybertext theory’s advantages is its ability to protect the field of “cybertext” against the encroachments of other disciplines and approaches, something that he claims “hypertext theory” is powerless to do. Such comments would suggest that he is concerned about the state of the field and wants it to flourish. Why then drive wedges between those who hold stakes in the distinct but closely related fields of cybertext, electronic literature, digital textuality, new media, and computer games? In exaggerating the differences between the textual practices loosely identified with hypertext and those with cybertext, he risks splitting a field that is still in its nascent stages into even more marginal fragments. Would it not make more sense to take an ecumenical approach that seeks to show how different theories make different kinds of contributions in ways that may be complementary rather than antagonistic? Simply by virtue of making choices and identifying areas of focus, no theory can be everything to everybody.</p> <p>Although I have been provoked into a response, there are some areas into which I do not care to go. I refrain from commenting on his violations of ordinary civility. I remark only on the obvious, that ridicule is not a reason, that sarcasm cannot replace argument, that insult erodes community. I want to close by noting the strong contributions that Eskelinen makes. He clearly articulates the power of cybertext theory; he writes vividly and with real enthusiasm about the potential of ergodic texts; and he cares passionately about the theoretical paradigm he champions. These are no small virtues, and to this extent we all benefit from his engagement with the issues.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/eskelinen">eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/lem">lem</a>, <a href="/tags/manovich">manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/yellowlees-douglas">yellowlees douglas</a>, <a href="/tags/landow">landow</a>, <a href="/tags/cyberdebat">cyberdebat</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/game">game</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 813 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com Cybertext Theory: What An English Professor Should Know Before Trying http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/notmetaphor <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/markku-eskelinen">Markku Eskelinen</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-02-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates">Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">Still, what would theory be worth if it were not also good for inventing practice?<br /> - Gérard Genette, <span class="booktitle">Narrative Discourse Revisited</span></p> <h2>introduction</h2> <p>There’s at least one serious downside to Espen Aarseth’s cybertext theory: <a class="internal" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates">reviewed by Nick Montfort in ebr winter 00/01</a> it puts, or is very capable of putting, an end to hype in the rapidly expanding field of digital textuality, where it seems there are always newcomers who can’t make a living without fashionable exaggerations and homebred buzzwords (like multicourse for the tel quelian text and genres always already blended). The golden age of media essentialism - confusing readers with writers, links with intertextuality and texts with rhizomes (among other equally monumental and influential misreadings) - has been over for a while now, along with some careers, and if that’s the end of the world as we know it, I feel fine.</p> <p>In contrast to the dead ends of hypertext theory and its posthuman derivatives, cybertext theory addresses the unique dual materiality of cybernetic sign production and gives us an accurate and heuristic description of how the textual medium works. It achieves this goal by approaching computers as computers, and not in the common montypythonesque way of defining networked and programmable media as something completely different, be that theatre, cinema, comics or (poorly read) continental philosophy. The elementary idea is to see a text as a concrete (and not metaphorical) machine consisting of the medium, the operator, and the strings of signs. The latter are divided into textons (strings of signs as they are in the text) and scriptons (strings of signs as they appear to readers/users). The mechanism by which scriptons are generated or revealed from textons is called a traversal function, which is described as the combination of seven variables (dynamics, determinability, transience, perspective, links <cite id="note_a">Links are then only one of these seven dimensions, and it is exactly this broader view provided by cybertext theory that is valuable, as it gives us more to think of than simple link and node-structures. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/quilted">Jeff Parker considers some not-so-simple link structures in a response to montfort and eskelinen</a> Consequently, it doesn’t make much sense to contrast links to the “computational” as they are both included in Aarseth’s model. Hayles’s cyber|literature becomes then just a parental guidance version of Aarseth’s cybertext: “In the case of cyber|literature, the set of statements are 1) the literary tradition is its parent, 2) the computer game is its parent, 3) the link is the essential feature, and 4) computation is the essential feature.” And cyber|literature is just literature if we are past fetishising the digital.</cite> , access, and user function), and their possible values. This combinatory approach gives us nearly 600 (576 to be exact) different media positions, where every text (from <span class="booktitle">I Ching</span> to MUDs) could be situated based on how its medium functions. All this has consequences that don’t seem to be well understood or even realized, and in what follows I’ll try to make some of them more obvious and visible. I’ll begin with traditional literary studies and hypertext theory and then move on to perhaps more interesting issues like “new media” studies and computer game research.</p> <p>Cybertext focuses on ergodic literature, where the user has to do non-trivial work to traverse the text (instead of merely interpreting it). After a thorough critique of existing paradigms, Aarseth presents his own model and then applies it to hypertext fiction, adventure games, text generators, and MUDs. The relation of ergodic literature to non-ergodic is not very extensively discussed; the focus is understandably elsewhere. Still, it is and should be obvious that to import values and expectations from the latter to the former is not only premature and blinding, but also an indication of the most conservative sort of colonisation. In that sense this essay serves as an introduction to things an average English professor should know before trying.</p> <p>But times change. The word digital doesn’t carry much descriptive weight any more, as almost every aspect of our culture is more or less digital. In such a situation digital theorists are or could be migrating or even sucked back to their old disciplines that are more than willing to have their fair share of “new media”. And then the crucial question becomes how to negotiate and renegotiate the relationships between these two literatures: in what terms and in whose. It’s also a question of autonomy and authority and there’s more to it than the inevitable changes in triviality, although I have to admit that when teaching cybertext theory nowadays in Finland, the hardest part is always to convince students that navigation is non-trivial.</p> <h2>ergodic and non-ergodic literature</h2> <p class="longQuotation">Between 1982 and 1983 I was very unsatisfied by what I then considered as a blind alley of visual poetry. Aware of the multiple directions the genre had taken in the twentieth century, I experimented with different media…billboards, Polaroid cameras, artists’ books, fine graffiti, electronic signboards, video, mail art, photocopiers, videotex, and finally holography.<br /> - Eduardo Kac, interviewed by Simone Osthoff for <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ekac.org/xenia.html">Xenia 2</a></p> <p>The fact that poets in the 20th century (and before) were keen on using whatever material alternative there was available to the printed page is not or at least should not be a secret. Still, such efforts seem to have completely escaped those that were inclined to contrast print to the digital or electronic, with paralysing consequences to the maturing of the field. The fuss about print versus digital seems thus to have been based entirely on narrative bias, to which the material diversity of experimental poetry was either a novelty or an insignificant fact to be ignored. In the context of the latter, however, that much hyped contrast reads more like a joke or a fairy tale: once upon time there were only two media, the old and the new, and they didn’t live happily ever after.</p> <p>If one tries to find a theoretical framework within which to begin discussing a wide variety of poetic practices, let’s say E.M Melo e Castro’s video poetry, John Cayley’s programmatology (<span class="booktitle">Beyond the Codexspace</span>), Eduardo Kac’s holopoetry, there’s no real alternative to cybertext theory (or if there is, it’s certainly not hypertext theory). That’s for the most part because Aarseth’s theory focuses on functional differences within media instead of making essentialist claims. That paves a way for more detailed findings, as the parameters of the cybertext typology can be supplemented, changed, and removed or made more detailed if necessary. The latter alternative is probable if such an undertaking ever traces connections between established practices and traditions including those usually situated outside serious or literal art, like advertising and movie titling for starters. This is of course only one example of many ways in which it is possible to introduce new topics and tensions to the seemingly saturated field of traditional literary studies. It may also be high time to make some sense of how texts are dispersed and scattered around our media environments.</p> <p>The useful inclusiveness of cybertext theory results from its almost standard deconstructive strategy. Aarseth’s theory lays its emphasis on a seriously and curiously understudied and marginalized area of literary scholarship (despite the previous honourable efforts of Brian McHale and the <span class="booktitle">Tel Quel</span>): the materiality of texts and functional differences within textual media. The existing field of textuality is then expanded and dynamically rearranged by combinatorial textonomy (the study of the textual medium) and the previously dominant forms are reinscribed back into a considerably changed field of study as mere subsets of cybertexts. (There’s an array of quasi-transcendental metaphors and concepts (see Gasché 295, 316) and dissemination patterns of randomness that should spring to mind here if one is already past the absences and presences in the <span class="booktitle">Of Grammatology</span> section of <span class="booktitle">Derrida for Beginners</span>.) What emerges this way is a medium-independent map or set of functional possibilities (or media positions) that is both empirical (all the values its parameters can have are already operational in existing textual objects) and of great heuristic value, as it soon becomes evident that the history of print literature and curiously print-like hypertext has been able to utilize only about 2 or 3 percent of those 576 non-hypothetical possibilities Aarseth’s theory is able to foreground. <cite id="note_b">Aarseth’s typology contains 576 different media positions for texts depending on the combination of their values in those seven parameters (dynamics, determinability, transience, perspective, links, access, and user function).</cite></p> <p>Needless to say this same inclusiveness of cybertext theory makes it useful also in defending its objects of study from various colonising enterprises from traditional literary institutions, whenever they’d become desperate enough to try. Cybertext theory can justify the study of digital and electronic textualities in their own terms, instead of submitting or committing to the traditions of print literature(s), as the above mentioned 2 or 3 percent is not too much to justify any attempts to assimilate or ignore multiple textualities in networked and programmable media.</p> <p>Despite the fact that cybertext theory doesn’t build essentialist barriers between textual media, it’s still clear that almost all the knowledge we can gain from traditional literary studies is based on literary objects that are static, intransient, determinate, impersonal, random access, solely interpretative and without links. The same goes for literary values as well. I’m not downplaying the importance of this knowledge or the flexibility of the traditional print format; I’m just saying we can now see and describe its limits more clearly (to our own benefit).</p> <p>From the broader perspective it will be extremely interesting to see what will happen in and to attempts to combine the realm of non-exhaustive interpretation (literary meaning) with the exhaustively and empirically describable realm of cybertextual functioning (textonomy). I think it’s exactly the combinatory and dialogic interplay between these two systems that will both make and keep literary studies attractive for years to come, and make us all look small-minded in the end. At least that’s something non-trivial to do for many anti-formalists who have nothing to lose but their ignorance.</p> <p>One possible way of proceeding might be borrowed from Louis Hjelmslev’s semiotics. In his terms the empirical textonomical dimension of cybertexts could perhaps be seen as the substance of the expression, or at least a highly useful specification of its manifestations. Then the empirical and functional textonomy could establish a reliable point of departure from where to begin discussions and transformations between traditions, aesthetics, poetics, practices, theories and media, and approach the stunning diversity of actual and potential literatures without the usual unifying interpretative violence. Of course, there are even more dangers in this for the content oriented posthuman scholars. In order to succeed in their hunt of supposedly transparent themes, they must move from being simply ignorant to being doubly ignorant, as they now have to turn a blind eye to both the form and the substance of the expression.</p> <p>Before getting into positive consequences and potential points of contact between theories (and practices) of ergodic and non-ergodic literature, let me briefly explain the two main reasons why hypertext theory can neither defend the autonomy of ergodic literature nor exercise much authority in studying it.</p> <p>Firstly, hypertext theory was too much into creating hype (invidiously separating digital or electronic and print textuality), however necessary it might have seemed to be at some moment of recent history, and too much of its legitimacy and identity is still connected to that enterprise. The fierceness of the hype was understandable, as hypertext is much nearer to average print textualities than most other subsets of cybertexts: it had to differentiate at any cost because it wanted to resort to its two most print-like qualities: permanent signifiers and intransient time. <cite id="note_c">Stuart Moulthrop seems to have moved from hypertext fiction to cybertext fiction during the 1990’s - from static scriptons and intransient time of <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span> to transient time of <span class="booktitle">Hegirascope</span> and intratextonic dynamics of <span class="booktitle">Reagan Library</span>. In contrast to later hype, Michael Joyce’s “Selfish Interaction” gives an interesting account of literary thinking behind and literary ideas beyond Storyspace.</cite> These two values helped and will help it to continue any print tradition without causing too much trouble to future chroniclers of literary history. There was so much bull in that static labyrinth.</p> <p>Secondly, for too many years it was en vogue to pretend and claim that the expanding field of digital textuality could be controlled by the shotgun wedding of hypertext theory and its forrestgumpian interpretations of post-structuralism. In retrospect this means hypertext theory will not be effective in defending that field because it is dependent upon its grave misreading and simplifications of the theories it borrowed. In short, serious print scholars will eat hypertext theory for breakfast sooner or later. And actually I can’t wait for that to happen because whatever its merits elsewhere hypertext theory was an educational disaster in what comes to the level of sophistication in its attempts to apply and create literary theory. Witness Landow clarifying the supposed novelty of hypertext narratives by using Aristotle. <cite id="note_d">In his <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0</span>, 181-192. Beginning with: “Hypertext, which challenges narrative and all literary form based on linearity, calls into question of plot and story current since Aristotle.” Challenges to Aristotle have been numerous in theory and practice, and there is really no excuse to reduce the problems of narrative and narration to the petty problems of plot and story. Landow seems to be totally unaware of sophisticated structuralist and post-structuralist theories of narrative communication (Chatman), comprehension (Sternberg, Bordwell, Branigan), and construction (Genette, Prince).</cite> Douglas struggling with the dickensian or cartlandian expectations of closure. <cite id="note_e">See her “How Do I End This Thing?” in Landow (ed) <span class="booktitle">Hyper/text/theory</span>, 159-188. For example: “While my readings of all these versions are logically possible, I cannot accept all of them simultaneously in my final understanding of the events described in <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span> ” (167). Why not accept all if you know at least a little of postmodernist fiction? For the strategies of the latter see McHale, and in practice the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet in the 1960’s and 70’s, and short stories such as Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter.”</cite> , or Hayles compromising her posthuman project by ignoring sophisticated theories of narrative (of focalization, regulation of narrative information, narrative situation etc.) in favour of outdated Henry James. <cite id="note_f">At least from the early days of the Tartu School (Jurij Lotman et al.), it’s been clearly articulated that narrative is a very effective way of packaging information. In order to find out <span class="lightEmphasis">how</span> effective, one needs to study narratives as narratives, hence the necessity of formal narratology and narratological sophistication to the highest degree if one uses narrative in relation to cybernetics and information theory as a circulatory system between the stories of science and those of literature. Sadly, in <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span>, N. Katherine Hayles neither has this kind of elementary knowledge nor seems to understand she should have. James doesn’t carry very far, as his theories of point of view have been replaced a long time ago with more accurate ones of focalization, perspective, and narrative instance. At least in Europe, as the sad fact remains that sophisticated narratology is still not a shared knowledge base in the U.S. according to a recent interview with Brian McHale.</cite> - in addition to quite amusingly reducing deconstruction to a dialectics of absence and presence (of all things).. <cite id="note_g">In her response to Andrew Kurz’s review.</cite></p> <p>So in order to minimize the damage done to justifiable claims for scholarly autonomy and authority - and to clarify the current globally marketed but easily localizable conceptual mess - hypertexts should be seen as a subset of cybertexts, among many others the advocates of the former never managed to come into terms with. This solution also helps to save outstanding hypertext fictions like <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>, <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span> from hypertext theory. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev3/landow.htm">Patchwork Girl was reviewed by George Landow in the fall of 1996</a></p> <h2>points of contact and departure</h2> <p>Due to self-imposed constraints of time and space I’ll limit myself to only seven examples of how to use cybertext theory in relation to other state-of-the-art practices and theories as well as to certain new disciplines or pseudo-disciplines.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Traditionalism (the OuLiPo)</span>. Marcel Bénabou could situate and present nearly 80 oulipian procedures in his heuristic scheme of objects and operations. The former were linguistic units (from a letter to a paragraph and beyond) and the latter such elementary ones as displacement, substitution, or deduction. If we run this system of practices through cybertext theory after supplementing it with the key concepts of Eduardo Kac’s holopoetry, we could once again both considerably expand and transform the variety of intriguing options. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/uncontrollable">Kac oulines his holopoetic concepts in ebr, spring of 1997</a> In practice this means that we divide objects into textonic and scriptonic ones and specify the operations with the seven parameters of Aarseth’s traversal function (dynamics, determinability, transience, perspective, links, access, and use functions).</p> <p>The differences between the ideas and practices of the OuLiPo (and the ALAMO) <a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr10/10bra.htm">Paul Braffort, a veteran of OuLiPo and one of the founders of ALAMO, has written an essay under constraint for ebr</a> and the literary hypertext tradition are not necessarily as great as they would seem to be at first glance. Nothing prevents us from defining conditional links of Afternoon, a story as a new type or even genre of constraint, not the traditional one situated between the author and the text, but between the text and the reader; an obvious third possibility and position would be between different phases or versions of the text. One needs only to read the user’s manual to Storyspace to see how precisely formulated and flexible this system of constraints both is and could be. And from that point on one might wonder why it is that Afternoon had so few followers in its use of the link structure that allows the work to go right against the basic assumptions of previous literary theory - in the sense that because of its guard fields controlling the reader’s access to some of its lexias, it can’t be read in just one reading session however long that period of time would be in human or inhuman terms.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Modernism and postmodernism</span>. Cybertexts are capable of introducing their own sets of epistemological and ontological problems in addition to the already automated ones of modernism and postmodernism that Brian McHale was able to discern in his heuristic study of postmodernist fiction. We could undermine the user’s predictable points of identification by changing the number and the content of scriptons, regulate the reader’s possibilities to read in time, decide to what he may return or whether he may do so at all, circulate characters between scriptonic and textonic positions, or process the traces of configurative uses of a cybertext as toxic waste in the “fictive” world it is supposed to contain. From this viewpoint it is sometimes hard to understand the constant attraction to static hypertexts.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Narratology</span>. Textonomy seen as the study of the substance of the expression is easy to combine with Chatman’s story (the form of the content) and discourse (the form of the expression). The options of controlled access and transient time necessitate the shift from two systems of time to four: in addition to story and discourse times and their altered specifications we need two other registers to account for the controllable and measurable reading time and the life span of the work of art. And so on. I’m not too interested in expanding narratives to infect too many cybertextual possibilities, but those who are, should at least know their narratologies.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Transtextuality</span>. If there’s one horizon cybertext theory is particularly capable of exploding, it is the studies of transtextuality (in this Genettean model intertextuality is only one of its five subcategories (Genette, “Palimpsests” 1-8). The relations between two or several texts described both in textonomical and textological terms results in relations and types of relations that go far beyond those recognizable in print and hypertext fiction and poetry. The main reason for this is that the relations between texts have ceased to be merely interpretative (as in print), or interpretative and explorative (as in web hypertexts): cybertexts can be programmed to affect each other far more deeply than that. In this scenario the way I read and use my Hegirascope could affect someone else’s options to read Reagan Library, or these works might assimilate or annihilate each other. More seriously, we could go beyond independent textual objects, which would be a logical continuation of self-variable and self-supplementing texts. This example of texts consuming and annihilating other texts is just one of many exciting and unforeseen possibilities that can be generated from Aarseth’s heuristic study and typology of cybertexts. It’s also capable of continuing the discussion of the architext and the self-contradictory mess called Western poetics from the point where Genette managed, in The Architext, to bring or advance it in the early 1980’s.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Creative writing</span>. Cybertext theory can be used for inventing new practices, and in its most banal form this means it could be a pedagogical tool of great heuristic value in the dubious business of teaching what is too often called creative writing. <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/opening">see Joe Amato’s and Kass Fleisher’s essay-narrative on CW pedagogy</a> Cybertext theory is a very effective antidote to the well-known theories of literatures of exhaustion, or the almost senile laments of the passing of the golden age, or of the supposedly necessary or unavoidable multimedialisation - for the simple reason it can show roughly 570 fresh alternatives to what those other approaches try to bury.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">“New media.”</span> The semiotic point of departure of cybertext theory gives this approach an advantageous edge that could be used and applied also to phenomena other than textual, such as digital cinema or various other forms of audiovisual presentations, representations, and transmissions. It’s ironic that film scholars like Lev Manovich, busy in their attempts to colonise something regrettably feebly described as new media for film studies and thematic narratives, are at their best just reinventing parts of the cybertextual wheel when they finally discover and try to theorize the all-important difference between database and interface. If we describe the material and functional side of audiovisual (re)presentations and transmissions through cybertext theory, we can quickly find 575 alternatives to traditional cinema (that is to the system of static dynamics, determinate response, impersonal perspective, transient time, controlled access, no links and interpretative user function) - much more than Manovich was able to find in his efforts to define what digital cinema is. So maybe there’s something that deserves to be called ergodic art (Aarseth, “Aporia”), if for once we could look beyond the differences in signs into the mechanisms that produce them.</p> <p><span class="emphasis">Computer game studies</span>. In Aarseth’s typology of cybertexts there are four user functions (very useful in specifying the nature of so-called interactivity). In every form of literature the interpretative user functions dominates the other possible user functions: even though we have to work in order to enjoy John Cayley’s Book Unbound, we do it for interpretative reasons. However, the typology suggests other arrangements not dominated by interpretative interests and goals, but only assisted by them. We can find such a situation in gaming and in computer games in particular. There we interpret in order to be able to configure and move from the beginning to the winning or some other situation, whereas in ergodic literature we may have to configure in order to be able to interpret. And here, finally, we’ll confront the great unstudied and non-theorized of our culture: computer games.</p> <h2>notes</h2> <h2>works cited</h2> <p>Aarseth, Espen. “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”. <span class="booktitle">Hyper/text/theory</span>. Edited by George P.Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 51-86.</p> <p>—. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.</p> <p>—. “Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock: Temporality in Ergodic Art”. <span class="booktitle">Cyberspace Textuality</span>. Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1998. 31-41.</p> <p>—. “Allegories of Space”. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Yearbook 2000</span>. Edited by Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Saarijärvi: Publications of The Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä, 2001. 152-171.</p> <p>Bénabou, Marcel. “Rule and Constraint”. <span class="booktitle">OuLiPo - A Primer of Potential Literature</span>. Edited by Warren J. Motte. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. 40-47.</p> <p>Bordwell, David. <span class="booktitle">Narration in the Fiction Film</span>. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.</p> <p>Branigan, Edward. <span class="booktitle">Narrative Comprehension and Film</span>. London: Routledge, 1992.</p> <p>Cayley, John. <span class="booktitle">Book Unbound</span>. London: Wellsweep, 1995.</p> <p>—. “Beyond the Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext”. <span class="booktitle">Visible Language</span> 30:2, 1996. 164-183.</p> <p>Chatman, Seymour. <span class="booktitle">Story and Discourse</span>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.</p> <p>—. <span class="booktitle">Coming to Terms</span>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.</p> <p>Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. “How Do I Stop This Thing?” <span class="booktitle">Hyper/text/theory</span>. Edited by George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 159-188.</p> <p>Gasché, Rodolphe. <span class="booktitle">The Tain of the Mirror</span>. Cambridge, Ma. And London: Harvard University Press, 1986.</p> <p>Genette, Gérard. <span class="booktitle">Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method</span>. Translated by Jane E Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.</p> <p>—. <span class="booktitle">Narrative Discourse Revisited</span>. Translated by Jane E Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.</p> <p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Architext. An Introduction</span>. Translated by Janet E Lewin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.</p> <p>—. Palimpsests. <span class="booktitle">Literature in the second degree</span>. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.</p> <p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span>. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1999.</p> <p>—. “Cyberlliterature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide”. EBR 11, 2001.</p> <p>—. “Reply to Andrew Kurz”. Available at: <a href="http://otal.umd.edu/~rccs/books/hayles.html#respond">http://otal.umd.edu/~rccs/books/hayles.html#respond</a></p> <p>Hjelmslev, Louis. <span class="booktitle">Prolegomena to a Theory of Language</span>. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.</p> <p>“Interview with Brian McHale: The Sense of Technology in Postmodernist Poetry”. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Yearbook 2000</span>. Edited by Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Saarijärvi: Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, 2001. 69-85.</p> <p>Joyce, Michael. <span class="booktitle">Afternoon, a story</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: Eastgate Systems, 1990.</p> <p>—. “Selfish Interaction”. <span class="booktitle">Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics</span>. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 135-147.</p> <p>Kac, Eduardo. “Key Concepts of Holopoetry”. <span class="booktitle">Experimental-Visual-Concrete. Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960’s</span>. Edited by K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 247-257.</p> <p>Landow, George P. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.</p> <p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2001.</p> <p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernist Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1987.</p> <p>Melo e Castro, E.M. “Videopoetry”. <span class="booktitle">Visible Language</span> 30.2, 1996. 138-149.</p> <p>Moulthrop, Stuart. <span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: Eastgate systems, 1991.</p> <p>—. <span class="booktitle">Hegirascope</span>. <a href="http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/Moulthrop/hypertexts/HGS">http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/Moulthrop/hypertexts/HGS</a></p> <p>—. Reagan Library. Available at: <a href="http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/Moulthrop/hypertexts/rl">http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/Moulthrop/hypertexts/rl</a></p> <p>Prince, Gerald. <span class="booktitle">Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative</span>. New York: Mouton, 1982.</p> <p>Sternberg, Meir. <span class="booktitle">Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/codework">codework</a>, <a href="/tags/gennette">gennette</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/dynamics">dynamics</a>, <a href="/tags/determinability">determinability</a>, <a href="/tags/transience">transience</a>, <a href="/tags/jurij-lotman">jurij lotman</a>, <a href="/tags/perspective">perspective</a>, <a href="/tags/links1">links1</a>, <a href="/tags/access">access</a>, <a href="/tags/and-user-function">and user function</a>, <a href="/tags/mchale">mchale</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/manovich">manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/ergodic">ergodic</a>, <a href="/tags/finland">finland</a>, <a href="/tags/kac">kac</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/experiment">experiment</a>, <a href="/tags/literal">literal</a>, <a href="/tags/cayley">cayley</a>, <a href="/tags/castro">castro</a>, <a href="/tags/combin">combin</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 812 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/interspecial <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-01-10</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates">Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Whenever interspecies mating occurs, the offspring are likely to spark controversy if not fear and loathing – think of the Minotaur, Leda’s two eggs, and in our posthuman age, the androids of Bladerunner. So it is not really surprising that electronic literature, the hybrid progeny of an interspecies mating between computer games and literary traditions, arouses strong feelings from the descendants of both lineages. Scholars mostly interested in computer games, such as Espen Aarseth, cut up the territory so that the literary component is largely obscured; scholars who come out of the literary tradition, such as George Landow, parse the new electronic forms so that they end up sounding like old wine in new platforms. The situation has encouraged partisans to declare that only one parent is legitimate and that the other ought to be murdered outright; witness Markku Eskelinen’s pronouncement at the 1999 Digital Arts and Culture conference that “Hypertext is dead. Cybertext killed it.” While it is understandable that scholars fighting for critical turf want to claim all of the territory for themselves, the nature of the beast called electronic literature cannot be adequately understood if it is orphaned on either side of the family tree. From computer games come interactivity, major tropes such as searching for keys to a central mystery, and multiple narrative pathways chosen by interactors; from literary traditions come devices developed over millennia of experimentation and criticism such as point of view, narrative voice, and literary allusions. To omit either of these resources would be to reduce electronic literature to something beyond our recognition.</p> <p>Which brings me to Nick Montfort’s “Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star,” a thoughtful, provocative essay that uses a review of Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature as the occasion to suggest that the “real” parent of electronic literature is the computer game. Alert to the importance of terminology in this emerging field, Montfort argues that parsing electronic literature as hypertext over-emphasizes the importance of the link and under-emphasizes other important aspects of electronic literature, for example the materiality of the medium and the reconfiguration of the reader as “operator” or “interactor.” This argument is important, I think, insofar as it correctly points out the major shift brought about by Aarseth’s terminology when he identifies cybertext as essentially a machine that computes rather than a text that uses links.</p> <p>Other aspects of the argument strike me as simply wrong. When Montfort constructs a typology of computer structures progressing from finite automata to Turing machines, he seems to imply that electronic literature using more powerful programming techniques is a priori better than texts relying on linking structures. Surely the effectiveness of electronic literature springs much more directly from its effect on readers than from the kind of programming structures it uses. Links in themselves, without regard to their context, conceptualization, or dramatic effectiveness, cannot reasonably be considered inferior to other modes of programming, also considered without regard to their use or contextualization. Electronic literature achieves its power not only through computational operations but also through devices that have traditionally been considered literary, for example originality of expression, construction of plot, use of metaphor and tropes, and characterization through action and narrative voice. Just as literary analysis of electronic literature that does not consider the reader’s choice of pathways or the materiality of the medium would be seriously incomplete, so would an analysis that looks only at programming structure without regard for these tools of a writer’s trade.</p> <p>Indeed, a close (dare I say literary?) reading of Montfort’s essay suggests that it embodies a dual impulse. The explicit purpose of his argument is to shift the emphasis from links to computation. But running throughout are assumptions that implicitly acknowledge the importance of literary effects. His own interests, he says, are invested particularly in interactive fictions, of which he has authored an excellent example, <span class="booktitle">Winchester’s Nightmare</span>. Here more than with many electronic literary texts, the dual parentage of computer game and literary tradition becomes evident. The game structure challenges the reader to progress through the work, but it is the good quality of Montfort’s prose that makes the reader think this game is worth the candle. The very nomenclature that Montfort prefers and defends, interactive fiction, speaks to this dual parentage. If these works are interactive, they are also fictions, and they cannot be understood as meaningful cultural practices without this literary component.</p> <p>To return to Aarseth’s influential Cybertext and Montfort’s endorsement of it, let me suggest that Cybertext both illuminates and obscures by treating ergodic literature as primarily computational. It illuminates in all the ways that Montfort suggests, but at a price. Especially for texts that achieve signification through literary effects, the term “cybertext” operates to occlude the qualities of language, structure and verbal richness that we traditionally associate with literature. To think of hypertexts such as Shelley Jackson’s <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span>, Michael Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>, <span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Twelve Blue</span>, M. D. Coverley’s <span class="booktitle">Califia</span> and Stephanie Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span> as depending primarily on computation for their effects is to render them virtually unintelligible as works capable of making readers care about the stories they tell. Works like this proclaim their literariness through heightened language, literary tropes, and extensive allusions to other literature (<span class="booktitle">Frankenstein</span> for Patchwork Girl, <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> for <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>, California narratives for <span class="booktitle">Califia</span>, ballad form for <span class="booktitle">Sand and Harry Soot</span>). <a class="internal" href="Leclairpf">Tom LeClair considers such allusive contemporary narratives as “parasitical”</a> Just as they could not be fully understood if they were taken out of the computer and printed out on paper (as the <span class="booktitle">Norton Anthology</span> does for <span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>), so they also would become incomprehensible if wrenched out of the literary tradition so integral to our cultural Imagination.</p> <p>There are other reasons not to kill off the literary parent. Nick Montfort implicitly alludes to one of them when he suggests that interactive fictions ought to be taken “seriously,” or to say the same thing in another way, ought not to be dismissed as “categorically less…worthwhile” because they rely on computation. We might ask, taken seriously by whom? Since he is presuming that his interactors like computer games, it seems that the resistant readers he evokes here are precisely the folks who like to read literature. What is gained from the viewpoint of these readers by arguing that interactive fictions do not have qualities traditionally associated with literature? Electronic literature comprises a tiny percentage of texts that can lay claim to the close critical attention and careful reading that Montfort wants to gain for interactive fictions. Trying to kill off either parent, literary or computational, is more apt to result in infanticide rather than parricide. Literature and computer games are both doing very nicely these days; it is their hybrid offspring that is in danger. To see critics argue against either of this offspring’s parents reminds me of Freud’s analysis of the “narcissism of minor differences.” The phrase describes a common tragedy: a small group, infinitesimal compared to the mainstream, engages in fierce ideological battles that result in splintering, thereby reducing its already problematic effectiveness. The American Communist Party splits into two and these factions split yet again; the Mennonites split into two and continue to splinter until common sense finally takes hold and they begin to reunite. Let us not make the same mistake with electronic literature. This new-born hybrid, still so young many do not know it exists, desperately needs all the parents it can get.</p> <p>To this end, I want to propose another terminology, one I hope will be inclusive and synergistic rather than exclusive and confrontational. For the broad category of texts generated through computation and relying extensively on literary effects, I propose the term “cyber|literature.” The two halves of the word allude to the two parents, connected by a vertical line that in programming is called a “pipe.” Two pipes in C++ denotes a “logical or” (I am using one because the “l” in literature can be understood as alluding to this second line), which says that if any statement in a set of statements is true, the entire set shall be considered true.” In the case of cyber|literature, the set of statements are 1) the literary tradition is its parent, 2) the computer game is its parent, 3) the link is the essential feature, and 4) computation is the essential feature. The pipe implies that foregrounding any one of these aspects necessarily opens the door to the others as well.</p> <p>A final word on terminology. As many commentators have noted, including Marjorie Luesebrink, Carolyn Guertin, and Daniela Daniele, cyber|literature with its links and computational permutations is especially well-suited to fragmentation, rupture, combinations of disparate discourses, and multimedia. To put this another way, cyber|literature is not well-suited to coherent continuous narrative. A glance at two sites, “Progressive Dinner Party” curated by Marjorie Luesebrink and Carolyn Guertin, and <a class="outbound" href="http://califia.hispeed.com/Jumpin/">“Jumpin at the Diner”</a> curated by Luesebrink and Jennifer Ley show that most of the 79 web-specific works at these sites employ multiple discourses as well as text, image, animation, etc. Consider geniwate’s “Rice.” It includes autobiography, travelogue, poetry, fiction, non-fictional narrative, and philosophical meditation. No generally accepted term exists to describe the promiscuous mixing employed by this work and many others. Luesebrink and Guertin use the term “blended genre,” which has the disadvantage of masking ruptures (by implying differences have somehow been “blended” together), and of using “genre,” a term loaded with specifically literary meanings that do not map well onto the multiple discourses and multimedia effects characteristic of these works. To describe these ruptured, fragmented multiplicities, I propose “multicourse,” a term that can be understood as a neologism for “multiple discourses” but that also alludes to the multiple reading pathways generated by links and computational combinations. Like “cyber|literature,” “multicourse” acknowledges both of electronic literature’s parents.</p> <p>Others will no doubt have different ideas about creating a critical vocabulary to describe electronic literature. All efforts are welcome, but especially urgent at present is crafting a vocabulary that opens the way to consider how computational operations work together with linking structures and literary devices to create richly textured works that are something like computer games and something like literature. Like a child who is first parsed as a combination of her parents and gradually understood as fully a person in her own right, so cyber|literature, now in its infancy, will begin to take on its own unique characteristics. When that happens, we will learn to read cyber|literature not as an etymology marking its origins but as a signifier richly resonant with its own specificities and meanings.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/geniwate">geniwate</a>, <a href="/tags/luesebrink">luesebrink</a>, <a href="/tags/markku-eskelinen">Markku Eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/interact">interact</a>, <a href="/tags/material">material</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/computa">computa</a>, <a href="/tags/litera">litera</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 804 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates <div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix"> <div class="markup">by</div> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><a href="/author/nick-montfort">Nick Montfort</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2000-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>the hypertext murder case</h2> <p> “Hypertext is dead - ” declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts<br /> and Culture ‘99 in Atlanta. “Cybertext killed it.”<br /><ebr-gloss position="1"></ebr-gloss><br /> No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be<br /> written, but - if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a<br /> special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works<br /> of writing - Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been<br /> produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a<br /> patchwork that includes other types of literary machines. </p> <p> One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one to<br /> consider, is that of “cybertext.” The word was first used in the<br /> critical discourse by Espen Aarseth in<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic<br /> Literature.</span><br /> The term denotes not all possible networks of lexia, but the<br /> more general set of text machines. These machines are operated by<br /> readers, and depending upon how they are operated they present different<br /> outputs, different texts for reading. The cybertext category therefore<br /> contains hypertext, which is operated by means of clicking and<br /> traversing links, but it is much broader. Indeed, Aarseth’s chief<br /> accomplishment in<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br /> was not to completely illuminate any particular interactive work<br /> or form of computational writing, but to erase the stifling hypertext<br /> boundary, and to redraw that boundary so that it demarcates a more<br /> interesting territory of reader-influenced texts. The cybertext terrain<br /> includes computational literary artifacts that are in some cases novel,<br /> although yet to be thoroughly explored. In other cases, the cybertexts<br /> included have some history, but one that is woefully neglected. </p> <p> Notably absent from Aarseth’s definition of cybertext is mention<br /> of the link, and this missing link - or, more specifically, this<br /> replacement of the link with a more interesting feature of computational<br /> literary interaction - frees the new category from the chains of a<br /> critical-theory-influenced and essentially non-computational<br /> perspective. The definition of computer hypertext given in George<br /> Landow’s 1992<br /><span class="booktitle">Hypertext</span><br /> (a work that, like<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>, took the category of literature under consideration as its<br /> eponym) was drawn from Roland Barthes’s<br /><span class="booktitle">S/Z</span>. Landow describes the form as “text composed of blocks of words<br /> (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails<br /> in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the<br /> terms link, node, network, web, and path.” Landow also indicates here,<br /> by his use of the term “computer hypertext,” that non-computer hypertext<br /> - besides the hypertexts he describes as implicit, such as<br /><span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span><br /> - exists as well; Cort·zar’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Hopscotch</span><br /> and Queneau’s “Story as You Like It” are in this category.<br /> Oddly, the idea that hypertexts can appear in print has been a<br /> contentious point for some critics, many of whom either see the<br /> electronic digital computer as an essential element in defining a<br /> category of interactive texts or consider all texts (which one can,<br /> after all, skip around in) as hypertexts. Aarseth deftly disposes of<br /> this issue by simply making his definition independent of the medium in<br /> which the work is presented. </p> <p>As appropriate as the hypertext category might be for Landow’s<br /> topic (the embodiment of late 20th century critical theory in<br /> interactive computer text forms), it includes only a subset of<br /> electronic literary efforts. An extended analogy to the theory of<br /> computation demonstrates this restricted scope, and explains why the old<br /> collection called hypertext cannot continue to hold our interest as a<br /> critical category or as a category describing what literary efforts<br /> should be considered valid and worthy.</p> <h2>classes of computational power</h2> <p>There are four different classes of theoretical computers.<br /> Since theoretical computers can compute the same sorts of algorithms as<br /> can languages governed by formally-defined grammars, these four<br /> computational classes map directly to four classes of formal language.<br /> Only the first and fourth class will be considered at all here, but in<br /> terms of increasing generality (i.e., ability to execute larger and<br /> larger sets of algorithms to solve additional classes of problems) the<br /> four classes are as follows, ranked in what is known as the Chomsky<br /> hierarchy:</p> <p> 1. Finite automata / Regular languages<br /><br /> 2. Pushdown automata / Context-free languages<br /><br /> 3. Linear bounded automata / Context-sensitive languages<br /><br /> 4. Turing machines / Recursively enumerable languages<br /></p> <p>A computer in the first class, when given a string of inputs,<br /> will indicate after each whether it accepts the input or not. Using the<br /> alphabet of possible inputs (the alphabet “ab” is one, but any alphabet,<br /> including ours, can be used) a finite automaton accomplishes useful<br /> computational tasks by accepting certain strings and rejecting others.<br /> Given that there are a finite number of words in the English language,<br /> including their inflected forms, a finite automaton using the “a-z”<br /> alphabet can be constructed to distinguish English words from other<br /> strings of letters. A large amount of enumeration would be involved, but<br /> the task could clearly be accomplished. Another automaton using the<br /> alphabet “ab” could be constructed to distinguish all strings [ab]*<br /> (which includes “abab” and “ababababab”), or b*[aaa]b* (which includes<br /> “aaabbbbbbb” and “bbaaab”), or - as the Chomsky hierarchy above<br /> indicates - any given “regular expression” of the sort Unix grep is used<br /> to find. In fact, it is correct to conceptualize the use of the Unix<br /> grep utility, or the Find dialog in Microsoft Word or one’s text editor<br /> of choice, as a way of programming a finite automaton. The programming<br /> is done so that strings in a regular language can be recognized; so the<br /> expression can be found in the text that is used as input for this<br /> simple computer. Of course, while the Find dialog is useful, it does not<br /> constitute a very powerful computer, and certainly not a general-purpose<br /> one. A finite automaton of this weakest class cannot even distinguish<br /> strings such as “aaaabbbb” and “aaaaaabbbbbb” (N occurrences of “a”<br /> followed by N occurrences of “b”) from those that do not fit this<br /> pattern. For this, a computer of at least the second class is<br /> needed.</p> <p> Before leaving the finite automaton, however, it is important to<br /> note that this simplest theoretical computer can be described in a<br /> diagram that has nodes linked by transition rules. The diagram shown<br /> here describes a finite automaton that accepts strings of the form<br /> [b]*a[b]*a - any number of “b’s” (including 0) followed by “a” followed<br /> by any number of “b’s”(including 0) followed by “a.”</p> <p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><br /><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/finite.gif" width="249" height="194" /><br /></span><br /></p> <p>Note that the possible paths through a static Web site with<br /> five pages, each offering at most two sorts of link, can be<br /> conceptualized with a very similar diagram - with the same diagram, in<br /> fact, appropriately labeled. Hypertexts of the sort that typify the<br /> category - whether crafted in HTML or various proprietary environments<br /> such as the Microsoft Help Workshop or Eastgate’s Storyspace - present<br /> lexia (pages) as nodes, and links as transition rules. Such hypertexts<br /> are text machines of the first class, finite automata. Adding random<br /> effects, revealing or concealing links based on the history of<br /> interaction, or allowing the reader to jump to a node by name, will of<br /> course move the hypertext beyond this simplest level of computational<br /> complexity. But the essential definition of the form, a set of lexia<br /> connected by links, most clearly relates to the lowest and simplest<br /> level of the Chomsky hierarchy.</p> <p>The computers sitting on our desks, stashed in our backpacks,<br /> and integrated into our cars and microwaves are (except for the<br /> non-theoretical fact that they have limited memory) Turing machines,<br /> devices of the fourth computational class. These general-purpose<br /> computing machines take input, provide output, and can solve any<br /> computer-solvable problem. Given inputs from the keyboard in the form of<br /> a string and allowing outputs to the monitor in the form of a string, a<br /> Turing machine can run Quake III, display GRAMMATRON, or beat Garry<br /> Kasparov in chess. Indeed, the computers that do these things are Turing<br /> machines. Computers may be slower or faster, and they are all ultimately<br /> constrained by disk space and RAM, but there is no known theoretical<br /> computer more powerful than a Turing machine. Because of its ability to<br /> compute any algorithmm that is computable at all, the Turing machine is<br /> also called a universal computer.</p> <p> The cybertext, according to Aarseth, is a machine for the<br /> production of expression. It may model a world underneath the textual<br /> surface (as is done in MUDs and text adventures), it may select<br /> conversational responses based on the reader’s textual input (as<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> and<br /><span class="booktitle">Racter</span><br /> do), or it may (as in hypertext) offer additional lexia based on<br /> the links that the reader follows. The defining characteristic of these<br /> text machines - what distinguishes them from<br /><span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span>, for instance, however allusive and open to sampling that text<br /> might be - is that they calculate. They do not,<br /><span class="lightEmphasis">essentially</span>, have links. They essentially have computational ability. </p> <p>The paradigm of the hypertext is the least powerful<br /> computational machine, the finite automaton. The prototypical cybertext<br /> is of the fourth and most powerful computational class - a Turing<br /> machine.</p> <h2>hot, ergodic cybertext</h2> <p> “Ergodics” and “cybertext” provoke curiosity. Aarseth attracts<br /> the reading eye by using one neologism each for title and subtitle. He<br /> has also selected terms that sound somewhat similar to the words<br /> “erotics” and “cybersex.” Cybertext is certainly a recent term, and new<br /> to literary studies, but Aarseth was not the first to use it. A book by<br /> science-fiction poet Bruce Boston, published in 1992, is titled<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>. The term “ergodic” is used to denote a work that requires<br /> labor from the reader to create a path. This is not in reference to a<br /> traditional book that is difficult to read, of course. Aarseth is<br /> careful not to get wrapped up in metaphorically applying the idea of<br /> multiple paths, confusing reader response for influence over the<br /> actually presented appearance of the text, or employing Barthian uses of<br /> the term “writerly” to refer to someone who is not literally doing<br /> writing. Calvino’s<br /><span class="booktitle">If on a Winter’s Night a<br /> Traveller</span><br /> is not an ergodic work by his definition, since, whatever<br /> tortuous paths may be represented within it, there is only one course<br /> through it that is actually presented for the reader to take. Cort·zar’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Hopscotch</span><br /> is ergodic, by contrast, since the reader does choose a path -<br /> even though only one choice is explicitly presented, so there are<br /> actually only two explicit paths through the novel. “Ergodic” is<br /> borrowed by Aarseth from the field of ergodic theory, where it means<br /> something else entirely. The present use of the term is justified by the<br /> etymological roots of the word, which are in the Greek words for “work”<br /> and “path.” </p> <p>The text that constitutes a cybertext is not “a chain of<br /> signifiers” in the linguistic sense, Aarseth explains, but “a whole<br /> range of phenomena, from short poems to complex computer programs and<br /> databases.” Text includes natural human language, but also data<br /> structures, functions, procedures, and programmatic objects. The<br /> cybertext is considered as a machine, “not metaphorically but as a<br /> mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs.”<br /> The text/machine operates on verbal signs, requires a medium (just as a<br /> filmstrip requires a projector), and depends upon the action of a human<br /> operator. These three elements are shown at the vertices of the<br /> text/machine triangle. This division clarifies several confusions -<br /> pointing out that we should attend to the medium as an important but<br /> distinct aspect of cybertextual experience, and suggesting that<br /> “operation” should be considered as fundamentally different than<br /> “reading,” which of course it is.</p> <h2>text adventures and interactive fiction</h2> <p> In<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br /> there is examination of the aesthetics of hypertext, the<br /> experience of MUDs (environments that have received a good deal of<br /> attention from the perspective of cultural studies and computer mediated<br /> communication), the semiotics of an arcade-style computer game (a form<br /> seldom discussed even by game designers, which so far lacks even a<br /> critical vocabulary), and the nature of the “cyborg author”<br /><a class="internal" href="/firstperson/creole">Katherine Hayles<br /> reviews Diane Greco’s ‘Cyborg’</a><br /> and<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> -descendent<br /><span class="booktitle">Racter</span><br /> (representative of an underexplored form, but one that has<br /> benefited from the examination and development done by Janet Murray).<br /> These discussions are useful, although not strikingly insightful. The<br /> chapter on MUDs, for instance, does not convincingly describe these<br /> environments as mainly literary, mainly ludic, or even mainly dramatic,<br /> rather than being essentially social. The discussion of<br /><span class="booktitle">Dark Castle</span><br /> and<br /><span class="booktitle">Lemmings</span><br /> effectively topples Peter B¯gh Anderson’s semiotic typology of<br /> the computer video game, but leaves open the question of what typology<br /> might work, or whether the perspective of distiguishing classes of signs<br /> is a fruitful one at all. (Aarseth’s discussion of the typology of<br /> texts, in which he distinguishes seven variables that apply to<br /> cybertexts, is one positive contribution along these lines.) In<br /> venturing into new territory, Aarseth points out areas of interest where<br /> future work can profitably be done. </p> <p> The chapter exploring Marc Blank’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>, a work of interactive fiction from 1982, is particularly<br /> interesting - interesting to me, no doubt, because I work in this<br /> particular form. Aside from that, the chapter is unusual in considering<br /> interactive fiction in the context of literature. Such discussion has<br /> been almost entirely neglected by academics since Mary Ann Buckles’s<br /> 1985 PhD thesis on<br /><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. Also interesting is that in this chapter, a cybertext with<br /> evident narrative elements is explored, - not the case during the<br /> discussion of MUDs and arcade games. These factors make it fruitful to<br /> look at the “Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game” chapter in<br /> detail. The chapter also illustrates some of the practical difficulties<br /> involved in broadening the category of acceptable electronic literature<br /> to include other works, and reveals some of the benefits and insights<br /> which can come from such broadening - insights which would have been<br /> much harder to come by if critical discussion were restricted to<br /> hypertext. </p> <p> The publisher of<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br /> was the software development company Infocom (now a label of<br /> Activision), which also published<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork I-III</span><br /> and two works that attraced some notice for their literary<br /> merits, Brian Moriarity’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Trinity</span><br /> and Steven Meretzky’s<br /><span class="booktitle">A Mind Forever Voyaging</span>, The<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br /> series, based on a mainframe implementation of<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br /> at MIT, became the most widely-known commercial text adventure<br /> trilogy. It was strongly influenced by the earlier mainframe work<br /><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. </p> <p>Interactive fiction of the text adventure sort accepts textual,<br /> natural-language input from the individual formerly known as the reader.<br /> (Aarseth more aptly labels this individual the “operator.” I and others<br /> have used the term “interactor” in the past. Both terms suffice to show<br /> that manipulation of the cybertext is done by this individual, not just<br /> reading.) In response to this input, usually a command to the main<br /> character in the story, actions and events transpire in a simulated<br /> world and text is produced to indicate what has happened. Then, unless<br /> the character has progressed to some conclusion of the story, the<br /> operator is allowed to provide more input and the cycle continues.</p> <p> The phrase “interactive fiction” is used almost exclusively<br /> today among aficionados of this form (often it is abbreviated “IF”), but<br /> this term can cause loud gnashing of teeth among hypertext authors. They<br /> ask, “if these things are interactive fiction, what is my work - not<br /> interactive?” (This complaint usually comes from the people who brought<br /> you “serious hypertext,” a phrase that clearly suggests everything else<br /> is not serious.) This would be a reasonable question in many cases, but<br /> literary terms often employ adjectives that are not exclusively<br /> descriptive of a single form. One could ask a similar question about<br /> many other literary categories, after all: “If this is concrete poetry,<br /> what is my poetry, abstract?” “If this is language poetry, what is my<br /> poetry, not language?” “If this is a novel, what is my work, a passÈ?”<br /> The term “interactive fiction” is not a claim that the form it describes<br /> is the<br /><span class="lightEmphasis">only</span><br /> fiction that is interactive in any way. It was simply coined<br /> because interactivity and fiction are central features of this form,<br /> which also has other distinguishing characteristics that do not lend<br /> themselves to encapsulation in two words. </p> <p>The other main argument against use of the term is brought up<br /> by Aarseth, who correctly points out that the word “interactive” is a<br /> commercial catchword that has been used to promise vague technological<br /> enhancements and improvements. (Ironically, of course, Aarseth names his<br /> own category of literature “cybertext” - as if the “cyber” prefix were<br /> somehow less tainted by hype than is the word “interactive.”)<br /> “Interactive” is certainly no longer constantly denuded of meaning in<br /> the marketplace today, whatever false promises it may have once held<br /> out. Historically, that word, by itself, has been used to distinguish<br /> computer processes which reply to user input (just as interactive<br /> fiction does) from batch processes, which run without any user<br /> intervention. Used in that sense, of course, the term “interactive” is<br /> very broad, and would apply to hypertext fiction as well as many other<br /> programs. But the entire term “interactive fiction” has its own history.<br /> It was used by Adventure International, and later Infocom, to designate<br /> their works, referring to something of exactly the sort described above.<br /> The term has also been used in the academic discourse, specifically to<br /> refer to works similar to since the early 1980s.</p> <p> There is another reason to prefer the term “interactive fiction”<br /> over “text adventure.” Not all interactive fiction, and not even all<br /> classic works in the form, are actually text adventures, simply because<br /> not all of them are “adventures” - extraordinary explorations involving<br /> danger. In fact,<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br /> is not a text adventure.<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br /> is a detective mystery, in contrast to the fantasy adventures in<br /> the<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br /> series and the Infocom adventures that transpire in modern-day<br /> settings, such as<br /><span class="booktitle">Cutthroats</span><br /> by Michael Berlyn and Jerry Wolper and<br /><span class="booktitle">Infidel</span><br /> by Berlyn. Although interviewing murder suspects may be unusual<br /> for the interactor and may involve some danger to the protagonist, the<br /> situation is a very ordinary one for this main character, a detective.<br /> Most other famous interactive fiction works (including the very literary<br /><span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span><br /> by Robert Pinsky) are true text adventures, so it is not the<br /> case that all text adventures are pulp and all other interactive fiction<br /> works are artifacts of high culture. It is the case, however, that the<br /> category “interactive fiction” is not synonymous with “text adventure,”<br /> and the former term is the appropriate one to define the whole category. </p> <p> Similar arguments can be made against other proposed terms,<br /> namely “text adventure game” and “text game.” Some works of interactive<br /> fiction, in addition to not being adventures, are not games - certainly,<br /> they are no more games than are the least game-like hypertext fictions.<br /> And there are all-text games, like<br /><span class="booktitle">Rogue</span><br /> and<br /><span class="booktitle">NetHack</span>, which are not interactive fictions. The term “interactive<br /> fiction,” most widely used by those who actually create and experience<br /> these works, is the best descriptor for this category, and deserves to<br /> be re-established as interest in this form is reawakened. </p> <p>Discussion of terminology may appear to be useless quibbling,<br /> but it is very important if new types of ergodic literature are to be<br /> considered by hypertext authors and critics. It is very difficult for<br /> individuals to take some alien subcategory of the cybertext set<br /> seriously if they disagree vehemently about what that category should be<br /> called. If they happen to strongly prefer a name that sounds<br /> low-cultural and non-literary, it is all the more important to advance<br /> solid arguments for the commonly used and most precise term.</p> <h2>meeting deadline</h2> <p> Aarseth examines “adventure game” interaction as exemplified by<br /> the murder mystery<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>. In this interactive fiction cybertext, both story and game,<br /> Mr. Robner has been found dead in his locked study and the operator must<br /> direct the detective to investigate, walking around the house in which<br /> the death occurred, examining things, and interviewing suspects. Aarseth<br /> comes to the conclusion that the operator, who is ignorant of the proper<br /> outcome and of what he or she is supposed to do, is actually not at all<br /> a “wreader” with strong authorial power, a similar conclusion to that<br /> which Buckles reached regarding<br /><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. Instead, the operator is what Aarseth calls an “intriguee,”<br /> the target of an elaborate intrigue perpetrated by the designer of the<br /> narrative world. This is a kinder interpretation than, but similar to,<br /> one I made in<br /><a class="outbound"></a> href="http://www.suck.com/daily/97/01/27/">Interactor’s Nightmare, an article on Suck.com that was published during the same<br /> month<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br /> came out. There, I suggested that the operator of an interactive<br /> fiction usually is in the same situation as the protagonist of<br /> Christopher Durang’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Actor’s Nightmare</span><br /> - thrust upon the stage without any warning, without having had<br /> time to learn lines or even know what play is being enacted. Aarseth’s<br /> concept of intrigue, discovered in his encounter with a work of<br /> interactive fiction, applies to other cybertextual experiences as well.<br /> It could be used to enlighten critical discussion of works such as John<br /> McDaid’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Uncle Buddy’s Funhouse</span><br /> and Rob Swigart’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Portal</span>, which present puzzling worlds that the operator must decipher. </p> <p> Aarseth only touches on the ludic nature of<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>, though he at least makes mention of the game-like qualities of<br /> this and other cybertexts. In a comment on one specific<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br /> interaction, Aarseth complains that some of the replies provided<br /> are “pure nonsense,” giving the example of the work’s response to the<br /> command “fingerprint me”: “Upon looking over and dusting the me you<br /> notice there are no good fingerprints to be found.” Actually the<br /> response, although unhelpful in the context of trying to win the game,<br /> is sensible, amusing, and perfectly apropos. Aarseth no doubt wanted his<br /> detective protagonist to perform an odd behavior: to stop, ink his<br /> hands, and record his own fingerprints on paper in the middle of an<br /> investigation. For the interactive fiction to parse his command<br /> differently and come up with an even more odd interpretation is not<br /> nonsense, but felicity. </p> <p> In a 1984<br /><span class="booktitle">Computer Games</span><br /> article, Dan Gutman urges operators to have fun by prodding the<br /> parser in similarly unusual ways: “after you’ve given up for the night<br /> trying to find out who the murderer is in<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br /> or<br /><span class="booktitle">The Witness</span>, have some fun with the computer. Tell it a joke. Insult it.<br /> Type in a sentence which makes no sense.” This sort of subversive<br /> interaction is not particularly uncommon in any sort of gaming or play<br /> situation, as children often use toys and software for purposes that are<br /> different from or even contrary to those intended by the creators of<br /> these products. </p> <p> <applet alt="Your browser does not support Java, or Java is not<br /> enabled." codebase="cyberdebates" archive="" code="ZPlet/Zplet.class"></applet> width="409" height="409"></p> <param name="Foreground" value="green" /><param name="Background" value="black" /><param name="StatusForeground" value="black" /><param name="StatusBackground" value="green" /><param name="StoryFile" value="ExDead.z5" /><p> <span class="emphasis">[Click above, type something, and press<br /> Enter to interact with this Deadline excerpt.]</span></p> <p> In interactive fiction, this subversive typing is an interesting<br /> way to interact, and has been recognized as such since early in the life<br /> of the form.<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br /> creators David Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson mention<br /> this mode as one of two interesting ones (the other being the<br /> problem-solving mode of interaction) in their 1979 article in<br /><span class="booktitle">IEEE Computer</span>: “a great deal of the enjoyment of such games is derived by<br /> probing their responses in a sort of informal Turing test: ‘I wonder<br /> what it will say if I do this?’ The players (and designers) delight in<br /> clever (or unexpected) responses to otherwise useless actions.” The<br /> operator using the text/machine in this way is engaged, and enjoys the<br /> text responses that are provided, but seems to be ignoring the<br /> overriding interactive and narrative purposes for which the interactive<br /> fiction was purportedly created. This mode, perhaps, offers the true<br /> “play” that these “games” provide. Solving puzzles in order to advance<br /> in the story is actually more work than play, related to mathematical<br /> and logical challenge more than ludic enjoyment. The operator who solves<br /> puzzles must labor to understand the author’s intentions and slog<br /> forward, learning the correct operation of the text machine and then<br /> operating it. The one who pokes at the interface to see what will happen<br /> is actually being playful. </p> <p>In this chapter, as elsewhere, when Aarseth is not making<br /> strong original contributions, he is still practicing a basic standard<br /> of scholarship often not met by other writers. He corrects publication<br /> years given by previous authors; provides the names of actual<br /> interactive fiction authors, so often omitted in lieu of simply naming<br /> the publisher or pretending that the work sprang forth of its own<br /> accord; and insists that critics attend to other details with the same<br /> care they use in researching the citation of a printed text. That<br /> Aarseth attends so closely to the works he discusses is not a<br /> spectacular feature of the book, but such attention is necessary if<br /> previously neglected cybertexts are to be discussed alongside other<br /> works and treated with critical respect.</p> <h2>ghosts and the text/machine</h2> <p> The epigraph for<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br /> is from Italo Calvino’s provocative essay, “Cybernetics and<br /> Ghosts.” It reminds the reader that</p> <p class="longQuotation">The literature machine[’s] poetic<br /> result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a<br /> man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an<br /> empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if<br /> the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual<br /> and his society.</p> <p> These ghosts are not a major topic of discussion in<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>. They flit outside of Aarseth’s text/machine triangle, without<br /> connecting to it directly as its verticies (operator, verbal sign, and<br /> medium) do. A moment of shock occurs during the encounter with any<br /> provocative text, whether generated cybertextually or not, and this<br /> moment is often profound and enigmatic. In the case of a cybertext, the<br /> shock can come not only from reading (the encounter with a particular<br /> permutation of verbal signs) but from reading in the specific context of<br /> text/machine operation. </p> <p> It is this particular moment that may first have been<br /> experienced by Joseph Weizenbaum’s secretary, or perhaps one of the<br /> other early operators of<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span>, a computer character Weizenbaum developed to simulate a<br /> psychotherapist. Operators of<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> type replies to questions in plain English. The text/machine<br /> then issues a noncommittal response, sometimes excerpting from what the<br /> operator has typed. Although Weizenbaum had been working on the program<br /> for several months in the presence of his secretary (as he relates in<br /> his 1976 book<br /><span class="booktitle">Computer Power and Reason</span>), one day as she operated the text/machine, via a teletype, she<br /> asked him to leave the room so that she could converse in private. </p> <p> A legend related by Janet Murray in talks after the release of<br /> her book<br /><span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span><br /> offers a more powerful twist on this story. Entering his office<br /> one day, as the legend has it, Weizenbaum saw his secretary bowed before<br /> the teletype, broken down in tears. A transcript of interaction with<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> was on the printout. “I’ve just had a breakthrough with my<br /> analyst,” the secretary explained. </p> <p> Clearly, reading through a transcript of the same text, or<br /> clicking along links to read the doctor-patient dialog in a hypertext<br /> would not have had the same effect on this cybertextual operator. The<br /> operation of a cybertext such as<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> is not only interesting because it results in a particular,<br /> provocative series of signifiers, but because it creates a context of<br /> operation - which might involve exploration, writing, and witnessing the<br /> reaction to what the operator has written, and engaging in other forms<br /> of advanced computational exchange. </p> <p> <applet alt="Your browser does not support Java, or Java is not<br /> enabled." codebase="cyberdebates" archive="" code="Eliza/Eliza.class"></applet> width="400" height="200"></p> <param name="script" /> value="http://www.altxlists.com/ebressays/electropoetics/cyberdebates/script" /><br /><p> <span class="emphasis">[Click in the box, type something, and<br /> press Enter to interact with Eliza.]</span></p> <p> Whatever the early cybertextual encounter of computer<br /> psychotherapist and secretary was like - tearful or not - in it, this<br /> shock of connection with individual and social ghosts was certainly<br /> achieved. And this shock occurred about 35 years ago, as<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> was developed between 1964 and 1966. After this incident (and in<br /> part as a result of it, if legend is to be believed), Weizenbaum, a<br /> pioneer in artificial intelligence, denounced the field. He stopped his<br /> research and drowned his book. </p> <p> Cybertexts long ago demonstrated their potential to be<br /> provocative, affecting, and powerful. Thanks to Aarseth’s book, a larger<br /> literary category has been declared worthy of critical attention - a<br /> category which includes<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span>, MUDs, poetry that involves text morphing and motion in<br /> response to input, interactive fiction, and other sorts of<br /> non-hypertextual works. Additionally, thanks to<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>, authors who create works in these forms are more likely to<br /> find their efforts acknowledged as valid from a literary standpoint.<br /> Critics may still prefer to examine hypertexts, if their tastes in<br /> text/machine operation lead them to dwell on that set of cybertexts, but<br /> they will find it increasingly difficult to consider other cybertexts -<br /> with their more powerful computational abilities and their demonstrated<br /> ability to affect the consciousness and unconsciousness of the operator<br /> - as categorically less serious and worthwhile. </p> <p></p><h2>Works Cited</h2> <p> Buckles, Mary Ann.<br /><span class="booktitle">Interactive Fiction: The Computer<br /> Storygame ‘Adventure’</span>. PhD Dissertation, University of California San Diego, 1985. </p> <p> Gutman, Dan. “Shoot Your Own Men! And Other Weird Ways to Play.”<br /><span class="booktitle">Computer Games</span>. Dac/Jan 1984. </p> <p> Landow, George.<br /><span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of<br /> Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology</span>. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. </p> <p> Lebling, David P., Marc S. Blank, and Timothy A. Anderson.<br /> “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game.”<br /><span class="booktitle">IEEE Computer.</span>, 12:4, 1979: 51-59. </p> <p></p><h2>programs included</h2> <p> Blank, Mark.<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>. (Excerpt allowing play for the first hour of game-time.) </p> <p>Infocom, 1982. Excerpt created in 2000 by Nick Montfort using a<br /> port of Deadline to the Inform language. Port to Inform by Volker Lanz,<br /> 1999. Inform by Graham Nelson, 1993-1999. Excerpt created and used with<br /> permission of Activison, Inc.</p> <p> Russotto, Matthew.<br /><span class="booktitle">ZPlet</span><br /> 1996. Java interpreter for Z-code, used to run the<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br /> excerpt. Used with permission of Matthew Russotto. </p> <p> Weizenbaum, Joseph.<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br /> 1964-66. Java version created and made freely available by<br /> Charles Hayden, based on a 1983 Macintosh version by Charles Hayden. </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags: </div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/chomsky-hierarchy">Chomsky hierarchy</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/deadline">deadline</a>, <a href="/tags/adventure-international">adventure international</a>, <a href="/tags/infocom">infocom</a>, <a href="/tags/zork">zork</a>, <a href="/tags/turing-machines">turing machines</a>, <a href="/tags/algorithm">algorithm</a>, <a href="/tags/eliza">eliza</a>, <a href="/tags/racter">racter</a>, <a href="/tags/ergodics">ergodics</a>, <a href="/tags/bruce-boston">bruce boston</a>, <a href="/tags/italo-calvino">italo calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/if-winters-night-traveller">if on a winter's night a traveller</a>, <a href="/tags/james-joyce">james joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/cortazar">cortazar</a>, <a href="/tags/hopscotch">hopscotch</a>, <a href="/tags/kat">kat</a></div></div></div> Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000 admin 662 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com | http://www.electronicbookreview.com/taxonomy/term/285/feed | dclm-gs1-419695528 | false | true | {
"keywords": "transmission, mutations"
} | false | null | false |
0.027068 | <urn:uuid:236d3efe-e7c9-4a79-8a24-5e947ad8fdad> | en | 0.955014 | Play Free French Style on EnjoyDressUp
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Free Video Walkthrough for French Style | http://www.enjoydressup.com/french-style | dclm-gs1-419835528 | false | false | {
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0.032217 | <urn:uuid:a3bb6063-fe5c-45ec-b876-d4256715d24a> | en | 0.932355 | CES Group. Click here.
4 FM quick reads on HVAC
1. A VFD Offers Energy Savings, Other Benefits from Part-Load HVAC Operation
Today's tip comes from James Piper, contributing editor for Building Operating Management: Variable frequency drives, or VFDs, offer multiple benefits for HVAC systems.
For more than 20 years, VFDs have successfully been installed on fan and pump motors in wide range of variable load applications. The most significant benefit of the use of a VFD is energy savings. By matching system capacity to the actual load throughout the entire year, major savings in system motor energy use is achieved.
Another benefit of the units is reduced wear and tear on the motors. When an induction motor is started, it draws a much higher current than during normal operation. This inrush current can be three to ten times the full-load operating current for the motor, generating both heat and stress in the motor's windings and other components. For motors that start and stop frequently, the heat and other stresses produced contribute to early motor failures.
In contrast, when a motor connected to a VFD is started, the VFD applies a very low frequency and low voltage to the motor. Both are gradually ramped up at a controlled rate to normal operating conditions. With no significant inrush current, heating and stresses are practically eliminated, extending motor life.
VFDs also provide more precise levels of control of applications. For example, high rise buildings use a booster pump system on the domestic water supply to maintain adequate water pressure at all levels within the building. Conventional pump controls in this type of application can maintain the pressure within a certain range, but a VFD based system can maintain more precise control over a wider range of flow rates, while reducing energy requirements and pump wear.
2. Basic Ways That Building Control Systems Can Help Save Energy
Today's tip from Building Operating Management: Building control systems offer a variety of basic energy saving capabilities.
There are a variety of energy saving strategies built into the energy management function of the current generation of controls. The energy savings from these functions can help justify the cost of new or upgraded energy management system.
One basic function is automatic stop-start. While this saves energy by turning equipment off at scheduled times, a more powerful strategy can be more effective. Known as stop-start optimization, this approach goes beyond a schedule by considering indoor and outdoor temperature to decide when a piece of HVAC equipment should be started and stopped.
Another important function is the system's ability to change set points automatically in response to changing conditions inside or outside of the building. A simple example is the air-side economizer cycle. When the temperature and humidity of outdoor air are appropriate, that outdoor air can be brought into a building without being heated or cooled.
A control system can also optimize the operation of chillers, boilers, cooling towers and pumps, adjusting equipment operation on the basis of loads.
A sophisticated strategy is called load shedding. That strategy adjusts HVAC equipment operation to reduce energy use. This may be done when a building is in danger of setting a new demand peak load, or it may be initiated in response to a signal from a utility.
As useful as these and other control strategies are, they can't be taken for granted. Over time, for example, start-stop schedules may cease to reflect actual building operations, possibly because of changes to the occupancy of a building. What's more, control strategies are all too often overridden by maintenance and operations staff. Those overrides are frequently intended to solve a problem, but the long term effect is often energy waste.
3. Energy Model Can Improve HVAC System Energy Efficiency
Today's tip from Building Operating Management: Energy models are valuable in achieving high performance HVAC designs.
How efficient can a building's HVAC system be? To a very large extent, the answer depends on other factors in the building. The type of windows, the amount of insulation, the lighting system, the reflectivity of the roof — these factors and others like them can constrain the performance of the HVAC system by requiring it to work harder to heat and cool the building.
Today, it is possible to evaluate the HVAC impact of these other elements while the building is being designed. Powerful energy modeling software, available from a range of sources, enables the design team to estimate just how efficient a given set of design choices is, and then to compare other designs to identify the one that best meets the building owner's requirements.
For example, Option A may involve code-minimum insulation, ordinary insulated glass windows and a non-reflective roof. Option B, with more insulation, low-emissivity windows and a reflective roof, may initially cost more, but pay for itself in energy savings. What's more, savings associated with a smaller HVAC system can free up funds to cover the cost of those added efficiency measures. In some cases, the energy model may identify options that actually reduce the first cost of the project.
The use of an energy model is required to obtain federal tax deductions under Section 179D of the Internal Revenue Code. These are also known as EPAct tax deductions for the Energy Policy Act of 1995. To qualify for a deduction, an HVAC project must reduce energy costs at least 16.67 percent below the costs for a building designed to meet ASHRAE 90.1-2001. Energy modeling has to show the energy cost savings.
It's important to keep in mind that the energy model, as important as it can be at the design stage, is only an estimate. The actual energy efficiency of a building will depend on how the building systems are operated. A well-designed building can't overcome poor operation.
4. High-Performance HVAC System Requires an Integrated Design
Today's tip from Building Operating Management comes from Jeffrey Heiken, engineering design principal with Kling Stubbins: A high-performance HVAC system requires an integrated design.
Designing a high-performance HVAC system starts with understanding its end goals. It effectively serves the functional needs of the building and its occupants. It minimizes the use of resources by accurately "right-sizing" components and configurations. It is flexible in response to changes in use. And it employs design elements to capture waste heat, reduce material or energy use, or reuse materials wherever possible.
Across the spectrum of building types, high-performance HVAC systems provide more pleasant and satisfying work environments, and efficiencies which translate into lower owning and operating costs.
But a high-performance HVAC system is impossible without a truly integrated design team fully engaged and focused on project goals from the start. That's because so many aspects of design are interrelated and have to be considered simultaneously to achieve the goal of a high-performance HVAC system. For example, the HVAC design is affected by sustainability elements like daylight projection into the building, which helps drive building footprint and building aspect ratio (length to width dimensions) as well as solar orientation on a site. Daylighting also brings consideration of external shading devices and internal reflective light shelves to prevent glare and heat gain while bringing natural light to the occupied spaces. Internal shading (often mechanized and automated) in concert with computerized lighting control systems are also common energy conservation measures. With all of those factors affecting the HVAC design — not to mention the exterior wall construction, glazing, occupancy and utilization — it's clear that an integrated design approach is essential. From building siting to building envelope composition, the performance of all elements is enhanced.
HVAC can't be an afterthought once the shell of the building has been designed. Compared to the overall building life, the design process is brief and often fast-paced. Attention to HVAC performance at the earliest steps will be felt for decades. So will a lack of attention.
HVAC , energy efficiency , variable frequency drives , variable speed drives , VFD , VSD , motors , fans , pumps , equipment life , part-load operation , domestic water , inrush current
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click here for more member info. | http://www.facilitiesnet.com/hvac/tip/A-VFD-Offers-Energy-Savings-Other-Benefits-from-PartLoad-HVAC-Operation--22725 | dclm-gs1-420025528 | false | true | {
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0.044957 | <urn:uuid:833f3a9b-2e29-44bb-96ee-a4f7aa391768> | en | 0.971858 | GOP wants budget; Schumer warns they will get one
Monday - 1/21/2013, 4:19am EST
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats are looking to make new revenue part of the Senate's first budget in almost four years, which will be released soon after the start of President Barack Obama's second term.
Obama has pushed for a "balanced approach" to solving the nation's financial woes, including more tax revenue.
Republicans for years have complained bitterly that Senate Democrats last produced a comprehensive budget in 2009 and say that, if Obama and fellow Democrats want to borrow more money, they'll have to outline a spending plan.
"We're going to do a budget this year," Schumer said hours before Obama officially began his second term. "And it's going to have revenues in it. And our Republican colleagues better get used to that fact."
The tough talk by Schumer, the number-three Democrat in the Senate, follows House Republicans' announcement last week that they would approve a short-term increase in the nation's borrowing limit without linking that to demands for spending cuts. Democrats called it a step in the right direction but also said the extension should be longer than the three months the GOP is offering.
White House senior adviser David Plouffe said the brief extension "is no way to run an economy or a railroad or anything else" and seemed cool on the proposal. Yet he said Obama would review Republicans' ideas once they're in the form of legislation.
"We haven't seen what they're proposing, and they're going to have to pass it," he said, hinting at House Speaker John Boehner's difficulty in rounding up enough votes within his Republican caucus to pass his own party's proposals.
Democrats are saying they will release a budget, but it won't be what Republicans want.
Schumer and Cruz spoke with NBC's "Meet the Press." Plouffe appeared on CNN's "State of the Union," `'ABC's "This Week" and CBS' "Face the Nation." No House Republicans appeared on the networks' Sunday morning talk shows to represent their proposal.
| http://www.federalnewsradio.com/108/2830448/Schumer-says-Senate-Democrats-will-pass-budget- | dclm-gs1-420105528 | false | false | {
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0.575855 | <urn:uuid:8e928071-6b6b-416c-9687-9886cc498e3e> | en | 0.810157 | ダウンロードする WinPatrol 19.0.2010.0
WinPatrol 19.0.2010.0
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WinPatrol 32.0.2014.5
* What's so special about the WinPatrol Cloud ?
If "Cloud" sounds stupid and doesn't make sense, think "collaboration". The new version allows everyone in the WinPatrol community to safely share when something new works or doesn't work properly.
The WinPatrol Cloud Edition is considered a “Software-as-a-Service” version of cloud computing and relies on a collaboration approach to bring a huge value to all everyone in the WinPatrol community. Results detected by individual WinPatrol users are collected so everyone using WinPatrol can share their good and bad experiences.
* One part of the WinPatrol Cloud is a poll where the WinPatrol community of users can provide personal feedback on files that are detected. The poll data will be available to both FREE and PLUS users. | http://www.filehippo.com/jp/download_winpatrol/changelog/8455/ | dclm-gs1-420145528 | false | false | {
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0.022759 | <urn:uuid:60327f48-4c20-4144-aa86-e10d5a3200b7> | en | 0.975332 | Member Profile
Name Michael
Joined 213 days ago
Pro Choice
Oh No You Did NOT, Jessa Duggar!
13 days ago
Whether I agree with this article or not, I do feel the need to make a point to the Pro Lifers out there. I am Pro Choice and was raised that way. Now, I am NOT against Pro Life, I just find your way of thinking wrong.
Example: A HIV positive, drug addicted woman is raped - should she have the child because YOU think she should?
Here's a question for all the Pro Lifers out there: how many children have you adopted to give them a better life after bulling their mothers to have them, when their mothers can't even take care of themselves, never mind a baby? My guess is none. You can talk the talk, but not one of you will walk the walk and help an innocent baby. You think it's murder/evil to abort, I think in some situations it is more kindness.
Put up or shut up, put your money where your mouth is, ADOPT A BABY THAT NEEDS A GOOD, SAFE HOME. Many women/girls get pregnant not by their choice, but sadly they are the ones that have to make a choice. They are the ones that have to deal with it and people like you that think you have the right to pass judgement. Let me tell you a little secret, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO PASS JUDGEMENT. God is the only one that has the right to pass judgement, and I don't care what Bible verse you want to quote, God is forgiving. God understands that sometimes we as people (created in His own image) have to make decisions that He may not agree with, but He forgives. So get off your high horse.
John 8:7
Oh, and FYI the Holocaust was real. How about stop standing outside of abortion clinics and on the side of highways with your nasty pictures and attitudes and go read a history book. Go talk to a survivor of the Holocaust. | http://www.fishwrapper.com/member/michael-13/ | dclm-gs1-420165528 | false | false | {
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0.158289 | <urn:uuid:33ac22b3-e457-4461-9599-83af86c79b57> | en | 0.8681 | Tested and Perfected by Food and Wine
Spicy Green Olives
© Quentin Bacon
Spicy Green Olives
Bring a batch of these as a hostess gift instead of wine. The olives look beautiful in a simple mason jar with the bay leaves pressed against the glass and garlic, chiles and other seasonings scattered throughout.
1. 2 teaspoons black peppercorns
2. 2 teaspoons coriander seeds
3. 2 teaspoons fennel seeds
4. 2 teaspoons dried oregano
5. 3 cups brine-cured green olives (1 pound)
6. 6 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
7. 6 very small red or green chiles
8. 4 bay leaves
9. About 2 cups extra-virgin olive oil
1. In a mortar, coarsely crush the peppercorns with the coriander and fennel seeds. Stir in the oregano.
2. Spoon half of the olives into a 1 1/2- or 2-pint mason jar. Top with half of the crushed seasonings and the garlic, chiles and bay leaves. Add the remaining olives and seasonings and pour in enough olive oil to cover. Let stand for 2 hours, then add more olive oil if needed to keep the olives covered.
3. Close the jar and let the olives marinate at room temperature for 5 days to allow the flavor to develop.
Make Ahead The spicy marinated olives can be refrigerated in the jar for as long as 2 months. Let return to room temperature before serving. | http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/spicy-green-olives/print | dclm-gs1-420205528 | false | false | {
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0.322762 | <urn:uuid:daf3164f-bd4f-443b-a6fe-b25dcf323bb9> | en | 0.688564 | Selection for :
nations forsaken
For all Banana Stand Republic members!
The United Sovereign Nations of the World
The Official Site of the United Sovereign Nations of the World
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Free forum : Requiem for Regina
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Create a forum | http://www.forumotion.com/tag/nations/forsaken | dclm-gs1-420295528 | false | false | {
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0.379652 | <urn:uuid:4f50ca59-6c41-430a-9c8a-a7a6aaa97ca4> | en | 0.986361 | Now, it might seem like I'm pouring salt on poor Ceciliantas' wounds. Sure, I'll admit that his nigh fanatical threats of legal action are pretty hilarious, but seriously, my motive for bringing this whole thing up was a bit grander than just eliciting "LOLs" from you guys. Watching this unfold brought to my mind the notion of online identity, and just how seriously a great many of us take this. Many people have been lucky enough to form very meaningful relationships with people they've met on the Internet, and oftentimes, the bonds they create mean more to them than those they have with people they know in real life. Not everyone is able to meet people with similar passions in their direct vicinity, and when they hook up with like minds in virtual space, friendship, camaraderie, and mutual respect flourish. Ain't no shame in that. It's a beautiful thing.
When you take this into account, it's easy to see why Ceciliantas is in an uproar about it. Public humiliation of this magnitude can really hurt your rep, and when you spend so much of your time playing these games, it's not only your virtual life that's being messed with -- it affects the opinion of those in your immediate circle, as well as that of any onlookers. Given how many people were clowning on Cecil on those forums, I'd bet that he's gonna have a hard time on his server.
Things are heating up in Permafrost.
If you trust the word of the guys who set him up thus, you'd think he deserves it. According to them, he stalks players in-game, defames those he doesn't like very publicly, and generally acts like an "asshat." I don't know Cecil, I'm not on his server, and I hardly play EQ2 anymore, so I can't say either way. You know how it is: even nice people can be very malicious on the Internet, often forgetting that there are actual people bearing the brunt of their attacks. Remember, even those who are pwned have feelings. But whatever, these things happen, and as long as it isn't us, it's funny as hell to watch. Remember the Star Wars kid?
Anyway, Ceciliantas is threatening the involved parties with legal action. It seemed silly at first, but then, someone posted a real-life pic of him, along with some of his RL information. That's when it gets a little sketchy. Yeah, you got the guy good; you took screens of him typing all dirty in EQ2, lolz, gg. If I were him, I would have laughed it off, ducked under for a little while, and then come back. But unfortunately, it got all drawn out, and this lead to his info being posted online. I think that's a little more serious. I ain't no paralegal, but I think that if Cecil wanted to, he could get one of them computer detectives on the case, and bust somebody. He's threatened to, and I hope he doesn't come after me for writing this column. I don't know any computer lawyers that could defend me in a court of computer law. If it happens, I'll just cite that Freedom of the Press thing (incidentally, do we still have that?), and hope for the best.
I'll leave it at this: many people take these games very seriously. The connections they make within these worlds are often more meaningful to them than those they form in the outside world. If you mess these up for them, you're doing a bit more harm than you think. Personally, I play these games to run around, gather herbs from the ground, shoot magic at horses to kill them, and clear instanced dungeons with my friend, the orc. But that's just me. If I were to fall in with a group of really cool players, I would probably spend tons more time playing. | http://www.gamespy.com/articles/577/577809p2.html | dclm-gs1-420425528 | false | false | {
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0.052353 | <urn:uuid:12ae1d2c-4c4c-4471-b4c8-6a56739f48e7> | en | 0.914687 | The Best Flowers to Put in a Garden
Bright and long-lasting flower varieties jazz up the garden to create a vibrant garden display. Grown in dozens of varieties, each with its own growing requirements, flowers that are perennial often make for the best flowers because they come back year after year. Other qualities to look for are a flowers ability to withstand drought, heat and frost and to grow at a fast pace to ensure a pop of color in a short period of time.
Zinnia (Zinnia elegans) is a vibrant summer annual with a rapid growth rate to have the garden filled with their vibrant blooms in no time. Growing 6- to 36-inches tall and 8- to 12-inches wide, zinnia grow in a wide range of colors including, yellow, pink, purple red and orange. Their single, semi-double or double flowerhead sits atop the upright and long green stems. Zinnia brings in butterflies and hummingbirds to the garden to create a quintessential garden feel. Zinnia are drought- and deer-tolerant, making for a hardy plants, ideal in environments where water is limited. The upright clumping habit of the zinnia is ideal tucked into flowerbeds or containers or lining a garden path. Zinnia requires full sun and well-drained, humus-rich soil. To promote a long flowering season, deadhead or remove the spent blooms as soon as they are noticeable. The USDA Hardiness Zones for planting are 3 to 10.
Hellebore (Helleborus --- hybridus cvs.) is a perennial flower that blooms in the garden when most others plants and flowers have died down for the season. Growing 1- to 3-feet tall and wide, hellebore flowers are evergreen to retain their vibrant green foliage and color all year long, making for an essential garden flower. Frost-tolerant, hellebore flowers have nodding-like blooms that grow in white, purple, green, pink and yellow. The blooms emerge in winter to last through spring, making for a long-lasting garden flower variety. The leather-like and dark green leaves of hellebore provide vibrancy to the garden. Hellebore requires part to full shade and neutral to alkaline soils that are nutrient-rich. To grow in other areas of the garden, divide the hellebore after flowering. The Hardiness Zones for planting are 4 to 9.
Black-eyed Susan
A fast growing summer perennial, black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia fulgida) has a rapid growth rate to grow 18- to 30-inches tall. Beginning in summer, black-eyed Susan emerges to light up the garden through fall. The orange to yellow petals surround the deep brown cones for a contrasting display. Grown in mixed borders or within a cutting garden, black-eyed Susan is a garden flower staple. A butterfly attractant, black-eyed Susan requires full sun to part shade and well-drained soil. The Hardiness Zones for planting are 3 to 9.
Keywords: best garden flowers, zinnia blooms, hellebore flowers, black-eyed Susan
About this Author
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0.030393 | <urn:uuid:c5aa3318-0f15-4f81-992a-7b57b3cedddc> | en | 0.892574 | Goldman finds the right formula to build a giant
Sun May 1, 2005
Carhart and Iwanowski push the bank into the quant manager elite
Think Goldman Sachs and think quantitative hedge fund stars and you probably think Cliff Asness and his Greenwich-based AQR Capital Management. You're right. But only half right. In fact, the men who rebuilt Goldman's Quantitative Strategies Group after AQR's highly-regarded partners decamped to form their own firm have quietly built it into one of the largest and most profitable players in the highly academic and idiosyncratic world of quantitative global macro funds, a fraternity that includes AQR, Bridgewater, D. E. Shaw, Quantitative Financial Strategies, Alpha Simplex and Barclays Global Investors.
Today, Goldman - so long a breeding ground for hedge funds run by its departed partners - suddenly finds itself the seventh-largest U.S. hedge fund operator, with a total of $11.2 billion of assets. Yet, the men who have reinvented the Goldman quantitative group, Mark Carhart and Ray Iwanowski, are...
ISSN: 2151-1845 / CDC10004H
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0.063365 | <urn:uuid:334576f7-ec1b-46c9-9d59-10fc844745ae> | en | 0.961724 | See y'all...
written 2000-01-09 17:50:35
"It's time I sling the baskets off this silver burdened horse...sink my toes
into the ground, and set a different course..."
I'm bound for California, y'all. Next time you see me, I'll have an address It's been a pleasure, everyone. See you all again some day.
written 2000-01-10 12:01:00 know those "adopt a highway" signs that are all over the place?
At the 181 mile marker in Oklahoma, on I-40 west, there's a piece of highway
adopted by "Bob Weaver, family, and friends."
written 2000-01-11 12:42:18
(I'm trying out this mass-email thingey from Outlook, we'll see if it works.
Please let me know if you don't want to get these emails anymore, and send
it on to friends who didn't get it. Better yet, send me their email
Yeah. Greetings from a Motel Six in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. I managed to
make it here in one day. Not too shabby. This is due mostly to the fact that
the speed limit across all of I-40 is 70mph. Except in New Mexico, where it
seems to be -75- ...sweet. It's actually difficult to break the speed limit
here, and when you aren't consciously trying to speed (as we all do in 55
mph zones, but with a 75mph speed limit, I find myself just driving however
feels confortable and don't concern myself with the speedometer much.),
you'll find yourself actually going UNDER the speed limit. I keep looking
down and seeing my speedometer at around 65-70.
...oh, and not sleeping for 28 hours worth of driving helped a lot in
reaching Santa Rosa today, too.
...of course, I could've used this speed limit about ten miles to the east
of the NM pulled over for going THREE friggin' miles over the
speed, those Texas cops REALLY take their traffic laws
seriously...the cowboy let me off with a warning, though, so I can't
Anyhow, the ride has been going pretty quickly thus far. Tennessee and
Arkansas were the most boring states, but since they were relatively near
the beginning of the trip, they sped by fast enough. Tennessee was fine,
honestly; it just wasn't anything special. Arkansas, however, SUCKED. The
roads are disastrously bad out there. I actually had to turn on the radio,
since I was being bounced around so bad that I couldn't get a CD to play
without constantly skipping. No shit.
Now, as far as geographic locations are concerned, I'm pretty cynical about
"nature's inherent beauty" ...there's really only one view before that
impressed the hell out of me: the top of the Eiffel Tower...well, add
another to that list. The stretch of land between the middle of Oklahoma and
the western border of Texas was ineffably beautiful. Wow. Sunset over New
Mexico was definitely something to write home about, too. And did I mention
the speed limit is 75? I may just stay here. :) Everything is very
panoramic; the sky just fills your whole view.
My wrists are killing me. Both of them. Not a good thing to be developing
carpal tunnel syndrome right before the start of a programming job, but I
think it might just be all the driving I've been doing this month. I've
noticed that on long trips I tend to sit my hands on my lap and hold the
wheel, and just tense and untense my wrists to adjust direction and steer.
So once I get settled in, they'll probably stop hurting. That's my official
justification for the time being. Hopefully those medical benefits will kick
in REAL soon. :(
Why DO they call these things Motel "6" anyhow? I've noticed that every
advertisement almost always had two other sixes in it somewhere (like "Stay
here for only 36.99 a night! Exit 26 on I-40!")... 6. 6. 6. I figured this
must be a front for some kind of cult activity, so I had to investigate.
Nothing strange so far. But if my body is found dead and ritualistically
marked up, you all know what happened.
I've burnt through most of my CD collection at this point (and you realize
how lame some of those CDs you've collected over the years are when you are
running out of selections..."Oooh, I'll listen to Richard Marx!" Ugh.
Sleep...felt VERY good.
I've got about 900 or 1000 miles to go until Orange County, and I'll be
leaving this motel around noon (mountain time; it'll be 2 o'clock for you on
the East coast....) so I'll probably hit California in the wee hours of the
morning. Talk to y'all then.
The most western point on I-40 with a Waffle House is Amarillo, Texas.
written 2000-01-12 06:01:36
...just in case you were wondering. :)
Not quite to my destination yet. I'm in Victorville, CA, probably less than
a hundred miles from my destination. Seeing as that would put me at Scott
Draeker's door at 4a.m., I opted for the hotel room tonight.
Started off the day right with a meal at a closed down gas station turned
all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Six whole items on the bar, but actually it
was all pretty good. The breakfast of champions. Finished my email at the
breakfast table. Ain't technology grand? Everyone should own a VAIO.
Wrists seem a little better today, with the left one bothering me almost not
at all (a definite improvement from last week), and the right one
hurting...uh, less.
New Mexico continued to be beautiful. But this quickly gaveway to the
universe of ineffable gaudiness that is...ARIZONA. Think of an Indian in a
spaghetti western movie. Think Buffalo Bill's sidekick. You know the type.
VERY stereotypical. Now have him making fake indian trinkets at discount
prices. Now have his environment splattered with white trash-style
decorations and obnoxious billboards advertising things like "rattlesnake
skins and real indian silver, cheapest prices anywhere!" Picture
advertisements for authentic buffalo burgers. Picture hotel rooms IN THE
SHAPE OF WIGWAMS. (No shit...I actually saw this off an exit somewhere)
Now, picture that nasty display for the next 400 miles with some casino type
things thrown in every now and then. That's Arizona. Good riddance.
Once I hit California, I had to pass the "inspection station"'s kinda
like a small tool booth, but I wasn't really sure what they were planning to
inspect, so I put on a winning smile, and tried my best not to look like a
criminal. I also considered the possibility that they wanted to inspect my
trunk for illegal immigrants or my engine for emissions or something.
Wrong. They wanted to inspect my FRUIT.
"Any fruit, sir?"
"Uh, I think I have an orange in the cooler..."
[Armed security guards approach]
"Please step away from the car, with the orange over your head, sir."
Well, sure.
After that, I almost ran out of gas. I pulled off at the only gas station
for 25+ miles, and found that the cheap gas was $1.89 a gallon. That's not a
typo. I have the receipt. It took over 22 bucks to fill my 12 gallon tank.
If you do the math, you might see that "over 22 bucks" is actually the
entire 12 gallons at that price. I know this for a fact; the auto-shutoff
feature of this gas pump didn't work, so it alerted me to the fact that my
tank was full my spraying gasoline everywhere as my tank overflowed. Is this
why they put that warning on the gas cap about "topping off"?
Other exits later on have the cheap stuff for 1.50 ...also, not a typo. I
hope it gets MUCH cheaper in Orange County, but I have this sinking feeling
it won't.
Oh, Highway 666 really DOES exist...I thought that Natural Born Killers just
made that up for fiction's ends, just like Robert Downey Jr. says,
in Gallup, New Mexico. What government official let THAT one slip by?
Speaking of the mark of the beast, I get to this Motel 6 (my cult
investigations are continuing...:) ) and find that the phone number here is
760-243-0666 ...WHAT DID I TELL Y'ALL?! It's Satan's hideout. (and if you
get this before 3p.m. EST and want to call, I'm in room 204.)
Altavista lists 10 different internet dialup numbers for this area code,
none of which are local to this friggin' hotel room. I get this obnoxious
beeping whenever I dial any of them, as if to say, "hey, jagoff, you can't
call the room next DOOR without using our AT&T service, so just give it up,
punk!" Hey, a beep can say a lot.
So fine. I used the calling card Youcentric gave me (and never deactivated)
to call DOWN THE ROAD and connect to the internet. Ain't technology great?
Figuring out the dialing string for that took gotta time the
numbers right to get it to go looked something like this in
the long run:
Fun, huh?
A moment of Zen: here are some signs I've seen down the road:
"Safety pullout." (uhh?)
"Controlled burning ahead." (didn't see anything on fire, though.)
Bumper sticker: "Cryptography is not a crime." (I'm so home here.)
Adopt-A-Highway donor: "Lesbians for Change." (Hell, I've got a whole
So I'm crashing out for the night. I'll be hitting either Tustin (Loki
headquarters) or Santa Ana (Scott Draeker's place) tommorow afternoon. Will
write again then.
(By the way, I'm seeking the following email addresses...please help, if you
can, for you Charlotte folks: Nicole Kinney, Connie Bray, Amanda Labrie,Will
Harkins, Charlie Heard, Andrew Webster, Heather Hughes, Brad Hughes (is he and anyone else you can think of. Thanks!)
Made it.
written 2000-01-13 02:58:11
...I'm here. Hi to those just tuning in. I'm now at my final destination in
California, and am sitting on my bed (apparently the sofa deal was
completely metaphorical) after my first day of "work." Some of you are
probably getting emails out of sync, since some were written (but not sent)
this afternoon on this laptop, while others were sent directly from hotmail
via Loki's network. I need to sync up my address book with the web-based
hotmail service, so I don't get spit upon for booting up Win98 at the
office. In the meantime, bear with me as there will be some lag and time
skews on my emails.
Anyhow, forgot to mention this yesterday:
Remember the gasoline overflowing from my tank? Well, rather than smell like
gas for the rest of the trip, I went to a rest area to clean up. Upon
entering the bathroom, I found a sign with the following text:
"WARNING: Detectable levels of ARSENIC in this water. Do NOT drink."
Life at Loki.
written 2000-01-13 03:46:57
Loki is the Norse god of Chaos. How aptly named is this company, then. Once
you walk through the pleasant garden in the middle of this office complex
(you Queens people can think of the center area of Albright for a visual),
and find the door to the Loki suite (suite #42, coincidentally), these are
the first things you might notice, in no particular order:
- Bill Gates's picture on the dart board.
- An iMac ("Blueberry") on the front desk.
- Boxes. Cardboard boxes everywhere.
- Cables, joysticks, and other assorted hardware everywhere.
- Handwritten list of exact weight of each product taped to the wall.
- Original proof of box to Myth II, uncut, tacked to the wall. This is
actually pretty cool. If you cut the pattern out and fold it, you get a real
packaging box.
- Robotic Operating Buddy, his gyros, and associated ghetto Nintendo.
- Piles and piles of games and books. Everywhere. I wouldn't walk in here in
my bare feet.
"Disorganized" does not begin to cover it. It's great.
So around lunchtime I'm pulling into Orange County. I now understand what
everyone's been telling me about the smog out here. I consider dicking
around until nighttime, since all I have are directions to Scott Draeker's
house, and I assume he and his wife (who also works for Loki) won't be home.
Still, I get bored and decide to check out the house. Nice place; kinda what
you expect in a place like Orange County...I guess the best description is
expensive looking, but not on that Fresh-Prince-of-Bel-Air level of
expensive. "Well off," perhaps. Kinda a Spanish feel to the design, like a
lot of the houses out here. Since there's a car in the driveway, I give a
knock on the door. A rugrat answers it. I hate that. If I have kids, I'm
training them to do the same thing my cat instinctually does when the
doorbell rings: run and hide under the table in the dining room.
So I'm like, "uh, is your mommy or daddy home, kid?"
At this point Kayt Sorhaindo (that's Scott's wife...dunno what's up with the
last name) gets to the door. She's pretty cool, in a frenetic kind of way.
She's this giant source of energy...talks a mile a minute...and seems a
little burnt out by the two little kids and-one-on-the-way. Honestly, the
little girl is cute, but the little boy just continually does that maniacal
laughter and jumping on you's a lot like what your labrador
retriever does to your guests when they first show up, no matter what you do
to stop him...the kid just kept jumping on me...if he tried to sniff my
crotch I was gonna roll up a newspaper and bap him on the nose.
So I put my hat on his head to distract him while I got directions to Loki's
office. Kayt drew me a map and wrote down the telephone number, in case I
get lost on this five minute excursion (hell, I just made it 2500 miles on
worse directions, this was gonna be a cakewalk!)...she looked sad and said,
"oh, you don't have a phone, do you?"
"I'm sure I can find a payphone if I need to..."
This seemed to releave her immensely. In so many words, she thinks that most
of Loki's staff could do quantum mechanics in their sleep, but probably are
so socially inept they couldn't handle finding a payphone if they get lost.
So onward to Loki.
There's no one to be found in the front room. So I wonder down the hall, and
into a german dude with LONG black hair. And no shoes. He's walking around
in his athletic socks. So much for my fears about walking around barefoot, I
guess. He points me to Scott Draeker's office, and I make my way down there.
Scott's got a beard now, and his shirt open about three buttons too low.
He's on the phone when I poke my head in his door, and without missing a
beat, midsentence, he says, "holy shit, Ryan Gordon just walked in my door.
I'll call you back." (What an introduction; you'd think I was the Pope or
I get roughly a similiar reaction from Sam Lantinga, Loki's lead programmer.
Smart dude; looks and sounds a lot like the hippie teacher from Beavis and
Apparently my first project will be to write a map editor for Heroes of
Might and Magic III (I mentioned I knew how to use GTK+, so I guess I signed
off for this duty automatically) ...Quake 3 Arena is already shipping, so
I'll be picking at bugs for the next release...there's a crate of a couple
hundred copies of Quake 3 CD-ROMs in the hall...definitely droolworthy.
I got my "employee starter kit": a pile of six or seven games. Myth II,
Heretic II, Quake 3, Railroad Tycoon II, Civilization: Call to Power, Erik's
Ultimate Solitaire, and Might & Magic III. And a dual Pentium III/500 system
to run them on. Oooooh baby.
So today was spent customizing my machine, and playing deathmatch Q3 against
a few other Loki employees. Sam and I spent some time squashing a bug with
deadlocks in SDL.
Sam and his girlfriend took me out to a place called "Spoons" for
dinner...some of the best milkshakes I've ever seen...when I ordered a
hambuger, the waitress asked how I wanted it cooked....I'm like "uh...with
fire?" (for those not in North Carolina, there's STRICT laws there about how
you can have beef'll never gets asked there how you want your
burger, since there's only one way: burnt to hell.) She took me by surprise,
I guess.
For you Phish fans, apparently my email address will be It's not set up yet.
Scott was mentioning that I could unload my stuff at his house for now, and
(cringing to myself as I think of the disarray in my car, which makes Loki's
office space look damned clean in comparison) I told him that, being the
world traveller that I am, I'm fully prepared to live out of my backpack for
the next six months. Apparently this was a "good" answer, since the response
it elicited was, "hey, do you want to go to New York?"
(For reference, that was said roughly like, "hey, do you want to go get some
Sure. Looks like I'll be manning the Loki booth at LinuxWorld in New York on
February 1st. Sweet.
So, I'm beat. It was a long day of playing video games. Life is good.
Talk to y'all.
National Geographic look at a programmer...
written 2000-01-13 22:55:14
(For you Pi Kapps, I saw a car with a sticker in the window that read:
"Powered by Deez Nutz". Really.)
Email account is now set up. If y'all really dislike, I can now be
reached at, or alternately
...both end up in the same mailbox. Also, I got my address book moved over
to the web-based version of Hotmail, so hopefully this will still work.
Anyhow, I was informed on the LokiHack mailing list that accepting a job
as a developer in California, statistically speaking, reduces my chances
of mating. Seeing as it's too late to quit, I figure I'll just have to
forage on in my new role as the geek who makes other people look more
As far as daily events go, I woke up (to screaming hellspawn children
downstairs) around 8:00a.m., read some more of Cryptonomicon, hopped in
the shower when it became available, and was off to Loki. The basic gist
is that I spend about half my day playing video games, and half reading
...and I get paid to do so. Oh, yes.
But finally I got set up with the code for the Might and Magic III's relatively clean, surprisingly, but it's all crufty MFC
code, which means that all the cleanliness in the world won't change the
fact that I'll have to rewrite most of it from scratch. Joy.
Anyhow, I made a first stab at apartment hunting today. Found a studio
apartment EXACTLY one mile from the office for about 700 bucks a month,
which for the record, is about 50 bucks more than I was paying in
Charlotte, so it's not as bad as it sounds.
Oh, by the way, don't be fooled. California isn't nearly as expensive as
you think. It's a little more pricey than, say, Charlotte, but it's not
Still, Andrew Henderson (another LokiHacker from Atlanta) just signed
papers to work here, so I might wait to see if he wants to split an
apartment...oh, wait. He's bringing his fiancee...that won't work.
I really wanted to discuss my eating habits. Mostly I'm on what I've
termed the "Friends and Family" diet, which basically means that I eat
only when those around me are footing the bill. Good for weight loss,
especially in foreign cities like Tustin. So after spending the better
portion of the day eating (free) stale pretzels and communal coke, I
finally broke down and went to find food. Sam pointed me towards a
Persian restaurant, so I figured if I'm going to try something new, I
might as well go all the way.
Every play Russian Roulette Dining? It's fun. Basically, you find a
restaurant you've never been to, go in, and point to some items on the
menu. Don't even read it. Get your food to-go. When you get back to your
house, or office, open the box and see what you selected. This works best
in chinese restaurants.
I ended up with some sort of chicken kabob with rice and a real thin
torilla-wrap. It was delicious. I could have just as easily ended up with
dog, but that's a chance you take when you live on the edge like me. :)
Sam squashed some more SDL bugs...mouse grabbing now works in all sorts
of wierd configurations.
Found out that Disneyland is a little closer than I thought. Roughly five
miles (not a typo) from here. Sweet.
Got invited to a Jewish Casino Night. That just begs to be a good
story. I'll keep y'all posted.
It is confirmed, I'll be in New York from January 1st through the 5th (that
should actually read "February". --Ed.), shlepping Quake 3 at LinuxWorld expo
for a few days. Come visit if y'all get a chance. General expo passes are free
Alright, going home. Sam's locking up. See y'all.
Nutcases abound.
written 2000-01-14 21:45:52 everyday, down Newport Avenue, there's this guy. Sits there
everyday on a park bench. No big deal in itself, but the thing is he has
this big wooden sign leaning up against the bench everyday. I think he
repaints the sign everyday. It's a big, white hunk o' wood with black
letters. The first day I drove by it said, "Blessed is he who cuts
through the bullcrap."
The second day it said, "An (the) answer always brings more questions."
I forget what it said today. But I asked around, and sure enough, that
dude is out there every day. About a block down the road from him there
is a "Christian Science" church...dunno if there's a link here, but no
one's quite sure what to make of the guy. Next time I see him, I'm gonna
pull over and talk to him. I'll letcha all know.
Speaking of nutcases, I went to "Jack-in-the-Box" for lunch. This is the
most depressing place I've ever been. There was this dude that looked
like Dustin Hoffman sitting at a table and talking to himself. You know
the type; the kind of guy you stare at until he glances at you, then you
try to pretend you were looking at the potted plant beside him, in case
he wants to kill you. He must be a very funny man, since he would let
out this high-pitched, oversmoked cackle every few minutes.
There's a picture of the "founder" of Jack-in-the-Box on the wall. It
looks like something out of the movieization of Pink Floyd's "The
Wall". I think this was an advertising gimmick, but I'm not sure. :)
The lady who took my order for a Chicken Fahita Pita (say THAT five times
fast!) had a badge on that said "Judy; fifteen years of service."
Fifteen friggin' years in a fast-food joint. Kill yourself, Judy. Kill
yourself now.
Anyhow, I'm supposed to go to this Jewish community center Casino Night
tommorow. If I make it there, it'll be a trip, I'm sure.
Got Civ: Call to Power working on Slackware 7. Almost have the Heroes III
map editor compiling on Windows 98, and a GTK framework (thanks to
Glade) hacked together for the Linux rewrite.
Supposedly Loki is moving offices to Irvine (I guess that's nearby) soon,
so I might hold off on apartment hunting briefly. This will be good, so I
can save a week or two of paychecks up before dumping them into rent...
ooh...that reminds me...need to fill out that W4 form. Ugh.
I made the mistake the other day of mentioning that I'm not too impressed
with South Park. People's mouths dropped open. Kayt informed me that of
all the quirky people we have here, the only thing that truly unites them
all is this show. Personally, I think that's a little scary. That and
Quake are the binding elements here. And computer genius, perhaps.
Saw the packaging for Quake 3. Tin boxes. VERY pretty. Comes with SuSE
Linux 6.3, too.
So, I'm gonna reply to some of this mail piling up in my box (thanks to
all that write, by the way!) and be on my way.
Signing off.
written 2000-01-16 19:43:12
Greetings from the Draeker residence bathroom around 6:00a.m.
It's been a very full night.
First, I woke up and tried to get VMware installed on my laptop. This is
a cool piece of software; it lets you run Windows in a window. No
kidding. Lots of fun. The thing doesn't install on Slackware Linux (what
I've got on my laptop) due to a difference in the init directory
structure from Red Hat. So I spent some time hacking their Perl install
program to make it work...learning Perl on-the-fly is about equivalent to
learning Swahili from watching VH1. I don't recommend it.
Anyhow, most of that work is done. (Update from Sunday; it's done,
now) Maybe I can get my name in the VMware credits for "adding BSD-style
init support to the installer." Woohoo.
Watched "Run Lola Run" on videotape tonight. It was wierd seeing it
dubbed into English (in the theaters, it had subtitles), especially since
Manni seemed more like a whiny bitch than a bad-ass. Plus, after a while
you tend to forget you're reading subtitles, but you keep the original
feel for the dialog. Not so with dubbing.
Anyhow, if you haven't seen it, it's a German indie film largely about
chaos theory, but it manages to feel like a 90 minute badass music
video. Check it out.
After this, I was off to a Jewish community center for "Casino Night." I
was invited to this by a coworker of mine, named Loren. Loren's a nice
enough guy, but you get the impression he's one of those guys that got
beat up from kindergarden on through grad school. The kind that you like
talking to, but you know that he's not going to leave when the
conversation's over.
The consumate 25 year-old virgin. You know the type.
Anyhow, he invited me to this thing, so I figure, hey that's a new
experience. So off I went. And it wasn't QUITE as comedic as I had
hoped. I mean, yeah, there was every single jewish stereotype in the
world there, a hand-painted portrait of George Burns on the wall, and a
advertisement for a seminar entitled, "Sure, Jesus was a Jew, but a Jew
can't be FOR Jesus!" (No, I did not add that exclamation point), but it
wasn't like a living, breathing Woody Allen film, like I had envisioned.
Mostly, it was a standard casino-type thing. You get your funny money at
the door, and you proceed to piss it away on various gambling-related
I figured this would be a good place to test out my abilities to control
randomess. :) Mostly, I found I didn't do too well at roulette (above
the average), but I think it's because I have the attention span of a
gnat, and lose my concentration before the wheel stops spinning. Most the
hands of blackjack I played came up as twenty one, however, except when a
burst of cheering or something would distract me in the middle.
I mean, I don't want to say there's a correlation, but it's even starting
to freak me out. I tried to demonstrate this to Loren, by having him draw
out a hand of five card stud for each of us. I came up with three kings
and two queens. You draw your own conclusions.
Las Vegas is only a couple hundred miles from here. Hhm... :)
Since "Run Lola Run" features a scene with a roulette table that comes up
with twenty twice in a row (with 37 slots on the wheel, that's basically
statistically impossible), I figured I'd watch for this. It never
happened. If you bet 100 bucks on that and it DID happen, however, you'd
have 122500 bucks after two spins.
I left as quickly as possible after the gambling was over, since the
gorgeous dealer I was busy being enchanted with all evening was packing
up to leave herself. Her name was Lisa. I know this because she was
wearing a name tag and I had spent much of my night staring at that
region of her clothing. This is also a good explanation as to my
attention span difficulties at the roulette table.
So, after the gambling ended, Loren, Stephane (french dude from's pronounced Stef-ahhn) and I headed out to "The Spectrum",
which was apparently a big movie theater, but being from Philly, I
expected something else entirely.
Stephane is from Southern France, and you can tell this by three details
of his character:
1) His accent.
2) His fanny pack.
3) His driving.
The dude drives like a friggin' maniac. Like everyone else in
Europe. Thankfully, he stayed on the correct side of the road. I need to
tell him that he's gonna end up in the same sexual boat as Loren if he
doesn't lose the fanny pack.
It was about 1:00a.m., and nothing was playing. Fortunately this is a
HUGE mall complex, complete with CIRCUS TENTS, (no kidding: Cirque
d'Solaie is performing there...I know, I butchered the spelling...) and a
Dave & Busters.
For those that have never seen a Dave and Buster's, think a classy,
bigger version of Chuck 'E' Cheese's. With no rodent costumes. And
alcohol. And virtual reality equipment. I went to one of these in Atlanta
for the Slashdot party...they will suck your money like Count Dracula
drains a virgin, but MAN, they are FUN.
And, I still had my "power card" (the video games have a card slot, no
coins) from Atlanta. I "recharged" it with twenty bucks I can't really
afford, and since you get a random number with each recharge, you even
get to gamble here. That is, if that random number matches the ID number
on your card, you get 100% of your purchase in addition to what you just
bought (and 50% if half numbers match, yadda yadda...) All three were
matches, so I effectively got 40 bucks worth of video games. Sweet!
We pissed around in D&B's until 2:00a.m, and then over to Loki to check
mail and play some Quake (you know, for a change. hah). Tried to write an
email to Erik, but Netscape died in the middle. I dumped the contents of
the system's memory to a file and pulled my reply out, but I haven't
finished writing it. I am now a system recovery God for that
stunt. You'll get the email later, Erik, but I still have it, at
least. :)
I expect Quake will have the "ice cream parlor syndrome" sooner or
later. The theory is this: if you work in an ice cream parlor, you can
have ALLLLL the ice cream you want. Tons of it. You may drown yourself in
ice cream...bathe yourself in it, if you want. 32 flavors and then some.
After about a week of working in an ice cream shop, you would rather eat
your own feces than eat ice cream. You burn out on it. Too much of a good
thing, and all that crap. I'm hoping Quake is the same way. I've wasted
too many hours on DeathMatch.
I asked about the theater scene here, but the best answer I got from
Loren was that there's a dinner theater down the street from Loki. Of
course, Loren also told me that his one true theatrical love is musical
theater, so I guess he's a 25 year-old, gay virgin. But then again, he
also didn't realize that dinner theater is kinda like making a movie
version of a Charles Dickens novel, so I guess he gets filed in the
"Waiting for Guffman" category.
Thinking about writing "Cryptonomicon! The Musical" (exclamation point
added by me). No, not really.
Wrists feel almost perfect again. Nothing like a carpal tunnel scare to
make you reevaluate your life and install Xwrits. More on this some other
It was time to chuck the cooler in my car: the melted ice had leaked
through the bottom, into the passenger-side carpet, where it could not
evaporate, since there was a block of styrofoam on top of it. It has
begun to mildew. I opened my car door today and found the interior
smelled like the portajohns at the Phish new year's eve show.
Highlight of the night: Piano player at the Jewish community center
playing "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof to close off the
evening. I'm not sure if this could be considered tasteless or not.
Night (morning!) y''s about 10:00am on the east coast. See you.
just an FYI.
written 2000-01-18 01:18:32 one needs to be on this mailing list that doesn't want to be. In
case I wasn't clear in the first place, please, PLEASE tell me if you
want to be taken off of it, and I'll happily do so. I understand that
there's just so much email one can read in a day, so no hard feelings if
someone doesn't want to be on here.
Right? Right.
Tommorow: more of my fairy-tale life as a cartoon character.
bathrooms and postage and chairs, oh my!
written 2000-01-20 04:14:24
Hello my little apple dumplings.
Gotta play a little bit of catch up here for the last few days.
First, in case anyone is going to New York (hah), the website for free
tickets to LinuxWorld is, not like I had previously said.
Secondly, this mailing list stuff is now addressed to myself, and the
other 48 (!!!) of you are being blind-carbon-copied. This will prevent
"spamming" and also clean up y'all's email headers. Thanks, Erik, for the
suggestion. Also, anyone you want to recieve this email, please send me
the address and I'll add it to the list. Comments also welcome. Yadda
yadda yadda.
I saw "The 13th Warrior" last night. We watch a lot of movies around
here. We also have a pirated copy of the full South Park movie on the
network at Loki. Good stuff.
Got my next project as incentive to finish off the Heroes III map editor
(which is progressing nicely, btw), but I'm not legally allowed to
discuss it. Really. Let's just say it will ROCK to have my name on the
credits of this game. And Greg will crap himself. :)
C++ on Linux is still WAY lagging behind Windows. In case anyone cares.
Anyhow, what I really wanted to talk about are my bosses. Basically,
there's Sam, who spends half his day looking over my shoulder
(litterally, since if I swing my arm to the right, I'll hit the back of
his chair) to make sure I'm being productive, which is fine since that's
partially his job, and Scott, who owns Loki.
Both are cool guys...but Sam tends to irk me a little bit. He's one of
those guys that NEVER reacts the way you expect him tell him a
joke and he doesn't laugh, even for politeness's sake. You know the
type. After a terse conversation with Sam, you tend to walk away with the
distinct impression that you are a shithead. It's very disabling.
Take that stereotype a step further for Sam...just when you think he has
no sense of humor, he'll crack up at something small you say. So overall,
any time spent with him actually burns calories; you spend every
conscious second that you are in the same room with him trying to gauge
his reactions. He spends 90% of the workday sitting about 1.5 feet away
from me.
Which is why I spend the other ten percent of the time hiding. I need to
relax for at least five minutes out of every hour, which is why I
installed Xwrits.
I mentioned this before. Here's what Xwrits does. Basically, you run this
program, and after you type on your keyboard for fifty-five minutes
without a noticable break, a little window with a sore looking wrist pops
up. You click on it, and the wrist slumps over like it's resting. After
five minutes, the wrist (and attached hand) point valiantly forward, and
you can start typing again. If you try to type during those five minutes,
the wrist (and attached fingers) make an obscene gesture at you. I
personally find a lot of strength in that.
None the less, pleading carpal tunnel prevention in the software industry
is always a good excuse to jagoff for five minutes out of every hour. I
have recently been spending this time exploring the five-minute radius
around Loki headquarters. Currently I've found not much of interest on
foot. Except today.
Every Wednesday across from Loki there's a "Farmer's market", where a
bunch of (surprise) farmers drive up in trucks, set up tables, and peddle
their wares.
It's a lot like a flea market for produce. It's kinda cool. The highlight
for today's market was some homemade salsa that Andy (our QA
guy) scored...dear LORD, my mouth is still burning from that death brew
hours later. I guess the name "Lava dip" should have tipped me off to
this, but I'm now a few tastebuds wiser.
Sam looks and sounds a lot like that hippie teacher from Beavis and
Scott Draeker, on the other hand, looks a little like Chris Farley with a
good beard and a pulse...nonetheless, he's a great guy. I wanted to
demonstrate the man's compassion to you all.
First, remember Stephane? The french dude who drives like a maniac? He
finally got a car of his own. A little red number...two door coupe. A
potential chick-magnet, although probably not enough of one to cancel out
the fanny-pack.
At any rate, with some amount of pomp and circumstance, he returned the
key to Scott's car. Which he's been driving since he came to work for
Loki. Give or take, that's about FIVE MONTHS that car has been on loan to
him. I would say that's generous of Scott, but that was before I made the
connection of why Scott's always looking for a ride home everyday...Scott
gave up not just A car for Stephane to drive, but HIS car. I find that
impressive. This is in addition to the fact that everyone that works for
Loki has lived in the guy's house for some amount of time or another.
I -am- telling you this for a reason. First, I need to tell you about my
chair. I don't have one. Well, I do, but it's not very comfortable, and
it squeaks a lot. A chair that squeaks profusely for several hours wears
on everyone's nerves sooner than later. Apparently Loki employees get
taken to some furniture store and bring back a chair of their choosing
eventually...they haven't gotten to this point with me yet (in fact, it's
occurred to me that I never even signed an employment agreement, so
TECHNICALLY I'm not under a noncompete or NDA... hhm. More on this some
other time.), so whatever was laying about became the point I place my
butt upon.
The other day I see Scott wheeling a cart around. I ask him what he's
doing and he tells me he's bringing some chairs up to the new upstairs
offices. I'm like, "great...does this mean -I'm- getting a chair soon?"
I don't mean to sound catty, but c'mon, the upstairs lawyers just aren't
likely to remain planted in front of a monitor for twelve hours a
day. Their need for high-quality ass-platforms just isn't as great as
mine. I think I should get dibs on the furniture. I know, I'm whining.
Anyhow, later that day, Scott comes into Sam, Stephane and my office, to
inform us of TurboLinux's (a Japanese company) recent venture capital.
57 million dollars. Companies go PUBLIC and don't raise 57 million
dollars. As usual, this is not a typo. What would YOU do with 57 million
"Personally, Scott, I'd buy myself a chair."
(pregnant pause.)
"Y'know what, Ryan...I'm gonna shame the fuck out of you," says Scott as
he walks out of the office. That's a direct quote. A moment later he
returns, pushing in front of him the chair from his office.
"Here. You use this until we get you a new one," and as quickly as he
appeared, he was gone again with my old seat.
I call after him as I try my new seat on for size, "ooh, I'm really
shamed now, Scott! Thanks so much!" And I smile and settle into my work
in my comfy new chair.
...and much to my surprise, guilt set in.
So I find myself wheeling this nice chair back into Scott's office, where
he is sitting in the obnoxious, uncomfortable, squeaky chair doing some
work. He sees me in the doorway as I try to explain that he's right, and
I'm a shithead, but he just points back towards my office and says, "no,
you keep it."
Who'd've thought? He shamed the fuck out of me.
The point is the dude's got the biggest heart of just about anyone I've
ever met...and I guess I learned a little something about being spoiled,
Anyhow...what else? Oh, the post office.
I got my first paycheck, for three days work. Checks are cut twice a
month here, so I just happened to stumble into this right at the end of a
pay period.
Since 1-800-WACHOVIA had, earlier that day, declared my bank account
"OVERDRAWN" in that cheery, digitized, pre-recorded voice that makes you
want to throw a brick through the phone line, I was rather pleased to get
some flow. In fact, I even did "The Money Dance" in celebration.
For those uninitiated in the ways, The Money Dance was actually started
by tribal indians when droughts came across the land. It involves you
bouncing from foot to foot while moving your index fingers in a somewhat
Saturday Night Fever, disco style, occasionally pointing at your
paycheck, and singing, "I've got MONEEEEEEEY...I've got MONEEEEEEY."
Slight quantities of retardation, and a mullet, add to the visual
effectiveness of The Money Dance. Accept no substitutes.
Anyhow, I sent the check express mail to Columbia, SC (a "small
town" according to the lady at the post office), where Wachovia will
happily place the funds in your checking account for you. I sent the last
of my actual Charlotte bills by standard mail, in hopes that everything
will make it to its final destination in the correct order.
Coincidentally, a rebate for my laptop showed up the day I left
Charlotte. From Sony headquarters in California. So this means it went
across the country. Carrie's gonna have to mail it back across the
country to me for signing, where I will then have to mail it back across
the country to have it deposited in my account.
Note that Bank of America exists out here AND in Charlotte. I'm just
protesting. I think they launder money for the Illuminati or
something. Little known fact is that Hugh McColl was in fact a
conspirator in the Kennedy assassination. I mean, you didn't hear that
from ME, but it's true. Suffice it to say, I'll use my paycheck for
toilet paper before I send it to Bank of America.
Which reminds me of the bathroom at Loki.
I had mentioned to someone that there's no indoor plumbing at Loki. It's
true. You take a key that is clipped to the hockey stick leaning up
against the wall by the front door, walk out that front door, across the
quad, and use that key to unlock the bathrooms. At least once a day
someone forgets to put the key back, and a small outburst of hysteria
erupts in the office. That's unimportant, but I just wanted to clear up
that we do NOT have an outhouse, we just need to go to a different part
of the building to urinate.
BUT--the damned thing has those stupid automatic lights in it. You know
the type. The friggin' things sense movement and activate, so as you open
the door, the lights turn on. When you leave, after a few minutes of no
movement in the bathroom, the lights turn back out.
So I'm sitting on the toilet the other day, working on some code (isn't
this technology gone horribly awry?), and the stupid lights go
out. There's no sensor in the stall. I know this, for in a brief panic, I
waved my arms around hoping it would trigger the sensor. It did not. I
took a roll of toilet paper and winged it over the stall door, hoping it
would register as movement. It did not. I thought briefly about raging
against the dying of the light, and just continuing on as if nothing had
happened. After about thirty seconds I had thoughts of cockroaches, rats,
and other things that come out in pitch darkness crawling on my ass, and
seeing as I was likely to be eaten by a grue, I decided to wrap up my
...and then I realized I had thrown the only roll of toilet paper out of
the stall as a sensor grenade. And just earlier this day I had parted
with my paycheck.
So imagine me, crawling around in pure darkness, using the laptop screen
as light to find the roll of toilet paper. With my pants down. The stupid
light sensor was around the corner, so even when I humbled myself to
leave the stall, the friggin' lights didn't come back on.
In the future, I will reserve my deeper thinking for less
technologically-inclined bathrooms.
But what I wanted to talk about is the post office. I think Christmas is
actually held on January 19th out here, since the line that started at
the desk litterally went out the front door. Something must have been
going on that day. A holiday or whatnot...everyone had a massive box to
mail. This must be why postal employees shoot their bosses...too much
work all day long. Either that, or Sam works nights at the post office,
and drives the other employees over the edge.
By the way, did you know that dentists have the highest suicide rate of
any profession? It's true. And probably half of them off themselves while
waiting in line at the post office. Man, this place might beat
Jack-in-the-Box for depressing atmosphere. Then again, Jack-in-the-Box
has better commercials; I've never heard the United States Postal System
use the word "lesbian" on television.
Alright, enough typing. Xwrits just triggered, and it's WAY past my
written 2000-01-21 12:56:52
> Perhaps this is the Ryan that is sending me all this mail about
> your cross country tour. If I've reached the right person...kindly
> delete me from your blind copy mailing list. To be quite honest I
> don't really have the time nor care about the cross country map
> tour.....I would imagine most people on it don't.
Mr. Hicks:
I can understand that you wouldn't have an interest in my travels don't know me. At least, I've never heard of you. AND i
would happilily remove you from my list, but you aren't on it. Perhaps
someone is forwarding the mails to you? Forward one of "my" emails to
this address, and I'll help you sort out where it came from, but I
promise I'm not just randomly mailing people...and I'm sorry you're
getting these against your will.
[Ed.-- I never got another response from this guy. (*shrug*)]
a brief carpal tunnel interlude
written 2000-01-23 02:23:34
I was going to write today about my medical benefits agent, as there's a
lot of comedy in that, and I did. It's sitting in a text file on my
laptop. I'll send it out tommorow. Today I want to talk about, hopefully
for the last time, my wrists. They hurt. Still.
I know of at least one person on this mailing list that is having wrist
pain...I dunno if his is carpal tunnel syndrome or not. The fact is that
like 70% and higher of the wrist pain cases in the computer industry just
simply are not carpal tunnel syndrome. That's not denial on my part,
btw. Frequently it's tendonitis or something else.
I started typing this email on a Kinesis brand keyboard. It was a
brilliant design that is completely useless to me. There's a picture of
it at ...this thing costs more
than 250 dollars. Unbelievable.
Again, this keyboard can help a lot of people, I'm fairly certain. A lot
of people also learned at some point to touch-type. I never did. After
spending about 15 minutes trying to write a small paragraph to Kara, I
gave up on this thing. Which is a shame, because not only does it rest
your hands in a really good "natural" position, but it really alleviates
the need almost entirely for any kind of hand movement (the space key is
hit by your right thumb and the backspace is your's
wild.)...largely I've discovered that my modified hunt-and-peck typing
style (which is completely undistinguishable from real typing after all
these years) fails miserably on this thing.
First, my hands come to rest at an offset of one from the "home
row"...that is, my left hand hits capslock (or whatever), A, S, and D
instead of A,S,D, and F, whereas my right lands on K, L, ";", and
"'" instead of J, K, L, ";"'s completely subconscious.
Furthermore, I hit the T key with my right hand half the time, and the
"Y" key with my left more often than not...since these keys are in the
wrong "bowl" for those hands to hit them, I find myself trying really
hard not to reach across the keyboard for them. This makes this keyboard
instinctually impossible for me to use.
Ironically, I find my posture getting worse as I lean forward to try and
see into the curves and see where the key I want to hit is located.
At any rate, I really wanted that keyboard to solve all my problems, but
alas, it will not.
But a word about my posture; it is absolute horrible. Any one that's seen
me in person already knows me to be completely slouched over anyhow, but
that only worsens at the computer. I hunch over the keys, rest my wrists
on the table (which bends them at a decidedly awkward and unhealthy
angle), and type by twisting my wrists from a bad angle to a distinctly
worse one, depending on what I'm trying to do.
My quick fix (which I had never thought of before I just typed that last
paragraph) is to move the keyboard to the edge of the table. This
prevents me from resting my wrists down, which in itself makes me adopt
the more ergonomic stance of typing above the keyboard, much like a
piano player...uh, plays. It also forces me to lean back a little more,
improving my posture. Knowing me, the chair will just slide back
subconsciously and I'll slump forward to type like the Hunchback of Notre
Dame again.
Also, prime suspect #1 (er...besides the last 7 months of 12-hour
development days) is my laptop. Sony VAIO's a tiny little
grasshopper, for those that haven't seen it, but it is MURDER on my
wrists, usually because of where I use it as much as the miniscule
keyboard and mousepad positioning.
Oops, there goes Xwrits. More in a second.
Anyhow, other stuff. Today I checked my balance with 1-800-WACHOVIA, and
I'm down to 98 bucks in checking. This means they received my
check. Good. So I verify who cashed what, and find that one of the bills
was paid. That means the checks have also hit town. Good.
Of course, if the 40 dollar bill is the only one paid out of 386 bucks
worth of paycheck, where's the rest? Apparently Wachovia changed my
account (since I'm no longer a student) to no longer have overdraft
protection. Which is fine, if you ask me. The assumption is that if I
don't have the money in my account, my Visa check card should then just
decline to process a purchase. Cool. Before, it would process it, the
overdraft protection would dump 200 bucks in the account, and I'd have X
days to pay that 200 off and I'd be fine.
But my assumption is incorrect. Here is what ACTUALLY happens:
I make a 5 dollar purchase on my card (for example), and my checking
account can't cover it. Wachovia pays that five bucks, and charges me 28
bucks in fees. Seeing as all my gas and hotel rooms were on this card to
get here, I have at least 5 (and maybe more) overdrafts on my account.
So, unbeknowest to me, I spent about 140 or so bucks of my first paycheck
here at Loki on overdraft fees. Thanks a million, Wachovia.
By the way, no one directly told me they had changed my account...some
telephone operator at one point several months ago, said she was
"updating my record," which I assumed meant updating the telephone number
and address, since I had moved. Can I sue for this? :)
So the short of it is that either the phone bill or the cable bill will
clear, but not both. Unless the overdraft thing "works" and I just pay an
extra 28 bucks at my leisure to keep the power running.
This is also assuming that the mail got in before the due date. Ugh.
I'm done bitching, now. Tommorow's update will actually be funny, I
promise. :)
your moment of zen.
written 2000-01-27 14:30:06 know how local and national governments allocate funds every year
to spend on education of the population in regards to the most important
issues? D.A.R.E. is an example of this.
On the way to work work today, on the back of the bus that was in front
of me was an advertisement. It featured a picture of a pair of hands in
handcuffs, and the text:
"'She looked 18', is not an excuse."
Oh, my.
I'm on my way...New York, New York...
written 2000-01-30 21:05:08
...bedtime, and then a plane ride to New York City. More details en
day one.
written 2000-02-03 06:52:49
(I'm a little behind, here.)
Greetings from the city that never sleeps.
I'm in the New Yorker hotel, on the 23rd floor. Not too shabby. :)
There's three of us in this suite: myself, Jim, and Andy. Andy's our QA
guy at Loki (for a description of his job, check out "QA Confidential" at, and Jim is...I -THINK- he's a programmer,
since he did most the work on the Heretic II port, but he doesn't like
programming anymore, so he's doing the trade shows, now. This is his
first trade show, and it hasn't even started yet and he's hating it. He's
not long for this profession, I think. More about that later.
We left Orange County yesterday around noon from (no kidding) John Wayne
Airport. Our flight was scheduled for departure at 12:10. I managed to
drag my butt out of bed around 10:45 and get in the shower.
Hey, if you've never missed an airplane, you're spending too much time in
the airport.
So Lance, Loki's VP, comes and gets me around 11:30. We then swing by to
get Andy, who is flipping out, since it's now 11:55. The airport is about
15 minutes away, but Lance seemed unconcerned. We made it there in
roughly 4 minutes, total. And while I appreciate maniac drivers, I think
it's important to note that Lance said he was taking it slow.
So we cruise into the airport, and hop on our flight. Three hours later
we're recharging our laptops in the airport terminal in St. Louis, and
three hours after that, we're cruising into La Guardia airport.
Jim is from New York originally. I don't mean some suburban, richy-bitch
part of New York; I talking about friggin' Queens. So the second we start
breathing New York city air, he turns into the power-New Yorker. He's on
his cell phone trying to get a car to pick us up, and he's cursing at the
luggage, and he's actually suddenly (re)developed a New York accent. After
hanging up on the car people (with a little curse), he tells us that it
would take too long to get the actual car out there, so being a New Yorker,
he flipped his phone the figurative bird, and then hailed a cab.
New York City apparently contracted with a bunch of famous people to
record sound bytes for the taxis. When you start your ride, a recording
of a famous person tells you to buckle up, and at the end of your ride
tells you to get a receipt.
Our sound byte was from Issac Hayes. Imagine how it feels to hit a big
city like New York and be effectively greeted by South Park's Chef.
So we get to the hotel, and after a small credit card problem, find our
way to our suite, drop our luggage, and hit the town.
We headed for Times Square, got some food, and went to bed. Saw on the
ABC news ticker that a plane had crashed outside Los Angeles. No, I
wasn't anywhere near that airport. Thanks for worrying, though. :)
The next morning, we dragged ourselves over to the Javis center for the
expo setup. This is wierd, since the place was a barren warehouse when
the day began, and looked damned polished and professional by the time we
But when I'm standing in line to get my exhibitor's badge ("Ryan Gordon,
Hackmaster, Loki Entertainment" ...I had my for
"programmer"...ugh), I see this lady who I swear used to work at
Youcentric, my previous's then that I remember they are
actually one of the exhibitors at this show (which is strange, since they
aren't a Linux shop...they do Java that happens to run on Linux...largely
thanks to me. Pfft.)
I wonder if they've noticed I'm still using their phone card. today I sneak up behind Brett (one of Youcentric's hackers) and
say, "so you finally got this thing to support more than two users at
once, huh?"
And he jumps. Whoa, strange dude in a hockey jersey that knows our
product is a poor performer...uh oh. Oh, it's just Ryan. Whew.
So he fills me in on Youcentric. Apparently there was a small developer's
riot, and they've decided they aren't working 14 hour days anymore, so
they're gonna slow down and do their code right. This is probably not
going to fly, since they signed FedEx to a > 3.5 million dollar contract,
so the pimps that run Youcentric are probably going to slap their bitches
around, and make 'em bring in more C-notes. I mean, business as usual.
Anyhow, I've met a WIDE variety of people here. Mostly strange. I'll tell
y'all about it tommorow, but I'm tired after pitching Quake all day.
Hell, pimpin' ain't EASY, dawgs.
If Gatsby were a technogeek...
written 2000-02-18 13:44:52
It's been awhile. Sorry, everyone. I've been alternately busy and
exhausted, so I haven't been writing. Furthermore, Netscape decided to
eat a bunch of my email (and I don't even USE Netscape as an email
client!), so if you haven't gotten a response to a letter...sorry.
So let's catch up on my time in New York. Stop me if you've heard this.
First things first. I need to talk about Slashdot weenies.
Slashdot is a website, ( "News for nerds. Stuff
that matters.") full of geeky stuff. Probably everyone that reads this
site is VERY fanatical about technology and/or buys our
games. Conversely, a lot of them are young and/or stupid.
There are people that were considered geeks in high school, and many of
them have either become rich in the computer industry or gunned down
their fellow students before graduation. Lots of the people who frequent
Slashdot fall into a sad third category: The Lusers. (I guess that's
short for "Lame User," but it's a frequent term, whatever the exact
definition might be.) Think of the jackasses that didn't shower much, and
didn't understand about computer technology so much as they played a lot
of Nintendo. Potentially (but not necessarily) smart yet irreparably
socially underdeveloped lifetime 15 year-olds: Slashdot weenies. You know
the type. Everyone knows a Slashdot weenie...Frequently Slashdot weenies
start out using Windows, but graduate onto using Linux, and find
instantly that this admits them access to a fraternity of angry holy
warriors that have nothing better to do than fling insults at Microsoft.
(Hint to any potential Slashdot weenies: Microsoft doesn't care.)
The reason I tell you all this is that had a booth at
LinuxWorld. Not really a booth, but a stage. And there were Slashdot
weenies gathered about the area, wearing #!/usr/bin/perl t-shirts and
crying out for death to Sun Microsystems for their mishandling of
Java. (Bernd calls these guys the "GNUjaheddih." I'll explain that
later.) Some, from what I could tell, CAMPED in front of this stage all
weekend on the beanbag chairs that were placed in front of it.
Why? To worship Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and Jeff "Hemos" Bates.
Rob and Jeff are about the same age as me. They run Slashdot. They're
worth probably a few million dollars, now, since bought
Slashdot, and VA bought Andover.
Good for them. But they are just guys, and (at best) technology
journalists of questionable ethics. Still, lusers hang on their every
word. In Atlanta last October I watched a guy almost wet his pants when
talking to Rob. It's kinda frightening.
So the whole plane ride and first day of setup for the expo, we all joked
about the imminent arrival of the Slashdot weenies.
And arrive they did. And I discovered very quickly that not only does
Slashdot have Slashdot weenies, but Loki has Loki weenies.
So I spent a good deal of LinuxWorld in the SuSE booth. They wanted
someone from Loki showing off Quake III running with their software
underneath, so that duty fell to me. And what I discovered is that most
people that wandered by, even if they don't play games, still found
conversation about the technologies and what Loki does to be
interesting. So that was cool.
However, the lesser humans, the Loki weenies, have a different slant on
communication. This one guy came up to me, saw I was wearing a Loki
shirt, and (no shit) dropped to his knees saying "I worship you guys."
So I'm like, "Get up, kid, I'm not a holy relic."
Other than that, there wasn't too much to the show. Pimp the game, play
the game, piss away SuSE's money, since they were footing the bill for me
being here. And piss it away I did. Nothing really beats a 150 dollar
dinner in Times Square, except for a 150 dollar dinner in Times Square
with a non-itemized receipt.
A little more Linux social commentary: There's a company called LinuxOne,
who is greatly hated in the Slashdot realm, because they are more or less
taking MandrakeSoft's Linux distribution, changing the name on it,
selling it (which is legal in this case, but unethical)...and they are
going public. Lots of pissed off weenies.
So I got some stickers from the Mandrakesoft booth. Their logo is a
purple top hat on the traditional Linux penguin, so I took one of these
top hat stickers and managed to stick it on the head of the penguin on
the LinuxOne package. I figured it was a political statement. I even
managed to get a picture of it with a digital camera. Figuring this would
be a prime piece of trash journalism for Slashdot, I go running for the stage.
And as I'm about to reach the weenie compound, a guy on stage with a
microphone yells "Holy shit! Ryan Gordon works for LOKI?!"
I look down at my hockey jersey, which is emblazoned with the company
logo in big letters, and wonder how this guy knew my name.
And I look back up to see Emmett, one of slashdot's authors. Right about
now I'm considering what a rediculously small world it is, since while I
had never met this cyberspace Emmett, I had met the real life Charles
Emmett Plant, whom I went to junior high and high school with.
Now the Chuck Plant I remember had a huge problem with truth. That's not
to say he's a dirty liar...he's actually a little better and worse at the
same time. It's more like he would construct a fantasy world around
himself. He'd tell me that Warner Brothers had hired him to do cartoon
voices, and that he did the music for the video game Wolfenstein 3D. This
was in 8th grade. Ironically, years later, -I- was the one who eventually
did some work on Wolf3D. I've met others in my life that have this same
pathological need to make stuff up. This doesn't bother me, because if
you can distinguish truth from lie, it all adds up to a good story,
Anyhow, here he was walking off the Slashdot stage (and if he had ever
told me he works for Slashdot I'd've assume it to be a fib), and we're
walking towards the Loki booth, and he's telling how he's known Scott
Draeker for years, and Michael Vance (a programmer at Loki) and he used
to hang out in Philly, yadda yadda yadda...and I'm thinking that I
haven't seen this guy in six years and he's already spinning a fantasy
world for me.
So when we get back to the Loki booth, the first thing Scott Draeker does
is say, "Emmett, where've you been?" And tosses him a Loki jersey that
says, sure enough, "EMMETT".
Whoa. I'd've expected Chuck to be living in a gutter somewhere,
roleplaying and avoiding showering for weeks at a time. Or to be dead. Or
As of that Thursday morning, when VA Linux Systems announced they had
purchases, this guy who dropped out of tenth grade was worth
over a quarter of a million dollars. I would have never predicted that
Chuck would stumble into the role of the geek who became rich at 23 for
being a technology advocate at the right place and right time.
Some of the people on this list actually know Chuck through various
channels. For those people, I will pause now to allow you to clean up the
shit in your pants.
Oh, and your moment of Zen: "Blame Canada," the song from South
Park: Bigger, Longer, and up for an Oscar. Best original
song. I read that on Slashdot. Hah.
I will wrap up the New York stuff next time, and again, sorry to those
that haven't gotten responses to email. I am reading them, but I've been
somewhat overwhelmed. Keep writing.
written 2000-02-18 17:07:16
As far as I can tell, in Orange County, it's easier to purchase a firearm
than it is to rent a post office box.
That is all.
Your moment of Zen...
written 2000-02-26 17:28:10
...the Dave and Busters in Irvine, CA has a wall of autographs from
famous people that have eaten there. One of them reads as follows:
"Screech got drunk here! --Dustin Diamond"
Finally, finally, finally. A New York finale.
written 2000-03-03 03:34:31
...for those that missed this fact, I'm in Charlotte, and I am kickin' it
in Skyland with a glass of Sweet Tea and a plate of biscuits while I type
this. Across from me are a bunch of dancers and bouncers that just got
off work at one of the strip clubs down the road. I always liked Skyland,
because I imagine this is what Jerry Springer's dressing rooms look like.
Ah, the Progressive New South.
But first, let me wrap up what happened in New York really quickly. See
how behind I am?
Uh, let's see...what wasn't computer geeky, yet still worth mentioning? I
almost got into a fight with the Teamsters at the convention center,
since I broke into the storage area to get Loki's boxes during the
breakdown. Apparently we aren't allowed to move our own boxes, since
otherwise, these poor teamsters would have no reason to live. After the
second trip back to the storage area, some painfully urban union boss
caught me lifting a cardboard box...which is apparently intolerable to
these guys. I was escorted back to the show floor by two goons and the
ghost of Jimmy Hoffa.
Hours later, after being the last exhibitors to get our boxes (don't piss
off Teamsters, because they WILL beat you), we packed up and headed to
dinner. In a stretch limo. You can buy ANYTHING for dirt cheap on the
streets of New York. For thirty bucks, seven of us rode in comfort to
Chinatown. We thought it was the Chinese New Year...apparently we were a
few days early, so instead of arriving to see dragons and fireworks we
arrove to see the same filthy city as elsewhere...with a little more
With the exception of Jim, who considers everything past New Jersey to be
"out west," none of the other Loki guys understood the principle of
eating chinese food in New York City. There are NO restaurants that sit
you down, take your coat, give you a nice pot of tea,'d be
lucky not to catch a disease in most of them.
That is, unless you know the correct process for selecting a
restaurant. There's two steps to this process:
1) Find the restaurant with the most rediculous name. Chances are they
know nothing about American advertising, which means they probably know
how to cook up a storm. So avoid places with names like "China
Delights" and "King Tien's Oriental Palace", and look for something more
along the lines of "Happy Duck Chinese Food." Remember to distinguish
between poor grammar and an absurd name...this is a common mistake made
by first-time visitors to Chinatown.
2) If in doubt, ask a cop. Police in New York know full well that their
badges label them as tour guides for Out-of-Towners. If you watch NYPD
Blue, you would think this would piss them off, but it doesn't, since you
will probably be the only person in the course of the night that will
talk to them like a human being, and you will DEFINITELY be the only one
that talks to them with respect.
The cop we asked had the THICKEST Bronx accent I have ever heard. This
guy was a Pizon, through and through. So it shouldn't come as a surprise
that his response was, "I don't eat no chink food. But there's a GREAT
Italian restaurant right down that road..."
For the life of me, I can't remember the name of that restaurant, but it
was the best food I think I've ever had. I've never been grateful for
cops before.
At dinner we discussed the upcoming expos we would be attending. Among
them is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or "E3" for short. The reason
I bring it up is this: Unlike LinuxWorld, it's a show dedicated to video
games, and nothing but video games. Seeing as this is the case, the main
clientele for this show are horny young men, that do nothing all day but
jockey their to speak. Since the main characterics of this
demographic are hormones and a short attention span, it follows naturally
that every company with a booth at E3 is going to need SOMETHING to catch
their eye and hold onto it like a bucking bronco for as long as possible.
The solution: Booth babes.
If you've never heard that term before, the plan goes something like
this: a couple of days before the show, the town is stripmined for
beautiful girls by game companies. They hire every stripper, exotic
dancer, prostitute, and catholic school girl they can, dress them up like
Laura Croft, and plant them in the company's booth. The girls are
effectively paid to be dick magnets.
If I'm not mistaken, E3 takes place in Las Vegas, so no worries: this
will be decidedly not the most gaudy display of sexual exploitation in
Still, not to be outdone, Loki has already hired a booth babe. Her name
is Asia. Asia Carrera. She's a porn star. I've already seen the Loki
jersey with her name on it.
I thought I might do some research about her and see who I'll be hanging
out with during E3. After punching "Asia Carrera" into a 'net search
engine, I expected to get about 8,000,000 pages of results.
Fortunately, the first one on the list was
...who says domain-dipping doesn't work?
So apparently we've hired a computer geek porn star...which seems
appropriate to me. She runs her own website and writes the HTML by hand.
Oh, and she's been in over 300 porn movies. I am alternately impressed
and repulsed by this fact.
Anyhow, I'm in Charlotte for the week, so I'll probably see a lot of you
mailing list folks soon, if I haven't already. And, since I'm not hacking
video games and map editors (much) this week, I'll actually be able to
REPLY to email. Oooh...
written 2000-03-03 06:16:42's the thing for Freshmeat...
The official HOWNOTTO.
So, you've found your niche in the open-source world, and now you want to be
noticed? You're producing cool, original, K-rad elite apps, and you want to
get the recognition you deserve? There's can only be one solution: FRESHMEAT.
Many Linux folks who know how to program, and many more who don't, post their
offerings to Freshmeat everyday, so if you desire acknoledgement, you darn well
better start placing announcements for your own 0-day Linux Warez here, too.
However, it's never wise to dive in without knowing what you're doing, so here
are some simply guidelines to help you get the most out of your Freshmeat
experience. In honor of the Linux Documentation Project, we'll call this the
"Freshmeat HOWTO."
Remember that it is important to announce early, and announce often on
Freshmeat. Adding a new #include line to your program is usually all the
reason you need to make an announcement. In fact, most programs contain less
code when they are labelled version 0.0.1 and posted. With just this much, you
are certain to get lots and lots of capable programmers to contribute to your
infant project. After all, there's nothing like a blank slate to call a throng
of rootless hackers to your aid. All coders are really just looking for a home,
and you are providing them one in your new project. So go forth and announce.
Didn't get the overwhelming response to your project that you expected?
That's okay. Sometimes hackers get overwhelmed by a busy day of trolling at
other websites. This has become less of an issue since turned off
the user-comment feature, but still, the inherent human right to talk about
Natalie Portman and repeatedly try for a "first post" can eat into one's
productivity, and cause the exhausted hacker to miss a few Freshmeat postings.
Therefore, you must simply make more annoucements. Make two or three a day. Go
ahead; bandwidth is cheap, and chances are you still won't generate more
daily announcements than the Linux kernel.
It is also important, when submitting applications to Freshmeat, to have a
good name for the program. Remember that the Linux community doesn't need
any advertising, so there's no need to waste those precious Perl-coding brain
cells on a marketable name. To simplify the matter, the Linux community has a
naming scheme that it borrows from a system known as "hungarian notation."
Follow this simple algorithm: Is your program GNOME-based or KDE-based?
Prepend a 'g' or 'k' to the name, respectively. If it is not specific to
either environment, graphical apps may usually prepend an 'x'. Java apps may
use 'j', with written permission from Sun Microsystems. Database-related code
may use "sql". Some other important letters are 'e' for Enlightment-related
programs, 'z' for compression algorithms, and 'b' for BeOS apps. You thought
all those hours of watching Sesame Street were a waste, didn't you?
To make your application truly cool, what you really need is a RECURSIVE
acronym. You get bonus points for using the word "not" in the name, too. Some
examples of this are "GNU's Not Unix", "Pine Is Not Elm", "Wine Is Not [an]
Emulator", and "Linux Is Not Useless [without] X-Window."
Contrary to what was stated previously, it's important to note that the 'G'
in "GNU" does NOT stand for "Gnome". It doesn't stand for anything. This is
merely a necessary evil in the Linux Application Naming Scheme.
Numbers are also permitted. Following the lead of artists such as MC Hammer,
the Video4Linux and ISDN4Linux projects have made the replacement of words
with their phonetically equivalent numerics an acceptable practice.
After you've selected all the letters that relate to your program, pick a
simple word (try to avoid words that contain vowels, as vowels generally are
frowned upon in Unix circles), and prepend the letters to it. A good example
is a GNOME-based, database-enabled program for caching webpages. It might be
named something like "gsql4httpBy". Note that 'y' is not considered a vowel
in all situations, so this is a valid name for your new program, even though
it isn't a cool recursive algorithm. This will give the whole of the Linux
community all the information it needs about your app.
Since you've expertly encoded all the relevant information about your
project in its name, there's really no need to fill out that section in the
appindex entry labelled "description." In fact, this was placed there merely
to satisfy those without the creativity to come up with a decent project name.
Since you are capable of producing a proper name in the first place, you may
use this section to give a shout out to all your homies. An example is:
"Yo, wassup from the PhreakMaster?! Yours truely, Sir Cracksalot, is
bestowing onto you all this 37337 new demo app. I wanna give some props to my
buds in #visualbasic, Linux Torvalds (you kick b7tt, dude!), Loki 4 giving me
stuff to pirate, and 'A' through 'F' in the phone book."
Versioning schemes are important to consider. Gone are the days of DOS where
programs used a MAJOR.MINOR versioning scheme. After all, why be so direct as
to increment the minor number for bugfixes, and the major number for new
features? Where's the DRAMA in that? Also gone are the days of Windows, where
programs start at 1.0 and never, codewise at least, make it much further. Linux
programs are versioned as a fraction of one, and as they travel towards
perfection, they get closer to being an integer. The astute reader has already
figured out that this means Emacs must clearly be the perfect program, since
it's version is currently much, much greater than one right now.
But hey, at least we haven't adopted the Solaris versioning system. This
means that Linux programmers do not need an advanced degree in calculus in
order to write applications. This has helped jumpstart the Linux application
market. Thanks to this easing of the programmer's burden, you can get on
Freshmeat any day of the week and see a proliferation of IRC clients and
Napster clones available for download.
Which brings us to the point of cross-pollination. You might be thinking
that you are now ready to hack some code and submit it to Freshmeat, but golly
gee, whatever should you work on? You could perhaps find a lacking feature in
Linux and implement it, or find a radical new concept and make it a reality.
But, until you've been in this business as long as Stallman, you probably want
to take it easy and hone your hacker skills. Clearly, the best way to do this
is to reinvent the wheel.
Is there a cool KDE application? Rewrite it from scratch with the GTK+
toolkit. Don't contribute enhancements to the existing project. Don't even
evaluate their codebase for potentially reusable code; that goes against the
spirit of COMPETITION. You need to write something...cooler. Is there a Java
version, yet? Rewrite it. What about a console version? Rewrite it. A
applet? Rewrite. An EPPLET? REWRITE. A pure assembly version? RE. WRITE.
Make sure that every program exists for every possible user's exact
configuration. We are talking about the very soul of user friendliness here!
Also try not to forget about BSD, BeOS, OS/2, and...uh, Windows. Remember that
rewriting is always a more creative process than porting, and there's nothing
more imporatant in mental health than a creative outlet. Doing a search on the
appindex for "icq" will demonstrate how popular this method of project
development/psychotherapy can be.
For those that aren't inclined towards end-user applications (those pesky
user interfaces!), you may also delve in at a lower level. There are many
libraries that need to be cross-bred. Do you like SDL? You can help make sure
it can use GGI, SVGAlib, X, FBcon, and AAlib as video backends. BUT -- does
GGI have an SDL backend? Is anyone working on linking clanlib into this? And
you can help make sure that clanlib can use DRI. And DRI should be able to use
SDL as a backend. You should be able to link all graphic libraries together so
they can call each other in a perfect zen-like circle. Remember that Linux is
not complete until every possible graphic library is really just wrapping every
other one. Compatibility is key, here. And don't forget sound APIs; I haven't
even mentioned OSS, ALSA, and ESD, yet. Look at all the work we have to do!
So, with this preparation added to your programming toolkit, you can now
submit your applications to Freshmeat with confidence. Get hacking.
After years of being oppressed by the computer industry, Ryan is coming out of
the closet; he was an English major in college. He can be found sleeping on
Scott Draeker's laundry room floor, or alternately at
The cluestick beats the air-travellers...
written 2000-03-05 07:10:03
...I wanted to put down, for posterity, some previously unwritten laws of
airline travel.
- You can tell a lot about a city by the type of people that hang out in
its airports. Atlanta has beautiful people. Philadelphia has ugly
people. Everyone in Los Angeles International looks like a cheap
whore. Look around next time; everyone in a given airport fits the same's almost eerie.
- The security measures taken in airports are a fuckin' joke. There's
just no nice way to say this. If I really wanted to blow something up,
I'd go to an airport. This replaces my previous choice for worst
security; now, if I had a destructive urge, I'd hit an airport BEFORE I'd
attempt it at a public high school. Really, the whole thing runs off the
convenience and whim of the airport staff.
- It's important to not show up too early. We don't want to crowd the
airports. Showing up more than ten minutes before your flight is
unnecessary. Afterall, you don't want to waste your valuable time sitting
in an airport terminal. And besides, running for your departing gate is
good exercise. Which brings up our next point:
- You WILL inevitably be departing from the gate that marks the furthest
point from where you are currently standing. No joke; I've been flying
for YEARS, and never ONCE has my gate been even the second furthest
away. It's always the furthest. Just deal with it. Furthermore, you will
be in the very back of the plane. Since you are getting on the plane 3
nanoseconds before it takes off, this means you'll be doing some dirty
dancing with at least one Mother Teresa lookalike who can't get her ass
out of the aisle while you try to get your luggage settled and your butt
- Someone is going to be in your seat. Don't be disruptive; steal someone
- Fate has frowned upon you. Inevitably you will either be stuck between
two people that are clinically obese (who will be likely to snore, sweat,
or drool on you during the flight), or you will have the window
seat. Whether you enjoy the view the window affords you or not, one thing
is certain: the other two passengers between you and the bathroom will
sleep soundly for the duration of the flight.
- Don't worry: if you think the food on the flight sucks, it'll be
WONDERFUL compared to the in-flight movie. Will you be seeing "American
Beauty"? How about "The Shawshank Redemption"? Nope. The last two
movies -I- saw while airborn were "Crazy in Alabama", which was Antonio
Banderas's directorial debut, and "The Spy Who Knew Too Little", which
was just another nail in the coffin of Bill Murray's career. Do what I do
now: Get a laptop, a fast internet connection, and pirate a movie before
you leave. Watch it instead. I've got the entire South Park movie sucking
up over a gigabyte of my hard drive. It's a bootleg stolen by some guy
going into a theater with a video camera. I can't identify the language
the subtitles are in. But it's still better than watching Antonio try to
recreate Citizen Kane.
- Airlines have a sort of contagious financial vampirism. Not only are
they going to RAPE you for cash every chance they get, but every business
within a five mile radius will do the same. I blame the business class,
yuppie motherfuckers for this one; if people willingly pay rediculous
prices, then the prices willingly stay rediculous. USAir will rent you
headphones, to listen to the movie...for five bucks. FIVE?! You really
want me to PAY you so I can watch this PUKE you call a MOVIE? Fuck
you. Hint: Regular headphones work, too. You probably have them anyhow,
since you brought your own movie to watch. And don't even DREAM of using
that phone in the seat in front of you if you ever want to put your child
through college. Anything in or near the airport has this problem. Parking.
Shuttles. Restaurants. Bars. Prostitutes. Beggars. Overpriced, every one of
them. The fact they don't charge you for the crappy packet of peanuts is
probably due to a federal regulation.
- Speaking of federal regulations, does anyone REALLY believe that all
these safety instructions are going to help you in the event of a
crash? A jet plane is effectively an attempt to test the laws of
physics; you are, more or less, strapping enough force to a lump of steel
to propel it through the air. If you have 100 really light passengers,
you've added at least another 10,000 pounds to this lump. This isn't even
considering the absurd amounts of luggage all these richy-bitches are
carrying. Therefore, if this vehicle decides to stop propelling itself,
it's going to hit the ground. And YOU are GOING to fucking DIE. There's
just no way around it. You might as well fire up that pirated South Park
before the safety lecture is over. No one else is listening, either.
- Light a match at 30,000 feet. See how obnoxious that is? Still wonder
why smoking was REALLY banned on flights?
- You will be required to keep your tray down for most of the flight,
since the stewardesses will patiently ignore all your attempts to hand
them your empty cup and the foil wrapper from your honey-roasted peanuts.
- Beyond the peanuts, on longer flights you might get a meal. Chances are
you will have a choice of meals: chicken or fish. Anyone who's seen
"Airplane" knows better than to choose the fish. If they're out of
chicken, then just starve. Hey, how come they never show "Airplane" as
the in-flight movie? I'd pay for the headphones for that one...
- You are going to want to minimize the restriction of blood
flow. Recline your chair as soon as federal regulations deem you
worthy. Still, you're first reaction to the person in front of you doing
this will always be annoyance.
- Oh, if you really do bring the laptop, bring an extra battery. There
won't be an outlet to plug it in, or the supplied outlet will require
some Martian converter hoobajoob to operate. Remember that once the
battery fails, you will be forced to view the remainder of "Ernest Goes
to Camp." Come prepared.
- There's no such thing as a steward. Just stewardesses. The existance of
stewards is just a myth invented by the airlines to prevent descrimination
lawsuits. If you ever saw a steward, it was probably just a stewardess
with a horrible, embarrassing deformity.
- Steal EVERYTHING. Blankets. Pillows. Magazines. Take the barf bag. Rob
the drink cart. Cut the cord on the phone that's embedded in the seat and
take the reciever with you. Do EVERYTHING you can to these VAMPIRES to
minimize your financial loss and emotional abuse. Just don't tamper with
the smoke detector in the bathroom: there's a federal regulation against
"I am writing graffitti on your body,
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried."
-- Ani Difranco.
Italian-American Reconciliation...
written 2000-03-05 11:45:17
A public apology:
For reference, the police man in New York was a "paisan," and NOT a "Pizon."
Please don't kill me, Guido.
Free raisins. (?!)
written 2000-03-12 05:01:34
Hey, y'all.
I sat down and made a brief list of everything I've been meaning to write
about. There's a lot of stuff. It's almost frightening how entertaining
even mundane things can be.
For example, Chad had done his homework; apparently he's discovered that
Orange County is home to about 30 percent of the country's donut
shops. Who knew? Not only do I get the joys of BOTH Circle K and 7-11 out
here, but it IS indeed true; there's a veritable smorgasborg of donut
shops. Many of them are open 24 hours, in order to value-add to the
service of...donut supplying, I guess. Is this not commercialism gone
horribly awry?
Other news: Time Crisis II is no longer my quarter-swallowing
addiction. Since I can beat the whole game with my eyes closed, I've
moved on to other games. I'm now preparing diligently for a life of
second and third mortgages by repeatedly draining my Power Card on
"Silent Scope" (and Silent Scope II, but who's counting?). Also good is
"Crisis Zone," which is basically Time Crisis II with new levels...and a
machine gun. Ho ho ho.
It's odd...the best way to kill your addiction to "kid's stuff" like
video games is to work in the industry. If I never see Heroes of Might
and Magic III again, it'll be too soon. Same holds true for
Civilization...and I only spent about 48 hours hacking at that. If
nothing else, it's driven me away from my desk and back into the
arcades. It's like going back to gang-banging for white boys.
The real news is that tommorow (today?) I'll be moving into my
HOUSE. Actually, not mine; I'll be moving into my ROOM. That's cool. I'm
only there for about 45 days before I'm out looking for new digs
again. Unless I can convince Daniel to move in here (and convince Lance
to not turn that extra room into an office)'s not a big deal, but MY
GOD...this house is SWEET. I'm going to very thoroughly enjoy crashing
here for the next month and a half. It's a four bedroom number that
looks, inside and out, like a step below the place from Fresh Prince of
...but then again, i'm used to roach-infested shitholes. And screaming
kids at six in the morning, so it could be in South Central L.A., and I'd
still consider it paradise, so long as the only noise before 10:00a.m. is
some gunplay and maybe a screaming crackwhore. Crackwhores don't have the
same vocal range as three year-olds.
This will give me a decent chance to figure out what I still own. Packing
in Charlotte was basically a matter of throwing everything into my car,
so if it isn't in the backpack I've been living out of since January, I'm
probably no longer aware of its existance. More importantly,
claustrophobics will be able to ride in my car again when the piles and
piles of crapola are removed.
Ooh...gotta backtrack for a moment, though. I was in Charlotte last
week. Here's the highlights really quickly:
- Saw two plays: "Death and the Maiden" and "The Effects of Gamma Rays on
Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds." (whew!)
- Wrote an article for Got a lot of hatemail for it. I
love hatemail.
- Hit Lupie's for MEATLOAF NIGHT. Don't be fooled; when you leave
Charlotte, you WILL miss Lupie's.
- Robbed my previous employer blind. More on this in a moment.
- Slept very littled. Hacked quite a bit.
- Saw "Pump up the Volume" for the first time. If anyone blows up an
plane after reading my last email about airlines, I can be the next
Christian Slater. Just call me Charles U. Farley.
- Met "Gertrude" at the BareBones cast party. I'll get back to this next email.
- Saw quite a few people on this list.
- Other important stuff that'll hit me as soon as I send this email. I visited my old employer's office suites last Friday. Every Friday
they feed the whole staff pizza so the proles forget how badly they keep
getting fucked by the upper one percent. So I thought it might be funny
to sneak in and steal a box of pizza. I take about three steps towards
the door and my old boss sees me with pizza in hand. He yelps, "Ryan!"
I'm expecting this joke's gone very badly, but the next words out of his
mouth are not, "Security!" In fact, they are something more akin to
"Thank god you're here...there's some nasty bugs in the Mac code...can
you fix them?"
Here's your job-security tip for the day: Work for a Java-based company,
and be the only guy who knows C. Bonus points if you can pick up PowerPC
assembly language on-the-fly.
With this in mind, I remind him that I don't work for free when I'm
on vacation.
"No, we'll pay you."
"Yeah...but it ain't gonna cover my THERAPY BILLS for having to be
"Fifty bucks. An hour. Under the table."
I mean, damn. I know good prostitutes that don't make that much. So I did
some whoring of my own. For 11 hours. Not a typo. That'll finance the
Palm IIIc that's on it's way to me...can't wait to try and get Eric's
Ultimate Solitaire working on that thing. :) This is not overlooking
the fact that this was a paid vacation on top of everything else...oh,
yes. Life is good.
So I gotta go. I need to get a little more Silent Scope in before this
place closes for the night. Love me some sniping.
More tommorow.
In search of a good subject for rambling journal entries.
written 2000-03-13 01:15:57
Y'know, it's just never too late to look like a punk kid.
I got jumped by two security guards at a mall yesterday, because I was
wearing a trenchcoat. All these security vans swarmed around me in the
parking lot. I had a baseball cap on backwards over my ever-growing hair,
and about an inch of growth on my face, so clearly I must have been
looking to blow something up or rape an old lady or something. Later on,
some guy pointed me out to his friends called out, "Hey, it's Silent
Bob! What's up, Silent Bob?"
I finally made my way to a coffee house out here. The place was called
"Dierdrich's Coffee", and it's kinda like a slightly less yuppie version
of Caribou Coffee. Heaven knows, it's DEFINITELY less suffocating than
your average StarBucks. So I ambled in for a cup o' joe.
For those that aren't ardent coffeehousers, you should understand that
there really is no such thing as a cup of coffee at a coffeehouse. I know
that sounds odd, but it's true. You have to order a cup of Sumatra or
Kona, or find something else that sounds like a breed of pot. ("Yes, I'd
like a cup of Mexican Gold, please.") Other options are Espresso (but not
EXpresso; ordering that is apparently a sign of an amateur), or for the
really brave, a MOCHA LATTE or some crap like that.
Chances are, you can't even get a SMALL, MEDIUM, or LARGE drink; you'll
probably have to ask for a "Venti" or "Grande". I think that's
Italian. Being a stubborn American, however, I find it's best to say,
"just gimme the biggest thing you've got, ya lousy java jockey, and make
it friggin' SNAPPY."
I mean, could you see Sylvester Stallone or John Wayne in one of these
places? Try to imagine The Duke sipping a grande mocha latte and reciting
bad poetry. See? You can't do it. There's just nothing badass about these
places. It is a wonder to me that anyone who frequents coffeehouses ever
gets laid. But then again, we all know this is just a front; after
spending an hour or so being tragically hip artistes, these junior
highschoolers hop in their daddies' convertible Jaguars, throw the black
berets in the back seat, and drive off to the mall to make fun of people
wearing trenchcoats. How trendy.
To make a long story short, I made my way to the counter and got a cup of
Chai. If you've never had Chai, think liquid pumpkin pie. Most decidedly
After deferring my student loans, presenting two forms of identification,
and splitting the bill between my credit card and an I.O.U. signed in my
own blood, I paid for my drink and was ready to take in the atmosphere.
Tonight, like many nights in coffee shops across the country, there was a
band performing. Normally this is enough to make me flee the premises
without so much as a sip of my financial venture, but tonight's
performance was at least a little different from the usual fare of
suffering highschool bands and bad Radiohead covers. This group was
apparently going to perform "authentic" spanish music for our
coffee-swilling pleasure.
Immediately I'm imagining a bad reproduction of The Buena Vista Social
Club, but the music, I can safely say, jammed.
The stereotypes, however, were pretty bad. The lead singer had a
psuedomexican mullet, slicked back AND standing up at the same time. Think
Adam Sandler in "The Wedding Singer", but with more grease. He was
wearing sunglasses at night. I decided that he must be a good singer,
because from the looks of him, he could probably be making better money
mugging people in alleys. I was right; that dude could SING.
One of the guitarists was the standard viejo verde, raised on a healthy
diet of whisky, cuban cigars and whores. His shirt was opened about three
buttons too far to show gray chest hair, and his lips curved into a gaping
smile that displayed teeth that were never quite maintained properly. He
had to be about 20 years older than the rest of them, but you could tell
he never had as much fun in his life as when he was jamming with the
I find that I really like this music, even if for the life of me I can't
understand one word of it.
Other stuff. I'm now in my new house. I'll send my new phone number and
snail mail address tomorrow (hopefully I'll know it by then). My last
official act as a resident of the Draeker house was to pick Scott up from
the airport, where he had just finished speaking at GDC (Game Developer's
Conference? Something like that.) He's thrilled because of some very
important deals that are now in the works, and the majestic reception our
OpenAL library is getting. We spent most of the trip back to his house
discussing what we would do if we could actually get rich off this
business. Some of the better suggestions were "Blow 5,000 bucks on a hand
of blackjack," "light a cigarette off a burning 100 dollar bill," and
"pay to have people that call you 'Silent Bob' killed."
Ah, to dream.
"Where'd you get yer information, huh?
You think that you can front when Revelation comes?"
-- Beastie Boys.
written 2000-03-14 02:10:11
...87-grade unleaded gasoline ("The cheap stuff") was 1.72 a gallon this
morning. Not a typo. Can anyone beat that?
written 2000-03-14 22:58:34
Hey, y'all.
Greetings from a Palm Pilot IIIc. Using this thing is going to take some
getting used to!
I'm writing this text on a computer that fits in my hand. The way you
enter text on this little device is with a pen-like tool called a
"stylus". There's a little area at the bottom of the screen where you
scribble in a language called "graffiti". The gist is that you write
invisible letters in this area that seem to me to be a mixture of English
and ancient Greek; indeed, the symbol you write for 'k' is actually a
lowercase alpha. It's very space-efficient; a whole keyboard, including
letters, numbers, punctuation, and foreign characters takes up about
1x1.5 inches.
You find out very quickly how rarely some letters are used, and how often
other ones are...I never realized how many times the letter 'R' comes up
in English until I had trouble writing it.
For certain, there's nothing quite like challenging your basic
assumptions about the alphabet. Or the ability to write e-mail while on
the john. What a tradeoff.
Other than the new horizons, and the fact that this thing has a Java
Virtual Machine and all three Zorks already, there's not much new to
report. Not to mention that it took me about 3.5 eons to write this
much. The things I do for technology.
I'm going to stop promising to write about specific topics on specific
days. I still haven't gotten around to telling y'all about Gertrude at
the cast party. :) So, for the time-being, we'll just file such tales
under "for later."
"Let's get together and feel alright..."
--Bob Marley.
Pretty in Pink.
written 2000-03-15 20:22:39
In case anyone was wondering, my research seems to suggest that the most
expensive gas in America can be found at (surprise) DisneyWorld, but
apparently we can't complain too much. Once you take into account the
metric and currency conversions, Germany's got us all beat by a
kilometer: they're closer to US$3.50 a gallon. Ouch. Stephane assures me
that France's situation is simillar, so think about that next time you
roll up to a pump; just say, "at least I'm not in Europe..." Sorry to
those with a ".de" email address on this list.
Today I recieved an email from my ex-girlfriend's sister. When I say
"ex-girlfriend", in this case, I'm referring way, way, WAY back to those
hideous high school years. And I'm not just speaking of a time
frame. It's also a state of mind: an uninspired, unshowered,
disinterested state of the soul.
Forget about your prom, and that AP exam that you aced. Those happy
moments are more or less accidental. Misery, however, is completely
calculated in high school. Therefore concentrate instead on those moments
of pure rage, frustration, and uselessness that have hardened, darkened,
and defined your demeanor for the rest of your life.
Oh, wait. Maybe you CAN focus on your prom, then.
But let me focus on someone else's prom for a second.
It would have actually been -my- senior prom, but after being coerced
into going to one my junior year, I felt pretty confident I had gotten
all I could out of the experience. I mean, the gig's the same every
year; the only things that change are the styles (but not the
tackiness) of the music and costumes. So if you missed your prom, or just
have a masochistic need to relive it, then fear not. Your local video
store has an ample stock of Molly Ringwald movies available for just this
The reason for my attendence at my junior prom is also the reason I
mention my senior prom. The astute among you have already figured it
out: the ex-girlfriend. To protect the innocent, we'll just create a
false name for her. From here on, we'll refer to her as "Karie".
Karie really REALLY wanted to go to that senior prom. In retrospect, I
don't think this was a "girl thing"...I am willing to believe that Karie
is the only creature on Earth that looked forward to the prom for purely
selfless reasons. Guys would look forward to potential booty, and girls
would look forward to outdoing other girls, but Karie just loved the
thrill of the night. For her, the event wasn't gaudy: it sparkled.
However, there was no way in hell I was going to that prom. None. Threat
of torture, death, and Menudo concerts would not coerce me into attending
this event. It just wasn't going to happen.
But being the modern boyfriend I was, I was willing to compromise. Karie
could go to the prom WITH SOMEONE ELSE. Made perfect sense to me. Sure.
The reason I'm going through this ancient history is because Karie's
sister--remember her?--sent me an email to tell me about Karie's wedding
shower. For those who aren't in the know, she's marrying the guy who she
took to her senior prom. Yes, people like that apparently -do- exist. And
in this case, you don't need to rent a Brat Pack film to see it.
Karie and her fiancee are tying the knot in about two weeks, on
(yikes!) April Fool's Day. And for this, I am filled with an overwhelming
But no, this isn't a scene out of "There's Something About Mary" all
you people that have been keeping a betting pool on me all these years
can put your money away.
My sadness, in all truth, is that the world is growing up around me.
Or maybe the world's growing old around me. Whichever one applies.
Karie is only a few months older than me, and is merely hours away from a
honeymoon. It all seems so foriegn to me. Is this the real world? How
have I sheltered myself from this so effectively? I don't mean marriage
necessarily. Maybe just...maturity? Getting a bank account is a
terrifying experience for me, so you can bet that Marriage is ranked
right up there with Death in my book. They are things that happen to
"grown ups," a class which I supposedly should be a card-carrying member
I wonder what I did that night while my young destiny was silently being
altered across town at my unattended prom. Did I play Nintendo or work on
some stupid program, without the knowledge that both activities were
subconsciosly preparing me for this life in California? Probably. Nintendo,
programming, and masturbation were my holy trinity of activity.
Okay. Okay. "Young destiny" is a bit much. But I'm a big believer in
chaos theory. I think even the utterly insignificant events have an
incalculable, but nonetheless present, impact on us all. If I had gone to
that prom, or said a few more sweet nothings, or opened up to the
possibility that anyone could have cared half a fuck about my existance,
then who knows? Maybe I'd find myself getting married in two weeks. Maybe
I'd spend my days in Pennsylvania with litters of kids. Maybe I'd even be
content. Or happy.
Isn't it funny? Happiness isn't a boolean state; it's not on or off, like
a light switch. Video-game-hacker-in-California happy isn't the same as
family-guy-in-Pennsylvania happy, but they are both happiness, all the
same. Hhm.
So if any passes this email on to the happy couple (as my emails
apparently have trouble sitting still in people's inboxes), please tell
them that I wish them BOTH the best. And as a wiser man than I once said:
Where would I be without all my toys?
written 2000-03-17 17:25:23
I am duly impressed. Usually I get about 2 or 3 responses to any given
journal entry on this mailing list, but that last one, "Pretty in
Pink," brought in almost TWENTY responses. Apparently, I hit a real nerve
in a lot of people; my inbox was overflowing with prom night horror
stories, sad tales of love lost, and the nightmare that is The Grown Up
To be less-than-poetic, it was really cool. I feel for you all, and will
be responding to each of you in turn.
But, the need to vent has passed, so we can now get back to the dick and
fart jokes.
But first, one more thing about this Palm Pilot; the writing you do on
it, called Graffiti, is REALLY ADDICTIVE. I tried to write a check today,
and I was writing Graffiti on paper. Instinctually. And I've only had
this thing for four days. Plus, if you can get around the fact that the
'k's look like lowercase alphas, I would say it's vastly improved my
handwriting just that quickly. Creepy.
I'm thinking of putting up a webpage of old journal entries. I'll get
around to it one of these days... the meantime, in case anyone wants to see what I've been working on
at Loki all this time, there's some screenshots of the Heroes III map
editor up at:
[They're gone, now. --Ed.]
Note the files are pretty massive, as I like my big screen
resolutions. Also try to ignore the "Chef's Salty Balls" track on the
MP3 player in that first picture. :)
Other than that, I finally shaved off all that facial hair I've been
carrying around. All 12 or so pounds of it. I swear I must have the
weirdest beard in the world; it comes in mostly red--which not the color
of any other hair on my body--but there's also some pure black and some
platinum blonde in it. The only colors that aren't in it anywhere are
green and the hue of the rest of the hair on my head. I must have about
18 or 19 genetic donors standing behind my DNA.
Still, my face is cold now. I wonder if this is how sheep feel.
After 5+ years of putting it off, I've decided to get a full body
checkup. I've got a cavity that I just can't pretend is a little
toothache anymore. That, and I took a close look at my teeth under a
florescent light. Big mistake. Have you ever done this? I don't care if
you're Miss America, looking at your teeth under a florescent light is
always a humbling experience. You might as well guage your attractiveness
by examining your sphincter under a magnifying glass: it's just not going
to go well. Also need to have someone look at my wrists (although they
have somewhat leveled off in irritation, they aren't really improving,
either) and a thousand other deteriorations and betrayals of my body.
So, as soon as I figure out how to set up a doctor's/dentist appointment,
I will be officially submitting myself to pokes, prods, and probing from
strangers that aren't even going to buy me breakfast when they're done
with me.
Finally, I think that subconsciously, frisbee has become the offical
sport of Clan Loki. At the risk of exposure to fresh air, we've stopped
working to play it several times this week...just because. Isn't that so
stereotypically Californian?
Your moment of Zen...
written 2000-03-19 02:11:25 I saw one of those amusement machines where you guide a claw
mechanism around to pick up toys that it probably won't be able to
lift. Y'know, the kind really young children play for 25 cents a try.
On the top of the toy pile in this machine was a stuffed bear, purple,
with a gleeful smile and a big nose. Attached to this bear's hand was a
plastic newspaper with a tiny reprint of the Los Angeles Times front page
from the day Kennedy was assassinated.
The life of an addict...
written 2000-03-19 17:45:09
It's the little things that keep me happy. On Friday I actually found a
Boston Market out here. Oh yes, life is good.
As I found myself irresistably drawn towards an overpriced, undersized,
yet strangely tastey Turkey Carver Combo, I had to pause for a moment and
marvel at the big sandwich board sign in front of the restaurant.
"Flu Shots: $9"
I am standing firm by my belief that advertisements involving disease and
bodily disfunction have a negative consumer effect when placed in front
of a restaurant. You might as well put up a sign that says, "Fresh Ebola
Virus: Come on in!"
Needless to say, I didn't get the flu shot, so the fact that I'm
suffering from the flu right now should come as no surprise.
When I woke up yesterday, I felt like mashed ass. You ever get that flu
that makes it hurt to move your eyeballs? The sort that makes you feel
like the world is going in slow motion? That was me yesterday. Naturally,
my first inclination in my weakened state was to operate some heavy
machinery, so I grabbed the keys to the car. I'd be damned if I was going
to just sit back and suffer, so off I went to Target to get some aspirin.
I now know something very disconcerting about these sort of
megastores: they are all magnets for families with screaming kids. With
the exception of Walmart, which is more like a hall of lost souls,
everything from Kmart to Caldor is like a badly mismanaged day care
My poor, ringing head was numb by the time I staggered up to the
checkout, thanks to the legions of overemotional rugrats screaming,
"MINE!" and other things less intelligible.
I didn't even make it out of the store before I was popping pills like
candy. According to the warning label on the bottle, you shouldn't ever
take more than two of these at a time. But hey, people smoke crack and
shoot heroin into their veins, and live to tell the tale, so if I can't
take three aspirin at once, I must be a lesser human being.
So if y'all never hear from me again, you know what happened: aspirin
overdose. People on this list will forever speak in hushed tones to their
children about, "The Aspirin Guy," and numerous afterschool specials
starring Brian Dennehy will be produced about my tragic tale. Who
knows? Maybe I can even get a miniseries on Lifetime Television.
Some list maintenance...
written 2000-03-19 17:58:19
Some info on this journal mailing list, to keep y'all updated:
...This list is now officially too big for Hotmail. I'll be sending
future mails from my account, so update your
blocking filters accordingly. :) There is currently exactly 50 people on
the list, which is the Hotmail limit, and people waiting to get on, so
it's got to move. I'm honestly shocked at how many people request this
stuff. And a little flattered, too.
In regards to filters, all list traffic will now have
"[journal]" prepended to the subject (as above), so you can autofilter
the emails into separate folders (or the trash bin, if you like).
An archive of old entries will be going up next week at, in case you want to reminisce or
catch up.
Currently hunting down the following people's email addresses: Chris
Kolobow (he wrote it down for me and I lost it! Damn!), Tony Broadwater,
John Bryant, Michael Prater.
Tell your friends to email me if they want to be added to the list. And,
as usual, no hard feelings if you don't want to be on this list,
either; just drop me a line. In the move to the new email address,
however, I'll assume that people want to remain on the list unless they
speak up...for convenience.
Also, there was a rumor/theory that email addresses on this list were
being harvested by BareBones for spamming purposes. I have checked into
this, and it appears not to be the case. If you get BareBones
advertisements, and don't want them, send a mail to,
and they'll stop sending them to you. There's actually a human being on
the other end of that address, too.
That's all!
testing, 1-2-3...
written 2000-03-25 00:31:01
This is just a test, to see if moving the journal list to this email
address was as painless as a copy from Netscape and a paste to PINE...
Where would I be without sampled noise?
written 2000-03-25 16:31:37
I think Dr. Dre might be the most masterbational rapper of all time.
I don't mean to single the poor guy out; after all, rap in general is just
one big declaration of ego after another. Now, I know what your thinking.
I'm not taking into account that it isn't easy to be dropping phat lyrics
like they was C-notes while all them Gs be biting the goodfellas' style,
yo. Nonetheless, the frequency of self-inflating statements in Dre's
tracks far surpasses your average M.C. battle in the ego department.
I mean, not only has he got the line, "I started this gansta s**t, and
this is the motherf***ing thanks I get?", which seems rediculous enough,
but he also got at least two other songs on the radio right now that
feature other rappers explaining how people need to show Dre more respect
because he's just so wonderful.
Now being a stupid white boy, I just can't grasp the concept of a musician
with a bigger ego than Axel Rose. But it must be possible, since Eminem,
who is both more stupid and more white than I, performs on two of those
three songs. I guess pimping ain't easy after all.
So that's what I've learned, since I never changed the station on my car's
radio after my trip across the country. Apparently, Power 106 "plays all
the phatest hip-hop joints", which apparently consists of three of Dr.
Dre's lyrical circle-jerks, but the real reason I haven't changed the
channel yet is because of the commercials.
Anyone who thinks the Afro-American culture has really advanced past the
absurd minstrel stereotype should stop looking at the Huck Finn past and
examine the Next Friday present. EVERY commercial on this station is like
another episode of Fat Albert's neighborhood. It's pure, unadulterated
Blacksploitation. Everything from the Fat Burger ads to the public service
annoucements: it's the stuff you'd otherwise find on TV between a Hogan's
Heroes rerun and The Price is Right. Y'know, the ads that run around the
time when unemployed people are likely to be on their second beer of the
morning. To me, it suggests that the obvious target market, black people,
are considered by their primary source of radio entertainment to be not
only poor and stupid, but unable to aspire to anything else. And that
basically sucks when you think about it. That's not just because a race is
being spoon-fed a negative self image. If the fact that the spoon-feeding
continues is evidence of anything, the real problem is that the audience
believes that this is all they are capable of achieving.
That being said, this is some of the funniest radio I've ever heard.
Everything from DJ Quik (remember him from "Bitch Betta Have my Money"?)
to the "Thong Song" (you've got to hear it to understand) cracks me up.
In the meantime, I need to invest in my own ethnicity; Wuthering Heights
is demanding my attention. G'night, folks.
Your moment of Zen...
written 2000-03-26 16:35:32
I went to see "The Ninth Gate", where Johnny Depp finally catches up with
his career in Hell. The only redeeming quality of the experience was the
change I got back from my ticket purchase, which consisted of some various
coins and a dollar bill. The dollar bill had a stamp on it, of a thought
bubble from Washington's face that read, "I grew hemp."
An odd turn of events.
written 2000-04-01 18:12:58
I had mentioned before that my ex-girlfriend was getting married on April
Fool's day. Myself not being one to be outdone, I figured I'd beat her to
the punch.
Mailing list, meet my new wife, Sandy. (God, isn't THAT a typical beach
bum name! Oh, i -KNOW- you're not a "beach bum," honey. By the way, no
one likes people reading over their shoulder.)
Since she's watching me write, I guess I have to be on my best behavior
and NOT tell y'all about that birthmark she's got...heheh...the only thing
saving me right now is her wonderment at the word "y'all." It's a southern
thing, I guess.
At any rate, we met about two weeks ago. Ironically, this was when I was
writing that journal entry about the prom and marriage and such. She had
approached me in a restaurant where I was writing it, having noticed the
Linux penguin sticker on my laptop. Conversation ensued, and it's all a
blur from there. Ah, geek girls. Gotta love them.
I figure that not knowing much about your spouse is probably the best way
to get married, anyhow. I mean, you don't really have any expectations
then, right?
Will write more tommorow, but today's been...uh, HECTIC to say the least!
a correction.
written 2000-04-02 15:23:41
First, I'm not married. Sandy doesn't exist. For those that fell for
it (you know who you are), please check the date on emails before you
believe them; April Fools Day strikes swiftly and silently. :)
That said, here's your moment of Zen:
On Friday, I finally took an impulse trip to Laguna Beach. As Route 133
dwindled into a one-lane road, I passed "Auto Dent," an auto body shop
with a sign advertising "The Hand Job."
All art is quite useless.
written 2000-04-05 15:13:08
(The next paragraph should give you an idea of how long I've been trying
to finish this entry...)
For those who missed it, Robin Williams DID sing South Park's "Blame
Canada" at the Oscars. Not only was the performance itself really weak,
but he wussed on his chance to say "fuck" on national television. It's a
shame, since the only time this could have been a bigger score would be
during the Super Bowl half time. After all, how do you threaten Robin
Williams into behaving?
"If you curse, you'll never work in this town again!"
Anyhow. Someone once asked me how you make friends after college. Good
question. Here's my best approximation of an answer, based on a recent
discovery: people are not, on general principle, hostile to strangers.
This comes as a bit of a shock to me, but I think this might just be my
yankee upbringing.
I had made my way back to my friendly neighborhood coffeehouse, where I
was hoping to hear some more authentic spanish music. Unfortunately,
there wasn't a band performing this night, so I resigned myself to a cup
of chai and a quiet hour or so of Java hacking. It was a cool night, so I
meandered outside, planted my butt on a chair, and whipped out the laptop.
It wasn't long before a guy came up to me, having noticed the penguin
sticker on my computer. "Excuse me, are you running Linux on that thing?"
At this point alarms were going off in my head. I was predicting the start
of a Linux Q and A session with some random guy who had heard about it
through USA Today or some other short attention span media pump. So when
the next question this guy asked was, "so it finally has support for the
NeoMagic chipset, huh?" I knew I had stumbled upon a fellow geek.
While we discussed the merits and flaws of the technology, I noticed two
girls sitting down at another table. Both were definitely young; maybe
late high school. And, while it pains me to confess the notion, both were
admittedly very attractive.
I'm certain I had been staring after a while. If nothing else, my rate of
casual glancing was increasing exponentially, to the point where "casual"
was no longer accurate. It's dreadfully embarrassing. I understand, even
without firsthand experience, how every woman must feel. The way you poor
girls are treated in the confines of the male imagination!
In my defense, I'm not the only guy that feels this way. The number of
Oscars that American Beauty won should be evidence of this atrocity; the
male mind longs not just for younger women, but also for this
pornographic concept of "barely legal" flesh.
It might be a grass-is-greener thing. After all, I don't remember the
girls being all that pretty when -I- was in high school. Yeah, there were
pretty girls...but never this many. Seriously. Take a stroll past a public
school next time recess rolls around. Notice anything different from your
secondary educational experience? If you answered "lots of painted
whores," you're probably on the right track.
This leads me to believe that either Darwin was right, and the gene pool
is steadily improving, or the school districts are now putting some magic
pretty-potion in the water supply.
...or I've become a dirty old man. I won't rule that out, either.
The girls were chattering away most energetically. One was of a faint
Mexican descent, both in looks and accent. Her dark, permed hair fell to
the middle of her back. The other's hair was short, and a very light
brown. She wore a bright red blouse, which I discovered exposed her whole
back when she removed her leather jacket.
As I continued hacking, and glancing, I started to wonder how perfect
strangers even hope to initiate a conversation with such a flimsy premise:
no connection, no common ground, just a one-sided, disinterested attraction.
The question answered itself, however, when both girls came and sat at my
table. They wanted to know about the MP3s I was playing, which, coincidentally,
were random Ani Difranco tracks, so at this point I was assuming they were
lesbians. If I had been playing the Indigo Girls I would have known for sure.
After initial conversation ("Hi, we came over here to harrass you."),
introductions were made. The dark-haired one was Sammy, and the one with
the backless shirt was Monya ("rhymes with 'lasagna'.").
After a few more minutes of conversation about everything from cops (Sammy's
father is a cop) to Mormons, these girls asked me if I'd like to go with
them to the beach.
"But I don't know you two at all."
"Is that a problem?"
This is the way a lot of horror films begin. However, this also the way a
lot of pornos start, too.
"Nope, in fact, it's the best reason to do something. Who's driving?"
And, in a flash, we were hurtling down the road in Sammy's car, with
soundtrack to The Matrix blasting from the CD player.
At this point they felt compelled to tell me their last names and some
other identifing info, so I could feel comfortable that they weren't planning
on killing me and quietly disposing of my body at the outskirts of Los
Angeles. I immediately forgot all this info, since it really wasn't going to
help me if I wind up dead anyhow.
We didn't actually make it to the beach, but did eventually wind up at a
bar/club place with an outdoor pool table. The table was pretty much owned
by some local pool shark at the time, so we found ourselves queue up in a
rediculously long line of challengers to the throne. Rather than patiently
wait to get schooled by another Tom Cruise wannabe, we opted to save our
quarters and just head home.
This left Monya without enough excitement for the night, apparently, since
she declared a need to dance when we returned to the car. She said she was
cold and wanted to warm up. I imagined she wouldn't have this problem if she
wore a shirt with a back.
So I got comfortable on the curb and watch two girls reenact a scene from
Dirty Dancing to the beat of the techno track blaring from the car's stereo.
On the ride home, the girls assured me that their little display was not
intended to "tease" me. Oh, yeah, sure.
If the American Beauty theory is true, we need to take it in full. If
Kevin Spacy wanted to nail Mena Suvari, then it important to remember
that innocent little Mena wanted to urge that desire in long as
it remained a game.
Ah, kids.
"This pig works for the mafia,
making some money off crack,
but this little pig got caught
so when he gets to the pen
it's all about the payback."
-- Cypress Hill
(nominee for "best soundtrack to play
during Quake 3 Deathmatches.)
Shakespeare gets his ass kicked.
written 2000-04-10 13:35:03
Tonight, to celebrate the release of the program I've spent the last few
months working on, I decided to take in a movie. The only thing starting
at 8:00 was "Romeo Must Die", so now I'm eight dollars poorer, two hours
deader, and not the least bit more entertained. The title is similar to
one of the lines in the movie ("Sorry, Romeo, but you gotta die!"), but
other than that, there's absolutely no relation to anything Shakespearean
in this whole film. That's only the tip of the pile of feces that
comprises this movie, though. If you want modern-day Romeo and Juliet,
rent the '96 version with Leo and Claire. If you want GOOD karate (and,
I'm sad to report, better dialog), rent Rumble in the Bronx.
After the credits, as the lights came back up, I gathered up my
smuggled-in snack wrappers and empty Snapple bottle. Among my trash on
the vacant seat to the left was a little, pretty glass pipe, left, I
assume, by the person on the other side of the chair. As I stuffed my
trash into my backpack to conceal it (wouldn't want to get caught with
THAT!), I grabbed the pipe and headed for the first guy I could find
wearing a bowtie.
"Excuse me, do you work here?"
"No, sir, I just wear this bowtie to pick up women."
"I see. Look, I found this ornate paraphenalia that is clearly designated
to aid in the smoking of tabacco products up there by my seat, so could
you be sure it makes its way to the LOST AND FOUND?"
He seemed a little stunned, but I pressed the glass pipe into his hand and
walked away. As I looked back, I saw him sniff the bowl appreciatively,
glance around, and slip the device into his own pocket.
In retrospect, maybe he was just there to pick up women.
...'cause the weasel goes pop.
written 2000-04-16 18:09:40
Today I made an attempt at recapturing my childhood.
I awoke to the sound of a jingling melody wafting through my bed room
window from the street below. It began faintly, and grew in intensity as I
roused from a dead sleep. There are train tracks that run about 20 yards
from my house, and the metallic beasts that grumble over them continually
blare their horns, but I never notice those ever-screaming greetings. Yet,
the synthetic music gently drifting into my room drew me to my feet, and I
was running, dazed and bleary-eyed, down the stairs, lured by instinct
and the Sirens' call.
The Sirens lured me with "Pop Goes the Weasel"; it was the Ice Cream Man.
Having the benefits of longer legs and my own source of income, I easily
outran the other children who had to endure the intolerably infinite wait
for their mothers to retrieve quarters from their purses. I stood in
front of the white truck and gazed slack-jawed at the colorful menu
pasted on the side. Choco Tacos. Fudgcicles. Ice Cream Sandwiches of
various exotic types.
I made my way home with my booty, and discovered how little I actually
like this stuff. As far as ice cream goes, it's all pretty low quality.
Still, it was the principal of the matter; of all the things I grew out
of, willingly or otherwise, chasing down the Ice Cream Man is a childhood
activity that just seems entirely natural at 22. It will probably seem so
at 62, as well.
fun in three dimensions.
written 2000-04-21 17:53:03
This is why I love my job.
I'm digging through the source code to Descent 3, and find there's a
command line option in the Windows-specific portion called, "-rocknride".
What the hell is that?
I start looking into what this command activates, and it appears to be a
game device like a force-feedback joystick or something. Did a websearch
and came up with (surprise)
Go look at what's there. We're getting one of those on loan for the next
few weeks, so I can implement support for it in Descent 3. Then, we're
gonna see about loading it (compressed air tanks and all), into Andy's
truck to bring it to E3 with us. I'm either going to have a lot of fun,
or lose an eye, or both.
eine kleine nachthacking.
written 2000-04-22 02:43:24
(I figure two journal entries within 24 hours of each other should make up
for the general silence of the list, even if both of them are particularly
Every birthday I like to do something a little illegal. Nothing too nasty,
like gang rape or homicide. Just enough to keep me young.
This actually started several years ago when I mentioned to a friend that
I couldn't legally acquire a set of lock picks. (It's true...possession of
lock picks without a good reason is a felony.) Sure enough, April 22nd
rolled around, and he came up to me and said, "I didn't get you anything
for your birthday."
Then he pushed a set of picks into my hands and concluded, "so get
something for yourself."
The rest is history.
My years of petty thievery may be over, but I'm still in the game, so to
speak. Yes, shoplifters may come and go, but software pirates are forever.
This year, to celebrate my youth, I figured I'd contribute some code to
the LIVID project, who are, against the boundaries of the law, working on
software that plays (and, if used correctly, pirates) DVD movies.
The moral of the story, however, is not to write software when tired. I
didn't manage to get to sleep last night, and must stay up tonight to be
ready to order some Phish tickets when they go on sale at 7a.m. PST.
When you aren't really paying attention, and you're tired enough that
everything is funny (free raisins), you'll review your code later and find
stuff like this:
surface = SDL_SetVideoMode(desiredWidth, desiredHeight,
vidInfo->vfmt->BitsPerPixel, sdlflags);
if (surface == NULL)
printf("After spending all day slaving over a hot stove to find the
" best possible surface, SDL still beat us down like an
" abusive husband. SDL_SetVideoMode() returned NULL, and
" then made us to get it another beer from the 'fridge while
" it continued to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
} // if
SDL_WM_SetCaption("Bitch betta have my money.", NULL);
contact info.
written 2000-04-23 02:23:21
More than two months after applying, I finally got my post office box.
Again, it really puts that five day waiting period for firearms in
At any rate, anyone that wants to send love letters, hate mail,
pornography, flowers, postcards, resumes, money, bills, cease and desist
orders, and well-endowed women named "Cassandra" may do so by addressing
them as such:
Ryan C. Gordon
P.O. Box 535
Tustin, CA 92781-0535
I'd give y'all my phone number, too, but I'll be moving again in a week or
two, and I generally dislike phones when they aren't supplying internet
American History WHY?
written 2000-04-29 05:22:16
After several days worth of overdue fees, I gave up on debugging the DVD
player I'm working on, swallowed my pride, and went over to Andy's (The QA
guy) house to watch American History X.
I'm sure you've all heard about the famous "Curbing" scene in this film. I
don't know which bothers me more: the fact that I sat and watched a guy
bite a street curb while Ed Norton stomped his head, or the fact that this
apparently happens frequently enough to merit a nickname.
Regardless of that, the movie kinda sucked ass. It was basically a bunch
of stereotypes, mixed in with some cheap-ass artsy-wanna-be film
techniques, and--of all things--a reaffirmation of the value of rascism
for a finale. Don't that just beat all?
Anyhow, after the film, Andy and I travelled across Orange county to catch
up with his girlfriends.
I say girlfriends, plural, because one is currently dating Andy, and the
other USED to date Andy. I generally make it a point not to bring
different generations of girlfriends together, personally. The LAST thing
I would need is for them to start exchanging premature ejaculation stories
across the table. Hey, let me tell you about the time Ryan let me stick a
broom up his ass! I could sense this sort of psychic communication was
going on across the table, but men, not having the same magical
discussion powers that women possess, can't even send a warning with a
hearty grunt. Andy was just going to have to remain oblivious to the fact
that he was the less-than-mighty protagonist in the sexual Odessey that
was being recounted in the looks and giggles of these two girls. Poor guy.
The restaurant was decorated from top to bottom with posters from 80s
movies. No shit. There wasn't an INCH of wall or ceiling left. These
weren't GOOD 80's movies either. These weren't "Close Encounters" or
"Blade Runner" or "Breakfast Club" posters...looking about showed
everything from "Mannequin" to "Twins" to "Moonwalker".
It should come as no surprise that our waitress looked like Elvira,
mistress of the dark. But older. MUCH older. Is there a legal age limit
to when you can wear spandex?
We eventually recieved our food. The chicken strips that Andy and I were
eating were half-cooked: dark brown on one side and YELLOW on the other. I
didn't think it was possible to NOT get an even cooking with a deep fryer,
but apparently I was wrong. The plate went mostly untouched. The girls
spent their time reveling in the fact that Marilyn Monroe (one of the
only non-80's posters in the joint) was not skinny, by any stretch of the
imagination. They ate their double-fudge brownie sunday, and I, with
Herculean effort, left the fat jokes alone.
To compensate, however, I started a food fight with the table next to me.
The girls at the next table, somewhere in the midst of their highschool
years (decidedly younger than the two chicks that had kidnapped me from
the coffeehouse), came into the restaurant and sat down at the booth next
to us. We were a foot or so above them, since our row of booths was on a
At one point, one of these girls threw a napkin onto our table, probably
by accident. I threw it back. She threw it back again. Not able to resist
a dare, I threw a pickle. She retailiated. Reason prevailed (Andy to self:
"Not going to get booty if girlfriend disapproves of food fight"), and the
fight was cut short as I reached for the double-fudge brownie sunday.
So, to demonstrate that we're all mature individuals, the girls at the
next table and I got into a penis shouting game.
Ever play this?
Basically, player #1 says, simply, "penis."
Player #2 then says it a little louder.
Then player #1 says it louder still.
Continue until someone is too embarrassed to continue. The other player is
your winner.
The competition went something like this:
Me: "penis."
Her: "Penis."
Me: "Penis!"
We were asked to leave shortly after that.
Coincidentally, the word "penis" loses it's meaning after you've written
it too many times in a row, in case anyone was wondering.
Anyhow, that was my night. I came back to Loki to hack some more, and in a
few hours, I'll be apartment shopping yet again. Ugh. Catch y'all on the
(Disclaimer: No, Mom, I did NOT ever stick either end of a broom up my
ass. However, all the premature ejaculation stories are true, I'm sad to
report. (*shrug*) Now let's see you try to keep a straight face next time
you want to exchange cute stories about me with one of my girlfriends.)
The Loki Pyrotechnics Project.
written 2000-05-05 07:57:20
Apparently, if you melt candle wax down with a blowtorch, and keep heating
it past that point, it'll ignite. If, at this point, you throw a glass of
water on it, it'll erupt into a fireball.
Don't believe me? Check out the fireworks at:
So the Loki gang spent the night trying to burn down Scott's house. In
response to the stress induced by seven guys tossing wax all over the
back porch and causing flames to reach the second floor windows, Scott's
wife Kayt went into labor that evening. They now have a (very small) baby
girl, which (in a manuever that'll surely get her teased on the playground)
they named Reagan.
Uh...and I'm moving for the third time in six months; this time into an
apartment with fellow hacker Daniel Vogel, who just flew in from Germany a
few days ago. Here is a picture of him decidedly NOT beating me at a
video game (for a change), taken in between fireballs:
Oh, and thanks for all the LOVELETTERs, everyone. I love when everyone
gets hit by email viruses and sends them on to me. Stop using Microsoft
products, and you won't have this trouble. :)
written 2000-05-12 15:19:00
Greeting from east LA, and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for
Just to dispel the rumors, we didn't bring Asia Carrera with us. In fact,
we don't even have a booth here. I'm not sure what changed, but I think
we're moving her appearance to LinuxWorld/San Jose in August. In the
meantime, I guess I'll have to look elsewhere for porn stars to talk to.
Fortunately, I don't have to look very far. This place is CRAWLING with
booth babes. Interestingly enough, they usually aren't scantilly-clad...
er, actually, they ARE, but not in the standard, Victoria's Secret way.
With the exception of the Playboy bunnies (courtesy of CNet), most game
companies have resorted to dressing their babes up like their games'
characters. Laura Croft syndrome. In short, this place isn't so overrun
with scantily-clad women as it is overrun with scantily-clad women with
guns. Ah, all those years of fantasizing...
Actually, the h umorous highlight of the day goes to the GUY who's walking
around dressed like Laura Croft. Now that is a political statement! A
close second goes to the midget booth babe.
The general atmosphere around here is busy. And gaudy. And loud. Driving
into the convention center, there are 20-feet tall inflatable renditions
of the band Kiss. Once indoors, you can't hear yourself think.
Most of what I've seen here isn't particularly refreshing: it lots of
sequels and largely overdone concepts. Here were some of the highlights,
- Dragon's Lair 3D. If you ever begged mommy for arcade quarters to spend
in the early 80's, you'll think this is really kickass, too.
- Meeting John Romero. He cocreated Doom and Quake with John Carmack. His
company, Ion Storm, just released "Daikatana", which is (surprise) a lot
like Quake. He basically blew me off when I asked about a Linux port, but
I really just wanted to mention him because he looks like Anthony Kiedis
from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Heehee!
- Playstation 2. Need I say more?
- Nintendo of America had a bar set up, and was selling alcohol. I felt
this was killing my childhood until it occured to me that the main
customers were probably NoA execs that had just returned from the
Playstation 2 demos. Oh, and there's another Zelda game on the way for
the N64...I played it, but it was in Japanese, so heaven knows what it's
- Dave Taylor (also originally an iD guy, now a Transmeta genius) showed
off a Crusoe processor that can, on the fly, switch between executing i386
instructions and Java bytecode...this is more significant to the future
of computing than I can put into words, and Transmeta did it just to be
cool. Unreal.
- Bruce Campbell. Ran into him outside the expo. He's every bit as cool in
- "Return to Wolfenstein." Sure, it's not only another tired sequel, but
it's also using the Quake 3 engine. Nonetheless, it looked to be as
hour-wasting as the original, and much more gorey.
- giving me a sticker that reads, "Still playing with
yourself?" ...that one got stuck on my laptop.
- Halo. As Ani Difranco once said, "Beatiful, but boring." Emphasis on
beautiful, however.
- The Loki mosh pit at the GameSpy party. Also, the projection on the
wall of the original Tommy movie (the Pinball Wizard scene) and Tron were
only outdone by the classic arcade's been YEARS since I've
played Moon Patrol!
Must sleep. Will try to catch up on other (not necessarily) recent events
Pumpkin Bromo,
airline ettiqutte, part two.
written 2000-05-23 14:21:00
(written on the 18th...)
Today I made my way to John Wayne Airport to catch a ride to New York.
After getting yelled at by the mean old lady behind the ticket counter, my
plane took off for its first stop in St. Louis.
Right before we were about to descend, The Powers That Be deemed that the
St. Louis weather was inappropriate for landing. So we circled. And
Finally, we landed. Since there was about an hour before the plane was
scheduled to take off for the next segment of the flight, I "deplaned" to
locate an outlet where I could get a charge in my laptop. I was a little
startled to find that the upcoming flight was already being flagged
"DELAYED" as I passed out of the gate. There was talk of cancellation,
and everyone sat very still in a state of panic, despair, and disbelief.
Two hours later, surrounded by defeated standby passengers with rage
burning in their eyes, I boarded the heavily overbooked plane to New
York. I won't call this a victory, though.
New York weather was inappropriate for landing. So we circled. And
And circled. And, eventually, we landed.
In Washington D.C..
Apparently New York City can withstand the weight of eight million
people, an ungodly crime rate, and ten years worth of uninterrupted
performance of Cats. But at the mere hint of a thunderstorm, the city
shuts down. After circling over Virginia for awhile, TWA lost their balls
and began the search for a foster home for our airplane.
On the ground in D.C., people were itching to stretch, use the payphones,
and make alternate plans. Naturally, technical problems prevent the crew
from opening the door. I thought a riot might break out on board.
We have finally taken off again. We'll see if The Powers That Be deem us
worthy of La Guardia airport this time around.
Some addendums to my airline theories:
- Come to expect that the people sitting direct behind you will be
passionately opinionated towards some controversial topic (this time
around it's gays in the military), and will carry on a heated discussion
about it for the duration of the trip. The more you eavesdrop, the more
accutely aware you will become that one or more of these people are full
of shit.
- You will inevitably be flying into an airport that is plagued with
thunderstorms, ice, natural disasters, and Mothra sightings. This may lead
you to believe that reality as you percieve it is just a big game of
SimCity. Regardless, expect to hear the term "holding pattern" come
through the intercom just as you stow your tray table and put your seat
back in the upright position.
- Anyone who speaks on the intercom is doing so to deliver bad news. To
ease the passengers' anger, the speaker will always speak calmly,
clearly, and slowly. In reality, this practice just pisses off the
passengers more, as it interferes with their eavesdropping.
Clock Skew Detected!
written 2000-05-26 20:13:43
(written over several days.)
Since I'm stuck in an airplane for the next few hours, I figure that this
would be a great time to catch up on life in general. However, you'll
have forgive the presentation; we're experiencing what we in the industry
call a "clock skew". Most of this is ancient history, a good portion is
told in the wrong order, and maybe some of it hasn't even happened yet.
Since novelists consider this to be good technique, I'll make no furter
apology for it.
(And the details of the Manhattan trip are STILL forthcoming. --Ed.)
I'm now settled into my new apartment, and not a minute too soon. Living
at Lance's house was a little too wierd for me. Don't get me wrong, the
house itself was really great, but the occupants were getting on my
nerves. Let me attempt the roll call:
Lance. Okay, Lance is pretty cool. He is the personification of the term
"weekend warrior" seven days a week. Some of his favorite activities are
skydiving, rock climbing, and motorcycling. He's one of Loki's "suits",
but I don't think he's ever owned one. 90 miles per hour is his idea of
driving slow. One time I peeked into his room to see if he was home, and
on his table was a Book of Mormon under a copy of "How to Read Auras"
under a huge roll of 100 dollar bills. What a metaphor! Lance is great,
and I really looked forward to living with him, but I didn't count on the
other residents.
Lance's girlfriend, Dulcie, also lives in the house. She's a prime
candidate for Jerry Springer. When I first moved in, she told me that she
couldn't wait for Lance and she to get married. Yikes. She would tell me
that she wouldn't know how to exist if they ever broke up. Yikes. And she
would tell me that she knows Lance really loves her, and he's clearly
just afraid to say so. YIKES. I asked her how long they have been a
couple, and after some amount of strained calculation, the result was,
"almost a month and a half."
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that Dulcie's currently married to another man?
Dulcie's husband, Mickey, is a real piece of shit from what I can gather.
Since Dulcie wasn't willing to have sex with the guy unless they were
married, they had a rather hasty knot tying, and were fighting before the
honeymoon was over. Since then, he has pretty much split his time between
smoking large quantities of marijuana and watching professional
wrestling, which I suspect he believes to be real.
Dulcie has a pit bull, named Sierra. I had never actually SEEN a pit bull
before this one, but I had heard lots of stories of these dogs removing
the arms of small children, so I wasn't too thrilled to find one suddenly
living in my house.
The dog itself doesn't bother me. In fact, Sierra is the friendliest (and
perhaps the most enthusiastic) dog I've met. I think it's the fact that
Lance and Dulcie used my shower to bathe her, and didn't clean the hair
out of the drain. And my towel mysteriously began to smell like wet dog.
Dulcie also has a sister, in whom she confided about her relationship
with Lance. Naturally, her sister immediately called Mickey and told him
all about the new guy Lance and his big house and big Mercedes. In short,
she's a backstabbing bitch. Dulcie told me that she would never be able to
trust her sister again.
One morning, around 3a.m., I came into the house and almost tripped over
someone sleeping on a foam mattress in the foyer. Upon interrogation, I
discovered it was Dulcie's sister. I guess trust is a lot like the
Maybe spousal abuse is genetic, since Dulcie's mother is apparently also
married to a real piece of shit. One night, while Dulcie's dad (or maybe
stepfather?) was in lockdown for some sort of domestic disturbance,
Dulcie and some friends rescued dear ol' Mom, and brought her to Mickey's
house to live with the happy couple and their pitbull. Under happier
circumstances, this would be a decent setup for an NBC sitcom.
discovered it was Dulcie's mother.
Now I can just imagine Mickey sitting on a worn couch, lighting a joint
and watching Monday Nitro. He normally hears the noise of a wife, a
mother-in-law, and a dog moving about the house. Now there's nothing but
the hooting of Ric Flair echoing through the silence. I wonder if he ever
started to suspect anything. White trash has a talent (if not an
instinctual need) to follow people; it's a 90s incarnation of hunting
skills. Thus, Dulcie's indiscretions would lead Mickey right here, and
probably sooner than later. I began to expect that he would show up at
Lance's one day. He would then shoot everyone, the dog, and finally
himself. They would make a Lifetime miniseries about the killings, and I'd
probably get played by Eddie Furlong.
So that's us: Lance, Dulcie, Dulcie's sister, Dulcie's dog, and Dulcie's
Oh wait. There's also Will. He's the ghost.
Nobody sees Will except Dulcie, but she claims to have talked with him on
several occasions, and has told him to "go to the light." In this case,
this is a Christian suggestion to go be with God, making Dulcie one of the
few truely devout people I've met that loves both Jesus and Ouiji boards.
Anyhow, apparently Will was murdered decades ago, and his body is
still buried under the foundation of the house.
And he doesn't like me because I'm "closed minded". Will, if you had an
email address, I'd send you this journal entry and we could discuss that
matter. Shame you haven't got an email address, cause you're just a
figment, you imaginary fuck.
Kiss my close-minded butt.
Your moment of Zen.
written 2000-05-26 20:35:16
This is my new "workstation."
Ignore the glare of my shoes, please.
(And yes, we have an eBay bid extended on a head-mounted display to
complete the setup.)
Don't pay the ransom, I've escaped!
written 2000-06-19 20:21:00
Happy belated Father's Day to all you fathers out there.
This is going to be a really short email with little to no detail about my
life in it.
There WILL be some less short emails with fun stuff coming later, right
after one or two less short emails containing not-so-fun stuff. I haven't
fogotten y'all, nor have I forgotten those that haven't gotten an email
from me recently. I'm plowing through my inbox as fast as I can.
To tide you over, I've set up the webpage I promised eons ago. You can
read any past journal list messages at
[Now at --Ed.]
Exhausted and cat-sitting,
parking lot full of lesbians.
written 2000-07-05 02:43:25
I hope you all had a good 4th of July. I thought I'd take my day off and
celebrate by...(gasp!) catching up on my life.
I'll tell you all about that later on. The real celebration is that
there's now only 505 emails sitting in my inbox. :)
Anyhow, when we last left Ryan, he was en route to New York City. Let's
just pretend that over a month has NOT elasped since then. I remember
every little thing as if it happened only yesterday...
[Ed.--Written...god knows when.]
The Travel Gods hate me. I must have run over a backpacker in a past life,
because even simple excursions can go wrong for me.
Take, for example, the plane ride to New York. Anyone who uses the
airlines will, sooner than later, get stuck in a holding pattern. Many
will also get rerouted to cities they never asked to visit. But it takes
a uniquely unlucky traveller to circle from one holding pattern to
another on a rerouted plane with a broken door, seated in front of three
over-opinionated morons.
How did li'l old me get to be so blessed?
Eventually I did manage to land at La Guardia airport in New York, over
four hours late. After a taxi ride to Madison Square Garden, under which
lies Penn Station, I discovered that I had just missed the last train of
the night, so I snuggled up with some homeless people and waited patiently
for the next available opportunity to get to Trenton.
At 4:30a.m., my train departed, and I was thrilled to find my brother
waiting for me in Trenton. The only good thing about New Jersey is
getting the hell out of it.
Estimated time to my parents' house from California: 10 hours.
Actual time it took: 19.
I had planned on meeting up with Emmett for lunch in Philadelphia that
day, but since it was rapidly approaching noon, dinner was starting to
sound like a better plan to my fatigued body. I had him email me driving
directions, and a few moments later, I was passed out by the dryer, while
the washing machine gurgled away on my clothes.
Have I mentioned the Travel Gods hate me? Off I went in my mother's car
towards Philadelphia. This was meant to be a 20 minute trip which quickly
became a two 2 hour endeavor. Damn you, MapQuest.
Finally, I found my way, but the plan for dinner was rapidly devolving
into take-out; at this point I only had a few hours before I had to be
back at La Guardia airport. So while it was premature even for computer
geeks of our magnitude, I found myself asking where the Internet
connection was as Emmett answered his door.
My partner in crime for this trip was to be Susan Stabley, intrepid
journalist of the Bible Belt and envy of all her friends, none of which
had tickets to Phish's tour opener. Her plane would be landing, if her
luck was better than mine, around 11p.m., which was rapidly
approaching. Meanwhile I was surfing the net two states away for a battle
Emmett gave me the grand tour of the apartment as he lead me to the cable
There are several arcade games scattered around the apartment. The walls
are filled with Back to the Future memorabilia. If it wasn't for the wife
sitting on the couch, the place would qualify as a bachelor's dream pad.
Emmett introduced me to his wife, Starr, and a random employee
who was hanging out, named Dave.
After hitting, I imagined I could extend the meal to at
least a trip to the McDonald's drive thru. If I was back on the road in
15 minutes, I could make it to Trenton, catch a train, then a taxi, and be
at La Guardia with time to kill. Not MUCH time, mind you, but time
As I explained this, Dave suggested that we just drive directly to the
airport. And before I could explain the mental anguish I'd be inflicting
on my mother if I drove her car through Manhattan, Dave had already
grabbed his keys, and Emmett had already grabbed the drinks. The Great
American Road Trip was commencing, and I silently prayed to the Travel
Gods for better luck going north than I had coming east.
The Travel Gods, of course, would have none of that. Somewhere up on
Interstate 95, we had a blowout.
The funniest thing about having a flat tire is that moment where, despite
the sound of flapping rubber and the uneven ride, everyone in the car
confers that MAYBE everything is fine and the best plan is to just keep
Sooner or later, common sense takes over. [Ed.--Usually, Dad.] As we
pulled over, we retrieved the donut and jack by the light of my Palm
Eventually we got back on the road, but we were pretty late at this
point. Getting lost in Manhattan didn't help much, either.
Oh, did I mention the traffic jam?
On the way, we hit one of those traffic jams you only see in movies
designed to keep Out-of-Towners away. In good New Yorker fashion, someone
stuck in the mess flipped it the proverbial middle finger, pulled out,
and started driving up the wrong side of the road. He started a small
revolution; soon, others followed, and we figured, what the hell. This
blatant moving violation actually gained us a few yards, until these lanes
also jammed, and we once again came to a halt, now blocking the whole
As we sat idling in a sea of cars, Emmett calmly rolled down his window
and addressed the driver in the lane to his right.
"Busy night, officer?"
The policeman assured us, in bored tones and from the correct side of the
road, that he simply didn't have enough tickets to handle all these
cars. Who says there's no safety in numbers?
We finally arrived at La Guardia about 2 hours late. As we started looking
for Susan, Dave asked what she looked like. Simplest answer: "Look for the
girl who's really, really pissed."
We found Susan more unconscious than pissed. On the way home, I tried to
explain why we were so late. And truth be told, it sounded like a
collection of lame excuses when I said it, but the stories all seemed much
more feasible as the car's donut went flat.
The funniest thing about a having a flat tire in the middle of Harlem is
that moment where, despite the sound of flapping rubber and the uneven
ride, everyone in the car could give a fuck less about the wheel.
Without the need for any encouragement whatsoever, Dave drove on,
ensuring beyond a doubt that this donut had seen its last tour of
duty. The Travel Gods decided that it was just downright mean to trap
four white kids in a decidely hostile environment, and blessed us with an
all-night garage after a few blocks.
Emmett was the first out of the car as we pulled in, and immediately
accosted the Rastafarian mechanic.
"You sell tires here?"
"Uh huh."
"You sell tires for that car over there?"
"Uh huh."
"You busy right now?"
"Uh huh."
"I got a hundred bucks that says you're not..."
Five minutes later, we were back on the road.
The rest of the trip was considerably less eventful. The highlights of the
conversation involved a metaphor named "Bad Dick" and the obligatory
existential conversation over coffee at a late-night diner.
Susan's plane landed at 11:30p.m.. We made back to my parent's house as
the sun was rising.
Overall, it was a pretty memorable night.
I turned over the pictures of myself in elementary school and showed
Susan into her room. Then I prepared to sleep myself. Considering my luck
in the past 24 hours, preparations involved checking the bed for poisonous
spiders, placing a fire extinguisher nearby, and doing some stretches, in
case I pulled a muscle in my sleep.
But I didn't count on the ninjas hiding in the closet...
nothing profound.
written 2000-07-13 23:34:56
Today my front right car tire went flat. Isn't it funny how history
repeats itself?
Glam rock is NOT dead. It just got REAL ugly.
written 2000-07-17 16:30:57
(Rest of the New York details are forthcoming, I swear. --Ed.)
There's no nice way to say this: I went to a Metallica concert.
Jim, the disgrunted Yankee that sat next to me, just moved on to a new
job. On his last day of work, around four in the afternoon, he loaded his
fiancee and cat into his stylish black VW bug, and started a trek across
the country.
As he walked across the business quad for the last time, I waved goodbye
from his office window. He waved back. I glanced quickly around at all his
possessions, most of which he left behind. On the wall were his two
tickets to the concert, which he had forgotten.
I continued to wave until he was out of sight. Once Jim was gone, the
looting began.
Andrew, one of Loki's programmers, hung a sign that said, "Oooh, AUCTION!"
over Jim's desk. Like vultures, we swooped in to feast on the corpse of
Jim's workspace. Little toy penguins, computer speakers, an OpenGL
reference, and that really cool USB mouse: all gone in a matter of
minutes. I vocally shunned this horrible display of savageness as I
pocketed the tickets.
I didn't really want to see a Metallica concert. In fact, I considered
hocking the tickets on eBay. But Scott had a plan.
Metallica has been getting a lot of press recently for taking action
against Napster, a company (and technology) that allows people to
effectively pirate music over the internet. If you haven't heard of
Napster, get your head out of the sand. If you don't know what an
"MP3" is...don't worry, you will.
Scott and a couple other Loki guys were going to the show, too. So we all
went together, dressed appropriately. Take a look at for pictures. Doesn't Scott
remind you of Hannibal from the A-Team with that cigar? :)
The concert itself wasn't too great. Vogel (who got Jim's other
ticket) and myself were planning to show up for Korn, and leave. Since we
all ended up piled in one car, that didn't happen. We missed the pissant
opening bands, and showed up JUST IN TIME for (ahem) Kid Rock. What joy.
Ron Jeremy (the porn star) announcing the Kid Rock was probably the
highlight of the hour. There was a three-year old up on stage rapping with
Kid. Maybe it was a midget. I hear they hang out with porn stars sometimes.
Don't get me wrong; I don't want to bash on Kid Rock too much...his music
isn't very good, and he sounds VERY market-engineered, much like Vanilla
Ice, Britney Spears, or any random Boy Band. What this means is that he's
the music industry's whore, and in every industry whore there's an
individual, a sincere artist, struggling to surface. Which is fine; I wish
him all the best. Unfortunately, in five years, when he's releasing an
all-acoustic guitar album with no rap, he's still gonna just be Kid
Rock. Go and ask Everlast how that all went for him.
The girl sitting next to me spent most of the Kid Rock's set guzzling
beer. For someone that looks like White Trash, she MUST have been
rich; the beer was five bucks per paper cupfull in the stadium, and she
surely emptied a keg by herself. She was good and sloshed by the time Kid
Rock finished his schtick. By the time the crew had loaded his equipment
offstage, she was litterally falling over on me.
I had stood up to watch the boobs. More on this in a moment. This girl
next to me stood up on her chair to get a better view herself, and put her
hand on my shoulder to steady herself. This is fine. Within a few minutes,
her arm was around me, and she was telling me that we (not editorial, as
in "she and I") were going to have a really good time tonight. You
betcha. I responded with something along the lines of "Please don't touch
me," and she took the hint.
A few minutes later she was passed out, and I was holding her head up so
that she wouldn't smack it against the back of the chair. I was reminded
fondly of my college days.
Now, about those boobs.
It took a good half hour between bands for the crew to set up for the next
one. The crowd got restless, and out of nowhere, some girl stood up and
flashed everyone. The mob went wild. Soon other girls joined in. You could
get a sense of where a tit-showing was going to occur, since the girl
would stand up and get everyone's attention, and then, like human
personifications of their genitalia, all the men around her would rise to
attention. It wasn't long before we were scanning the throng of 50,000
horny voyeurs to find groups of men standing up to get a better view. As
the girl lifted her shirt, everyone would go nuts for a second, cheering
wildly. If the girl chickened out at the last moment, the crowd would boo
until she was pressured into it. It was a fascinating study in social
science. At one point, a girl a few rows from me stood up (I think
probably to go to the bathroom, not so much to show her breasts), and
everyone around her circled like wolves. She sat right back down
when she realized what was occuring, and the mob booed and hissed. I
yelled something to the extent of "She's just a girl, leave her alone you
pricks!" and was amazed to find that everyone else from Loki had abandoned
One girl was going up and down the stairs of my section flashing the
audience and playing with her nipples. Every now and then, she'd collect
tips. It was a true exploitation of exploitation. It was Capitalism at its
Korn played next. Korn's fucked up. I appreciate a band that'll produce
songs like "Dead Bodies Everywhere." The lead singer was wearing a black
kilt, and played the bagpipes at one point. I enjoyed the set thoroughly.
Right after Korn started, the passed-out chick in the seat next to me shot
up to attention, hopped over the back of her seat, and wanderer off. Her
sister, two seats down from me, either didn't notice or didn't care. I
suspected I wouldn't be seeing that girl again, and sure enough, she
didn't return for more than two hours.
After Korn, there were more strip shows in various pockets throughout the
arena, followed by a food fight that engulfed the entire Los Angeles
Memorial Colliseum. I found it was better to watch the rows above me for
incoming Cokes and hot dogs than it was to watch the attention-starved and
peered-pressured that were distributing cheap thrills.
Eventually, Metallica started.
I approached this portion of the night much like I approach car races; I
imagined that even if the music sucked, if I was really lucky, I might see
James Hetfield accidentally set himself on fire again.
I don't have much to say about Metallica. I don't like most of their songs.
They have a good stage presence that masked the fact that the technical
system in the colliseum sucked. Lars Ulrich still wants to be Ozzy
Osborne, and he still isn't.
They played THREE encores. I think this is what Hell must be like.
The best part of the Metallica set was the group of people that broke
through a gate to get to the ground level. Ten or fifteen people spilled
out and made a mad dash towards the stage. They disappeared as they
entered the crowd, and thereby technically upgraded their seats. As the
sixteenth person attempted the dash he learned the hard way that the old
maxim is true: he who hesitates is lost. Without the chaotic safety of
numbers, the security guards tackled him, and wrestled him to the
ground. No one else tried to go through after that.
>From my view hundreds of feet above, it seemed very obvious that if they
all just streamed out at this point, security, three of which were
occupied holding that guy down, wouldn't be able to stop them. Maybe one
of them would get caught out of 100 more. I imagine this is how
revolutions die before they start; sure, the military can't possibly shoot
ALL the revolutionaries...but someone's gonna get shot. A false belief in
the comfort of the current situation is a phenominal demotivator.
Hhm. What a metaphor. Someone email me back that last paragraph next time
I say something quaint about my life.
there and back again.
written 2000-07-24 21:54:48
So, in a whirlwind storm of travel, I was in Charlotte long enough to
blink, and I'm now back in California. To celebrate yet another flight
across the country, here are some more maxims of air travel.
- If you are seated in the exit rows, you may be called upon to operate
the doors in the event of an emergency. This means that you have been
genetically preselected as the most efficient Crisis Manager on-board, or
you appear to possess the degree in Engineering required to disengage all
the safety latches on the exit. But really:
- In the unlikely event of an accident, don't bother messing with the
door. Just sit down and shut up; if you don't do your job, someone's
bound to do it for you, and this might be your last opportunity ever to
slack off.
- Airplane bathrooms always smell like chemical death. This is due to the
blue fluid that is dispensed when you flush the toilet, or the 90-year
old woman that was in front of you in line, or both.
- I have been told that a simple guide to success is this: whenever you
board an airplane, be sure to check out what the people in First Class
are reading, and then read those things yourself. I've spent the last
three years looking at what First Class reads, and they are almost always
reading trashy romance novels, Danielle Steel, or Steven King. The
bourgesie of First Class almost exclusively read John Grisham. Back in
the proles' section of the plane, however, I've seen the cattle read
everything from Oscar Wilde to Steven Covey. You may draw your own
- No matter where you live and where you've been, if you've been
travelling since 4a.m., you are always happy to get home.
Your moment of Zen...
written 2000-07-28 01:22:39
In Evans, Georgia, there is a drive-through fast food restaurant named
Paper or plastic?
written 2000-08-03 04:33:51
For a change, I went to a grocery store. At the checkout, the girl asked
me "paper or plastic?" and I asked which was better for the environment.
She just gave me a glazed look.
Wanna tango?
written 2000-08-05 06:12:21
On Tuesday, I went to the dinner theater down the road from work. They
were showing Grease. I figured a quality meal and good service could
outweigh the torture of this show, but alas, I was wrong.
I just do NOT see the enthrallment with this musical. It's bad. Bad bad
The movie is okay. If you've just seen the movie then stick to it. But the
stage show doesn't have:
- The good songs that are in the movie.
- A plot.
- Conflict.
- Character development.
- A climax.
- A resolution.
They have a brief pregnancy scare that lasts about 3 seconds, that is
magically resolved and certain to reaffirm premarital sex to everyone that
watches. More importantly, the basic message of the show is something
along the lines of this:
"I'm knocked up."
"That's a shame. Good luck."
"Eat a dick, Sandra D, at least I'm not a cock tease."
"Oh, God, you're so cool. Let me be just like you and your Pink Lady
friends: pregnant, socially driven, and completely vacuous."
Musical number ensues that ensures that these two chicks who have nothing
in common and both consider themselves better than the other can suddenly
be best friends...and all things, like on daytime TV, are resolved with a
More importantly, now that Sandra is putting out for Danny, the world can
accept her. Eat your heart out, John Travolta; the Lesbian Avengers now
make COMPLETE sense to me.
The funny thing about dinner theater is that there are only two types of
people in the audience: really old people, and really young people that
the really old people dragged along. There are countless kids that are
being "treated" to a show full of shitty stereotypes by their
grandparents. Here, little Jenny; be sure to aspire to be just like the
protagonists of this little musical!
Okay, honestly, I could care less about the moral themes of Grease. At
least, of all the popular artforms that get a bad rap for content, can I
REALLY blame this show? Maybe, MAYBE someone is out there bustin' a cap
in some chump suckah after listing to Dr. Dre, and maybe someone is
out there sawing on his wrists after listening to Nine Inch Nails. Hell,
maybe even some twelve year old is getting a boob-job after watching
Britney Spears's videos. But I doubt anyone is getting pregnant and
blaming Grease. Maybe it's just distribution channels. I don't know.
As for the old folks, I think these people come to dinner theater because
they expect this theater to be "easy," but theater never is. Rather, it
never SHOULD be. Generally, drama is considered challenging to the actors,
but no one ever considers the audience's role. Real theater forces the
performers and the audience into a sort of dance, and the steps are
complex. Theater isn't meant to be comfortable. Not even comedy
(ESPECIALLY not comedy!) should really leave the viewer
unaffected. Everyone thinks that catharsis is something reserved
for tragedies, but it's not. You don't need to see Antigone or Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf to have your guts ripped out and mangled in front
of your face.
Did I say "guts?" I meant "perspective."
When you aren't treated to this, then you've pissed away your night;
you've been robbed of The Experience.
Sure, it's dinner theater, and you aren't going to see "Shopping and
Fucking" there. But why do we insist on wasting an attentive audience's
time and thoughts on drivel? Rizzo gets knocked up? That was
quaint. Chino shoots Tony? The dancing was wonderful! Don Quixote
falls to the Mirror Knight? That was almost as much fun as South Pacific
last time!
We could give a fuck less, and that's not because we stopped for ice cream
at intermission. Even fluffy shows can challenge you. In all things
performance, if you aren't challenged, then you essentially got your
pocket picked for the price of admission.
Keep it in mind.
written 2000-08-20 03:06:14
I just helped one of our QA guys move into his new apartment. I have
muscles that I never knew existed that now ache.
It actually is difficult to make a fist, and impossible to snap my
fingers; I've never moved so much stuff in one day, and my arms are
So, before I fall into a coma-like sleep that will no doubt end with the
realization that everything hurts, I wanted to pass on a Moment of Zen:
As I left my apartment this morning, a kid came up to me and told me that
I "look like WWF."
I don't understand why he said this, but nonetheless, I am trying to
believe this to be a compliment.
Something borrowed, something blue...
written 2000-08-27 13:23:43
(Catch up time. I've been writing this, one sentence at a time, since
July 22nd. I'm so far behind, I may never catch up. --Ed.)
Ah, the Progressive New South.
I am in Augusta, Georgia, at the Jewish Community Center for a Baptist
wedding reception. We have just passed the "Electric Slide" portion of
the night, and progressed onto the "La Vida Loca" section. I am of the
personal belief that Ricky Martin may be personally resposible for
lowering the marriage rate this year; after all, I know I wouldn't want
this played at MY reception. Sorry, Sandy, but I'm gonna ride this Ricky
Martin thing out.
Nonetheless, Jason Jacobs and his beautiful bride Jewelia braved the La
Vida reprise and tied the knot today.
I foolishly expected the trip from Charlotte to Augusta to take four
hours, I allowed myself plenty of driving time, and much to my surprise, I
arrived at the church in exactly two. Rather than sit in my rental for
the next two hours, I wandered into the church. A lady inside wanted to
know if I was the sound technician, and for once I happily answered,
"no." I made myself comfortable and waited for the crowd to show up.
The ceremony was very nice; there was lots of music. Granted, every
wedding I've seen has some organ playing or whatnot, but this is the
first one I've seen that featured singing, and lots of it.
This was also the first time I've ever seen a minister openly admit that
human love is basically fickle by nature. The bigger message was, of
course, "put your love in God instead," but the initial statement was
still not standare fare for a wedding speech, in my experience.
At the reception, the Father of the Bride introduced the newlyweds, and
for a brief second, completely blanked on Jason's name. The pause was
long enough to be funny, and short enough to not be sad; I'll chalk it up
to stage fright.
Queens students, past and present, filled the reception hall. It was very
strange seeing the people that I haven't since my junior year.
I was back in Orange County within hours of the ceremony. This whirlwind
tour of the South filled me with a deep nostalgia and ...hey...maybe even
a sense of regret. At the same time, I was busy encouraging other people
to drop their lives and move to cities across the world. Go figure. I
still honestly think the concept of throw-your-shit-in-a-bag-and-cross-
the-globe is a good's just not so black and white. You have all
been warned.
Jason and Jewelia's honeymoon is now over, and they've settled down to
the tedious business of mailing out hundreds of thank-you cards. I got
mine in the mail the other day, thanking me for the wok I got them as a
wedding gift. It was listed in their wedding registry at Sears, and I
couldn't resist; it seemed like a ingeniously acceptable tacky gift,
functionality notwithstanding.
In a few weeks, I'm going to another wedding, this time in Los Angeles. I
guess I'm a nuptual roadie this season. How trendy.
The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle.
written 2000-08-27 13:28:01
I started a fresh build of Alpha Centauri, which takes a few hours of
processing to recompile from scratch. I went to one of those 24 hour
laundromats during the wait, and dumped the pile of clothes that was
filling my car's back seat into washing machines.
Heading back to Loki, I found the build died because of a typo in one of
the source files. I fixed that, and continued the compilation. Back to
the laundromat, throw my clothes in the dryer. Hit the Taco Bell, back to
the office. Build continues. Back to the laundromat. Clothes are missing
from the dryer. I flip my shit.
There are piles and piles of towels there, probably belonging to a hotel
or something, and two guys that have been patiently washing them this
whole time approach me to explain the whereabout of my wardrobe. In
Communication was impossible, so one of the guys ran next door to get a
translator. The man that owns the shop next door came in and explained
that the cleaning lady took my clothes. What?!
Rather, she took my clothes and locked them in a closet, since
"abandoned" clothing generally ends up in a homeless person's shopping
So great. Now I just need to get the owner to unlock the closet.
Unfortunately, he's only at the laundromat at arbitrary times in five
minute segments. Looks like I'm gonna be rotating shirts for the next few
days...On a brighter note, my build of Alpha Centauri finally finished.
My clothes.
written 2000-09-04 12:04:38
My laundry finally showed up, after a week of hunting, calling, and
mailing stamped letters.
It was returned to me, still wet, in black garbage bags.
I ended up washing it all again.
Travel tips, redux.
written 2000-09-20 00:29:33
you. Which brings us to an excellent point:
there was any concern about making flight crews walk through the metal
detectors everyday. Wasn't she scared of cancer? The stewardess thought
extract from this story, most of which are incorrect.
feel at home even in a foreign city.
I swear...
written 2000-09-20 00:36:16
...if I don't write SOMETHING about that New York trip from MONTHS ago
within the next 24 hours, Susan has my heartfelt permission to perform
Thank you.
--The McManagement.
When we last left our trusty traveller...
written 2000-09-21 02:08:28
(Ha! No castration for ME, Susan! Thank you to those that wrote in
suggesting I sell my removed testicles on eBay, but I guess I'm not done
with them, after all. Also, let's all pretendt to take Mr. Roger's magic
train and make believe that it's NOT four months later than when this
happened. Thanks. --Ed.) after dispatching the ninjas in my closet, I went to sleep.
The next morning, Susan and I hopped a train bound for Philly. Ultimately,
we were headed for the Big Apple, but we were taking a round-about route
for reasons I won't get into.
On the way to New York via New Jersey Transit (yeah, we touch soil in
every northeastern state), we took stock of our possessions:
We both brought cell phones, so we could fit in to the big New Yorker
lifestyle that we'd seen on those Pizza Hut commercials. This fell within
the 1.5 month window I owned a cell phone in. They suck. I hate them. I
gave mine away and splashed naked in the river...uh, metaphorically.
I also brought a Palm Pilot, and my laptop, so I could NOT write this
journal entry, but I'd be prepared with something of value in case I got
mugged. There's nothing more awkward than explaining to a mugger that you
just don't have anything worth taking, so I avoiding that discomfort by
carrying 2,000 bucks worth of technology in my backpack.
Susan brought along a copy of "Steal this Book," which, if you haven't
heard of it, is all about how to screw the system for free food, shelter,
and other basic human necessities. It features chapters entitled, "Fuck
Chicago," "Fuck Washington," and of course, "Fuck New York." The copy
smelled of whiskey, which I thought was superbly appropriate. We took
turns flipping through it while I started the hotel hunt.
Last-minute-hotel-hunting follows a basic principal. Take a travel
guide, magazine or whatnot that lists all the hotels in a given
city. For completeness, there should be a few five-star joints and
a couple of shithole hostels. Organize these into two categories: ones you
will sleep in and ones you will not. There are many factors involved here,
but there should be no gray areas in your final decision; it's on one list
or the other. No maybes.
Throw out the ones-you-will-not list. Then, start going down the other one
alphabetically. Stay at the first one that has room. This prevents you
from getting too picky about your accomodations, since there's the real
deciding factors are arbitrary (alphabetical) and random (what's actually
We ended up in a Best Western, which always brings to mind saloons,
gunslingers, and women of loose morals. The reality was a different
stereotype all together; imagine the run-down hotel that was, maybe fifty
years ago, an upscale waypoint for Presidents and plutocrats on the
go. Now, the hotel is for the proletariats, and while everything is
covered with a thin layer of dirt, it still possesses a sense of dignity
and style. Susan and I crammed into the tiny elevator, and made our way to
the fourth floor.
I was first to open the door, and as I peeked in to check for more ninjas,
I learned a valuable lesson about the hotel industry. Take notes, there
will be a quiz later:
"Double room" does not mean "two beds."
As I closed the door and turned around to face Susan, the best I could
come up with was, " want the first shift on the floor?"
We dropped the topic and our backpacks and headed out to the big, scary
There's not much to say; New York is, well, New York. The odd thing about
it is that I never feel scared walking around the streets in the middle of
the night there. I have no idea why. The city just vibrates. It's
great. We wandered through Time Square, arcades, restaurants...nothing
shuts down in this damned city. There was construction of what looked like
a giant dog in Rockefeller Plaza. The art in STORE WINDOWS blows away the
best that Charlotte offers in its museums. I love this city.
Not much more than wandering around happened on this day. We almost ran
into Trey Anastasio coming out of the NBC building, but just barely missed
him. Hum.
So off to bed (singular) we went.
I briefly flipped through the TV. Built in Nintendo 64. Cool. Henry V on
public access. Neat.
So I settled to the floor for a good night's sleep, as Susan protested.
"Look, either you get in the bed and I sleep on the floor, or we both use
the bed, but you aren't sleeping on the floor."
"Y'know, there's an AWFUL lot of letters to Penthouse that start out this
After much coaxing, we shared the bed, and it WOULD have been a good
night's sleep, if the secret agents hadn't placed that bomb in the
Your moment of Zen.
written 2000-09-24 05:19:41
[icculus@gamehenge ~]$ ls -l mbox
-rw------- 1 icculus root 19931368 Sep 24 03:53 mbox
The "19931368" is the size of my inbox. Nineteen megabytes.
Want some perspective?
[icculus@gamehenge ~]$ ls -l shakespeares_plays.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 icculus devel 5707111 Sep 24 05:15 shakespeares_plays.txt
This is getting fuckin' rediculous.
various updates.
written 2000-09-27 00:57:02
So much to say.
I guess I'll start at the beginning.
There's a website,, that, among other
things, makes lots of fun of the video game industry. Naturally, we all
love it, so when the site's owner posted that he'd be visiting John Wayne
Airport to pick up his girlfriend, we jumped at the chance to go meet him.
Unfortunately, so did some other people.
Awaiting us at the gate was a collection of some of the SCARIEST freaks
I've ever laid eyes upon. Try to imagine if Marilyn Manson and the local
computer user's group bred. Now imagine Chris Farley and Joe Peschi
contributed DNA to the mix. Put a cyst the size of a golf ball on one of
their heads.
You get the idea.
Other stuff:
Mr. Ting Lan, another alum of Queens, found himself out on the west
coast, so we kicked it old-skool style over lunch. There was a LOT of
insight into corporate activity, married life, and the inherent desire to
flee from cities passing over that lunch table. Come back and visit
anytime, Bobby.
Daniel and I visited North Carolina for a number of reasons. More on this
I went to another wedding. Must be popular this year, despite the Ricky
Martin thing. And, yes, they DID play that La Vida Loca song. More on
this later, too.
Finally, it has come to my attention that I've been spelling
"ridiculous" incorrectly all these years. Everyone should anxiously await
a full refund on the cost of their subscription to this service.
(Is that the sound of crickets I hear?)
written 2000-10-23 06:20:09
Your moment of Zen, and my moment of horror:
I was driving along the beach this morning, hoping to catch the sunrise,
and drove past a drive-thru Espresso bar.
That's my sign; I must flee California.
State of the union.
written 2000-10-30 02:14:57
First, thanks for all the kind emails after my run in with espresso
drive-thru. If I were to subdivide, I got several emails in each of three
1) "You can crash at my place if you need to."
2) "Come home." (These came from Charlotte and Philadelphia, mostly)
3) "About time."
I'm one step ahead of you all. More on this in a moment.
Secondly, thanks for your patience with the silence of the mailing list.
I'm writing humor pieces for on a weekly basis now, and it's
hard to be funny on demand all the time...especially when someone's paying
you to do it elsewhere.
Furthermore, I can't legally talk about the interesting things at work
right now (I hate that shit, but that's how it goes), and the other three
minutes of the day I'm playing ghetto Nintendo, which hasn't produced
interesting conversation since sixth grade when the Princess kissed Link
at the end of Zelda 2.
So, I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still alive, and I'm
working on something that might be taking me out of California. Nothing is
definite, so, like everything else in my life, it's under a metaphorical
NDA for the time being...hopefully it'll produce some stories in the long
run, if nothing else, and we can all scrape some entertainment from these
emails again.
Anyhow, back to whooping up on some Goombas. Ta ta for now.
A long December.
written 2000-12-09 02:22:39
California has been VERY foggy lately.
not kidding. It's eerie.
There is.
This is as close as California comes to a White's not SNOW
in the air, but it's white nonetheless.
outs," if we're calling things by their proper names.
- I will sleep.
- I will finally get to read Alice in Wonderland.
- I will sleep.
can all laugh at my experiences with the California DMV (which
coincidentally, ended today; I finally can drive legally.)
- Did I mention that I will sleep?
time, however, it'll be the Atlantic.
See you when I see you.
one for the road.
written 2000-12-09 19:29:52
in need of a few cats.
be put to death if I can't find them a home.
that's one less that gets put to sleep.
unfortunate soul here.
my email from the road.
Thanks in advance,
written 2000-12-29 00:32:39
Here's a miniature version of the written test for all you potential
The safest way to operate a motor vehicle is:
A) at 110 mph.
B) with both hands on the wheel.
C) while steering with your left knee.
D) while writing a journal entry on a palm pilot.
If you guessed 'B', you didn't send this email. If you think that is
stupid, wait until I tell you why I was taking a driving test in the
first place...
As I said before, I'm speeding across the country on I-40 East. Sooner
or later, myself and my car are going to end up in Philadelphia, and
while The City of Brotherly Love may welcome me with open arms, her law
enforcement personnel are going to want to know why my tags expired
nine months ago.
I've been driving around with Pennsylvania plates since I got the car
in April of 1999. I haven't actually lived in PA since...oh, say...high
school. The Tustin police force was starting to get real nosy about my
lack of California tags, but I don't fear them like I fear
Pennsylvanian State Troopers. With Thanksgiving only a few days away, I
figured I had better get moving on getting legal plates if I was to
drive across the country in December.
Off I went to the Santa Ana DMV. I explained my plight to the lady at
the information desk, and she pushed two forms across the counter. "Get
your California driver's license first, then stand in that line over
there to register your vehicle."
Aha. Simple. What a relief.
So I sat myself down in the driver licensing line and filled out my
paperwork amidst the chatter of Spanish all around. Name, address,
social security, current license number...wait in line, get picture
taken, pay my twelve dollars. Next step, take the written test.
Apparently it's mandatory, so I settle in to get it done.
Let me tell you, I have a new found respect for Californian drivers. I
passed...barely. That test was HARD. But, after sweating out whether it
was more dangerous to drive while wearing headphones during the day or
sunglasses during the night, I turned in my test for processing. All
that remained was to hand over my current license.
...naturally, my current license had vanished in the last 15 minutes.
Seriously. The damned thing just vaporized sometime between filling in
the paperwork and taking the test, and its loss made a process that was
going swimmingly grind to a complete halt. I scoured the hallways,
retraced my steps. Gone, gone, gone.
I didn't know what to say, and the DMV monkeys didn't know what to do.
After some deliberation, the old chinese guy behind the counter decided
that it would be best for me to get a new license from Pennsylvania,
and then immediately surrender it for the Californian version. Oh,
sure. As an alternative, he pressed a sheet of information about taking
the driving test into my hand...technically, he explained, I had just
earned a California learner's permit, so that was always an option.
I had visions of a fat, armed peace officer in my passenger seat,
screwing with the air conditioner and making sure I come to a complete
and noticable stop while he picks his nose and wipes it under my seat.
That settled that. After driving home illegally with my learner's
permit, I got on the horn with the PA Department of Transportation. The
lady I talked with at PENNDOT was calm enough about my woes; she could
happily provide me with proof of licensure, once I sent back a form
they could fax to me.
Faxing this initial form would take, of course, three to five business
days. Very efficient.
At any rate, after spending more time at the DMV with Mexicans and
freaks than I had at my apartment (uh...with Mexicans and freaks), I
managed to wrestle the sinister beast of bueracracy to the ground,
slither out of her red tape tentacles, and claim a license and
registration as a prize. Amen.
The moral of the story seems to be this: if it's a challenge to do,
it's not worth doing. Get a bus schedule.
Anyhow, I hope everyone's having a merry Christmas, happy Chanukah,
groovy Kwanzaa, and a bitchin' Boxing Day. Or whatever.
Even though I'm land-bound, here is some more Airline Ettiquette to
keep the spirit of travel. Hey, why not? It's been awhile...
- If you want to see what it's like to live well, open up that SkyMall
catalog in the seat back in front of you, and peruse all the wonderful
toys they sell, like kitchen utilities, nosehair removal systems, and
collectable coins from the Franklin Mint. Rich people own at least one
of every item in this catalog. If you aren't an avid SkyMall shopper,
you will never be invited to a party at the Playboy mansion.
- 38 hours of driving, straight, will alleviate any fear you've ever
had about flying. Trust me on this one.
a visual update.
written 2001-01-05 21:43:41
Webcam is up, so you can all see me screwing off at work.
More on why my apartment blows.
written 2001-01-23 19:05:07
Today, I awoke to the sounds of electric saws.
Apparently, the apartment next to mine had some sort of leak, and one of
the repairmen let himself into my apartment to find that the leak affects
me, too.
Whole kitchen flooded overnight, apparently, and when I woke up, they were
cutting through the kitchen wall to see what's wrong.
The words "sewer leak" were mentioned. I hope that doesn't mean I'll be
making dinner in raw sewage tonight.
...something about a silver-burdened horse...?
written 2001-03-30 15:23:24
Some news. Pay careful attention.
As of today, I am no longer employeed by Loki Software, Inc.
I have journal entries (and believe me, shit's been interesting
recently. :) ) that will be sent out when I get organized again, but as
my address list is becoming outdated, I'm scrapping it and starting
over. I've got a lot of addresses that have changed or been shut down,
not to mention that it's been so long that some people have probably
just lost interest in my life.
If you want to get more journal entries, please send me a line. Tell
your friends, too, because I don't know if everyone on my list is even
getting this email. will probably go down sooner or later, and I'm in search
of a new home for it.
Do not reply to this address as it will be shut down in a few minutes; I
can be contacted at (as opposed to,
effective immediately, and will send further correspondence from there.
Thank y'all, and see you soooner or later.
--ryan. (
"Exercising the Adventure Muscle"
written 2001-04-04 00:32:04
My journal hasn't been drawing to a close so much as dying a slow death. I
will give a full disclosure at a later time, but for now, let it suffice
to say that about all I have to my name is the crumbled remains of a
broken lease and a somewhat less self-esteem than I had when I started
writing journal entries. The last 1.3 years, while rewarding in many ways,
has also been a very humbling experience, taken as a whole.
And as things got worse and worse for me in California, I did what any
person with nothing but desperation does: I fled to Europe. At least
that's what every desperate person SHOULD do.
This journal entry isn't about Link
A word from my sponsor.
written 2001-04-06 05:16:54
Like every downtrodden hacker, I'm more interested in working for myself
than anyone else. Now that I'm jobless, I've been mulling over possible
business ventures. Game companies? Children's educational software? Maybe
write The Great American Novel? Full time blood donation?
Lord, I'm willing to do anything but work for The Man. Repeat after me:
Our Father Who Art In Heaven, please Please PLEASE don't make me work for
another dot-com startup. Don't make me write abstract relational database
interfaces. Don't make me enhance some fool's E-BUSINESS. Lead us not unto
corporate whoring, but deliver us from the Big Swinging Dicks of
I was sitting at Andrew's house last week, waiting until I could leave
California. For the most part, I sat in front of a dialup 'net connection
and drooled.
Check email. Check the 'chat rooms. Sift through for a goof.
Slashdot. Newsgroups. Check the time. Repeat.
Amid all that reduced brain activity, an email drifted into my ol' Hotmail
account from Rob, a friend from college and Charlotte. Aha. I perk up. As
the banner advertisement dithers in, I scan the body of the letter. To
paraphrase: "Hey, remember your ex-girlfriend Heather? She's getting
For those that rolled their eyes the first time through this rant, please
don't hit "delete" yet. I like to think I can grow and learn at least at
the same rate as a Furby, and I have a better outlook now. I'm not angry
at the world for maturing around me, although it bothers me that Heather
of all people managed to be more socially attractive than me and hook a
mate, but I can let that go. Poof. It's gone.
Okay, it fuckin' bothers me. So what?
I'm trying to pinpoint the nerve. Is it a fear of change? That seems to be
a theme in my life right now...maybe a fear of OTHERS changing? Maybe I
want people that aren't with me anymore to be bitter, loveless old maids
forever. It's not fair of me, and I don't CONSCIOUSLY wish that, but maybe
that's it. Karie (from the last rant) certainly had better options right
off the bat, and she's married now. Just had her first anniversary, I'm
honestly pleased to announce. Becky (my second serious girlfriend,
depending on who's definition of "serious" you choose), just got married a
few months ago. She wasn't going to take very long to find better options;
nobody even joked to the contrary, and she didn't, and good for her.
Heather (number three), well, that took me off guard.
Blahblahblah. It's not important. I'm talking about BUSINESS VENTURES
here, after all, and I think I've found an ideal means of avoiding
designing yet-another-customer-relationship-management-software-package to
make rent.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to announce the grand opening of the Ryan
C. Gordon Marriage Clinic.
Want to get married within the next five years? All you have to do is have
sex with me. I now have irrefutable proof that I am capable of endowing
women with phermones that make them IRRESISTABLE to men from all walks of
life. Afraid of being a bitter old lady with 50 cats in her apartment, who
watches Lifetime television and dreams of the day that Fabio will come to
sweep her away? Not a problem. Here at the Ryan C. Gordon Marriage Clinic,
our trained technicians can prepare you for a life of matrimonial bliss.
Think it'll work? I wonder if I can find some venture capital for it.
That might be hard, as the concept doesn't have the words, "Java",
"embedded technology", or "Linux" in it anywhere, so the usual VCs might
be put off, but then again, the business plan has the word "sex" in it, so
a few of you are probably reaching for your wallets right now purely by
instinct. Eat your heart out, Larry Flynt.
I do think the last year has been uh, educational at worst, but it sure as
heck strangled some relationships. Overall, I'm the prime candidate for
the lonely idiot with the house full of cats, and not people like Heather.
Heather and I had an odd relationship, that started oddly, and ended odder
still. Hey, she's an odd girl. But does that mean there isn't a match for
her out there? The crime here is really that, consciously this time, I
really believed there wasn't such an entity. Apparently I was wrong, but
it doesn't make the belief any more...right? Good? Correct?
Maybe I should dwell less on other people's love lives, and dwell on
me. On the here. And now.
So, I think I'll continue down this corporate line of thought. All my
ex-Loki compatriots are wondering how you meet women in a foreign city,
where there's really no place to go if you don't like chillin' in bars. I
think it just needs is that good ol' corporate bureaucracy to push it on
down the line: so here's a resume for all you eligible ladies in the
RYAN C. GORDON 1152 Chickasaw Circle
To find a soul mate, if not a physical one, that lets me
employ my skills in a creative environment.
BA in field mostly unrelated to interests in life.
Relevant Skills:
Very self-deprecating.
Potentially upwardly mobile.
Capable of coherent thought, and occasional artistic expression.
Thinks the Three Stooges are stupid.
Can dress self.
Phenominal beyond words as a lover.
Doesn't think you're fat.
References upon request.
The Adventure Muscle, part two.
written 2001-04-25 03:39:08
I have been called, on occasion, a world traveler. I won't pretend that
I'm some sort of hardened Indiana Jones spending my days skimming the
globe, but I do know enough about the world to pass on one universal
Hotels only wash the bedsheets, and not the bedspread that goes over top
of them.
Paying attention? Good. What this means to you, as a potential world
traveller, is that you should always crawl under ALL the sheets, not just
that top layer. After all, even in dignified business hotels, there's
going to some dignified businessmen who will use any convenient part of
the bed to mop up body fluids, which I discovered when I awoke the next
morning in San Francisco with the blankets wrapped around my head. There
are some smells that are distinctly less pleasant when encountered
second-hand, especially first thing in the morning.
After I finished scrubbing several layers of skin off my face in the
shower, Greg and I made a gameplan. We had 22 hours to experience as much
of San Francisco as we could get our hands on, whether we liked it or not,
because we were minutes away from being homeless; there were no hotel
reservations left, so it would be us verses the cold, cruel world until
our flights took off around 10a.m. the next morning.
Off we went. First stop: IHOP. Why be homeless on an empty stomach?
While chewing on my gardenburger, I flipped through a San Francisco
tourbook. This was really the first chance I had to do any research on the
town; what the hell is there to do in San Francisco, anyhow? As far as I
could tell, the most notable places were Haight-Ashbury (the drug
district) and Castro Street (the gay district). I could tell right from
the start that Greg would rather swallow feces than visit those places,
but it's a friend's duty to lead his pals into dens of vice and
corruption, and if nothing else, I'm fiercely loyal. Besides, spending the
day discussing drug abuse and mansex would be good preparation for a
college reunion.
Across the street from the cable cars that would carry us back to the bay,
we came across a bit of sidewalk with several unfolded card tables. The
tables were prepared with chess boards, and all sorts of strange pairings
were facing off over the various sets of pieces, while passerbys stopped
to comment and cheer. This was too cool; Greg and I claimed an empty table
and began arranging the pieces. A homeless guy stopped us and warned that
it costs 50 cents per game to use the tables. I'm not sure if that was a
scam, but it was well worth the money to whoop Greg's ass publically. Then
again, this was nothing compared to my agonizing air hockey defeat at his
hands later that night, but y'know, let's not get to gloating, here.
Off we sped. Wearied by the travelling and overwhelmed by my charming
influence, I managed to herd Greg onto a tram to, quite literally, the bad
side of the tracks.
Castro Street is, in more ways than one, miles apart from the Bay. After
about 45 minutes of riding a tram (which is sort of like a train mixed
with start-and-stop traffic), you start to notice something really
disgusting. First, it's the rainbow flags that line the street. Then,
you'll doubt that the girl you just passed in that lovely evening gown was
really female. By the time you get to Castro Street proper, you will have
no doubt come face to face with one of the real abominations personally.
I'm not talking about the gay men. I'm talking about the advertisements
for gay, lesbian, and transgender BANKING SERVICES.
No joke. I say let men bugger each other if that's their thing. But, my
God. When Martin Luther King said he had a dream, was he envisioning a
more convenient ATM card for African-Americans? When Moses cried to
Pharoah, "let my people go," was he preparing an exodus to the land of
milk, honey, and equity trading? One of the many scary things about being
a minority is not just that it targets you for prejudice, but also for
marketing campaigns. One of the stores we past was called "Gay Cleaners."
That aside, Castro Street definitely qualifies as the Emerald City.
Everywhere in the world, everyone has been to that overpriced,
overcultural corner of the city that your friends mockingly call "The Gay
District." Castro Street is the epitome of such places; it is ubergay.
Leather-clad bikers with bad mustaches hold hands with clean cut
businessmen. Lipstick lesbians stand on the street corner kissing bulldog
dykes. A television in the window of a club shows a male stripper's
performance. The second story window of a piercings store displays a
semi-erect, neon penis.
Ignore the homosexuality, and Castro is still very, very queer. It is a
perfect monument to fetishism, hedonism, and individualism. It is not so
much art as it is expression, and it is not so much depraved as it is
uninhibited. It is beautifully terrifying and revoltingly inviting.
...And the food is good. The sun was setting, and considering the
environment, I figured that Thai food would be an appropriate dinner.
After all, Thailand is reknown around the world as the best place to go if
you want to purchase a young boy of high quality at a reasonable price. I
wonder if QVC has gotten wind of this.
Haight-Ashbury was a disappointing tourist trap, on the other hand. The
highlight of that street was the teenager who had stuffed himself into a
trashcan and begged for change from the unwitting passerbys. It was a
brilliant, if not unfortunate, parody of the thousands of homeless people
that accosted us throughout the day.
Next, it was back to the arcades for
thathorribleairhockeydefeatimentioned(*cough*). Anyhow. There were other
arcades to be seen, like the Sony Meteron, which is very much like a
five-story advertisement for the PlayStation. Unlike London's SegaWorld,
however, every inch of the Meteron sucks, with one accidental exception.
The exception: Dance Dance Revolution.
For those that haven't seen this game firsthand, here's the gist. There
are spots for two players in front of a video screen. Each player has four
FOOT buttons that control an on-screen dancer that dances well if the
right button gets stomped at the right time, and dances poorly otherwise.
Players stomp in sync to vaugely familiar techno beats. To be honest, the
game itself kinda blows, but watching people play it is downright
hypnotising. Go and find an arcade that has one of these machines, and
bring a video camera.
The Meteron eventually closed for the evening. I keep hearing about these
cities that never sleep. I've seen New York, London, and Paris. They all
sleep. Some go to bed later than others, but there is always a point in
the wee hours of the morning where even the bums go home. San Francisco is
no exception, and Greg and I had no choice but to break back into the
hotel and pretend to be paying customers just to have somewhere to go.
We sat there for the last few hours, watched the management throw out a
bum who was sleeping in a chair ten feet away, and struggled to keep our
eyes open. For once, I was willing to endure white liberal guilt by
letting the hotel staff believe that I had more reason to be on the
premises than the black man they just escorted out.
It's a sick world. All these damned homeless people everywhere. When I got
back to Orange County, after Greg and I staggered onto our flights, I
began to make preparations to pack up my apartment and move into the
offices at Loki.
Somewhat homeless.
written 2001-05-03 20:50:15
For a short time, right after college graduation, I was homeless. I wasn't
on the streets, mind you. I slept in my car and in closets and offices at
my old college. I broke into the gym for showers and spent a lot of time
hiding from administrators and rent-a-cops.
I could've swallowed my pride and crashed at a friend's place, and did
eventually, but I hate to impose, and honestly, it was sorta fun. That
goes to show what sort of influence a sheltered life like mine has on the
definition of "fun."
Like I said, I never had to resort to sleeping on a sewer grate, so take
that for what it's worth. When I found work as a hacker at Sales Vision,
the joke was that I was, by far, the most well-paid bum in Charlotte.
Little did I know at the time that I would be returning to my starting
position only a year and a half later.
Not long after my return from San Francisco, my roommate Daniel left for a
job in Raleigh, as a hacker for Epic Games. There was no way I could have
afforded my crappy, overpriced apartment alone, so when Daniel left, we
decided to break the lease. And good riddence; I had experienced my share
of sewage leaks, crumbling ceilings, and screaming kids. Daniel packed all
his stuff into two suitcases and hopped a plane for North Carolina. I
packed my stuff into Daniel's abandoned car and drove straight to Loki.
Once again, I was the highest paid bum in town.
As time dragged on, the car got sold and I had packaged my stuff to be
mailed to my parents' house. My car was sitting in Pennsylvania with a
flat tire, and I was starting to get tired of sleeping on a futon and
walking a few miles to shower at Bernd's apartment. When I started to make
plans to get my work done as fast as possible and then humbly bow out, I
was asked to go to Sweden, which is another story. For now, let me state
what I was asked versus what was meant versus what I heard:
...I was told...
"We have a very important deal that requires your skills in Sweden."
"We have a very important deal in Sweden, and you are the most expendable
coder left."
...sounded like...
"Hey, want a free trip to Europe?"
Needless to say, I signed right on.
In preparing for travel abroad, I have a standard ritual I always go
through. I fill my backpack up. I try to fill it with stuff I'll actually
be carrying, but anything with equivalent bulk and weight will do. Then I
put on my hiking boots, coat, hat...anything that I'd probably be wearing
as I wander around that foreign country. This is designed to be
preperation for the worst-case scenario; if I can't walk a few miles in
too-hot clothing with too much weight on my back now, then how would I do
it when I have no other choice?
This has, I am certain, saved my butt on more than one trip. If nothing
else, it reinforces the primary rule of travel: if you can't carry your
own luggage, no one else is going to either, so you damn well better know
your limitations.
There is, however, a big difference between theory and practice. In
theory, I was testing my limitations. In practice, I was a guy dressed for
winter in Sweden walking across Southern California with everything I
owned strapped to my back.
It must have looked comical. A guy in a Mercedes pulled over next to me as
I trudged down El Camino Real. He rolled down his passenger side window,
and I saw that he was a young, clean cut man with what seemed to me to be
a sense of wealth and style. He seemed the sort that would have been
instantly popular in just about any crowd. And he asked me:
"Hey, where are you going?"
"Uh, down the road," was my witty reply.
"Yeah, but where are you going TO?"
I still didn't understand, but at this point my assumption was that he was
some sort of chickenhawk trying to pick up a long-haired whiteboy.
"I'm just going down the road."
"Are you homeless?"
"No," I lied, badly.
"Ok, I just wanted to make sure you had somewhere to go. I used to live on
the street, so I wanted to make sure you had somewhere to go."
"Oh, well thanks."
"Take care of yourself," he said, nodded, and started to drive off.
Stunned by what I just heard, all I could manage to squeak out was, "hey,
wait!" He stopped, and looked out at me again with that super-popular
smile. In my bafflement, it took a moment to find a sentence.
"Are you really...concerned about me?"
"Yeah. Like I said, I used to live on the streets, so I just wanted to
make sure you were safe."
"Sir, that is the COOLEST thing I've ever heard."
I meant it, too. He gave me one more of those popularity smiles and sped
off, leaving me filled with thousands of unanswered questions.
The Icculus World Tour 2001 hits Europe.
written 2001-05-08 05:09:00
...and then, without fanfare, I left for Sweden.
Scandinavian Airlines gives you a nice, but distinctly non-vegetarian
meal. As I scraped the beef gravy off of my boiled potatoes, I looked more
carefully at the condiment packets. The one made of blue paper read, "The
color of snow, the flavor of tears, the enormity of oceans." That was the
salt packet. The other one read, "Pepper has long been called, 'the gift
of the orient.' Don't let the fact that 'gift' is Swedish for 'poison'
stop you."
Needless to say, it stopped me dead in my tracks. I hate airline food.
Some sleep, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Rugrats in Paris later, I
landed in Copenhagen. About this time it occured to me that I never got a
chance to do any research on Sweden. None. None at all. I looked at my
flight ticket for the first time and discovered I was bound for a city
named Link
Will work for bandwidth.
written 2001-07-02 15:19:31
I haven't written lately, so I thought I'd let y'all know that:
a) I'm in America
b) I'm not in Sweden, and haven't been for awhile
c) I'm still an unemployed bum.
Real journal entry later. Honest.
In the meantime,'s back up. This means back issues of the
journal ( and the ever-popular webcam
( are available again. Amen. Thanks to Chris at
The Cyberspace Matrix ( for the
It could have been a brilliant career.
written 2001-07-24 22:17:41
(Anyone that's been reading Slashdot has probably figured out what I was
doing in Sweden. I was there for most of March, and the San Francisco
thing I talked about was in January. I left Loki at the end of March, and
besides some side trips to various parts of the country, I have been in
Philadelphia. This journal's gonna jump around a little as I continue to
play catch up. Stay tuned. --Ed.)
I've been craving chocolate, cookie dough Blizzards.
Recently I've been wandering over to Dairy Queen almost every night to
satisfy my craving. It all started when I was told that, despite the name
of the store, there's nothing Dairy in Dairy Queen ice cream. No milk.
None. Naturally, I had to find out if this was true, in the name of
Science, of course, and y'know how it goes. You start with the soft stuff:
Dilly Bars and those hand-dipped cones, but before long, you're playing
with the big boys and sucking down 8-balls of Peanut Buster Parfaits.
Before you know it you find yourself on the wrong side of the tracks,
giving blowjobs to strangers in a dirty bathroom to get your next Blizzard
At any rate, there is a girl working there that used to go to my high
school, and she's been working there every time I've visited Philadelphia
since at least 1995. Maybe she was even working there before I graduated
from high school.
I wanted to scoff at her under my breath for her...uh, lack of ambition,
but then I had to examine my hypocrisy; after all, the only REAL
difference between this girl and myself is that she gets a steady
Also, she may not be living with her parents.
Also, her cat's litter box might not be three to four inches from her bed.
So I thought about getting a job. Then I took a deep breath, played some
Crazy Taxi, and the thought passed, but only briefly. I have discovered
the horrible truth of "doing your own thing," which is code for, "refusing
to get a job," and that is, simply, that Doing Nothing Is Expensive. All
those late-night cups of coffee at 24-hour diners were adding up, and when
Geico sent me a cheerful reminder that my next car insurance bill was
closing in, I wept for the death of my savings account, which has been
somewhat anemic for quite awhile now.
So, I decided it was time for some upward mobility. And the path to untold
riches is education, right?
(I couldn't help but notice everyone with student loans just hit the
Delete button on this email. The rest of you still with me? Good.)
So, I enrolled at the prestigious Bucks County Community College, where
I'm making my way once again through EDUC101, also known as "Intro to
Teaching", which is BETTER known as, "So You Want to be a Teacher, Huh?"
Let me summarize this course. You can take it anywhere in the country, and
get the same basic synapsis.
a) Those in charge of Education (the "dimwits") have no idea what the hell
they're doing. The only ones that do are the teachers themselves. The
dimwits only concern themselves with the bottom line: The end result
for the dimwits is not the product, but how much the product cost to make.
b) The teachers themselves are permently restricted from doing the
right thing by the dimwits. Regardless of what position a given dimwit
holds, in any given teacher's mind, the dimwit is a Neanderthal. No
one tries to enhance the teacher's ability to teach, because sooner
or later the teacher will get fired, sued, shot, or just plain old
starve, in which case, the dimwits surmise, why should we expend the
resources on those pesky teachers in the first place?
c) The students don't care what the teachers do, because it's all the
same unproductive and/or annoying hazing session to them. The teachers
don't care what the students do, since more interaction with a student
means more likelihood of being fired, sued, or shot. The dimwits don't
care what the teachers do, so long as they don't get sued, because
sooner or later, they'll be fired, shot, or starve, which means more
money available for whatever dimwits like to spend money on, which is
nothing at all.
d) The only thing dimwits like to spend money on, apparently, is football.
The only reason that dimwits spend money on Arts Education is in the
hope that one of the students in the school-financed drumline will
accidentally be killed by an offsides football player, which means
cost reduction of bussing and cafeteria plans.
If you haven't developed a certain sense of hopelessness by this point,
then think like a dimwit for a moment: if you were a professional video
game programmer and went to teach highschool, even in the most highly paid
districts in America, you've taken a several thousand dollar pay cut. If
you work in the Dakotas, you've cut your salary in half, and you get laid
off for three months every year.
But we're not dimwits, so money's not important to us, right?
If you've managed to get through all of that, then there may be a position
for YOU in teaching.
In the meantime, the Dimwit in me has taken to contract work.
Let me explain this briefly. Contract work comes from a few different
venues. First, you might get an email from someone to the extent of this:
SUBJECT: Still looking?
Saw a posting on that you are looking for a job. My
company is looking for someone to implement casino poker machines as a
Netscape plugin, and we think you'd be a good choice for the job.
This is actually a trick. If you write back to them, they will NEVER talk
to you again. Instead, you should play hard to get, in which case they
still won't respond to you again, but at least you've saved yourself the
trouble of typing a response in the first place. The second type might be
SUBJECT: Job offer
Saw a posting on that you are looking for a job. We'd
like to have you port our program to Linux, but we can't pay you
anything for it. Interested?
This is NOT a trick; it's way too direct, and they are serious. Like I
said, we're not dimwits, so money's not important, right? Hey, there's a
million NCGs (New College Graduates) that think hard, unrewarding work
doesn't have to pay well if it will look good on a resume. These people
tend to starve with the teachers. It's a form of Darwinism.
Finally, there's the way I got the current contract I'm hacking on, which
is much like how everyone else gets their jobs:
SUBJECT: Job offer
My boss Theodore told me to hire someone, and I suspect that, while
your work ethic is generally mediocre, you will work for cheap and
probably WON'T screw the pooch on any assignments we give you. Where
can we send a check?
--guy you used to work with.
Needless to say, all you need to read in that email is "where can we send
the check." That's MY generally mediocre work ethic shining through.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go study and write a Netscape plugin
at the same time.
Your moment of Zen...
written 2001-12-13 01:59:38
On I-85 south, somewhere in Burlington, North Carolina, there's a
billboard with a picture of the Statue of Liberty. The text has partially
fallen off in the weather, and now reads:
"America the Beautiful: Our Home, Sweet Ho"
A political message, no doubt.
Fact. Fiction.
written 2001-12-13 02:13:02
I want to tell you a dirty story.
It's not really dirty, per se, but since it involves 13 year-old girls, we
might as well pigeonhole it from the get-go.
I spent a good portion of this semester at a gameshop that a friend of
mine owns. It's a nice little setup: a bunch of high-powered computers are
hooked up to a high-powered Internet connection, and kids stream in to
play networked games for three bucks an hour. Think of this as the next
generation of the arcade.
Every Friday, the kids stream in for the "Lock In". This event starts at
9:00p.m. and goes for twelve hours. During this time, they gourge
themselves on junk food and become zombie-slaves to violent video games
with names like "Diablo II" and "Dark Age of Camelot". It's not so bad,
honestly. These kids could be out gang-banging or shooting heroin into
their eyeballs or having sex with each other, but for twelve hours, they
can be knights or heroes or counter-terrorists.
Unfortunately, the other 156 hours of the week are fair game.
For example, there's Will. Will is a big dude, especially considering he's
13. He must weigh at least 250 pounds, and is a professional
mouth-breather. Will could kill me if he had to, which is no good, as he's
inclined to homicide as a form of conflict management. One Friday, he's
sitting outside smoking a cigarette, and a police car drives by. Will
says, "Good thing that pig didn't see me, since I'm still on probation."
I say, "Probation, Will? Why are you on probation?"
Will says, "Attempted murder."
Will says, "This kid was talkin' shit about my sister, so I took his head
and slammed it into a desk again and again."
Will says, "I would've killed his bitch-ass if they didn't pull me off him."
I wasn't there to see this, but I imagine a thousand Lilliputian teachers
trying to restrain Will while his bloodied opponent reconsiders his stance
on the sister's promiscuities. I let the subject drop, since, y'know, 13
year-olds tend to exaggerate.
Word travels faster than greased lightning. A few days later, I hear two
nine year-olds at the vending machine discussing the dude from Lenape
Middle School who tried to kill some other dude for making fun of his
sister. Needless to say, Will's at the top of this odd food chain, and the
villagers are singing folk songs about his legendary exploits.
On the other end of the food chain is Rob. Rob is a runt, for lack of a
nicer word. He, despite being the same age as Will, is tiny in comparison.
He's got the Mommy's Bowl Cut hair and his voice suggests that he is still
outrunning puberty. Rob hangs out with Will at the Lock-Ins, for some
reason beyond my comprehension, since as far as I can tell, Will only pays
attention to Rob long enough to swat him, which seems fitting, since one
is a horse and the other is a mosquito.
I promised this is a story about 13 year-old girls, however, and I won't
disappoint. This is really a story about Rachel.
Rachel is an anomaly at the gameshop. Generally speaking, there is a
rather narrow demographic that patronizes the store. Most of the kids are
white, male, eighth or ninth graders. Most of them are maladjusted, and
some of them you will recognize from their yearbook photo on the news next
time there's a school shooting. After all, Columbine was blamed on violent
video games and the Internet, and, at three dollars an hour, these boys
have both in abundance.
To be fair, Columbine was blamed, by the more rational observer, on poor
parenting and a lack of decent role models. If the stories I'm told are to
be believed, these kids get that whether they've got their three bucks or
not. Rachel is no exception; she's another creature that is misunderstood
by her teachers, by her parents, by everyone. Or so she says. Perhaps she
is just really bad at making a good first impression, and is thus
misjudged. When I first met Rachel, she came to the Lock In wearing a
Catholic school girl's dress (that is inaccurate; in reality, this skirt
would make a nun blush), and said to me, "Hey you, if you could say one
thing to the world, what would it be?"
Ah. How better to develop a picture of an individual than with their
answer to THAT question!
I say, "Do I get one sentence, or can I have a whole paragraph?"
I say, "I think I'd need to think about it. I have a lot to say."
I say, "What would YOU say, Rachel?"
Rachel does not think; she has an answer prepared. Rachel says, "I'll tell
you what I'd say. I'd say WHITE FUCKIN' POWER!"
Some stories you just can't make up.
It is easy to label Rachel as dumb, but I think that's inaccurate. Rachel
may be dumb, but if so, she's the smartest dumb girl you'll ever meet.
Every word she uttered made me cringe.
Rachel says, "Let me tell you about how I threw a pair of scissors at my
teacher today."
Rachel says, "Let me tell you about this boy I'm stalking."
Rachel says, "Let me tell you about my time in a nuthouse."
Still, Rachel knows that no matter what drops out of her mouth, she is
still swimming in a sea of greasy cock, and the hordes of 13 year-old boys
will shower her with adulation for twelve hours straight, once a week. I'd
call that entrepreneurial, honestly.
Will and Rob and Rachel form a sort of clique. This popularity planet is,
on and off throughout the night, orbited by more distant satellites. I
call this the "Smoker's circle", as most of the orbiting is done while
huffing Camels out in front of the store.
One Friday night, Will decides to walk down the road to the convenience
store. Rob tags along, as does one our satellites, Dave. Dave is 15 or so,
and considerably more mature. Keep this in mind for later.
If you're unfamiliar with Main Street in Doylestown, the Wawa's about
three blocks away, separated by a few bars. Being Friday night, these bars
tend to have some people hopping between them, and yes, a few of these
people are attractive young women. Right near the Wawa, our little solar
system sees one such attractive woman, and accosts her.
Will says, "Check out the tits on that chick!"
Rob says, "Yo, bitch, why don't you come over here and suck my dick?"
Dave, to his credit, says nothing.
I need not tell you that this poor woman did not find this funny. Moreso,
the boyfriend to her right didn't, either. I wasn't there to see this, but
I imagine a large man with a crew-cut and a marine's jacket, punching his
fists together and walking determinedly across the street.
Will says, "Fuck!" and runs.
Rob says, "Shit!" and runs.
Dave, to his credit, says "I'm sorry!" and raises his hands in surrender.
I am first aware of this is when I see Will and Rob hotfooting it back to
the gameshop. I had seen three trek off, and then I saw two scramble back.
In general, when you see someone as large as Will move that fast, you
should deduce that something is horribly wrong. I assumed that Dave was
arrested or dead.
Will, breathing heavy, told me what happened, while Rob squeaked in the
missed details, bobbing and weaving through the tale to get a word in.
Dave came back near the end of the story, shaking his head. When the
Marine had approached him, Dave calmed him down, told him that his friends
were jerks and that it wasn't right. The Marine even apologized, and went
on his way, honor restored to his fair lady.
Will concluded his retelling with, "Y'know, I didn't WANT to get into a
fight, but if I had to...I'd've kicked his ass."
Rob concurred, "Yeah! I'd've beat some ass, too. I'd've STOMPED him."
Dave, to his credit, just shook his head.
Rachel, on the other hand, was getting visibly angry. If it had been just
a few degree colder, I think I might have seen smoke coming out of her ears.
Rob and Will walked around the corner of the building to continue their
discussion on how they would have easily bested this marine in
hand-to-hand combat. Rachel continued to fume, until, unable to sit
anymore, she rises and says to me, "Can you believe that shit?"
I shrug. I let the subject drop, since, y'know, 13 year-olds tend to
Rachel walks over to the corner of the building and calls to Rob. Rob is
still busy describing the Dragon Ninja Death Move he was planning to
unleash on the marine. Rachel calls again, more sweetly. "Rob, honey, can
I tell you something?"
Rob comes around the corner and asks, "what?" Rachel answers, "this," and
throws Rob into a headlock. She then smashes his head into the wall, knees
him in the stomach, and leaves him for dead on the ground.
Rachel screams, "I'm a thirteen year-old girl and I kicked your ass, you pussy!"
Some stories you just can't make up.
Justice being served, Rachel went back inside to play some more
CounterStrike, confident in the knowledge that Rob would have a more
sensitive view of how to approach women in the future. I'm not sure I
condone such vigilantism, but somehow, I do approve.
Your moment of Zen (or: "Wang" is always funny).
written 2002-08-12 14:26:45
In Stockholm, Sweden, a few blocks from the city center, there is a
restaurant called "Chinese Wang", across the street from an alternative
clothing store named "Cum". Those zany Swedes.
Bork. Bork. Bork.
written 2002-08-12 15:42:23
Hmm...not only did I not put a "[journal]" tag on that last email, I also
managed to send everyone's address in the clear. See, spend a week being
treated like a stupid American and you start to become one. It's an
international Pygmalion effect.
So here I am in Sweden. I was sort of rushed over here, and now I'm being
held against my will. Seriously. I'll get to that later.
But now, after sitting on my duff for months ("Hey, Ryan, why hasn't there
been a journal entry in months?" "Because I don't do anything
interesting."), suddenly I'm running around the country in a mad fit of
Linux consultancy work. Who'd've thought that there'd suddenly be a demand
for...well, for me. I've even got the big-ass beard so clients will
immediately recognize me as a Unix hacker. I debated not showering, too,
but decided against it. Still, I have to laugh at all the "real"
consultants and contractors that have to show up at their jobs wearing
suits and ties. Today I'm sitting in an office wearing Converse high tops,
a Che Guaverra T-shirt, and a pair of jeans where the crotch is about to
rip out. And I'm getting paid for it.
Er, I'm getting paid for the work, not the crotch thing. Just to be clear.
I'm in Stockholm. A game company out here needs some work done, and under
no circumstances will they send me the source code, which makes it hard to
actually do any work. Instead, they decide to fly me out here on a
moment's notice and work on site. Much cheaper, no doubt. Companies with
money worry me.
So I race up from North Carolina, where I'm working on another contract in
Raleigh, hop a plane in Philadelphia, and a few in-flight movies later,
I'm sitting in London Heathrow.
Here's the thing about British Airways: if you haven't seen the
commercials, I need to tell you: The seats. The friggin' seats! They fold
_completely_ down to be a horizontal bed. They have modern movies (I'm
talking Spiderman and such...has that even been released in Europe yet?
I opted for "The Shipping News" and "I am Sam"...I regretfully declined
"The Goonies"), and overall, it was the fastest trans-atlantic flight I've
ever taken. We got stuck on the runway in Philly for over and hour and I
was happy about it. Think of these planes the way Ferris Bueller describes
Cameron's Dad's car. It's _so_ choice.
Stockholm itself has, as far as I can tell, one notable feature: this is
where they do that whole Nobel Prize thing. Since I won't be seeing that,
they best I can do is just soak in the general culture.
The people of Sweden are beautiful. Even the ugly ones. It's all blonde
hair and blue eyes and perfect figures that you see on the covers of
American magazines that inspire eating disorders. This seems strange to
me, since the daily Swedish diet is's all fat. You'd think
that you couldn't subsist on lard, but Sweden proves you wrong...and Dr.
Atkins laughs all the way to the bank.
Truth be told, it's pretty difficult to be a vegetarian in a country where
you can't read the menus. Fortunately, Sweden is a pretty
vegetarian-friendly country, over all. When I was living in Linkoping last
year, someone told me that I came from America: "The Land of Meat".
Linkoping, in its microscopic city center, has a McDonalds staring at a
Burger King. I'm not sure if that guy was a hypocrite or a victim of a
cultural drive-by. The crew at Nokia, the reason for my trip to Linkoping,
told me about how their favourite watering hole, a McDonalds on the
outskirts of town (hmm...maybe not the victims afterall) was burned to the
ground by a militant group of vegans. I shrugged my shoulders; it sounded
less like political action and more like the voice of Good Taste speaking
to me.
That was then, and this is now, a little more than a year and many
kilometers away, and I've learned the finer points of vegetarian dining in
Sweden: you can always count on Falafel and Pizza. Falafel comes with
everything green that's nearby piled on top of it, and pizza comes with
"Pizza Salad" which is kinda like cole slaw without the mayonnaise...a
shredded cabbage thing drowned in oil, vinegar, and other spices. I tried
to explain that this doesn't really qualify as salad by any stretch of the
imagination, but nonetheless, it was there. And it was good.
Anywhere you go in the world, you need to be very observant. Watch what
other people do, in case you need to do it yourself. In New York, it's
illegal to ride in the front passenger seat of a taxi, but if you don't in
Sweden, you're weird. Looking around the restaurant, there were people
putting this cole-slaw-salad on their pizza. I opted to be weird. It's
good by itself...and I did see others eating it this way eventually. I
wonder if I was a trend setter.
So I'm sitting at a table outside this pizza joint, chewing on cabbage and
sipping Swedish Coke (which is like an oversugared, less carbonated
version of American coke...Pepsi is better here, but more rare), watching
a kid dance barefoot in a doorway where I watched a drunken club-hopper
piss the night before. Urination is a public event here, I swear. Over the
weekend, I must have averted my eyes at least twenty times while walking
down the main drag. I even walked past a girl peeing in the bushes on a
side road a few days ago, which is cool in my mind. Pissing in public is
really the first step to women's liberation, if you were to ask me.
There are kids everywhere. All those perfect Swedish genes are going to
good use, I guess. Babies, babies everywhere. Everywhere you go, there's
strollers being pushed by mothers (and fathers! Lots of men pushing baby
carriages...this is the second step to women's liberation, I suppose).
Most staircases have a ramp for strollers. My current theory is that all
these babies are to replace the kids that are killed by diseases they
picked up from dancing barefoot in other people's urine...but that's just
a working theory. Darwin would be proud.
Anyhow, back to work. If I keep rambling like this, I'll never be allowed
to go home.
...and what's funnier than 'wang'?
written 2002-08-16 14:21:57
So there's this fireworks competition going on in Slussen, about a
kilometer from here. We're all up on the roof watching this. It's like
DisneyWorld on crack.
At the end of the show, the night sky is lit up like it was day, and the
noise thunders like the world is ending.
As it comes to an end, in the silence, I say, "Right now, France is
probably surrending."
I think everyone is still laughing. There's your universal truth: forget
the UN, forget international diplomacy. No matter where you go in the
world, everyone makes fun of the French.
back to digest | http://www.icculus.org/~icculus/journal/index.php?id=all | dclm-gs1-420945528 | false | true | {
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0.025263 | <urn:uuid:1a128350-e826-4a87-a18f-d0d51f78d06d> | en | 0.971622 | Wednesday, February 5, 2014
[Insert Interesting Title Here]
ALERT. I have been named to Almie's (aka Apocalypstick) "Most Interesting People Under 38" list because screw Forbes and their 30 Under 30 and also because her list apparently didn't have very stringent criteria. I feel a bit out of place given the other people on the list that are actually interesting and deserve to be there, but I have evidence that it happened and you can't take that away from me. Pride may be temporary but screenshots are forever.
So, click through and scroll down. You'll also see fellow #BiSCuits Simone, Jessica, and Casey, who are, of course, much more qualified to be there. In addition to Almie, of course. Because, duh.
Or, if you're lazy, here:
(The "this" in question is the time Target got permission to use my tweets and then had models strut down the runway holding snack food and pout and be sultry and then recite my tweets before catwalking away. It was still one of the more bizarre things that has happened to me during my tenure on the Internet.)
I have no closing for this post, so I'm just going to kind of awkwardly inch toward the door and then turn and flee suddenly. BYE. | http://www.insertcleverlinkhere.com/2014/02/insert-interesting-title-here.html | dclm-gs1-421065528 | false | false | {
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0.874615 | <urn:uuid:f1a335a0-c01b-4681-a32f-79ae9755924f> | en | 0.961129 |
My questions:
yamata451 year ago
Hi Fypsigon
I'll give you my best shot at an answer. The two pieces of into you'll have to find out is:
1. What is the rating on the NiCa battery? probably 1.2V at around 600/1200 mAh
2. What Voltage and Amperage will the solar cells output?
From my experience with Garden Solar Cells, they put out about 2.4V at 47-50 mA each. So you are right about that. If they are wired in series, they put out 2.4V at 40-50 mA, which means it would take about 12 hours to charge the 600 mAh battery fully. It would then output 600 mA for 1 hour, or 100 mA for 6 hours, as you convert.
I'm confused about your "Device" and the "Wall Charger". Are they the same device? 1.3V at 2W is about 1500 mA or 1.5A. Do you want to power the device itself, or are you hoping to recharge the battery through the device? Depending on what you want to do, the answer changes.
Hope this helps!
Fypsigon (author) yamata451 year ago
Thanks for the answer so far!
The "device" is an electric razor with 1 NiCa battery inside (that´s all I can see, I would have to break the thing open to see the rating)
The label that says 1.3V=2W is on the outside of the electric razor...
I want to charge that battery with the 2 solar cells... | http://www.instructables.com/answers/I-need-help-building-a-13V-solar-charger-from-gar/ | dclm-gs1-421075528 | false | false | {
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0.048898 | <urn:uuid:fa615cb7-0f9c-4327-be90-b058f42545e9> | en | 0.933274 | Nevada Corporation
DEFINITION of 'Nevada Corporation'
A business incorporated in the state of Nevada, which is known to be business-friendly through its tax and corporate law statutes. Companies that incorporate in Nevada have several distinct advantages, including no state income tax, no franchise taxes, no personal income taxes and no succession taxes.
Another unique advantage of Nevada Corporations is that company officers and directors are well-protected against lawsuits arising from lawful business pursuits.
Nevada has become a well-utilized tax haven in recent years, drawing a large number of West Coast-based companies in the United States. In addition to public companies that choose to incorporate there, many private companies are attracted to the state because of its strong protection laws against hostile takeovers of a business.
A term known as "piercing the corporate veil" refers to the ability of a plaintiff to go after the personal assets of a company owner or director. While piercing the veil is rare in any state, Nevada is well-known for its strict adherence to the protection of personal assets and information.
1. Hostile Takeover
2. Internal Revenue Service - IRS
3. Tax Haven
A country that offers foreign individuals and businesses little ...
4. Franchise Tax
A tax levied at the state level against businesses and partnerships ...
5. Delaware Corporation
A corporation that is legally registered in the state of Delaware, ...
6. patent attorney
A lawyer with expertise in intellectual property law as it pertains ...
Related Articles
1. Zooming In On Net Operating Income
Zooming In On Net Operating Income
2. Should You Incorporate Your Business?
Should You Incorporate Your Business?
3. What Is Your Risk Tolerance?
Options & Futures
What Is Your Risk Tolerance?
4. Share The Wealth With Franchises
Personal Finance
Share The Wealth With Franchises
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Hot Definitions
1. Accounts Payable - AP
2. Ratio Analysis
3. Days Payable Outstanding - DPO
4. Net Sales
5. Over The Counter
6. Earnings Before Interest After Taxes - EBIAT
Trading Center | http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nevada_corporation.asp | dclm-gs1-421105528 | false | false | {
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0.308142 | <urn:uuid:c39503de-7b36-4936-b370-37cb4cee90e7> | en | 0.937321 | Derrick Russell
Guess What?
How many times have you been asked that? How many times did you guess correctly? Once maybe... zero more likely, have you ever even responded? "Guess What" is the worst phrase/questions in the English language. It's a question designed to not be answered.
When you ask somebody "Guess What" you don't actually want somebody to guess, you just want to talk about something and think thats a friendly way to start the conversation. If you get asked "Guess What" you know you aren't actually supposed to guess... if anything your only response should just be "what?" YOU CAN'T RESPOND TO A QUESTION WITH HALF OF THE SAME QUESTION!!!!
But then there are those moments where that's not good enough... there are some mad anarchists out there who will actually make you guess. They ask "Guess What" you respond with "what?" as years of being part of civilized society has taught you to do and they respond with "guess" YOU CAN'T RESPOND WITH THE OTHER HALF OF THE QUESTION I JUST USED TO RESPOND TO YOUR ORIGINAL QUESTION!!! I don't have time for your mind games evil villain.
That's why I've taken to actually guessing when somebody asks me "Guess What," no matter what, using all possibilities in existence:
They've changed the name of North Dakota to Dakota #2? Porcupines no longer exist? People flying on airplanes are traveling through time fractionally faster than those of us on the ground? It's supposed to rain this weekend?
Now I'm more involved in the guessing than whatever your actual story is. Why do we all have to be the riddler when we have an interesting tidbit we would like to share? I'd like to hear what you have to say... Just don't ask me to guess what it is.
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0.398116 | <urn:uuid:fe9525aa-8051-4f3a-ae95-b2fed791eb94> | en | 0.676117 | English Italiano Espanol Francais
eyaculacion femenina
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0.071671 | <urn:uuid:6a2df858-beac-4cb6-9243-4faf13dfb9a9> | en | 0.953074 | The Flag Flap
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Originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of The Free Market
There are many curious aspects to the latest flag fracas. There is the absurdity of the proposed change in our basic constitutional framework by treating such minor specifics as a flag law. There is the proposal to outlaw “desecration” of the American flag. “Desecration” means “to divest of a sacred character or office.” Is the American flag, battle emblem of the U.S. government, supposed to be “sacred”? Are we to make a religion of statolatry? What sort of grotesque religion is that?
And what is “desecrate” supposed to mean? What specific acts are to be outlawed? Burning seems to be the big problem, although the quantity of flag-burning in the United States seems to be somewhere close to zero. In fact, most flag-burning occurs when patriotic groups such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars solemnly burn their worn-out American flags in the prescribed manner.
But if burning the flag is to be banned, are we to clap numerous American Legion or VFW people in the hoosegow? Oh, you say that intent is the crucial point, and that you want to outlaw hippie types who burn U.S. flags with a sneer and a curse. But how are the police supposed to figure out intent, and make sure that the majesty of the law falls only upon hippie sneerers, and spares reverent, saluting Legionnaires?
But if the supporters of the proposed flag amendment are mired in absurdity, the arguments of the opponents are in almost as bad a shape. Civil libertarians have long placed their greatest stress on a sharp difference between “speech” and “action,” and the claim that the First Amendment covers only speech and not actions (except, of course, for the definite action of printing and distribution of a pamphlet or book, which would come under the free press clause of the First Amendment).
But, as the flag amendment advocates point out, what kind of “speech” is burning a flag? Isn’t that most emphatically an action–and one that cannot come under the free-press rubric? The fallback position of the civil libertarians, as per the majority decisions in the flag cases by Mr. Justice Brennan, is that flag-burning is “symbolic” speech, and therefore, although an action, comes under the free-speech protection.
But “symbolic speech” is just about as inane as the “desecration” doctrine of the flag-law advocates. The speech/action distinction now disappears altogether, and every action can be excused and protected on the ground that it constitutes “symbolic speech.”
Suppose, for example, that I were a black racist, and decided to get a gun and shoot a few whites. But then I could say, that’s okay because that’s only “symbolic speech,” and political symbolic speech at that, because I’m trying to make a political argument against allegedly pro-white legislation.
Anyone who considers such an argument far-fetched should ponder a recent decision by a dotty leftist New York judge to the effect that it is “unconstitutional” for the New York subway authorities to toss beggars out of the subway stations. The jurist’s argument held that begging is “symbolic speech,” an expressive argument for more help to the poor. Fortunately, this argument was overturned on appeal, but still “symbolic arguers” are everywhere in New York, clogging streets, airports, and bus terminals.
There is no way, then, that flag laws can be declared unconstitutional as violations of the First Amendment. The problem with flag laws has nothing to do with free speech, and civil libertarians are caught in their own trap because they do in fact try to separate speech and action, a separation that is artificial and cannot long be maintained.
As in the case of all dilemmas caused by the free-speech doctrine, the entire problem can be resolved by focusing, not on a high-sounding but untenable right to freedom of speech, but on the natural and integral right to private property and its freedom of use. As even famed First Amendment absolutist Justice Hugo Black pointed out, no one has the free-speech right to burst into your room and harangue you about politics.
“The right to freedom of speech” really means the right to hire a hall and expound your views; the “right to freedom of press” (where, as we have seen, speech and action clearly cannot be separated) means the right to print a pamphlet and sell it. In short, free speech or free press rights are a subset, albeit an important one, of the rights of private property: the right to hire, to own, to sell.
Keeping our eye on property rights, the entire flag question is resolved easily and instantly. Everyone has the right to buy (or weave) and therefore own a piece of cloth in the shape and design of an American flag (or in any other design) and to do with it what he will: fly it, burn it, defile it, bury it, put it in the closet, wear it, etc. Flag laws are unjustifiable violations of the rights of private property. (Constitutionally, there are many clauses from which private property rights can be derived.)
On the other hand, no one has the right to come up and burn your flag, or someone else’s. That should be illegal, not because a flag is being burned, but because the arsonist is burning your property without your permission. He is violating your property rights.
Note the way in which the focus on property rights solves all recondite issues. Perhaps conservatives, who proclaim themselves defenders of property rights, will be moved to reconsider their support of its invasion. On the other hand, perhaps liberals, scorners of property rights, might be moved to consider that cleaving to them may be the only way, in the long run, to insure freedom of speech and press.
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0.547204 | <urn:uuid:4aef4697-b8a5-4a65-9ddc-ef099dc19072> | en | 0.919661 | Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method
Author(s): Joan Kee
Contemporary Korean Art--Cover
Starting in the mid-1960s, a group of Korean artists began to push paint, soak canvas, drag pencils, rip paper, and otherwise manipulate the materials of painting in ways that prompted critics to describe their actions as “methods” rather than artworks. A crucial artistic movement of twentieth-century Korea, Tansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) also became one of its most famous and successful. Promoted in Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, Tansaekhwa grew to be the international face of contemporary Korean art and a cornerstone of contemporary Asian art.
In this full-color, richly illustrated account—the first of its kind in English—Joan Kee provides a fresh interpretation of the movement’s emergence and meaning that sheds new light on the history of abstraction, twentieth-century Asian art, and contemporary art in general. Combining close readings, archival research, and interviews with leading Tansaekhwa artists, Kee focuses on an essential but often overlooked dimension of the movement: how artists made a case for abstraction as a way for viewers to engage productively with the world and its systems. As Kee shows, artists such as Lee Ufan, Park Seobo, Kwon Young-woo, Yun Hyongkeun, and Ha Chonghyun urgently stressed certain fundamentals, recognizing that overwhelming forces such as decolonization, authoritarianism, and the rise of a new postwar internationalism could be approached through highly individual experiences that challenged viewers to consider how they understood their world rather than why.
Against the backdrop of the Cold War, decolonization, and the declaration of martial law in South Korea, these artists asked questions that continue to resonate today: In what ways can art matter to the world? How does art exert agency when its viewers live in times of explicit or implicit duress? How can specific social and political conditions inspire or influence methods and styles?
Publication Information:
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Month of Publication: July
Year of Publication: 2013
Location: Minneapolis, MN
# of Pages: 381
Additional Information:
Price: $28.05
ISBN: 0816679886 | http://www.lsa.umich.edu/vgn-ext-templating/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=534d2881f4c00410VgnVCM100000c2b1d38dRCRD&vgnextchannel=bf4b52fe9f13c210VgnVCM100000c2b1d38dRCRD&vgnextfmt=detail | dclm-gs1-421585528 | false | false | {
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0.171475 | <urn:uuid:c8fe346b-728d-4d0a-b867-efd35d914236> | en | 0.931382 | Recently it seem like everywher we go the drinks stay cold when we coolin behing broke starts to get a little old my mony had to get some fine tuneing tn might be the night I make it so lets live it up and don't regret it at all all these faces diff places people hit me up but I forgetting to call california when the wether getting colder? Chillin at the beahc house
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Traffic In The Sky Lyrics | http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/mac+miller/traffic+in+the+sky_20886917.html | dclm-gs1-421615528 | false | false | {
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0.018825 | <urn:uuid:343d0fea-bd6f-4f5d-952c-5bcd671a802a> | en | 0.95748 | New! Read & write lyrics explanations
• Highlight lyrics and explain them to earn Karma points.
I had one friend in high school recently he hung himself with string
His note said
"If livin' is the problem, well that's just baffling."
And at the wake I waited around to see my ex first love
And I barely recognized her, but I knew exactly what she was thinking of
We sat quietly in the corner whispering close about loss
And I remembered why I loved her, and I asked her why I drove her off
She said
The slow fade of love
Its soft edge might cut you
And our poor friend, Jim
Well he just lived within
The slow fade of love
A woman calls my house once a week; she's always selling things
Some charity, a phone plan, a subscription to a magazine
And as I turned her down, I always do, there was something trembling in her voice
I said
Hey, what troubles you?
She said
I'm surprised you noticed
Well, my husband, he's leaving, and I can't convince him to stay
And he'll take our daughter with him, she wants to go with him anyway
I'm sorry I'm hard to live with, living is the problem for me
I'm selling people things they don't want when I don't know what you need
He said the slow fade of love
And it's mist might choke you
It's my gradual descent
Into a life I never meant
It's the slow fade of love
I was driving south of Melrose; I happened upon my old lover's old house
I found myself staring at the closed up door like the day she threw me out
"Dianna, Dianna, Dianna I would die for you
I'm in love with you completely, I'm afraid that's all I can do"
She said
"You can sleep upon my doorstep, you can promise me indifference, Jim
But my mind is made up, and I'll never let you in again"
For the slow fade of love
It might hit you from below
It's your gradual descent
Into a life you never meant
It's the slow fade of love
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0.044121 | <urn:uuid:61ef1d7c-380a-428c-9ab8-6a0c7b1c16c3> | en | 0.878582 | Sorry about that.
It looks like the page "www.marinello.com/beauty-schools/kansas/kansas/quiz/beauty-schools/def/main.aspx" doesn't exist.
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0.047366 | <urn:uuid:5214b1ec-cfe0-4cce-b659-d64340458586> | en | 0.962763 | Felix Morrow
Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain
4. Toward a Coalition with the Bourgeoisie
IN every other period of dual power—Russia of February-November 1917, Germany of 1918-19 are the most important—the bourgeois government continued to exist, thanks only to the entry into it of representatives of the reformist workers’ organizations, who thereby became the main prop for the bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries not only defended the Provisional Government within the Soviets but also sat with the bourgeois ministers in the government. Ebert and Scheidemann wielded a majority in the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils but simultaneously sat in the government. In Spain, however, for seven critical weeks, no workers’ representative entered the cabinet.
Not that the bourgeoisie did not want them there, nor that workers’ leaders were not available and willing! On the evening of July 19, when full confirmation of the workers’ conquest of Barcelona arrived, Azaña finally abandoned the attempt to form a ‘peace cabinet’ under Barrio. Giral became premier. Azaña and Giral asked Prieto and Caballero to enter the cabinet. Prieto was more than willing. Caballero refused Giral’s proposal, and Prieto dared not enter without him.
In Catalonia, during the last days of July, Companys took three Stalinist leaders into his cabinet. But in three days they were forced to resign, at the demand of the anarchists, who denounced their entry as disruption of the leading role of the Central Committee of Militias.
Thus, for seven weeks, the bourgeois governments remained isolated from the masses, unprotected by reformist ministers. Nor did the conduct of the republicans enhance their prestige. The more cowardly functionaries fled to Paris. The CNT Solidaridad Obrera published day after day a ‘Gallery of Illustrious Men’, of republicans who had fled. The government had in its possession one of the largest gold reserves outside those of the big imperialist powers—over six hundred millions in dollars—yet made no effort during those first two months to purchase arms abroad. It praised France’s attempts to organize ‘non-intervention’. It cried out against the workers’ seizure of the factories and organization of war production. It denounced the district committees and worker-patrols which were cleansing the rearguard of reactionaries.
The Catalan-bourgeois regime, led by the astute Companys (he had once been a lawyer for the CNT and had a keen knowledge of the workers’ movement), riding a revolutionary upsurge far more intense than that in Madrid, behaved much more cleverly than Azaña-Giral. In the first red weeks it sanctioned without question all steps taken by the workers. But it was even more isolated in Barcelona than was the Madrid cabinet.
The Madrid and Barcelona governments lacked the indispensable instrument of sovereignty: armed force. The regular army was with Franco. The regular police no longer had any real independent existence, having been swallowed up in the flood of armed workers. Though itself denuded of its police, most of whom had either volunteered or been sent, under workers’ pressure, to the front, the Madrid bourgeoisie had looked askance at the official status conceded to the worker-leadership of the militias by the Catalan government. The discreet explanation offered by the Esquerra leader, Jaime Miravittles, tells volumes:
The Central Committee of Militias was born two or three days after the [subversive] movement, in the absence of any regular public force and when there was no army in Barcelona. For another thing, there were no longer any Civil or Assault Guards. For all of them had fought so arduously, united with the forces of the people, that now they formed part of the same mass and had remained mixed up with that. In these circumstances, weeks went by without it being possible to reunite and regroup the dispersed forces of the Assault and Civil Guards. (Heraldo de Madrid, September 4, 1936.)
Yet, the fact is, despite the rise of dual power, despite the scope of the power of the proletariat in the militias and their control of economic life, the workers’ state remained embryonic, atomized, scattered in the various militias and factory committees and local anti-fascist defence committees jointly constituted by the various organizations. It never became centralized in nationwide Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils, as it had been in Russia in 1917, in Germany in 1918-19. Only when dual power assumes such organizational proportions is there put on the order of the day the choice between the prevailing regime and a new revolutionary order of which the Councils become the state form. The Spanish revolution never rose to this point despite the fact that the real power of the proletariat was far greater than the power wielded by the workers in the German revolution or, indeed, than that wielded by the Russian workers before November. Locally and in each militia column, the workers ruled; but at the top there was only the government! This paradox has a simple explanation: there was no revolutionary party in Spain, ready to drive through the organization of soviets boldly and single-mindedly.
But isn’t it a far cry from the failure to create the organs to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to the acceptance of the role of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie? Not at all. In a revolutionary period the alternatives are poised on a razor-edge: either one or the other. Every day is as a decade in peacetime. Today’s ‘realism’ becomes tomorrow’s avenue to collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Civil war is raging. The liberal bourgeoisie offers to co-operate in fighting the fascists. It is obvious that the workers should accept their aid. What are the limits of such cooperation? The ‘sectarian’ Bolsheviks, in the struggle against Kornilov, set exceedingly sharp limits. Above all, they gathered power in the hands of the soviets.
In the very heat of the struggle against the Kornilov counterrevolution in September 1917, when Kerensky and the other bourgeois ministers in the coalition government were certainly shouting for smashing Kornilov, as much as Azaña and Companys were declaiming against Franco, the Bolsheviks warned the workers that the Provisional Government was impotent and that only the soviets could defeat Kornilov. In a special letter to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, Lenin castigated those who uttered ‘phrases about the defence of the country, about supporting the Provisional Government’. ‘We will fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, even as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky,’ said Lenin. ‘On the contrary, we expose his weakness. There is the difference. It is rather a subtle difference, but it is highly essential and one must not forget it.’ And there was not the slightest thought of waiting until the struggle against Kornilov was over before taking state power. On the contrary, declared Lenin, ‘even tomorrow events may put power into our hands, and then we shall not relinquish it’. (Works, Vol.XXI, Book I, p.137) Lenin was ready to collaborate with Kerensky himself in a military-technical union. But with this pre-condition, already existing: the masses organized in class organs, democratically elected, where the Bolsheviks could contend for a majority.
Without developing soviets—workers’ councils—it was inevitable that even the anarchists and the POUM would drift into governmental collaboration with the bourgeoisie. For what does it mean, in practice, to refuse to build soviets in the midst of civil war? It means to recognize the right of the liberal bourgeoisie to govern the struggle, i.e., to dictate its social and political limits.
Thus it was that all the workers’ organizations, without exception, drifted closer and closer to the liberal bourgeoisie. In the intervening weeks, Azaña and Companys recovered their nerve, as they saw that the inroads of the workers were not to be consummated by the overturn of the state power. Azaña gathered together every officer who, caught behind the lines, proclaimed himself for the republic. At first the officers could deal with the militias only through the militia committees. But the Bolshevik method of using the technical knowledge of the officers without giving them power over the soldiers, can be employed only during the height of the transition from dual power to a workers’ state, or by a soviet régime. Little by little the officers pushed their way to direct command.
The government’s control of the treasury and of the banks—for the workers, including the anarchists, had stopped short at the banks, merely instituting a form of workers’ control which was little more than guarding against disbursements to fascists and encouraging capital loans to collectivized factories—gave it a powerful lever in encouraging the considerable number of foreign-owned enterprises (which had not been seized), in placing governmental representatives in the factories, in intervening in foreign trade, in providing room for quick growth to small factories and shops and traders that had been spared from collectivization. Madrid, controlling the gold reserves, used them as an unanswerable argument in Catalonia in instances where Companys proved powerless. Under contemporary capitalism, finance capital dominates manufacturing and transportation. This law of economics was not abrogated because the workers had seized the factories and railroads. All that the workers had done in seizing these enterprises was to transform them into producers’ co-operatives, still subject to the laws of capitalist economics. Before they could be freed from these laws, all industry and land, together with bank capital and gold and silver reserves, would have to become the property of a workers’ state. But this required overthrowing the bourgeois state. The manipulation of finance capital to curb the workers’ movement is a phase of the Spanish struggle which will deserve the most careful and detailed study, and undoubtedly will provide new insights into the nature of the bourgeois state. This weapon was openly unleashed in its full force much later, but even in the first seven weeks its guarded use enabled the régime to recover much lost ground.
In the very first weeks the government, feeling its way, returned to the use of one of the instruments of state power most hated by the workers, the press censorship. It was hated particularly because of the government’s use of it during the last days before the fascist rebellion, when socialist and anarchist warnings against the imminent civil war were deleted. Azaña hastened to assure the press that the censorship would be limited to military news; but this was merely a bridge to general censorship. The unreserved supporters of the Popular Front, the Stalinists and Prieto Socialists, agreed without a murmur. An objectionable feature in the Stalinist Mundo Obrero of August 20 led to suppression of the issue. Caballero’s Claridad grumblingly acceded. The anarchists and the POUM followed. Only the Madrid organ of the Anarchist Youth refused entry to the censor. But censorship was not a separate problem: it would inevitably be the prerogative of the state power.
In August, the CNT entered the Basque ‘Defence junta’ which was not a military organization at all, but a regional government in which the Basque big bourgeois party held the posts of finance and industry. This, the first time in history that anarchists participated in a government, was reported by the anarchist press without explanation. A great opportunity was presented to the POUM to win the CNT workers to struggle for a workers’ state, but the POUM made no issue of the Basque government-for the POUM acted identically in Valencia.
The ‘Popular Executive’, with bourgeois participation, was constituted in Valencia as a regional government, and here the POUM entered too. In those days the POUM’s central organ, La Batalla, was calling for an all-workers’ government in Madrid and Barcelona: the contradiction between this slogan and the Valencia step was passed by without comment.
Formed within two days of the uprising as a military centre, the Central Committee of the Catalan Militias began to undertake collaboration with the bourgeoisie in economic activities as well. Transformation of the Central Committee into a body of democratically elected delegates from the factories and militia columns would have given it more power and authority and, at the same time, would have reduced the role of the bourgeoisie to its actual strength in the militias and factories. This was the only way out of the dilemma. But the CNT was blind to the problem, and the POUM kept silent.
Finally, on August 11, the Council of Economy was formed on the initiative of Companys to centralize economic activity. Here it was, despite the bait of a radical economic programme, an undisguised question of socio-economic collaboration under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. But the CNT and POUM entered it.
Thus, in every sphere, the bourgeoisie edged its way back. Thus, the workers were carried, step by step, toward governmental coalition with the bourgeoisie.
To understand this process clearly, we must now examine more closely the political conceptions of the workers’ organizations.
Last updated on: 9.1.2006 | http://www.marxists.org/archive/morrow-felix/1938/revolution-spain/ch04.htm | dclm-gs1-421705528 | false | false | {
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0.020159 | <urn:uuid:36a8c946-42bc-4dd8-b533-beaa8f7abbc6> | en | 0.910885 | Managing an International Workforce
Whenever an organization expands its operations to other countries, it tends to become multicultural and will then face the challenge of blending various cultures together. The managerial personnel entering another nation need to adjust their leadership styles, communication patterns and other practices to fit their host country. Their role is to provide fusion of cultures in which employees from both countries adjust to the new situation seeking a greater productivity for the benefit of both the organization and the people of the country in which it operates.
Read More:
1. Human Resource Management from an International Perspective
2. Managing Workforce Diversity
3. Managing International HR Activities
4. Selection Criteria for International Assignments
Barriers to Cultural Adaptation
• Another category of managers called ‘individualistic’ place greatest emphasis on their personal needs and welfare. They are more concerned about themselves than the host country.
• Another potential barrier to easy adaptation of another culture occurs, when-people are predisposed to believe that their homeland conditions are the-best. This predisposition is known as the ‘self-reference criterion’ or ‘ethnocentrism’. This feeling interferes with understanding human behavior in other cultures and obtaining productivity from local employees.
Cultural Distance
To decide the amount of adaptation that may be required when personnel moves to another country, it is helpful to understand the cultural distance between the two countries. Cultural distance is the amount of distance between any two social systems. Whatever may be the amount of cultural distance, it does affect the responses of all individuals to business. The manager’s job is to make the employees adapt to the other culture and integrate the interests of the various cultures involved.
Cultural Shock
When employees enter another nation they tend to suffer cultural shock, which is the insecurity and disorientation caused by encountering a different culture. They may not know how to act. may fear losing face and self-confidence or may become emotionally upset. Cultural shock is virtually universal. Some of the more frequent reasons for cultural shock are as follows:
• Different management philosophies
• New language
• Alternative food, dress, availability of goods
• Attitude towards work and productivity
• Separation from family, friends and colleagues
• Unique currency system
Overcoming Barriers to Cultural Adaptation
• Careful selection of employees, who can withstand/adjust cultural shocks for international assignments is important.
Read More: Cross-cultural preperation in employee training programmes
Cultural Contingencies
Productive business practices from one country cannot be transferred directly to another country. This reflects the idea of cultural contingency that the most productive practices for a particular nation will depend heavily on the culture, social system, economic development and employee’s values in the host country. Hence, the expatriate managers must learn to operate effectively in a new environment with certain amount of flexibility. Labor policy, personnel practices and production methods need to be adapted to a different labor force. Organization structures and communication patterns need to be suitable for local operations.
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0.161696 | <urn:uuid:b37a3513-f157-4dd0-bcb7-a9a85da02aba> | en | 0.919139 |
Bashar Assad
Kurdish hope for autonomy drives politics across four nations' boundaries
WASHINGTON With its decision to drop ammunition and weapons to the defenders of the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, the Obama administration has inserted the United States into one of the most complex territorial and ethnic disputes to roil the Middle East. Unlike the better known split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, or the battle to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the battle over Kobani pits a relatively obscure political group against the extremists of the Islamic State. Here are some of the key terms used to discuss the complex situation: Kurdistan Literally the land of the Kurds, Kurdistan refers to a largely mountainous region about the size of... | http://www.mcall.com/topic/politics/government/heads-of-state/bashar-assad-PEPLT007504-topic.html?target=all&sortby=display_time%20descending | dclm-gs1-421775528 | false | false | {
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0.027836 | <urn:uuid:5832822b-0c25-4c3d-9b2b-4adca958b3c4> | en | 0.678795 |
Disney Cruise Line Remy Champagne Brunch
BrunchDining and DrinkingDisney Cruise Line
A duo of chocolate dessert, the Fondant Chocolat Croustillant with Sorbet Cacao and Jus Mousseux. The signature French restaurant aboard the Disney Fantasy and Disney Dream now offers a champagne brunch on some sailings. Disney Cruise Line | http://www.mcall.com/travel/vs-disney-cruise-line-remy-champagne-brunch-pi-007-photo.html | dclm-gs1-421785528 | false | false | {
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0.311547 | <urn:uuid:fcf55e90-c186-4a68-b81f-d360f47d206b> | en | 0.879266 | What is portal hypertension - MedicineNet
What Is Portal Hypertension?
Introduction to Portal Hypertension
Portal hypertension is an increase in the blood pressure within a system of veins called the portal venous system. Veins coming from the stomach, intestine, spleen, and pancreas merge into the portal vein, which then branches into smaller vessels and travels through the liver. If the vessels in the liver are blocked due to liver damage, blood cannot flow properly through the liver. As a result, high pressure in the portal system develops. This increased pressure in the portal vein may lead to the development of large, swollen veins (varices) within the esophagus, stomach, rectum, or umbilical area (belly button). Varices can rupture and bleed, resulting in potentially life-threatening complications.
Picture of Portal Hypertension
What Causes Portal Hypertension?
The most common cause of portal hypertension is cirrhosis of the liver. Cirrhosis is scarring which accompanies the healing of liver injury caused by hepatitis, alcohol, or other less common causes of liver damage. In cirrhosis, the scar tissue blocks the flow of blood through the liver and slows its function.
Other causes of portal hypertension include blood clots in the portal vein, blockages of the veins that carry the blood from the liver to the heart, a parasitic infection called schistosomiasis, and focal nodular hyperplasia, a disease now seen in people infected with the AIDS virus. Sometimes the cause is unknown.
What Are the Symptoms of Portal Hypertension?
The onset of portal hypertension may not always be associated with specific symptoms that identify what is happening in the liver. But if you have liver disease that leads to cirrhosis, the chance of developing portal hypertension is high.
The main symptoms and complications of portal hypertension include:
• Ascites (an accumulation of fluid in the abdomen).
• Encephalopathy or confusion and forgetfulness caused by poor liver function.
© 2005-2014 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.
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0.035691 | <urn:uuid:3cb9a460-0ecb-4c9a-8e31-065e5838cdc4> | en | 0.969141 | Get Covered America volunteers Cynae Derose (L) and Jalisa Hinkle talk with Daniel Glover about the Affordable Care Act - also known as Obamacare - while canvassing a Chicago, Illinois neighborhood September 7, 2013.
John Gress/Reuters
Your health exchange is coming to town
By Zeke Emanuel
This article was co-authored by Emanuel and Andrew Steinmetz, who serves as Emanuel’s administrative coordinator and research assistant.
Republican lawmakers can shout and cry and pout and threaten a government shutdown all they want, but the Affordable Care Act’s new Health Insurance Exchanges (or Marketplaces) are coming online.
On Tuesday, millions of Americans who do not get coverage through their employers will be able to sign up for an affordable, understandable health insurance policy on websites that will look a lot like Amazon or Expedia. And when they log on, they are in for a pleasant surprise.
According to a report released last week by the Department of Health and Human Services, premium rates for 2014 will be 16% lower than expected in the 48 states that have released their data—and that’s before tax credits and subsidies are factored in. Affordable prices can be found from coast to coast. In New York, premiums in the individual market are set to fall by as much as 50%. In Texas, a 27-year-old man from Houston will be able to buy insurance for as little as $138 a month, and that’s if he earns too much to be eligible for a tax credit. If he earns $25,000, he could pay as little as $81 a month.
This is big news for a lot of people. There are roughly 15.4 million Americans who buy their insurance on their own. There are also roughly 20 million Americans who are currently uninsured but will not be covered by Medicaid, even after the program is expanded in 26 states in January.
Until now, these 35-plus million Americans have been getting a raw deal. Their health insurance (if they even have it) has cost them much, much more than their friends’ and neighbors’ who get coverage through their employers. Why can the new Health Insurance Marketplaces offer these great deals?
One reason is that insurance companies can more accurately predict, for example, the total health costs of 500 people than they can the total health costs of one person. And since these 35-plus million Americans have to purchase insurance entirely on their own, without the benefit of a large employer pool, they’ve had to fork over much higher premiums to cover this increased unpredictability.
The health insurance exchanges will begin to change all of that. This week, when self-insured individuals and families log on to their new exchange website, they’ll be joining a larger pool of people who also want insurance. They might not know it, but they’ll be aggregating their risk with others’, and consequently, they’ll be making it easier for insurance companies to offer them lower prices.
Another reason is in the word Marketplaces—with an emphasis on market. The exchanges come replete with all the economic forces that drive down costs in every other industry. They have standardized plans in 4 tiers that make comparison-shopping easy. There will be plenty of choice. Individuals in a federally run exchange will have an average of 53 plans to choose from. This induces competition among insurance companies. If they expect to win new customers, they’ll have to strive to offer lower priced packages than their competitors. Choice and competition will create downward pressure on premiums, and the 35-plus million Americans who buy insurance on their own will pay much less as a result.
It is still puzzling how conservative Republicans who champion the free market can be so viciously opposed to this idea.
Over the long term, this downward price pressure bodes well for everyone—even people who currently get insurance through their employers. If premiums keep falling and the user experience is good, over time, buying insurance on the exchange might end up being a better deal than employer-based care. Or at the very least, employer-based plans will feel pressure to keep pace with plans on the exchanges.
Unfortunately, there is one potential hitch in all this progress. There are several states that are doing their best to make sure the exchanges don’t succeed. And in a cruel twist of irony, the states that are resisting the exchanges are actually the states that need them most.
The diabetes death rate in states that have refused to set up their own exchanges is 7% higher than the national average. And take a look at this map of female mortality rates. Notice anything? These are the very red states that are opting out of Medicaid and not running their own exchanges.
Via: The Advisory Board Company
The governors, state legislatures, and federal representatives in roughly half the states have committed themselves to gumming up the Affordable Care Act in any way possible. That means when you call your congressman’s office to ask how sign up for insurance, instead of saying “just go to,” the person on the other end will shrug and wish you good luck.
They are also discouraging enrollment among younger individuals, hoping to prey on a concept called adverse selection. If the population in the exchange is disproportionately old and disproportionately sick, insurance companies will still be able to charge very high prices for coverage because there would be a much higher likelihood they’d be stuck with high cost medical bills. Even though the risk would still be pooled and predictable, the risk would be too high. The presence of young and healthy people in the pool will allow risk to be spread and costs to go down for everyone.
Of course, young people have every reason to sign up. Buying insurance will be quick, easy, and accessible. They’ll be able to purchase it online, just like they purchase everything else. And many of them will be eligible for considerable subsidies. Of males aged 18 to 34 in the individual market today, for example, 60% will be eligible for Medicaid or a tax credit to help pay their insurance premiums. In Philadelphia, a bronze plan for a 27-year-old with an income of $25,000 will cost as little as $94 a month.
No matter how you slice it, the opening of the health insurance exchanges is a major milestone in American health care. We are at a pivot point. With these marketplaces providing choice and competition to individuals we will finally begin to lower insurance costs while also helping more people protect themselves from the financial burden of getting sick.
Check out to find out more information about the exchange in your state. And make sure to tell everyone you know: your health exchange is coming to town.
Affordable Care Act, Health Care, Medicaid and Obamacare
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My crush now appears to like me - what's he up to?
(35 Posts)
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 14:20:30
I am single, 40s, no kids, decided after my last relationship that I preferred being single and have been happily so for the past 10 years.
But there's a man who I work with - also in his 40s, married for a long time - who I have always liked, and thought that if he were single and I was interested in relationships, he'd be just my type. I never got the impression that he was into me at all though.
Then last autumn he just said out of the blue that he had moved out of his house and had to make a decision whether to separate from his wife. This triggered a massive crush - I guess because he was suddenly potentially available. I read up here on the Relationships board about similar situations and worked out that he almost certainly had an OW. So I decided to just try to get rid of the crush. Avoided him as much as I could, tried not to think about him, didn't ask him or anyone else any questions about his personal life. I just wanted him out of my head. He may have noticed the crush as I was very awkward around him for a while. I also lost a lot of weight, but credited this to a diet smile
We have a mutual friend who he confides in, who later dropped hints to me about a 'girlfriend', so it looks like there is in fact an OW.
He then moved to a branch in another town - the story was that it was so he could move in with his brother who lives there, although I imagine it was to be with the OW. He still has to come in to our branch sometimes though.
So six months have passed and my crush had petered out, but lately when he's in our office he's been very very friendly with me. I thought I was possibly imagining the flirting until another coworker made a sarcastic comment to him (like 'you obviously want a shag'). So now he's back in my head again.
So what's the most likely situation now?
He has no interest in doing anything, but wants to get me crushing on him again for the ego boost?
He wants a fling when he's working in our town, whilst still in a relationship with the OW? He probably thinks I don't know about her.
He's splitting from the OW and looking for a new GF? (If only...)
I could try getting information from the mutual friend, but I'm worried that this would be showing my hand.
I think I should just try to forget about him again and possibly find someone outside work to have a fling with, to get it out of my system.
Convince me smile
oopsadaisymaisy Sun 03-Mar-13 14:24:28
I'm probably not the best person to comment but in my experience men just love the attention. I get it lots! Bloody men! Well, only some men, not all men smile
SanctuaryMoon Sun 03-Mar-13 15:05:42
Sorry but this guy sounds awful, i would stay well away!
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 15:34:12
Oh dear I have made him sound awful, haven't I. He's actually very quiet and sweet and kind. I don't know why though, but I just have the slight niggle that underneath all that he could be a player. Even though his flirting is a bit too obvious, like he's not really used to doing it.
He probably does just want the attention sad
hellocatty Sun 03-Mar-13 15:36:37
well he probably does like you - so what?? he sounds like an idiot so give him a wide berth for a bit until you can suss out if he is worth it or not.
TomDudgeon Sun 03-Mar-13 15:47:06
From what you say he's a cheater so its not worth even considering going there
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 16:24:47
Tom, yes, it doesn't look good does it.
Although I did read on here somewhere that 95% of men who walk out on marriages have another woman to go to (which is how I worked out that he must have!). So do non-cheaters just stay in unhappy marriages? Or do most men in unhappy marriages become cheaters to make the break? This has puzzled me.
badinage Sun 03-Mar-13 16:31:16
Why do you assume that his marriage ended because he was unhappy? confused
Isn't it just as possible that he cheated and was thrown out? Or that his wife ended the marriage because she was unhappy? Or that his head was briefly turned by an OW and he mistakenly thought this was love, but his marriage was basically fine until he had an affair?
But isn't this irrelevant anyway if he's in a relationship and cheated to get it?
Hissy Sun 03-Mar-13 16:37:51
"He's actually very quiet and sweet and kind"
... and he had an OW.
That cancels out the sweet and kind bit.
Why are you so desperate for anyone that would look at you? why are you even considering that if this guy is back on the market that you should hurl yourself at him?
Slow down, if he left his wife (and kids?) for another woman, he would do the same to you. Cheats DO take OW and then cheat on them in turn.
Forget this guy, sign up to internet dating, go out for a few non-serious dates to toughen your hide up a bit, don't get too emotionally involved to begin with and give yourself some value and self worth.
If you behave anything like the way you come across on here, he will be seeing 'Easy Shag' and given his history.... <bullseye>
Don't sell yourself short, you are worth more than someone like him.
Mollydoggerson Sun 03-Mar-13 16:38:01
Why not wait until he asks you out, and then ask him straighout what the story is?
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 16:40:30
He said that he was deciding whether to leave or not. I suppose I just assumed that, if he was happy there, he wouldn't want to leave. I agree though, the marriage may have been happy until he had an affair. I don't know.
badinage Sun 03-Mar-13 16:51:30
Yeah but his wife might have insisted he moved out and then when he wouldn't give up the OW, forced his hand and gave him the order of the boot. That happens a lot. So what he might have meant was that he had to make a choice between the two relationships and because the OW one was all shiny and new, he was in lust and didn't want it to end, especially if he'd been found out.
Either way, this is a bloke who cheated on his wife and if he asks you out, is looking to cheat on the OW too.
What's to like?
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 16:54:17
Hissy, I'm really not desperate for anyone. My problem is that I got a crush on him and it's completely thrown me. I know I need to forget him, really.
What I would really like is to go back to how I was this time last year. Single and happy with it. Maybe I should just give it more time.
MsCellophane Sun 03-Mar-13 17:01:48
I would be finding out if there was a GF first, you are only assuming
I know lots of marriages that have ended without anyone else, especially long ones - mine was one of them. And I ended the marriage as I wasn't happy. The last person I dated ended his marriage as his wife had OM. Why assume he cheated?
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 17:08:31
badinage - He could have meant that. And if he is still with OW and asks me out that does indicate he's a serial cheater. Not good.
I'm still curious as to why all men who leave marriages seem to do it via affairs though. It's like there's not a good and bad set of marriage leavers: they are all the same.
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 17:10:51
MsCellophane I hadn't read your post before writing my last one (slow typer).
I did a lot of research initially to find out what the various scenarios were - and there did just seem to be the one.
And he has definitely had a gf in the last few months.
bingodiva Sun 03-Mar-13 17:15:12
sounds like he wasnt happy with his marriage and left and then someone else came along. if he is very quiet and his flirting obvious doesnt sound like he is a player... you, and some other people on here, seem to have focussed on all the negative stuff and made him out to be a bad person because he left his marriage so of course it must be his fault after all hes a man
zzzzz Sun 03-Mar-13 17:21:56
How do you know his wife hadn't had an affair and he was deciding weather he could forgive. Then moved in with his brother to save cash and is now back "out there".
You sound weirdly obsessed with his motives, on the basis of a few passing flirtatious comments. Ask him out for a drink and ask him if he's in a relationship.
witteringon Sun 03-Mar-13 17:32:58
I do think he left for an OW. Sorry, I didn't mention this before but there are a few other things that the mutual friend has said which point to this, but are a bit tenuous - I think he was kind of trying to tell me without telling me, IYKWIM.
But you are correct that I have no hard information.
Hissy Sun 03-Mar-13 18:32:28
OK then, but then this crush is a SIGN to you. It is the awakening of you.
It's not about HIM per se, it's about the idea of a man that DOES deserve you. You know that he is not good enough for you, and you know that you don't need to stoop to picking up a cheat for a boyf.
What this is, is a message to you to remind you what it feels like to be attracted to and desire someone.
You know that you can be single and happy, and that in itself gives great strength. Now that you have learned to be YOU, and to be happy with yourself, the big wide world is saying to you that you can't keep all that wonderfulness to yourself! You are ready for the next stage in your life!
How about getting back into dating, and filtering out the undesirables, you have the power and nous to do that now.
By allowing yourself to get hung up on someone that turned your head, you haven't seen that this person is merely a representation of what you need to be doing next.
allaflutter Sun 03-Mar-13 19:00:49
I understand what you are saying OP - I'm also puzzled my the black-and-white mentality on MN that once a cheater always a cheater. But in fast there IS a type of situation when marriage is stale and unloving on both sides and then a man (or a woman) cheats and leaves, in these cases there is no shock to the spouse. Obviously sometimes it's a one-sided unhappiness, but I also cringe that on MN no one considers the mutual unhappiness when it's a matter of time. My father divorced my mother early on because OW got pregnant but also really even my Mum concedes that they married vey young and were wrong for each other - not that it wan't painful for her. He married OW and lived with her for 15 or so yrs but later admitted that marriage was only happy for 4 yrs, and they slept in sep rooms for the last 5yrs as I visited and knew about this (had a DD together). The marriage was a shell where my father lost all imterest in his wife for various reasons and lived like neighbours - THEN the OW appeared (at his workplace) and put an effort towards him even though he wasn't confident as she was younger, and they've ended up together. Wife kicked up a big fuss financially and got what sge wanted but she knew full well marriage was over a while ago. Now he's been with this new woman for 8yrs and everyoine can see that they ARE really com[atible unlike his previous wives - ther is no way on earth he'll cheat on her as their r-ship is solid, and yes, he's much older than he was before but still. He couldn't divorce once he net ow but before getting involved because wife WOULDN'T agree to divorce so they just went to live together, so according to mn logic he's just a cheat and a bad person. Well neither he nor his prev wife are bad but they had a bad r-ship, and he was absolutel right to go with OW (and paid with a mild heart attack even). Yes, men don't like going off by themselves mainly because - they have to leave family home, pay wife and kids and they have nothing to live on (rent/buy) unless very wealthy. So it makes all the sense that they will wait for an ow first. When a woman leaves marriage, esp with child she CAN be living on her own more realistically as exH pays and leaves them the flat/house - at worst she can get benefits and accomodation fron the state.
As to your guy - I think you have to let him ask you out if he wants to, but don't rush into things, getto know his situation. Nothing wrong with slightly encouraging him with smiling etc., if he's already paying you attention. he may well be single now.
allaflutter Sun 03-Mar-13 19:02:22
Bear in mind, OP, that ow might have finished with him, so he could be free. She could also have never been serious gf, just a rebound after a bad marriage.
badinage Sun 03-Mar-13 22:27:54
Well that would only be logical if the OW had enough money of her own to fund his lifestyle, otherwise why would it 'only make sense' to leave if there was an OW? confused
There is of course the rather avant-garde option of leaving an unhappy marriage with dignity, without lies and then living on one's own.
But then of course such men would have to do all their own domestic tasks and look after their children on their own......and that would never do, would it?
I think you'll find that's why men in particular wait until there's another woman before leaving home.
Whereas women leave marriages for all sorts of reasons and they certainly don't all live off their ex husbands or the benefit system.
allaflutter Sun 03-Mar-13 23:35:16
yes, and I wasn't talking about 'all women'', badinage, but the law remains such that a mother with a child up to 16/17 gets the family flat/house (unless the father was main child carer while she worked, still a small minority), whereas the man has to leave - indeed that also for him means doing domestic chores but I'd say that's not a younger man's worry anymore as they tend to get married late these days and look after themselves for a while before marriage. Also I did say, exception for the wealthhy (both sides). For the average woman there is still SECURiTY just in case she doesn' earn enough or she becomes unwell or the child becomes unwell, that exH has to pay child maintenance. I'm coverung the average here, not a dozen of more unusual cases where exH is a bankrupt etc,etc. A man looses out financially when leaving and while he doesn't have to fund the OW's lifestyle, she's likely to own a property, either as a decent rental where he contributes, or property that HER ex left her (esp if she has dc). Plus OW may motivate him to take risks and to feel he's not losing out for nothing. The fact remains (so far) that majority of married men leave when there is an ow, whereas women leave often to be by themselves.
badinage Sun 03-Mar-13 23:47:35
I think a lot of that is old hat nowadays. Spousal maintenance and the primary carer keeping the house until the kids are independent are quite rare now actually. I wish you were right about younger men being prepared to do their own domestic work, but the threads on this board suggest otherwise......
Unless in a situation of wealth, both men and women lose out financially after a divorce - but especially the person who's left as the primary carer for whom earning money is difficult because of childcare. All the studies show that over an average lifetime, women suffer more financial losses after divorce than men. The trend towards shared parenting might equalise those losses a bit more, but it's much easier for a single parent to work and earn money if a new partner or ex partner are looking after the children, because paid childcare is so expensive.
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Lee Fang
ThinkProgress / Investigation
Published: Wednesday 24 August 2011
Article image
– Monday May 23 8:43pm: Haller writes to Flavio Cumpiano, a congressional liaison for the CFPB, the night before the hearing to make “an [sic] late change to 1:00.” At 11:00pm, Cumpiano responds to figure out a better time.
– Tuesday May 24 morning: After Haller and Cumpiano go back and forth with e-mails about which time would be best, a phone conversation occurs between Haller and Adewale Adeyemo, chief of staff to the CFBP implementation team, and a schedule is set. At 10:11am, Cumpiano e-mails Haller: “Hi Peter. I understand from Wally -copied here- that you both spoke and she’ll [Elizabeth Warren] testify from 1:15pm to 2:15pm. Thanks, Flavio.”
– Tuesday May 24 afternoon around 2:15pm: McHenry, with Haller sitting behind him, accuses Warren of trying to evading the committee by trying to leave at the agreed-upon time. When Warren noted that McHenry’s aides had agreed upon the schedule, McHenry elicited audible gasps in the room by declaring Warren a liar: “You’re making this up, Ms. Warren. This is not the case.”
– Tuesday May 24 2:32pm: As Warren leaves the hearing room, Haller fires off an e-mail to Cumpiano demanding that he “please confirm” that he did not “confirm the end time.” Later that afternoon, Cumpiano responds by reiterating that Haller had confirmed the 2:15pm end time, and had even told Adeyemo that he would inform McHenry of the schedule during the call.
Haller, who is visible to the C-SPAN camera in a seat near McHenry, shakes his head at Warren when she said “we had an agreement for the time this hearing” (time stamp 00:55). Watch here:
ThinkProgress reached out to Haller for comment on this story, but the Oversight Committee refused our request.
Goldman Sachs has spent millions this year lobbying on new Dodd-Frank mandates, and has sent its representatives to private meetings about the implementation of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules.
The Warren incident provides more fodder to critics who say Issa has turned his Oversight Committee over to lobbyists. In comments to the press, Issa’s spokeswoman did not deny that Haller worked previously Goldman Sachs or that he covers financial issues for the committee.
Public Citizen’s Bart Naylor commented on ThinkProgress’ story last Friday, noting “Chairman Issa must take every step to ensure that his investigations are unclouded by any appearance of conflict. The next time Chairman Issa sends a scolding letter to regulators and asks that they contact Peter Haller, he should disclose that Mr. Haller worked at Goldman Sachs.”
Author pic
ABOUT Lee Fang
Lee Fang is an investigative researcher and contributing author for NationofChange. A resident of Sacramento, CA, Lee has written for the Boston Globe, The Nation, and
A whole lot of avoiding the
A whole lot of avoiding the truth. Dismantle this thing called the bank cartel. They have had too much time to cover up. Crooks and liars will in fact kill you to get what they want. They have no business in serving the people of the United States of America. Elizabeth Warren is the type of public servant that this country needs. Our current banking system needs to go. If Timmy wants to protect them and he has then he needs to be held accountable. NY FED president before taking the US treasury job. He is fooling no one as to where is bread is buttered. Issa, Simonyi and Geithner should all be in jail as accomplices .
The scary thing is that
The scary thing is that someone voted for this McHenry toady. And scarier yet is the fact that some idiots will probably still vote for him. What a classless jerk.
Mr. McHenry have you no shame? You definately should be ashamed of yourself and you should be appologizing and grovelling at her feet.
Despicable behaviour for the
Despicable behaviour for the nation's representatives!
I am ashamed that McHenry is
I am ashamed that McHenry is from my state. He is an ideologically driven demagogue, and a danger to the Union. What is so bad here, he made Ms. Warren out to be a liar in an open hearing when HE was the lair. She was too polite to say it, so I'll say it for her.
McHenry seems treasonous. He
McHenry seems treasonous. He should be charged with it.
We need to Prosecute this
We need to Prosecute this people and send them to prison, this clip really pissed me of. They do not represent the people or America...... What happen to Tar and Feathers on a pole, that would be a good start before prison terms.
I don't suppose there are any
I don't suppose there are any apologies to Warren anywhere in the wind now that some duplicitous identity-switching lobbyist masquerading as a Republican aide has been found to be responsible for the scheduling issues?
Didn't think so.
I don't suppose there any
I don't suppose there any apologies to Warren anywhere in the wind?
Why is it that I am not the
Why is it that I am not the least, and I do mean the least, bit surprised by any of these yahoos that call themselves representatives of the people?! *$^@
And McHenry should be
And McHenry should be censured! If there is anyone with any class at all left in the federal government, this mealy-mouthed liar should be driven from Washington along with Darrel Issa and Peter Whatever-his-name-is-today.
You go, Lee Fang!!! Little by
You go, Lee Fang!!! Little by little, we will nail these cocksuckers. Hope to see you 10/6.
A couple of snakes! Snakes in
A couple of snakes! Snakes in the conGRESS! If Peter Simonyi, Haller, etc., etc. has to change his name to work for this snake of a congressman, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he is up to no good. In the criminal world, where both of them belong, this is called an alias. What name will Simonyi-Haller-? use next?
I am ashamed that McHenry is
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Read the rest... | http://www.nationofchange.org/revealed-former-goldman-sachs-vp-turned-issa-staffer-supervised-scheduling-elizabeth-warren-incident | dclm-gs1-422175528 | false | false | {
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0.031594 | <urn:uuid:d50642c3-1c8f-485f-a95b-188f7c758b35> | en | 0.969852 | Quake is major test for hard-luck California city
Quake is major test for hard-luck California city
VALLEJO, Calif. (AP) — The historic blue-collar town of Vallejo is a short distance but a far cry from the touristy Napa Valley vineyards and quaint towns. So when Sunday's earthquake struck, the damage to the wine industry took center stage and the rubble in Vallejo got scant attention.
Just 10 miles from the quake's epicenter, parts of the town suffered broken windows and collapsed masonry.
"This city has been through an awful lot," Keen said, including budget cuts that leave it operating at about 50 percent of normal city staffing. But, he said, "we'd never really worked together as a team" in an emergency before Sunday's quake.
Mostly, it seemed on Tuesday that Vallejo came through the challenge. Yellow-hatted building inspectors and structural engineers, including 20 from the state who showed up that morning to help, climbed the rolling city's hilltops to scan chimneys and rooftops for damage.
"Wouldn't want a lot of people standing in there and then all of a sudden it just collapses," Thomas said.
Vallejo is less than 15 miles south of tony Napa, the wining, dining and tourism center hardest hit by Sunday's quake, but Vallejo is in some ways a world away.
The city's poverty rate stands at 16 percent, and personal income is two-thirds that of Napa residents.
Elizabeth Hoffman ticked off past quakes felt here: "1906, 1989, and now. I don't think they're going to survive another one." Hoffman, 34, was taking her elementary-school-age son around Tuesday to show him the damage from the latest temblor.
Her driveway was one of 30 sites the city deemed too dangerous to enter because of quake damage. The shaking, less severe overall than up north in Napa, had sent a neighbor's Victorian chimney down on her parked car.
The hard side of everyday life was evident among the quake repairs. Residents walking back from a food bank with arms heaped with canned goods stopped to talk with neighbors about the quake — the new cracks they were noticing in their homes, how someone's cat had behaved in the quake. They were checking on each other, seeing if anyone needed a hand.
"There's a weird camaraderie in this town when weird stuff happens," Harvey said. "People help each other."
Associated Press photographer Eric Risberg contributed to this story. | http://www.newstalk990.com/news/articles/napa-earthquake-hastens-calls-for-warning-system | dclm-gs1-422345528 | false | false | {
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0.031495 | <urn:uuid:74d4f2b1-8d59-4084-a3f2-203cfb84a3ad> | en | 0.992512 | NUFORC Home Page
National UFO Reporting Center
Sighting Report
Occurred : 10/1/1973 21:30 (Entered as : 10/01/73 21:30)
Reported: 9/19/2011 11:29:24 PM 23:29
Posted: 10/10/2011
Location: Beatty, NV
Shape: Disk
Duration:2 hours
Lights in the sky and lost time
Dear Mr. Davenport, As per your email request I am responding using your online reporting form. I went to high school in a small southern Nevada town. Certainly strange things happen in Nevada as they do elsewhere but with Nevada being home to area 51 and a history of nuclear programs and black projects it's notoriety for strange happenings puts it at the forefront. Small communities generally have little to do for kids except school sports for those interested in them and cruising up and down the streets in their cars. To afford the expense of having cars we had jobs at various businesses providing cheap labor for the owners. It also would supposedly keep us out of trouble. For the most part we stayed out of trouble but, we were teenagers after all. My friend and I played sports and each of of had jobs at gas stations at opposite ends of town. Back then they were called service stations since we actually washed the windows, checked the oil and filled the gas tank.
One school night in 1973 or 1974, I don't recall exactly, we planned to meet after work at the stationed I worked at and do a little cruising and drink a few beers from the six pack we had. My friend closed the station he worked at a few minutes before 9:00 and came to the station I worked at which was open 24 hours a day. We got into my car and drove north out of town. We both opened our first beer and listen to the radio and talked. It was a nice night in late summer and we had the windows down. I had been driving around 35 miles an hour for about 20 minutes or so and noticed the road in front of us appeared white. As I drove into the white area of highway I saw it was snow and I stepped on the brake and slid off the road. Fortunately I had slowed down even more so I wasn't off the road much. I turned back on the highway and headed south towards town again. I pulled off to the roadside and stopped just past the snow line on the road and turned the car off. We got out of the car and went to where it was snowing. What was interesting was the snow was creating a slow moving line on the pavement. It was like a wall of snow and we could step into the snowy area and step out. We made a few snow balls and threw them at each other to have a little fun since snow was uncommon to see in our area. I noticed the snow had reached my car and I figured I should move it forward some since the windows were still down. I pulled it forward on the side of the road about 30 feet and turned it off again. We had both finished our first beer and my friend had walked to the car. We both decided to take a leak before heading back to town. It was about 20 minutes before 10:00. We both had 11:00 curfews so we had plenty of time to get back to town with time to spare. It was dark out and quiet. As we stood there we looked up and saw a series of lights. It appeared as though they were on something circular shaped and slowly rotating since one would go out on one side while one would appear on the other. It didn't seem to be moving other than it's rotation. Whatever it was, it was huge. We were both really frightened and quickly went towards the car. That's where our memories end for a period. The next recollection we have is almost like coming out of a sleep. I'm driving and in front us us are the lights of town. I asked my friend what time it was and turned on the dome light so he could see his watch. It was almost 11:30. I took him back to his car quickly and dropped him off. We both hurried to our homes since it was beyond our curfews. The next day at school when we saw each other my friend asked, "What the hell happened last night." I responded, "I have no idea but it was something weird." He said, "Do you think we should tell someone?" I said, "If we do they'll think we're crazy." We left it at that and over the years when we have spoken the subject has come up but neither of us can recall what happened during the lost time. It's always bothered me that I can't recall the events of that night but I always kind of left it on the back burner, until recently. I was having shoulder pain from a torn rotator cuff in my right shoulder and went to see a surgeon to take care of it. He did some x-rays at his office and came to the room for the consultation. He asked if I had been in an accident or had a knife tip possibly broken off in my shoulder. I told him nothing like that had ever happened to me and asked why he would ask such an unusual question. He said the x-ray showed a triangular shaped object medial to the rotator cuff tear but it was not what was causing the problem. He said he couldn't tell if it was metal, glass or plastic. He said it definitely wasn't bone and suggested I get an MRI done. It wasn't the first time I had an MRI done, just the first time for the shoulder. During an MRI you can communicate with the technician. It seemed to be taking much longer than they had told me so I asked if there was a problem. The technician said, "There is something in your shoulder that is distorting the magnetic field and I can't get a clear picture." Before the surgery I asked the surgeon if he was going to remove the object and he said he was not because it wasn't close enough to were he was going to do the rotator cuff repair. I never quite felt the same after surgery. I can't really explain how except I just have never felt the same. Two years later I was still having pain in the same shoulder. I went to a different surgeon and he also sent me for an MRI. During the procedure I asked the technician if he was getting a clear picture and he said there was no problem. I asked him if he had the prior MRI report and he did have it. I asked if he could see the same object that the prior report detailed. He said it was no longer there. So far that is the extent of my story. I would love to find an individual that can conduct regression hypnosis so I can fill in the blanks. If you can be of any help I would truly appreciate it.
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0.040462 | <urn:uuid:424f8801-6fc4-4a84-9b91-2f387716cdad> | en | 0.941987 | Edition: U.S. / Global
Looser Rules Proposed for Health Claims on Food Labels
Published: July 11, 2003
The Food and Drug Administration plans to loosen its regulations for health claims on food, making it easier for companies to make them based on less scientific information. The agency said it wanted to provide more and better information about diet to consumers to help them lower their risks of chronic diseases.
''Many Americans are not getting clear information on how the foods they choose affect their health,'' the agency commissioner, Mark B. McClellan, said yesterday at a news conference. ''We need to do a better job on this urgent public health problem.''
The National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute will work closely with the F.D.A. on this project, Dr. McClellan said.
Critics say the new standards, instead of helping the public, will confuse it, and they contend that the new procedures for approving the claims may be illegal. One critic is the former commissioner of the agency, Dr. David A. Kessler, who helped to write the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990.
The new standards ''seem to fly directly in face of all work done by Congress implementing the N.L.E.A.'' Dr. Kessler said. ''There is so much nutritional chaos. This will just add to it. It's a potential return to the 'tower of Babel,' '' referring to a remark by Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, then secretary of health and human services.
Before the 1990 nutrition act, companies could make almost any health claim without federal approval. When the act was passed, Dr. Sullivan said, ''The tower of Babel in food labels has come down, and American consumers are the winners.''
The 1990 law requires ''significant scientific consensus'' -- a preponderance of scientific evidence -- for a health claim. Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, who was the author of the act, said that under the stringent rules 75 percent of the claims submitted to the agency later proved false. Mr. Waxman and other critics say the new rules ignore the 1990 law and could be illegal as a result.
In a letter to the commissioner, the American Medical Association said: ''The scientific evidence is, for the most part, inadequate to support the so-called 'qualified' health claim that might be made. Consumers are likely to be, at best, confused, at worst, seriously misled by these claims.''
But the American Heart Association and the Consumer Federation of America called the new plan a good idea.
The new rules provide for establishing a graduated set of four claims from the one that now exists. That one would be given the highest ranking and would be designated by the letter A, though the agency has made no decision about whether the letter will appear on the label. At the other end of the scale would be a claim given the letter D that would require it to state that ''very limited and preliminary scientific research suggests'' the claim, which would be spelled out at that point. It would then add, ''F.D.A. concludes that there is little scientific evidence supporting this claim.''
Letter B claims will have to say: ''Although there is some scientific evidence supporting the claim, the evidence is not conclusive.'' Letter C claims will say ''some scientific evidence suggests'' the claim, then carry this statement: ''However, F.D.A. has determined that this evidence is limited and not conclusive.''
Companies wishing to make a claim would be required to include the agency's exact wording.
The Grocery Manufacturers of America is pleased with the agency's decision to allow a wider range of claims. ''The ability to use qualified health claims by the food industry will provide food manufacturers with new incentives to develop and market new healthier-for-you products,'' the group's director of scientific and nutrition policy, Alison Kretser, said yesterday.
But, Ms. Kretser said, the group would prefer to let each company find ''the best language for each qualified health claim,'' rather than use the agency's wording.
The agency has taken the position that it is being forced to produce the new rules because a 1999 court decision on health claims for dietary supplements found that the F.D.A. could not use the same stringent rules for supplements that it uses for food. The ruling did not address the food standards.
Beginning in September the agency will accept petitions requesting health claims. One of the first claims Dr. McClellan said he expected to be approved was the National Cancer Institute's recommendation to eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day to help prevent cancer.
Bruce Silverglade, legal director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, said the ''commissioner's argument that it is necessary to roll back health standards to use this type of message is specious.'' He said his group was considering a suit to bar use of the new standards. | http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/11/us/looser-rules-proposed-for-health-claims-on-food-labels.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm | dclm-gs1-422505528 | false | false | {
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0.349334 | <urn:uuid:b44bf8ca-d517-4be2-a5cb-3b69c252ba66> | en | 0.96551 | Fruits of the Deep Ecology Tree: Re-Enchantment
The re-enchantment of the world refers to the return of a sense of mystery to the world or to a sense of our participation in that mystery through our non-intellective, imaginative faculties. Re-enchantment is a countercultural response to a reductionist and positivistic science which views nature (including human beings) as mechanism and a capitalism which reduces nature (including human beings) to commodity and resource. [Read more...]
There’s being Earth-centered, and then there’s being earth-centered: why both are important
I recently made two attempts to explain why I think why our subjective experience should be given as much importance in our discourse as our attempts to bracket that subjectivity in favor of the ideal of scientific objectivity. This discussion was framed in terms of the relative value of geo-centric and helio-centric perspectives on the [Read More...]
My (Neo-)Pagan Elevator Speech
Jonathan Korman (whose post I can’t seem to talk enough about) recently described an awkward interaction he witnessed at a Pagan festival: I was at a public Pagan festival a while ago and a passing non-Pagan asked one of the people working at the information booth who we all were and what we were doing. [Read More...] | http://www.patheos.com/blogs/allergicpagan/tag/disenchantment/ | dclm-gs1-422685528 | false | false | {
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0.036746 | <urn:uuid:4d5ebe84-cbf0-499d-80b4-7002e33d2b7f> | en | 0.978115 |
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, photographed in 2001, are now professors in Chicago.
Todd Buchanan
courtesy of the San Francisco Police Department
In 2007, a memorial plaque to honor McDonnell was placed outside Park Police Station in the Upper Haight.
Jacob Poehls
Former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn is suspected by investigators of organizing the deadly attack on Park Police Station.
Courtesy of Max Noel
Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers, pictured in a law-enforcement identification kit from the 1970s.
Courtesy of Max Noel
Former Weather Underground member Mark Rudd has denied that the group was involved in the bombing of Park Police Station.
courtesy of Max Noel
FBI evidence photos document bombmaking supplies found in a Weather Underground safe house in Nob Hill in 1971.
Courtesy of Max Noel
Retired FBI special agent Max Noel was angered by arguments defending the Weather Underground during the 2008 election
Jacob Poehls
FBI special agent Noel inspects Weather Underground members’ belongings during a 1971 apartment search.
Courtesy of Max Noel
FBI special agent Noel inspects Weather Underground members’ belongings during a 1971 apartment search.
Noel (left) and two unidentified agents discuss the pursuit of Weather Underground fugitives in 1971.
Courtesy of Max Noel
Information in the long-running investigation into the Park Station bombing has been closely held by authorities, who still cling to hopes of bringing charges in the nearly 40-year-old case. Yet rumors have circulated for decades that the Weather Underground, a militant leftist group, was involved in the attack.
Working from these statements, authorities have quietly devoted far more attention to the Weather Underground in recent years than was previously known. Dohrn, Machtinger, and Ayers were all targets of a secret federal grand jury investigation in 2003 into McDonnell's killing, according to San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Stuart Hanlon, who has become familiar with the Park Station case while defending a client charged in another 1970s police murder. While indictments against the three were never issued, Hanlon said, "it was clear they were the targets. They weren't called — other people were called about them. The Weather Underground was the target of Park Station [investigators]."
Reagan, 68, has little in common with the partisans who tried to make hay from Ayers' militant past during the 2008 election season. A gruff career undercover investigator who now lives in retirement north of San Francisco, he has deployed his talents for disguise and detection to help bring down extremist groups of all political stripes.
"I worked the right wing as hard as I worked these nuts," he said of the Weathermen. "But the press kisses their asses, and a lot of the information isn't out there."
In 2000, Reagan was recruited out of retirement to join the Phoenix Task Force, a team of local and federal law enforcement officials investigating unsolved cop killings from the 1970s, including the long-dormant Park Station case. Among his duties was sifting through the FBI's voluminous paperwork on the Weather Underground.
He soon came across a set of decades-old documents that astonished him. In the bulging case file on the Weathermen was a sheaf of FD-302 forms, used by bureau agents then, as now, to summarize interviews performed in the course of investigations.
The FBI's first recorded statements on the Park Station bombing plot came from interviews over two days in June 1972 with a man who once had been a writer for the Berkeley Tribe, an underground newspaper. While Reagan would not disclose the man's name, law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation said he is Matthew Landy Steen, who has used the alias William Hellis Coquillette.
Steen told agents he had attended a Bay Area meeting in January 1970 at which half a dozen Weather Underground activists discussed their plans to plant a bomb at Park Police Station. Among those Steen placed at the meeting were Dohrn, the Weather Underground's charismatic leader; and Machtinger, who investigators believed to be one of the group's principal bomb technicians.
Also in the case file were multiple forms from interviews with a former Weather Underground member named Karen Latimer. In the mid-1970s, years after Steen spoke to the FBI, Latimer came forward to say she had attended a separate planning session for the Park Station attack with Dohrn and Machtinger in the winter of 1970. (In the months leading up to the bombing, Dohrn was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, according to an account in A Radical Line, the family memoir of Thai Jones, son of former Weatherman Jeff Jones.)
At these meetings, Reagan said, Dohrn "seemed to be more or less the ringleader," while "Machtinger gave instructions on how to build the bomb, and they discussed the placing of the bomb at Park Station."
Reagan said the witnesses' descriptions of the meetings were consistent with each other and strikingly similar to other Weather Underground planning sessions he had personally attended while an undercover agent. The idea, he said, was to implicate all members in a criminal conspiracy, reducing the chance that anyone would turn to the police.
"To them, building a bomb is an act of cohesion," Reagan said. "It's almost like the Mob, when they ask someone to kill somebody or hack a guy's arm off. They trust you more when they're dirty with you."
Reagan's account was confirmed by Max Noel, another retired FBI agent who investigated the Weathermen in the 1970s while based at the bureau's San Francisco field office. "They did exist, and they were credible," Noel said of the statements.
San Francisco police Inspector Joe Engler, the lead detective on the Phoenix Task Force, declined to comment on evidence or potential witnesses in the Park Station case, citing the ongoing investigation into the bombing. He referred a request for the forms on Latimer and Steen to federal authorities. At press time, the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said a Freedom of Information Act request from Village Voice Media for the documents was being reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
For decades, the only known indications of the Weather Underground's involvement in the bombing of Park Station had been tenuous hearsay from Larry Grathwohl, a U.S. Army veteran hired by the FBI to infiltrate the Weathermen in 1969. In sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1974 and in a 1976 memoir, Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen, Grathwohl asserted that he had heard from Ayers during a meeting of a Weather Underground cell in Buffalo, N.Y., that Dohrn "had to plan, develop, and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco." But former Weathermen have long dismissed his story as a fabrication. During a book tour of the Bay Area in January, Ayers told the San Francisco Chronicle that Grathwohl was "a paid dishonest person."
Reviewing the bureau's files in 2000, however, it was plain to Reagan that the case against the Weathermen went well beyond a solitary piece of after-the-fact hearsay relayed by an FBI mole. When he read the statements from the other two informants, who had independently supplied similar details about Weather Underground members conspiring to bomb Park Station, he had one thought: Why didn't they prosecute?
It turns out that law enforcement officials had come much closer to pouncing on the Weather Underground than Reagan realized. In fact, according to another investigator familiar with the case, prosecutors came within a hair's breadth of filing charges against the group in the 1970s based on Latimer's testimony alone.
An articulate young woman with short dark hair who had joined the Weathermen after getting involved with the antiwar movement at Michigan State University, Latimer wore a tan pantsuit on the day she met with San Francisco detectives in a Financial District hotel room. According to the investigator with knowledge of the case, she had come forward to betray her former comrades in the revolution to have a federal hold on her passport lifted so she could travel abroad, and was delivered to San Francisco police by FBI agents. She was willing to testify in court if granted personal immunity from prosecution.
Listening to Latimer calmly narrate the planning of the Park Station attack, step by step, the local detectives knew they finally had a break. In fact, they believed she could make their whole case. Latimer claimed to have personally cased the station, and could describe the package that had held the explosive device before it had gone off. "It was just too detailed," the investigator familiar with the case said. "It was A to Z without leaving out L and M. I was convinced."
The day after interviewing Latimer, the investigator said, the detectives hastily convened a conference with San Francisco District Attorney John Jay Ferdon and a federal prosecutor. At that meeting, the police officers and federal prosecutor argued for granting Latimer immunity and proceeding to file charges. (It is unclear which Weather Underground members would have been named as defendants, or whether the D.A. and U.S. Attorney were aware of Steen's earlier statement to police.)
Ferdon opposed this plan, arguing that Latimer's sudden appearance could be a ploy. Once she was granted immunity, he feared she would simply change her story and confess to planning and executing the bombing alone, clearing herself and her former comrades of criminal liability. He won the argument, and local detectives renewed their efforts to find more evidence or informants to support a prosecution.
Caution in filing charges based solely on Latimer's statements may have been warranted for other reasons. Testimony from criminally implicated informants is notoriously problematic for prosecutors, who must explain to a jury why their witnesses aren't merely lying to avoid more severe punishment. Hence the need, in an ideal world, for more extensive corroboration of what happened the night of the bombing, or physical evidence — in the form of fingerprints or ballistics — to back up Steen's and Latimer's stories.
The FBI's witness statements are also less comprehensive than investigators would like. For instance, neither Steen nor Latimer said they had been present for the construction of the bomb (though Reagan said at least one of them reported seeing bomb-making materials, such as detonator cord, at the planning session), and neither had seen who placed the device on the station's window ledge.
And then there is the most vexing obstacle to a successful prosecution of the Weathermen based on former collaborators' confessions — the inconvenient fact that an entirely different set of militant activists has also claimed credit for the bombing.
On August 28, 1971, Anthony Bottom and Albert Washington, cadres of the violent Black Panthers splinter group known as the Black Liberation Army, pulled up in a car alongside the patrol cruiser of San Francisco police Sergeant George Kowalski at an intersection in the Mission and leveled a submachine gun at him. The BLA was suspected or convicted of multiple attacks on police officers in the 1970s, including the 1971 shotgun killing of Sergeant John Young at San Francisco's Ingleside Police Station. On this occasion, however, they were unsuccessful. The gun, loaded with the wrong type of ammunition, jammed. Bottom and Washington were arrested and charged with attempted murder.
Over the next month, Bottom, while in police custody, made an extraordinary series of statements, according to investigators familiar with his case. He reportedly told SFPD homicide inspectors Frank McCoy and Eddy Erdelatz that he had personally planted the bomb that killed McDonnell at Park Station, and said he had helped plan the Ingleside attack, which took place while he was in jail. He also claimed involvement in the bombing of St. Brendan's Church in the Forest Hill district of San Francisco during a police funeral in October 1970, and in a plot to plant sticks of dynamite on the roof of the Mission District police station.
When he made his far-ranging confession, Bottom was already destined for prison. A revolver found with him at the time of his arrest had been traced to New York City police officer Waverly Jones, who was gunned down with his partner, Joseph Piagentini, by BLA members in a Manhattan housing project that May. Today, Bottom is serving a life sentence for his conviction in their murders at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
A number of law enforcement officials with knowledge of the Park Station case view a BLA link to the bombing with skepticism. Bottom, in particular, was famous among detectives of the era for his big mouth. "He was just a guy who liked to hear himself talk," one investigator said. "We could not corroborate independently what he told us about Park." Another former investigator connected to the case is more blunt: Bottom, he said, "would confess to the quake of '89."
Mark Goldrosen, a San Francisco attorney who represented Bottom when he was charged in 2007, with seven other defendants, for the 1971 attack on Ingleside Station, concurs with investigators' dismissive takes on his client's statements about the Park bombing. "If he had admitted it, and if it was considered credible, this would have been prosecuted a long time ago," he said.
Another former BLA member, Ruben Scott, also told police in the 1970s that the organization was involved in the Park Station killing, according to law enforcement sources. Scott reportedly said that he was not personally present the night of the bombing.
The BLA connection to Park Station may be a red herring — or it could mean that McDonnell's murder was simply the result of two militant groups working in tandem. A prime tenet of the Weathermen's through-the-looking-glass revolutionary doctrine was that it was their duty to shed "white-skin privilege" and put themselves at the service of black radicals, and there are indications that the affinity between the BLA and Weathermen was particularly strong.
For example, the BLA collaborated with former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert in a 1981 armed robbery in Nanuet, N.Y., that ended with the deaths of two police officers and a Brink's armored truck guard. Ayers and Dohrn have also expressed their fondness for members of the BLA in surprisingly personal ways. Their son, Zayd Dohrn, is named after BLA member Zayd Shakur, who died in a shootout with New Jersey state troopers in 1973.
From today's vantage point, the spectacle of so many revolutionary groups competing to blow up or shoot sworn peace officers might seem strange. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, America's major cities were in something close to a guerrilla war. In 1972 alone, the FBI attributed 1,500 bombings within the United States to "civil unrest" from domestic radical groups. Noel, the retired San Francisco FBI agent, said police officers routinely searched their patrol cars for bombs before starting their engines.
In this environment, many law enforcement officials resorted, with unfortunate results, to dubious practices of their own. The most notorious example of police overreach from the era was doubtless the FBI's COINTELPRO, an elaborate program of domestic espionage that targeted peaceful civil-rights groups alongside the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. Senate hearings on the program in the late 1970s concluded with a formal denunciation of such FBI tactics as wiretapping and illegal property searches.
The rise and fall of the Weather Underground is one of the more outlandish chapters in the phantasmagoria of Vietnam-era radicalism. Formed in 1969 as a militant faction of the mass antiwar movement Students for a Democratic Society, what was then commonly called the Weathermen — named after the Bob Dylan lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" — proclaimed a desire to foment what they saw as an imminent, global communist revolution within the U.S. Their motto: "Bring the war home." (After the winter of 1970, "Weathermen" became the Weather Underground, a nod to the group's fugitive status and disdain for sexist pronouns.)
In December 1969, the group convened a "war council" in Flint, Michigan, announcing its plans to attack institutions of the U.S. government and oppose "everything that's good and decent in honky America," according to an account of the meeting by former Weatherman Mark Rudd in his memoir, Underground. Rudd goes on to recount his own contribution to the proceedings: "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig," he told the group, using the '60s slang for police officer. "It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building." Presiding over the meeting was Dohrn, the mercurial beauty FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once called "the most dangerous woman in America."
The University of Chicago-educated Dohrn was a diva of the radical left, known for her shrill revolutionary creed. "We're about being crazy motherfuckers," she announced at the war council. Raising four fingers in what became known as the "fork salute," she praised the acolytes of cult leader Charles Manson for stabbing pregnant actress Sharon Tate in the stomach with a fork when they killed her in 1969.
This darker phase of the Weathermen lasted through March 6, 1970, when three members of the group were killed in an accidental explosion while building a bomb at a Greenwich Village townhouse. That bomb, members of the group would later reveal, was intended to cause a massacre at an Army dance in Fort Dix, N.J.
Following the townhouse explosion, the Weather leadership convened a summit at a beach house on California's fog-hung Mendocino coast. At that conference, they decided to alter their bombing campaign, targeting only empty government facilities, according to Rudd's memoir. Now in hiding or "underground" because of riot and conspiracy charges, the Weathermen went on to claim responsibility for setting small bombs at the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and the State Department, none of which resulted in loss of human life.
Significantly, the attack on Park Station falls within the narrow period between December 1969 and March 1970 when the Weather Underground was still loudly devoted to killing people.
"During that 10 weeks, they were intending, by their own statements — many statements — to commit acts of violence against persons," said Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism professor and former SDS president who has written extensively on the history of the 1960s. Gitlin admitted that he had no direct knowledge of the Weathermen's actions during the time in question, but said the bombing would have fit their M.O.: "It would have been consistent with their pronounced strategy during February 1970 if they had been involved in Park Station."
Resurfacing at the end of the decade, many of the Weathermen saw charges against them dropped or resolved with meager penalties because of the questionable FBI tactics used against them. Some went on to rehabilitate themselves through careers in academia. Dohrn is now a professor at Northwestern University Law School, and Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Machtinger became a teacher in North Carolina. No former member or associate of the Weather Underground has ever publicly acknowledged a role in the Park Station bombing.
Dohrn, Machtinger, and Ayers did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. Brian Flanagan, a New York City resident and former Weather Underground member who has condemned the group's tactics as misguided, denied that any Weathermen had carried out the bombing. "There's nothing that I have for you on Park Station, except that it was not the Weather," he said. "I'm absolutely positive." He declined to say whether he was in San Francisco when the attack took place: "That's as far as I'm going to go."
Rudd, who once held a leadership position in the group, said he didn't think the Weathermen had a hand in the murder of McDonnell but acknowledged that he could not be sure, since he was not based in California at the time of the bombing.
"It's my impression that Weather Underground was not involved in that at all," he said in a telephone interview from New Mexico, where he now lives. "I was on the East Coast at the time, but I was still high enough in the organization. I never heard anything about it. Not only that, I was in a position to know." He added, "Of course, that's not any kind of exculpatory evidence."
If the Weather Underground was involved in the attack on Park Station, the group's denials or silence on events during the winter of 1970 would make sense, at least from a legal perspective. Unlike the bloodless bombings the Weathermen carried out in the mid-1970s, murder and related conspiracy charges carry no statute of limitations. In other words, if prosecutors opted to file charges in the Park Station bombing, Dohrn, Machtinger, or any others implicated in the attack could be hauled into court.
Meanwhile, veteran investigators still fume over the ease with which Ayers and Dohrn have assumed the mantle of middle-class respectability. When people talk to Noel about the Weather Underground's avowed intent not to harm people, he likes to tell the story of a 1971 search of one of the group's principal "safe houses," an apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood. Inside, FBI agents and SFPD inspectors discovered C-4 explosives, voice-activated bomb switches, and concealable shivs made from sharpened knitting needles epoxied into the caps of ballpoint pens.
"'Voice-activated switch' means the bomb goes off when a person comes in and talks," Noel said. "This whole image that these were nice-type people is what makes me upset. It's bullshit. That's not what they were. They were thugs and they were criminals trying to overthrow the U.S. government." During the 2008 election season, Noel even made a brief televised appearance with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News to counter the arguments of Weather Underground apologists who were saying the group had been essentially nonviolent.
Noel, Reagan, and other law enforcement officials interviewed for this story still hold out hope that the Park Station case will one day bring a reckoning for the Weathermen. But the specter of the Vietnam era's radical legacy should be summoned with care, as another prominent cold case from the same period illustrates.
In 2007, the California Attorney General's Office filed charges against eight alleged former Black Liberation Army radicals — Bottom among them — for the attack on Ingleside Police Station and the murder of San Francisco police Sergeant John Young in 1971. The same Phoenix Task Force that reopened the Park Station investigation was responsible for building the case on the Ingleside attack.
After lengthy litigation and an outcry from liberal activists over the belated prosecution, charges against five of the defendants were dropped. An additional two, including Bottom, pleaded guilty to lesser charges and received probation — hardly a meaningful punishment for someone serving a life sentence. Charges against the eighth and last defendant have yet to be resolved, but by most accounts, the case has been a huge disappointment for cold-case investigators and a humiliation for the state Attorney General's Office.
According to San Francisco defense attorney Hanlon, who represented one of the Ingleside defendants, the documentation he's seen on Park Station doesn't bode for better results. "I've looked at probably 90 percent of the evidence," he said, explaining that much of it was available to Ingleside defense attorneys because of the BLA's possible connection to the bombing. "They have no case, and that's why they have no prosecution. They have enough snitches. They just don't have any evidence."
Investigators privately acknowledge that, as time passes, a conviction seems more improbable. Steen, one of the two former radicals who described the Weather Underground's alleged planning of the Park Station bombing to the FBI, apparently became a homeless drifter. It is unclear whether he would still be a competent witness. A 2002 SFPD bulletin seeking him as a witness in a criminal conspiracy investigation states that he was "transient," last encountered by police during a 2000 arrest for squatting in Golden Gate Park. Steen could not be reached by Village Voice Media for comment.
Latimer, who would likely have been a star witness for the prosecution, died several years ago, according to Reagan. During his brief return to the Park Station case in 2000, Reagan said, he re-established contact with Latimer, whom he had known during his years as an undercover agent in the 1970s. Speaking to her again after the intervening decades, he found her deeply frustrated that her decision to cooperate with law enforcement so many years ago had been of little consequence.
"She was looking for a form of justice, and she was totally disappointed that there wasn't enough to prosecute," he said. "To her, it was a reality. She was there, and she heard them talking about doing this."
But the Weathermen, fugitives for the better part of a decade, haven't lost their knack for evading the scrutiny of the law. At a preliminary hearing earlier this year in the failed Ingleside murder case, Dohrn, in a gesture of solidarity among aging radicals, traveled to San Francisco from Chicago to stand with the defendants' supporters in the courtroom. Engler, head of the Phoenix Task Force, was also present. He recognized and approached her, according to law enforcement sources who described the scene.
Engler introduced himself to Dohrn as a San Francisco homicide detective and said he would like to speak with her after the hearing. She greeted him politely, but was noncommittal, and left without giving him a chance to interview her when the courtroom session ended. It had been 39 years since Park Station was bombed. Police were still looking for a break. And once again, Bernardine Dohrn had disappeared.
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Ted McKim
Ted McKim
I loved this article. I think that last statement shows where the article gets its sources, from one-sided speculation! I especially enjoyed the last statement, "...she disappeared..." Cut to man's face not blinking.... Cut to: woman's back as she hurrriedly moves away from view...fading into dark smoke.
Hey, she disappeared to Chicago where she lives!
Ted McKim
Ted McKim
Having lived through that time I wouldn't trust an FBI agent's word for anything that they said about then. Not sure I trust what they say about people now!
Joe Curwen
Joe Curwen
Emil's comments are quite perceptive. One thing to bear in mind foremost in my opinion, is the operations of COINTELPRO at the time. Their activities continually muddied the waters concerning who was who and who did what.
During that time I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the White Panther Party (among other groups). I recall that then several of the WPP people were either incarcerated or wanted for various radical activities, including a small bombing alleged to have been perpetrated by them. They always asserted that COINTELPRO was behind a lot of it. Many people wrote their stories off as counter-culture paranoia.
Decades later, though, the truth came out. COINTELPRO had been behind a lot of the grief that came their way. Paranoid or not, they had been correct about that much.
I never cared much for the SDS or the Weathermen. They were (aside from the violence) a bunch of jerks and party poopers. The SDS always rambled on about Marxism and who wanted to hear that crap? The WPP were a lot more fun. Still, at the time, the government provoked people toward unreasonable measures, and sometimes the government aided and abetted the radicals with entrapment and fabrication of evidence.
Emil Pulsifer
Emil Pulsifer
(1) The article cites former Weatherman Mark Rudd's "memoir" in describing the group's "charismatic leader", a woman, as "praising the acolytes of cult leader Charles Manson for stabbing pregnant actress Sharon Tate in the stomach with a fork" -- scarcely an act of revolutionary violence. Is it possible that Mr. Rudd, like so many authors of scandalous "tell-all" biographies, added this and other shocking details to increase the notoriety (hence salability) of his book at a time when the group had been out of the spotlight? (2) The article states that the Weathermen "decided to alter their bombing campaign, targeting only empty government facilities" in March, 1970. Yet it also states that a 1971 search of "one of the group's principal safe-houses" by FBI and SFPD inspectors discovered "voice activated bomb switches", and quotes FBI Special Agent Noel in explaining that " 'voice activated switch' means the bomb goes off when a person comes in and talks". So, did the group "alter their bombing campaign" or not? Also note that in 1971 there was no such thing as a "voice activated switch": there were sound activated switches, but these would be very dangerous for anyone planting a bomb since, once the bomb was activated, any sufficiently loud noise would set it off, like a sneeze, or (depending on the sensitivity of the microphone) such random sounds as a door or window slamming nearby, honking car horns, slamming car doors, or the rumble of a passing truck. One possible use for a sound-activated switch would be to function as a killswitch to (permanently) deactivate the bomb, if anyone (such as an office cleaning crew) came in during the night when the bomb's timer would otherwise detonate it. This would be consistent with attempts to prevent injuries or deaths. (3) The article is surprisingly mute on the issue of forensic evidence, specifically on the design and materials used in the Park Station bomb. While it is always possible that this particular bomb could have been specially made to throw investigators off the track, it is more common for bomb makers to have a modus operandi in which certain elements of design and certain materials are used over and over, despite other variations. Parts must be purchased somewhere (the Unibomber notwithstanding) and they can be traced to manufacturers. Microscopic examination of bits of wire can reveal characteristic tool-marks (e.g., wirecutters and strippers). The authorities had numerous examples of Weatherman bombs and even some seized materials and tools. Was there a match to the Park Station bombing? Presumably not, since that kind of forensic evidence would allow a case to be built on the basis of independent corroborative evidence. (4) The article quotes FBI Special Agent Reagan as saying, of the Weathermen's culpability in the Park Station murder, that "...common sense tells you something. Who else could it be?" Yet, the article elsewhere characterizes America's major cities at the time as being "in something close to a guerrilla war" with "the spectacle so many revolutionary groups competing to blow up or kill sworn peace officers". The article notes that a different group, the BLA, actually took credit for the Park Station bombing: a group actually known to have committed, and attempted to commit more, murders of police officers. The two choices offered to the reader in connection with this admission, is that it was either empty bragging and the Weathermen are the real culprits, or else that the two groups were "working in tandem". But two other possibilities exist: (a) the BLA alone was responsible; (b) the bombing was the work of neither group. (5) The FBI was equally sure (perhaps on the basis of "common sense") that security guard Richard Jewell was responsible for the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After having his career ruined, Jewell was exonerated and successfully sued various media sources, including NBS News for Tom Brokaw's statement (apparently made on the basis of leaked information) that "The speculation is that the FBI is close to making the case. They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well. There are still some holes in this case". (6) The article cites FBI Special Agent Reagan, paraphrasing informant Karen Latimer (now dead) as saying in 2000 that she was "looking for a form a justice" and that she was "deeply disappointed that there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute" other former members of the Weathermen. Yet the article also states that Latimer did not come forward until the mid-1970s, years after the Park Station murder, and quotes an investigator as saying that she did so "to have a federal hold on her passport lifted so that she could travel abroad". (7) Informant Matthew Steen was not described by the article as a current or former member of the group at the time he told investigators, more than two years after the Park Station bombing, that he had attended a planning meeting at which the group discussed plans to bomb Park Station. But it isn't clear why a non-member, even if sympathetic, would be admitted to a planning meeting at which a police station is the intended target of a murderous bomb packed with industrial staples; particularly in an age when undercover police agents and informants were common and every radical group knew it. Steen might well have attended a Weathermen meeting or two, but this? Also omitted from the article is any mention of the circumstances of Steen's interview: was he being investigated on unrelated criminal charges or did he come forward voluntarily; and if the latter, why did he wait two and a half years? The Weathermen were publicly mentioned in the press as suspects in the heated, high-profile coverage following the murder. Investigators coming across any known or suspected associates or sympathizers of the group would question them about it, and anyone seeking a quid pro quo from the authorities wouldn't need much prompting to know that an identification of those responsible for the Park Station murder constituted a kind of golden ticket. (8) The most damning evidence presented in the article is twofold: (a) FBI Special Agent Reagan asserting that the descriptions of the Park Station planning sessions held by the Weathermen (as given by informants Steen and Latimer) were "consistent with each other and strikingly similar to other Weather Underground planning sessions he had personally attended as an undercover agent", a characterization backed up by FBI Special Agent Noel; and (b) the detail of informant Latimer's narration of the supposed planning of the Park Station bombing, as recounted by an unnamed "another inspector familiar with the case". Well, the descriptions given by Steen and Latimer couldn't be too similar to what was observed by SA Reagan in an undercover capacity, since he would then have had grounds to arrange some arrests. As a member, Latimer would have been familiar with the general layout and process, and if Steen attended some meetings he would be too. Aside from the fact that the reader isn't told whether "another inspector familiar with the case" was personally involved at the time or had acquired this familiarity second or third hand in reviewing the (cold) case files, it's a shame that New Times went to press before obtaining the (no doubt heavily redacted) primary documents in the case. That's because anyone who has seen enough original case notes understands that what investigators characterize one way in statements to the press (or other verbal testimony) may be less impressive when evaluated by third parties with different attitudes and goals. Ask any criminal defense attorney about the discrepancies between investigators' verbal characterizations and the casefile materials they've acquired through the discovery process. Note that none of these observations and counter-arguments exonerates the Weathermen of the Park Station murder: but the matter may be less clear-cut than suggested by the article.
Jack Swift
Jack Swift
libertyinjeopardy, you're an effen racist moron.
Wow the New Times uncovers a great story! The only problem you leftists have is that Drudge had this story 9 months ago. We warned you fools about Odumba way back when but of course liberalism is a mental disease.
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0.019209 | <urn:uuid:3d6ccacc-27d3-41b4-bc69-2d709136e3de> | en | 0.933351 | Porn ReviewsSpecialsAdult PersonalsPorn TrialsPorn BlogSearchBookmark
When I was initially assigned the task of reviewing Butt Crush, I assumed that the website would be about guys having crushes on cute asses or something like that. As it turns out, though, the sitename is meant to be taken quite literally, as the collection is devoted entirely to depicting lovely ladies crushing things with their beautiful butts.
All manner of objects are sat upon at ButtCrush, so there's really quite a bit of variety when it comes to what the women decide to smother with their bottoms. Toy trucks, dolls, teddy bears, towels, balloons and food are just some of the things that fall victim to the squashing power of the hot asses.
There are 161 videos and they can all be downloaded. The scenes aren't dated, but you can find dates on a few recent ones on the homepage and they look to be updating every three weeks or so. Some movies are solely available as RealPlayer files, but most also come in Windows Media files. The WMV flicks seem to be a bit better than the RealPlayer ones and newer ones offer HD bit rates.
The films are rather short and feature little more than a hot babe who crushes inanimate objects with her ass. The models don't ever get naked, but some sport undergarments that leave very little to the imagination. Now, obviously there's a market for the content, but it is a niche market, so this site won't be for everyone.
Once they're done with the movies, you can catch additional butt squishing in the 118 sets of pictures. The photo galleries are often split up into several parts and can't be saved in their entirety as Zip files, but they're still worth a look since they contain high-res images.
Although there's room for improvement, Butt Crush is still a decent site. It offers solid content, but as I stated before, it won't appeal to everyone.
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User Rating: 74/100 (total: 1 comment)
• Comment by: A1aviman - Score: 74/100 - Date: 3/19/2011
$25.00/30 days
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Number of movies: 161+ HD Porn: Yes Streaming: No
Video Formats: Windows (1280x720; 4000k)
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Independent Biller(s): N/A
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Pros & Cons
pros -some high-def videos
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Main Category: Fetish Porn
Updated on: 3/1/2014 03/01/2014- From 69 to 66: More content, but scores adjusted to new criteria. -A.K.
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[–]SeahawksPenguinBallZ 0 points1 point (0 children)
Well TIL. Honestly all I ever heard was that he used to play receiver so I assumed he was always a receiver. | http://www.reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/1nh2ww/game_thread_miami_dolphins_30_at_new_orleans/ccikl75 | dclm-gs1-423105528 | false | false | {
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0.282207 | <urn:uuid:7e522cac-d1c6-44e4-b64b-1f19d1d753e2> | en | 0.9474 | 62 of 370
May 3, 2010
For several decades, scientists have had strong evidence for two distinct classes of black hole: the stellar-mass variety with masses about ten times that of the Sun, and the supermassive ones, located at the center of galaxies, that range from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses.
But a mystery has remained: what about black holes that are in between?
Evidence for these objects has remained controversial, and until now there were no strong claims of more than one such black hole in a single galaxy. Recently, a team of researchers has found signatures in X-ray data of two mid-sized black holes in the starburst galaxy M82 located 12 million light years from Earth.
"This is the first time that good evidence for two mid-sized black holes has been found in one galaxy," said Hua Feng of the Tsinghua University in China, who led two papers describing the results. "Their location near the center of the galaxy might provide clues about the origin of the Universe's largest black holes - supermassive black holes found in the centers of most galaxies."
One possible mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes involves a chain reaction of collisions of stars in compact star clusters that results in the buildup of extremely massive stars, which then collapse to form intermediate-mass black holes. The star clusters then sink to the center of the galaxy, where the intermediate-mass black holes merge to form a supermassive black hole.
In this picture, clusters that were not massive enough or close enough to the center of the galaxy to fall in would survive, as would any black holes they contain.
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0.220441 | <urn:uuid:8393fba6-3dff-430d-af60-3031bb023055> | en | 0.943433 | describes in a sentence
Example sentences for describes
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So there is nothing strange about what the article describes.
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The verb in my sentence is is, even though the unpacked sentence describes the actions of certain thinkers.
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But, as the article describes, the college admissions market is in the midst of the inevitable transition to electronic form.
It is the only web page that describes the use of movable wooden ramps.
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Below is the link to their web site, with a copy of a portion of their page which describes the models of the missions.
Acid rain describes any form of precipitation with high levels of nitric and sulfuric acids.
Make sure the team describes how the damage took place, instead of focusing on the aftermath.
Each encounter describes a situation and the place where it occurred.
Have students explain how the bold words and the use of labels in the photo help them understand what the article describes.
He describes planting milkweed in a tiny city courtyard about the size of a living room one spring.
The large intestine, in its course, describes an arch which surrounds the convolutions of the small intestine.
He had little schooling, and he describes his early surroundings as poor and mean.
But that describes no more than a sixth of the total college population.
And that's probably because he still describes himself as an actor.
Oz has had several programs where he describes genetic reasons for choosing one of three diet plans.
The article describes a system for using the body as an antenna to extract a signal from electrical noise in the walls of a room.
But self consistency does not mean it describes our reality.
It turns out that the same math that describes the physics of waves also describes the physics of quantum probabilities.
The first is the power law that describes the number of links to each vertex in the network.
The paper also describes for the first time a particularly aggressive subtype of the disease.
And today, one physicist describes how it could be used to create propulsion.
The military describes the current situation as a three block war.
The result is a network that reflects the geographical structure of the fault zone it describes.
It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility.
But along the way she describes a number of battles fought over the treatment of prisoners.
The condition can be treated, so if you still think this describes you, speak to a doctor.
Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again.
Risk describes a situation where you have a sense of the range and likelihood of possible outcomes.
Describes how his approval has helped gain parole for prisoners serving life sentences.
Describes how the members of the band met and began writing music together.
The writer describes the bone-marrow transplantation process.
Writer describes the process by which scrap metal is shredded and sorted for sale.
Describes the life cycle of the bug and how it spreads.
Describes the torture devices in her room, and a claustrophobic coffin writer enters.
Describes the pasta water and how to clean the extremely hot pasta cooker.
Describes his subsequent risk-taking suicidal behavior.
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It is a fugitive within a theory called the standard model, which describes all the fundamental particles in the universe.
It describes the inherent inevitability of people towards selfish and destructive behaviour.
He describes the effect as similar to hair clogging a drain.
Famous quotes containing the word describes
If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Norma... more
Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes ... more
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describesmore
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0.105085 | <urn:uuid:964f46cd-e359-42e9-985c-10f0a7332bb7> | en | 0.85407 | Royal Opera House » timeline 2014-10-20T18:25:39Z WordPress Rachel Beaumont <![CDATA[Interactive Timeline: Giuseppe Verdi]]> 2014-05-19T15:25:27Z 2013-10-09T16:31:53Z Giuseppe VerdiGiuseppe Verdi
It's Giuseppe Verdi's birthday today and as The Royal Opera prepares for its first ever productions of Les Vêpres sicilienneswe've decided to celebrate with an interactive timeline packed full of music, video and images.
Unfailingly popular and with some of the best tunes in the repertory, Verdi's operas are loved for their dramatic brilliance and incredibly engaging music. The man himself had tremendous integrity; was passionately invested in his music, his country and his charitable work; and was an astonishing workaholic, composing nearly thirty original operas.
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June 2014 Archives
Fireworks / science activity to see what makes the colors
What makes all the great colors you see during a fireworks display? Experiment with a fun backyard family science activity to see firsthand how different chemicals produce different colors when burned.
Find other great hands-on science activities for families to do together in the Science Buddies Science Activities area.
Do you and your family head out each 4th of July to watch fireworks in your neighborhood? Do you tune in on New Year's Eve to watch fireworks that herald the start of the new year? In cities big and small, many hours of planning, preparation, and staging result in awe-inspiring fireworks displays designed to dazzle watchers with the biggest, brightest, and best bursts of color and light.
If the skies are clear, fireworks are sure to elicit oohs, ahhs, and cheers. From big explosions of color to subtle pops that splatter the sky with colorful trails, fireworks displays are full of amazing effects. Do you have a favorite fireworks pattern? Maybe you really like the Chrysanthemum, the Willow, or the Spider? Or maybe you love a good Saturn Shell or ring?
The shape (what it looks like when it explodes) of a fireworks effect varies, as does the height at which the fireworks climb before they explode. But part of what makes fireworks so mesmerizing is their color in the night sky.
Making Science Connections
You and your students can experiment with hands-on science to better understand what causes the colors you see in the sky during a fireworks demonstration. The Discover the Flaming Colors of Fireworks science activity is a fun way for you and your family to do science that ties in with popular July 4th celebrations in the US this week (or for Bastille Day celebrations later this month, or to better understand fireworks that happen any time of the year!).
The hands-on activity guides you and your students in experimenting with two different readily-available chemicals to see what colors these chemicals produce when burned. One of the chemicals you will use is ordinary table salt (sodium chloride). The other, copper sulfate, can be obtained from a pet store. These two chemicals will produce flame colors that are clearly different from one another, making this science that students can easily "see"—even in the dark!
More Chemicals, More Colors
For students wanting to investigate the colors of flame produced when other chemicals burn, or for students interested in turning this science activity into a full-scale science project, the Rainbow Fire kit from the Science Buddies Store contains the chemicals required to do the more comprehensive set of flame tests described in the Rainbow Fire physics project idea.
Explore surface tension with a small raft and soap science experiment / Hand-on STEM experiment
In this week's spotlight: a physics family science experiment that investigates the dynamics of surface tension. Surface tension may keep your soda from spilling over the cup when you fill it a bit too full, but can surface tension also be used to propel something? In this science activity, students build a small, lightweight raft and experiment to see how surface tension—and some dish soap—can help move it across the surface of water.
Lauren Killingsworth, a recent high school graduate, already has an impressive resume of stem cell research that may contribute to future treatments for blindness. Out of the lab, she is making a difference in the lives of both students in her community and people with visual impairments. For this Stanford-bound scientist, science is the key to the unknown, and doing hands-on science, she believes, is the key to engaging more students with STEM.
Ron Mardigan scholsarship winner, student Lauren Killingsworth
Lauren Killingsworth, recipient of the Ron Mardigan scholarship, awarded by Bio-Rad Laboratories.
Student Science Outreach
Reading about the pH scale and looking and textbook diagrams is not the same as dipping a strip and seeing a visual change that represents the acidity or baseness of a solution. With her implementation of a science outreach program that emphasizes hands-on learning, Lauren is helping excite students about science.
For Lauren Killingsworth, this year's winner of the Ron Mardigan essay contest sponsored by Bio-Rad Laboratories, the process of doing hands-on science experimentation and research is one that brims with excitement and possibility, a kind of magic that often ends up suppressed in traditional textbook-based education. In her winning essay, the recent graduate from Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, CA. poignantly articulates the importance of hands-on science education in engaging students with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
Lauren's winning essay opens by capturing and sharing a pivotal moment during one of her own research projects, the kind of moment she wishes all students had the chance to experience. The gap between actively doing science and reading about science is something she has set out to change for students in her community.
Exploring Biomedical Research
In recent summers, Lauren has conducted research at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. "I worked on stem cell research, specifically developing retinal neurons from stem cells," she explains. "My interest in stem cell biology was actually sparked by a lecture I attended at Stanford University when I was little. It was part of the 'Splash' program taught by Stanford students, and I remember being astounded to learn that cells, tissues, and even organs could be regenerated using stem cell biology. The medical applications of this technology were so promising, and I wanted to get involved."
At the Buck Institute, Lauren worked on projects that investigate the possibility of restoring vision to the blind. The "Assessment of Lineage Conversion to Neural Retina Fate" project "focused on converting human fibroblasts directly to retinal neurons, by infecting fibroblasts with viruses that cause expression of transcription factors." Another project involved "assessing whether or not the small molecule IWR-1 can replace the human recombinant protein Dkk-1 in developing induced pluripotent stem cells."
Making a Difference for the Visually Impaired
Outside of the lab, Lauren's interest in eye and blindness research takes humanitarian shape in the work she and her family does training service dogs. "I've been raising Guide Dogs for the Blind since 6th grade," says Lauren, "and it has been a very formative experience for me. It is incredibly fulfilling to see the bond and trust between a guide dog and his or her visually impaired partner, and I feel blessed to play a part in the process."
Service dogs make a dramatic difference in the lives of their companions, but Lauren says that her work with Guide Dogs for the Blind has also inspired her science research on blindness. "While guide dogs provide a tremendous service to the visually impaired, I envision a world where science research can provide medical cures to blindness-related diseases," says Lauren. "I hope to work with the organization Unite for Sight in college, and partake in an international mission where I would volunteer in an eye clinic in Ghana," she adds.
Science for Everyone
While at Tamalpais High, Lauren implemented a student mentoring program between her high school and Martin Luther King (MLK) Academy. Initially, the program provided tutoring in all subjects, especially math. The program has since evolved into a science-focused outreach effort to meet the need Lauren saw to create stronger opportunities to connect and engage students with science.
"Today, the program is mainly hands-on science labs," says Lauren. "Next year, students will be matched to high school tutors so that they can each conduct their own science fair project!"
The program recently received a youth service grant from ABC News and Disney. Lauren says this funding will help sustain and grow the program in coming years as other high school students step into her role and continue the student service program.
A Top Science Student
Like many young scientists, Lauren was a busy high school student. In addition to being a school leader, a member of the volleyball team, a trainer of service dogs, a volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, a student mentor, and recipient of an MIT Science Leadership Award, she has also been an active science fair participant—the only one, she says, from her high school.
"The science fair has been a big part of my school years," says Lauren. "In 10th grade, I won 1st place at the Marin Science Fair in Life Sciences for my project on decreasing oral bacteria by brushing the tongue. I also won 3rd at the SF Bay Area Science Fair." As a senior, she won the Grand Prize at the Marin County Science Fair (and 4th place in the SF Bay Area Science Fair) for research on development of retinal neurons.
Next year, Lauren will be attending Stanford University. "I am really looking forward to learning about exciting new topics—from biotechnology, to stem cell biology, to multivariable calculus," says Lauren. Lauren plans to study biology, with an emphasis on cell and molecular biology, neurobiology, or immunology. In the future, she hopes to combine her interests in medicine and science research, possibly in the area of veterinary science, a continuation of her work with animals and a career she says she dreamed of as a child.
Building upon the interest in community service projects and science education she demonstrated in high school, Lauren says, "I hope to incorporate service into whichever career I choose—whether continuing my efforts in science education or participating in a program such as Doctors without Borders, or—the veterinary equivalent—World Vets. I am also very interested in global health and development, and I look forward to spending a quarter abroad to acquire a more international perspective on medicine."
The full text of Lauren's winning essay appears below.
Encouraging Interest and Participation in Science: The Need for Greater Autonomy and Freedom of Exploration
By Lauren Killingsworth
I peer into the microscope, eager to discover if my hypothesis holds true. I focus the lens until the image becomes defined: intricate, web-like projections that stem from neuronal cell bodies. I experience a moment of revelation. After weeks of cell culture, it had emerged: the evasive photoreceptor, the light-sensing neuron of the eye. Under the microscope, vibrant gene-expression markers dot the culture dish—evidence that this cell can potentially restore vision.
That moment between a scientist's hypothesis and nature's answer is unforgettable. The process of experimentation—trial and error, questioning, and analysis—is rewarding at every step. That experience, however, was foreign to me until I became involved in hands-on laboratory research. Throughout middle school and high school, science had been presented as a strictly linear subject—one seemingly void of creativity and imagination. My excitement for topics such as DNA replication and cellular respiration was diluted by textbook readings. Labs had pre-ordained outcomes, with little room to manipulate variables or design studies myself. I sought greater autonomy and freedom for exploration: what I believe to be vital elements in any science curriculum.
Last year, when I began tutoring students at a local middle school, I noticed a concerning apathy—and even resentment—towards science. I identified with these students' frustration over the lack of hands-on science opportunities, and I began brainstorming possible ways to spark their interest in science. I remember working with one student, Torrey, who was frustrated by the obscurity of the black-and-white pH paper diagrams in his chemistry textbook. He explained that he had never done a science lab before nor used actual pH paper. Science, a study of hands-on experimentation and discovery, had been confined to textbooks and worksheets.
I set out to bring science to Torrey's classroom, confident that these students would enjoy the subject in a stimulating environment where they could manipulate materials and test hypotheses themselves. I created the Tam High-MLK Science Outreach Program, through which I gained a better understanding of how to best promote interest in science. My program required creativity; I declared my back porch a laboratory, producing steaming geysers of foam as I found the optimal ratio of hydrogen peroxide to potassium-iodide for an upcoming lab. One lab was particularly memorable: upon creating a foaming, exothermic reaction, Torrey was so excited that he asked to repeat the experiment.
In designing curriculum and teaching hands-on labs, I saw the importance of allowing students to experiment for themselves. By providing students with the freedom to adjust variables, they asked more questions and became engaged. Demonstrations with a big "Wow" factor also proved successful. The "Wow" factor: an explosive, loud, or colorful reaction, showed students that science was visible, fast-paced, and exciting. The element of surprise was also important. I found that students were more excited to conduct the chemical reaction when they didn't know what to expect, allowing students to wonder why the reaction occurred, rather than concentrate on whether they got "the right result." Additionally, experiments that focused on science applications in every day life—such as the "Household Acids and Bases" lab—showed students that science was relevant, and encouraged students to ask scientific questions about the environment around them.
To increase participation in science, hands-on science needs to become more accessible, students should be given autonomy in conducting experiments, and students need to feel supported and confident as they enter what some may view a daunting field. Additionally, it is imperative that the science research community becomes more diverse. As a woman in science, I have experienced the gender imbalance firsthand, as one of only 3 women in my 20-person AP Chemistry class, and the only woman in the science lab I work in. This can be intimidating to many female students, and must be addressed—by marketing children's science kits and engineering toys to girls as well as boys, through internship and science programs that reach out to young women, and through mentorship by female scientists.
I envision classroom environments that ignite interest in science by entrusting students with the design of their own projects and by introducing students to advanced laboratory techniques. This can be accomplished by mandating that science fair projects are included in school curriculum, providing students with science mentors, demonstrating to students that science is applicable to everyday life, and—most importantly—emphasizing the idea that the only prerequisite for science is curiosity.
Science Buddies Project Ideas in Biotechnology Techniques are sponsored by Bio-Rad Laboratories and its Biotechnology Explorer program.
Computer bugs and vulnerabilities like the Heartbleed bug provide frightening reminders of how important it is to set strong passwords online. Students can learn more about password practices and experiment with testing passwords by using and improving a password-guessing program written in Python.
Combination lock
How many possible passwords could be created from the lock above? How long would it take to crack a password on this lock? When you move to online passwords, you may have many more possible options for setting your password. How can you create passwords that are harder for a computer program to guess? Science projects at Science Buddies help students explore human behavior related to setting and remembering passwords—and let students learn more about computer science and programming by trying a password guessing program written in Python.
The Heartbleed bug detected a few months ago created a flurry of "change your password" warnings. The bug, a hole in popular opensource code that could let hackers grab chunks of server memory (including user login information) without leaving any trail, sat quietly for two years before it was discovered.
Heartbleed was a pervasive bug because many, many servers use OpenSSL, a tool used by sites, ironically, to help protect the transmission of sensitive information. Both the number of servers potentially affected by the bug and the fact that someone exploiting the bug (and stealing user information) could do so without being detected makes the bug particularly frightening.
Not every site and company was impacted by the Heartbleed bug, but many were. (According to some estimates, as much as 66% of the Internet was impacted by the Heartbleed security flaw.) Thankfully, news of the bug and checklists for sites for which users definitely needed to change their logins, traveled fast. Heartbleed was big news in both public and private circles. You may have even shared, retweeted, emailed, or texted warnings or public service announcements about Heartbleed to your own friends and family.
News of the Heartbleed bug immediately caused password and online security and privacy panic. While coders and server owners raced to patch the bug, users faced up to the fact that changing passwords was necessary. According to a recent Wired article, "Heartbleed triggered what was probably the single largest mass-password change in history: In response to the bug, some 86 million internet users in the U.S. alone changed at least one password or deleted an internet account."
After reviewing several charts of online sites that were affected by the Heartbleed bug, including many social media sites, I realized I didn't have a choice. To ignore the risk of the Heartbleed bug would be to bury my head in the sand. I needed to change passwords at least on some of the major sites I access frequently, sites that are part of my daily routine.
You may know that a simple password like "apple" is not a good idea. Neither is the name of your pet or your birth date. But what is a good password? How complicated does a password need to be to be safe from hackers? Is any password really unbreakable?
Taking a look at how passwords can be guessed can help answer that question. By experimenting with a password guessing program, students may better understand strategies to take to make sure passwords are as strong as possible.
Personal Password Protocol
Once upon a time, I used a single password for all of my logins. Gradually, a bit of paranoia crept into my approach as stories of identify theft began to rise and as the number of places requiring a login increased. Did I really want the same password at x gaming or shopping site as I use to access my bank? If someone hacks my email or my iTunes, to how many other accounts might they also gain access?
Along the way, I changed how I create my passwords, how many I use, and how I structure them.
Then there was Heartbleed.
Dealing with the Heartbleed bug was definitely not fun. Many of us have dozens and dozens of logins, possibly involving dozens and dozens of passwords. All those passwords add up!
In response to Heartbleed, I changed a handful of passwords in one afternoon. I jotted down a few of the changes on a slip of paper. (This probably wasn't the smartest choice.) I promptly lost the paper in moving between rooms and between computers. (More than a month later, I still have not caught sight again of that scrap of paper.)
When I next tried to use Facebook... bam. Trouble. I tried dozens of combinations and tweaks on my old password. Dozens of failed attempts. Lots of wasted time. I finally got in, and then repeated, amazingly, the same difficulty when I was prompted to log in again on another computer. And then again on my phone.
When I tried to log into one of several email accounts, my Instagram account, my Pinterest, I ran into password trouble at every turn. Because so many of my passwords differ, I repeatedly found myself at a loss trying to get logged back in, a process I had to repeat on every device I use.
Unfortunately, while I had trouble cracking my own passwords, even though I know the general parameters of how I set them and how I had tried to systematically change them, a hacker probably would not have nearly as much trouble breaking my passwords or yours.
Real-world Online Security
Password security is always something about which you want to be cautious, mindful, and protective.
In the movies, you often see people—on the well-intended side as well as on the criminal side—trying to figure out a password based on somewhat obvious details or identifying information about the person (like a child's name, a birth date, or a favorite rock band).
Off the big screen, guessing someone's password is not usually that easy. Most people are savvy enough about online security to use something less than obvious, to throw in some mix of capitalization, and to intermix numbers, letters, and symbols.
Guessing a friend or family member's password might be harder than you think, or even impossible—for you. But for someone applying technology to the process of stealing passwords, you might be surprised at how quickly a password can be broken by a bit of computer code.
A program isn't trying to "guess" the password the same way you might. Instead, a computer program may be coded to run systematically through all possible combinations to try and break your code.
Making Student Science Connections
Two science projects at Science Buddies tackle password security and guide students in an investigation of computer security behaviors and technologies.
• Do People Use Different Passwords for Different Accounts? is a human behavior project in which students investigate password practices among groups of users. In this project, students survey people to better understand how different users think about, use, and create passwords for online sites and services. Do they use the same password everywhere? How many passwords do they have? What kinds of trends can be identified among users regarding password practices? (For more information about conducting survey-based science projects, see the Designing a Survey and Sample Size: How Many Survey Participants Do I Need? resources from the Science Buddies Project Guide. Don't overlook the ways in which your online connections and social media can be used to help broaden your survey pool!)
• Password Security: How Easily Can Your Password Be Hacked? is a computer science project in which students take an inside look at how difficult (or not difficult) figuring out a password can be. By first thinking about a standard combination lock and doing the math to determine the number of combinations (and how much time it might take to test each one) and then moving on to thinking through the same process for more difficult kinds of locks, students look from the ground up at password construction and password cracking.
Using an introductory exercise in reading and writing Python code, the project guides students in an exploration of how computer routines can try and guess passwords. You can't use this code to steal someone's information from somewhere else, but you can have fun experimenting with guessing a password a friend inputs in the program code or testing the code to guess your own strings and compare the time it takes the program to guess different kinds of passwords. What makes it harder for the program to guess a password? What kind of password takes longest? Can this simple program crack the passwords you normally use? Can you come up with a password the program can't guess? You can also test the password guessing code to see if you can figure out a few sample passwords from Science Buddies.
Note: the project above is not designed to encourage students to try and write code that might steal user information. Instead, the project gives students a better understanding of how passwords can be systematically tested and guessed by software (even if millions of possible combinations have to be checked). The project also gives students a fun, real-world scenario in which to experiment with Python computer programming. Learning to run, edit, and revise the provided code involves installing Python, learning to interpret the code, and familiarizing oneself with the syntax specific to Python, which is important for students who may already have experience with other coding languages.
Memorizing Passwords
Keeping track of multiple passwords can be complicated, and as the number of passwords you use increases, so does the challenge of remembering them all! One strategy people often talk about in setting a password is to use the first letter of each word in a title or phrase. This kind of password is called a passphrase.
When using a passphrase password, you are using a memorable (you hope) sentence as a way to help you remember your password. People use similar approaches to help remember other strings of information. Mnemonic devices help people remember information by attaching the information to something more easily remembered. A silly sentence made from the first letters of the names of the planets, for example, may make it easier to remember the order of the planets than just trying to memorize the planet names in order.
The Memory Mnemonics science project guides students in an exploration of mnemonic devices and how they may help improve someone's ability to remember information. For a simplified family science activity version of this project, see Memory Science.
Protect Yourself Online
For additional information regarding best practices for online safety and privacy, see the Internet Safety Guide.
Support for resources and Project Ideas related to cybersecurity is provided by Northrop Grumman.
Support for Computer Science Project Ideas and Internet Safety information at Science Buddies is provided by Symantec Corporation.
3D printing has opened a cool new frontier of custom manufacturing that brings freedom to individuals interested in design, invention, or just in need of a rare or unusual part. With a hands-on modeling and design project using Autodesk 123D Make, students can design and assemble a layered 3D model for a better understanding of how 3D printing and additive manufacturing works.
3D printing is all the buzz. From replacement parts for household objects or toys that are broken to one-of-a-kind creations to a large-scale approach to manufacturing that may revolutionize the way products are made, 3D printing has changed how people think about "making" things that once required industrial machines and molds. In addition to giving individual inventors and designers new options for testing out ideas, 3D printing brings new possibility to many big industries, from automotive to healthcare. 3D printing is a game changer, and industry and DIY and maker communities alike are excited by what 3D print technologies enable, but the printer in your school computer lab or home office probably still prints out the same flat images and text as it always did.
What is 3D printing all about? What does it really mean for a printer to "print" a ready-made, fully-functional object, on demand, similar to the way you might request an item from a vending machine?
One-of-a-kind Designs
You may have read stories about "printed" objects ranging from artificial organs to cell phone accessories and other tchotchkes, things that someone wants to make but doesn't need a million of or even a hundred. Or maybe what you need is a specific little piece to replace something that is broken, a piece that is hard to find or no longer made. With 3D printing, you can make just one of any item you can imagine—as long as you can create a digital 3D model. There are no expensive molds and machines that have to be made, customized, or altered to handle each design or each change. Instead, using a digital design file as a blueprint, a 3D printer prints out the object, layer by layer.
With 3D printing, the z axis comes into play as the printer adds "depth" to the print. In order to create a file for 3D printing, designers use computer-aided software to create a 3D model of an object that can then be printed with a special 3D printer. Depending on the printer, 3D printed objects can be made from a variety of materials, including rubber, plastics, paper, and even metals. Using the digital blueprint, the printer (loaded with the chosen material) extrudes the material layer upon layer, similar to the way that a regular printer deposits ink as the printer head moves back and forth across the page—only dimensionally instead of just in flat, horizontal rows.
Creating Paper Models
The layer by layer approach central to 3D printing is an example of additive manufacturing. In traditional manufacturing, an object might be created by taking a block of material and removing (or subtracting) material to get to the desired shape. Sculpting something out of a block of soap or a block of wood, for example, involves a subtractive approach—you whittle away what you don't need to leave only the desired shape behind. With additive manufacturing, layers of material are added, one by one, to build the object to the desired shape and size. Only what is needed is used, so there is less waste.
That virtually any object imaginable, including artificial organs, can be constructed by printing "layers," may seem hard to believe. A novel software application from Autodesk helps remove the mystery of additive construction by giving users a hands-on way to create their own additive models.
Autodesk's 123D Make auto-converts 3D digital objects into 2D vector-cut patterns or templates. Using 123D Make, students can print out the individual layers needed to construct a 3D model (designed in another program) and then glue or tape the layers together to manually build the 3D object. Using paper (or cardboard) to construct a 3D object from layers lets students see, from the ground up, how a 3D printer creates a 3D object from layers. It's a great creative exercise, but using 123D Make is also a great way to take a hands-on, nuts-and-bolts look at how an object can be built from layers—and how computer-aided design and modeling is related to what a 3D printer will "do" when printing out the dimensional object.
Making a 3D Model
Using 123D Make, students can explore fundamental principles of 3D additive design by making their own 3D object from layers. Opening up one of the many gallery examples is a great way to get started. Choose a model like a "skull," "rocket," or "rhino," and you can immediately see how layers are used to create the item. With 123D Make, students can change the size of the item, change the direction of the "slices" (which plane is used for slicing?), and even view the same object as it could be assembled using various techniques, including stacking (layering) and paper folding.
Once a design has been finalized, it can be laser-cut (professionally) or, for an at-home look at the process, the design can be printed out on multiple sheets that contain all of the slices necessary to make the object, layer by layer. Trace and cut the shapes from cardboard, grab some glue, and you have the makings of a fascinating creative engineering activity. (Some versions of the 123D Make application animate the assembly steps, layer by layer, as shown in the screenshot below. All layers are numbered for DIY assembly.)
Screenshot from 123D Make Screenshot from 123D Make Screenshot from 123D Make
Above: Using 123D Make, students can see and print all of the layers needed to construct the 3D object.
123D Make is available as an iOS or Android app, a standalone software product, and a web application.
Next Steps
After experimenting with a cardboard-based, glue-it-together 3D model, students can continue to explore 3D modeling and 3D printing using one of a range of Autodesk tools. The Autodesk 123D site connects students with a number of free apps and tools, resources, and samples to help jump start exploration of 3D and computer-aided design.
Above: Autodesk offers a full suite of 3D modeling and 3D printing tools.
Premier Design Tools for Educational Use
Autodesk gives students, educators, and educational institutions free access to professional design software, creativity apps, and real-world projects. For more information, details about education use, and to download software, visit the Autodesk Education Community.
What Will You Make?
If you are already a user of Autodesk software, we would love to hear from you! If you try 123D Make, or any other tool on the 123D site, please let us know. We would love to see what you build, design, explore, or even print!
Science Buddies' resources for students, teachers, and parents remain free thanks to support from sponsors like Autodesk.
Compare finger prints within families and fingerprint science / Hand-on STEM experiment
In this week's spotlight: a genetics and genomics family science experiment for Father's Day. Fingerprints are unique, but do family members share fingerprint characteristics? Are there patterns of inheritance that come into play when it comes to fingerprints? Put the question to the test with a visual examination of fingerprints among siblings and between different family members!
From physics to statistics, science plays a big role in soccer. As the World Cup unfolds this summer, watch the games, cheer on your favorite teams, and see science in action!
Sports fans all over the world are gearing up for FIFA World Cup soccer, which begins on June 13 in Brazil. Over the course of a month, soccer devotees will celebrate victories and groan over defeats as teams from 32 nations play 64 matches in 12 different stadiums, culminating in the final game on July 13.
To make it into that final match, elite soccer players will leave everything on the field, giving their fans the chance to see awesome punts, exciting goals, and split-second reaction times. How can these players score from impossible angles? How do goalies block shots? Practice makes perfect, but scientific principles have something to do with it, too.
Making Connections
The following Science Buddies Project Ideas help students uncover and explore the science in soccer:
• The Science of Spin: How Does Spin Affect the Trajectory of a Kicked Soccer Ball?: To "Bend It Like Beckham," you need to put the right amount of spin on the ball. Experiment with kicking different points of the ball to see how the flight path changes.
• Under Pressure: Bouncing Ball Dynamics: What would soccer be without a bouncy ball? Does it matter how much the ball is inflated? In this quick and easy experiment, investigate the concept of air pressure.
• How Far Can You Throw (or Kick) a Ball?: Grab some friends, head out to a field, and have fun going for the longest punt! Explore how the trajectory of the ball affects the distance that the ball travels.
• Think Fast!: Lightning-fast reaction times are a must for top goalies. Try this project and discover how fast your reflexes are!
• Geometry of Goal-Scoring: Ready to score one for the team? Test your accuracy when kicking from different angles to the goal, and then use your math and graphing skills to explain your success rate.
Science and Sports Go Hand-in-Hand
Sports science makes it easy to bring up scientific concepts in everyday life. Whether they are throwing, running, swimming, or kicking, asking the right questions can help kids see that science that isn't just for classrooms. Visit the Science Buddies Sports Science topic area to find more winning ideas!
Time Warner Cable
Explore how gases contract and expland / Hand-on STEM experiment
In this week's spotlight: a chemistry family science experiment that guides students and families in an exploration of how gases behave, especially when they are cooled or heated. Many gases are invisible, but they are everywhere around us. By trapping gas in a balloon, you can investigate how the kinetic energy of a gas changes in response to temperature and how the change in the motion of the gas molecules makes the balloon shrink or expand. With some hands-on measurements, a bit of air spent filling up some balloons, and some chill time for a few of the filled balloons, students can "see" what happens!
A magic milk rainbow may be all about what's happening at the surface level between milk and soap, but when kids create the magic, the learning excitement is palpable. For Lily Arendt, hands-on science activities are a great way to help kids uncover the magic of science. We couldn't agree more!
Lily Arendt and a class of students explore surface tension with a Milk Rainbow science activity.
Above: Lily Arendt and a class of students explore surface tension with the Make a Milk Rainbow science activity.
For Lily Arendt, a biology student at DePaul University in Chicago and a participant on the Miss America beauty pageant circuit, engaging students, especially girls, with science and inspiring them to ask science questions and experiment to find answers is an issue she's putting front and center both as her pageant platform and with students in her hometown.
Lily recently took the Science Buddies Make a Milk Rainbow activity, part of the brand new Science Buddies Activities area, into fifth and sixth grade classrooms in Green Bay, Wisconsin to bring cool chemistry into the classroom and give students a chance to get hands-on with some awe-inspiring science.
After spending time with students in four different classes, Lily says the kids' enthusiastic response to the milk rainbow experiment was unanimous. "I was thrilled to see that all four classes were equally excited about the experiment!"
The project involves the reaction between food dye, dish soap, and milk. With these simple ingredients, four individual drops of food coloring can be mixed and swirled into a rainbow or a spin-art-style display by touching a cotton-tipped swab dipped in soap to the surface of the milk. The science of surface tension and surfactants helps demystify what is going on, but it looks a lot like magic when the colors begin to move away from the swab even though they were not touched. This is a colorful science experiment that is sure to bring oohs and ahhs.
Lily says she, too, was wowed when she first tried out the milk rainbow experiment. "I was just as impressed with the movement of the food coloring as the kids were! I definitely believe this experiment has an element of science 'magic' that all ages would enjoy."
In the classroom activity, Lily helped the students set up the demonstration, and then she stepped back, letting the kids get hands on to see what happened as they, not a teacher, touched the swab to the surface of the milk. A swab with nothing on it caused the milk to behave one way. But a swab dipped in soap caused something entirely different to happen! This kind of active learning can be incredibly empowering for students who think science is something that happens in a lab somewhere by real scientists.
Supplementing science education with opportunities for active learning is what Science Buddies project ideas and now science activities are all about. With great ideas and blueprints for science experiments scaled for independent study or fun family weekends, Science Buddies is helping students, teachers, and parents take an active role in science exploration at home or at school.
It's a perspective on science that Lily shares.
"After taking many lecture-based science classes throughout my education," says Lily, "I've realized how disengaging it can be to simply listen to someone tell you the cool things about science. The thing I love about science is that it does have that 'wow' factor, and students, especially in elementary and middle school, should have the opportunity to experience science in their own way! Doing a hands-on experiment may just be what it takes to ignite that spark between a student and a love for science."
Not only did they enjoy the chemistry experiment, but the fifth and sixth grade students Lily worked with were excited to go home and share the experiment with friends and family. In re-telling or re-creating the experiment at home, they continue to process and absorb what they learned, articulate it, and pass on the fun.
In the classroom, Lily spent time talking with students about science careers, showed them how the Topic Selection Wizard works, and looked at sample Project Ideas that came up as "recommendations" for an individual student.
"When I discovered the Topic Selection Wizard on the website, I knew I needed to share it with the students," says Lily. "I wish I had had this resource when I was doing my elementary and middle school science experiments and even when I was first looking into a science career!"
A popular tool on the Science Buddies website, the Topic Selection Wizard helps match students with science projects in which they might be especially interested—based on their responses to a simple questionnaire. Many times, students uncover a perfect project using the Topic Selection Wizard that they might not have discovered by just browsing the directory of projects.
"The school I visited does have a wonderful science fair every year," says Lily, "and scrolling through the recommended projects, I know there were many experiments that caught the students' eyes."
For Lily, time spent in the classroom helping connect kids with the "magic" and wonder of science is time well spent. Lily says she has always been interested in science. Even as a kid, she says she enjoyed both doctor and dentists appointments because the doctors would explain the science behind what they were doing.
Lily also fondly remembers her 4th grade science fair project. "It was called 'Which will float: the ball or the boat?'," says Lily. "I had shaped multicolored clay into both a round ball and a concave boat shape and placed them in a tub of water to see what they would do. I definitely wish I had had Science Buddies as a tool when I was in 4th grade, but I remember demonstrating the experiment to my friends and loving the fact that I had come up with the experiment all on my own!"
Her childhood fascination with science blossomed into career goals when she took AP biology in high school. Today, Lily is studying biology at DePaul while working to promote science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education as part of her pageant platform.
"My pageant platform is called 'Women in Science: Exceeding the Boiling point,' and I chose this title because that is exactly what I want to encourage young women to do—to exceed the expectations placed on them in the sciences! Currently in the United States, only 25% of the available STEM careers are filled by women, and in a country where science and technology is valued so highly, that is truly a shame. I believe an interest in science starts at a young age, and young women need female role models to demonstrate to them that it's okay to love the sciences and that it is possible to become a confident, successful woman with a science career! I am so happy to have found Science Buddies, and I look forward to using it as a resource to encourage young women to pursue the sciences."
With up-and-coming scientists like Lily speaking out to girls and going into classrooms to show students that science is there, within reach, and full of magic and fun, there is hope for more and more students to embrace the sciences. Science Buddies is proud to support the process and to provide materials that help mentors, volunteers, parents, and teachers bring science to life for students—just like Lily did for students in Green Bay.
Above: Getting hands-on with a science activity like Make a Milk Rainbow helps bring science to life for students.
See our overview of the new Science Buddies Science Activities area.
Science Buddies has added a new "activities" section to its award-winning science education website. The new science activities complement the existing library of science fair project ideas but bridge the gap between science "assignment" or "independent project" and doing science just for fun at home or in the classroom. These new activities appear just as summer break begins for many students, making the timing perfect for families looking to keep kids engaged with science all summer long.
New Science Activities at Science Buddies / hands-on science for the whole family
Science Buddies is excited to announce a brand new section of the website devoted to hands-on science activities. With a focus on short-term, family-friendly science and engineering experiments, these activities bring fresh new flavor and simplicity to Science Buddies and help families more easily make science a part of their time together at home.
In-depth Science Buddies Project Ideas for science fair projects and school assignments have been a key part of Science Buddies since the organization was founded in 2001. With a bit of ingenuity and reading between the lines, parents can adapt many of the more than 1,200 Science Buddies Project Ideas for home use, but the new dedicated science activities area makes it even easier to plan and lead a fun and engaging science experience at home.
The new activities help guide hands-on science exploration by providing simplified step-by-step procedures, key questions to think about or important observations to make, and information about what families can expect to see happen and why. In addition to a materials list, overview, and guided steps of the experiment, each activity includes explanatory information to help contextualize the activity and the science behind it, as well helpful links to relevant careers that help students make the connection between cool science and possible future career paths.
The science activities area is broken down into categories designed to help guide families in choosing a science activity to explore: All About Me; Build it Better; Crafting and DIY; Kitchen Creations; The Natural World; Outdoor Fun; Try It Out; and Whiz, Bang, Boom. As the section titles indicate, the new science activities area aims to help kids and families uncover and explore the science in everyday activities. Science really is everywhere, even in fun activities like throwing Frisbee at the park and making ice cream!
According to Sandra Slutz, Lead Staff Scientist at Science Buddies, "Most of the Science Buddies staff are parents. We understand the realities of balancing family time commitments, fun, and learning. So during the development of these activities, we continuously went back to three questions: Is it fun? Is it easy to do at home? Will kids learn something neat about science or engineering? I think we've succeeded in striking that balance across all 40 of these new activities. We hope our users will enjoy these activities as much as we have with our own children!"
Science Anytime
In the new Activities area, you will find great hands-on science ideas like these:
• Theme Park Science with Jell-O® Loop-De-Loops: what do you get when you fill cups with Jell-O, put a marble in each one, and sling them around your head like a lasso using a homemade centripetal force generator cup? Answer: a cool look at centripetal force and Newton's Laws of Motion!
• Make an Alka-Seltzer Powered Lava Lamp: can you simulate the behavior of a retro lava lamp using empty bottles, vegetable oil, food coloring, water, and Alka-Seltzer®? This no-power lamp won't give you any light, but it may produce lots of oohs and aahs as you watch the groovy movement of the bubbles and explore the chemical reaction that happens when Alka-Seltzer combines with water.
• Build a Gumdrop Geodesic Dome: with gummy candies and toothpicks, you can build a simple geodesic dome that lets you explore how the dome is made out of a series of interconnected triangles—and how the dome shape can support a surprising amount of weight!
• Make Your Own Marshmallows: with sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin, you can make homemade marshmallows. How you vary the ration of sugar to corn syrup will make a difference in the texture and taste of the marshmallows though, so be prepared to taste test!
• How Much Mass Can An Aluminum Foil Boat Float?: that heavy boats made of steel float in water can seem mind boggling. Shaping boats from aluminum foil lets kids see how the size and shape of a boat relates to how much weight it can hold and still float on water.
• Color-changing Cabbage Chemistry: what can you learn about acids, bases, and the pH scale from boiled cabbage juice? This project may be smelly, but when you add lemon juice or vinegar to cabbage juice, you will see the purple color of the cabbage juice change. As you experiment with combining different foods or solutions to cabbage juice, you will be exploring the pH of those foods—and seeing the pH register in front of you by the color the juice turns!
Support for development of the new Science Activities area at Science Buddies was made possible by Motorola Solutions Foundation.
Science Buddies Science Activities
Science Buddies and Autodesk for Student STEM Exploration
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0.156621 | <urn:uuid:d9f02c3d-c759-4899-bed1-ae6215b24c23> | en | 0.968268 |
Posted By News On October 16, 2012 - 5:00pm
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- People 70 and older who eat food high in carbohydrates have nearly four times the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and the danger also rises with a diet heavy in sugar, Mayo Clinic researchers have found. Those who consume a lot of protein and fat relative to carbohydrates are less likely to become cognitively impaired, the study found. The findings are published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Source: Mayo Clinic
I don't think so. How about all the additives in our food, preservitives, coloring, articficial flavorings, etc. I processed on a cattle crew and sometimes there were so many "growth" implants in their ear that we had to go to the other ear. And what about the modified grains and veggies. We dont eat real food anymore just the fake crap!!!!
I agree with the person that stated the fact that the food has so many chemicals...we don't know what we are eating. Alzheimers seems to be worse than ever. Behavioral problems in children are much worse than they ever used to be. Why doesn't the FDA make packing houses put a label on the meat to tell people everything they are ingesting.
I also have to agree with the sugar intake. Diabetics can get cranky, disoriented and act drunk because of their insulin.
When we go into nursing homes and see the CRAP those people eat it makes me wonder how much of their problem is food related.
We have allowed ourselves to poison the food sources, the soil and atmosphere. The best and most ideal diet would be totally organic, which, in most cases for most people, is econmically not feasible, but anything we consume in excess can have ill effects on us. As far as what causes Alzheimer's is still in question. What was thought to be true about a certain protein affecting the brain just a few years ago has changed to a different type protein affecting the brain in a different way. Until we know for certain what the causes Alzheimer's, we are still guessing how to prevent it, let alone cure it.
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| http://www.sciencecodex.com/eating_lots_of_carbs_sugar_may_raise_risk_of_cognitive_impairment_mayo_clinic_study_finds-100231 | dclm-gs1-423455528 | false | true | {
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0.070438 | <urn:uuid:fab57dca-d180-47f1-87d3-24c1163884eb> | en | 0.932386 | Mitigating the Impact of a Merger
When two companies integrate, it can wreak havoc on electronic security infrastructure
The first step is to provide a universal badge that looks the same and will be recognized as the official new company badge. Common issues when creating a universal badge include: Placement of picture and name on the badge; badge orientation - landscape or portrait; font used; company logo; colors; size; any printing on the back; clearance level; years of service, etc.
The creation of employee ID badges tends to be a very emotional and sensitive issue. Employees at each company involved in the merger tend to have an emotional attachment to the badge they have grown accustomed to and change can be painful and a long political process if not handled properly. Solving and defining this list will provide a badge that looks the same across the company, but it does not address electronic access control.
Standardizing Technology
A somewhat less emotional, but more of a technical challenge is to provide a standard electronic access control technology that must then be incorporated inside the new employee identification badge. However, defining a technology does not, in and of itself, ensure electronic compatibility with the various electronic badge readers that exist throughout the new merged company.
Developing a standardized technology and protocol will have a cost impact on the merged company and cannot typically be accomplished in a short period of time. Just manufacturing a badge that looks the same requires time to develop and distribute. On the technology and protocol side, equipment may need to be replaced, multi-technology badges developed, multi-readers in common areas or other options to transition to the standardized technology and protocol.
The best way to determine impact, schedule and cost is to survey each facility to define the level of effort and time required to implement the chosen technology and protocol.
Defining Functional Goals & Technology Roadmaps
Upper management must define some security philosophies that they want to apply across the new combined company in the form of functional goals. These functional goals should be defined and expanded by a team of stakeholders to make them a real-world solution. The challenge for the security department is to develop a standardized philosophy and minimum standards to meet the functional goals.
Functional goals tend to expand in their implementation, requiring other standards to be defined in order to reach the original functional goal. In the example of a universal employee badge, the obvious unresolved problem becomes defining a universal badge for contractors and visitors. This can be a special badge totally different from employees and it may or may not include a technology. Electronic access control might be limited to employees, while contractors and visitors must be escorted.
Besides using or not using a technology, other issues such as pictures, areas of access, badge layout, etc. must be determined for the contractor and/or visitor badge. The handling of visitors and contractors is now a security standard of the new merged company.
Other functional goals should go through the same development process. The functional goals must clearly express the objective to be achieved in a statement. A team of security stakeholders - typically a member of the security team, technical support personnel and some level of upper management - must then evaluate the functional goal, and a plan can be developed.
This functional goal is often placed on a roadmap that is facility-specific, time-specific and addresses any funding issues. Many times, functional goals for the merged company will require months or even years reaching completion, meaning that milestones are developed and added to the roadmap - providing a way to show progress and provide checkpoints that allow progress to be measured. Without specific dates on the roadmap, the functional goal will often not be realized and the merged company will find itself in "analysis paralysis."
Upper management's "buy-in" at the roadmap level will enhance the probability of reaching the timetable on the roadmap and assist in obtaining the funding to proceed smoothly. | http://www.securityinfowatch.com/article/10536754/mitigating-the-impact-of-a-merger?page=2 | dclm-gs1-423525528 | false | false | {
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0.073906 | <urn:uuid:7896009d-0698-488b-8486-4dea0276327f> | en | 0.911274 | Harry Hopkins Explains Why Stimulus Doesn't Work
A blog about business and economics.
July 23 2013 4:06 PM
Harry Hopkins Explains Why Stimulus Doesn't Work
A friend drew my attention to this passage from Michael Hiltzik's The New Deal: A Modern History in which he quotes Harry Hopkins explaining the basic dilemma of overseeing a government job creation program (he's talking specifically about the Federal Theater Program but the point is general):
You can't care very much what people are going to say because when you're handling other people's money whatever you do is always wrong. If you try to hold down wages, you'll be accused of union-busting and grinding down the poor; if you pay a decent wage, you'll be competing with private industry and pampering a lot of no-accounts; if you scrimp on production costs, they'll say your shows are lousy and if you spend enough to get a good show on, they'll say you're wasting the taxpayers' money. Don't forget that whatever happens you'll be wrong.
This was meant as advice to Hallie Flanagan, but I actually think it's something that those of us who believe stimulative policy is appropriate during recessions need to think more seriously about. For a long time we had a consensus that we could get around this problem because monetary policy could stabilize the macroeconomy. But it turns out that the Federal Reserve's customary tool of short-term interest rates can run out of firepower. One possible solution to this problem is for Congress to enact a massive fiscal stimulus program on a discretionary basis. What we found out in the 2009–11 period, however, is that this doesn't really work politically. And Hopkins found out the same thing in the 1930s. It's not that you can't get anything useful done with fiscal stimulus—you can do lots of great stuff and help the economy out in the process—but there are some really serious barriers to actually stimulating at the necessary scale.
That doesn't mean we're doomed. But it means we need to adopt public policies in advance to help rescue the economy before the next zero bound episode. That means giving the Federal Reserve a powerful new tool to hand out money to people and working out an automatic mechanism for state governments to get injections of money in severe downturns.
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0.029316 | <urn:uuid:06c31555-fa24-4e0f-ac63-a171083e8a7a> | en | 0.975893 | Skip over navigation
A Storm of Swords
George R. R. Martin
Chapters 37-41
Chapters 32-36
Chapters 42-46
Chapter 37 (Arya)
During a night attack, the Brotherhood Without Banners destroys a garrison of Brave Companions. The survivors are tried and mostly executed. Arya wonders how Beric survived the trial by combat. At first Beric claims he was only wounded, but it’s apparent from the condition of his body that he’s been revived from death six times. Gendry wishes to join the Brotherhood, and Beric knights him. Arya feels further abandoned by her friends, and she angrily parts ways with Gendry.
Chapter 38 (Bran)
Bran and his companions arrive at an abandoned village and find a causeway that leads beneath an adjacent lake. They spot a rider they can’t identify, and they wonder who might be pursuing them. Hodor, who only ever says his name when he speaks, starts to say “Hodor” over and over, despite Bran’s attempts to quiet him. Finally Bran tries to enter Hodor’s mind and stop him from speaking. They spot a camp, but they can’t identify the group. Bran enters the mind of his direwolf, Summer, and tries to spy on them.
Chapter 39 (Jon)
A group of wildlings has moved South of the Wall, with Jon among them. At a towerhouse, Jon and Ygritte debate their differences. Ygritte believes her Free Folk are a better people, because the world belongs to everyone, and she resents the people of the Seven Kingdoms, who divvy up and control their lands. They continue to move, until the wildlings find an old man and demand that Jon kill him. Jon hesitates, and when they accuse him and Ygritte of conspiring, Ygritte kills the old man. Jon uses the confusion to kill some wildlings and escape, but he is wounded in the leg, which slows his pace. He heads back to the Wall, but he feels torn between two lives.
Chapter 40 (Daenerys)
Daenerys arrives at the city of Yunkai with her massive army. She meets with three different groups: the leaders of the Stormcrows, a band of mercenaries contracted to protect Yunkai; the head of another band of mercenaries called the Second Sons; and finally a representative of the Yunkai’i. She tells the first two that they have until the morning to decide whether to join her, and to the last she says the city has three days to turn out its slaves and surrender to her. Daenerys, meanwhile, has planned a surprise attack for that same night. But before they can launch the attack, one of the Stormcrow leaders, Daario Naharis, enters the camp and gives Daenerys the heads of the other two Stormcrow leaders. He swears his allegiance to Daenerys and pledges the support of his company. The surprise attack then begins. Daenerys remains in camp and asks Whitebeard about her late brother, Rhaegar. Her army is victorious, and Daenerys enters the city of Yunkai, where free slaves shout and call her “mother.”
Chapter 41 (Arya)
The Brotherhood Without Banners make camp, and Thoros and Beric reminisce near around a fire as Arya eavesdrops. An old dwarf woman joins them and tells of her dreams and portents. She mentions something about a castle called the Twins and some sort of wedding. She meets a youth named Ned who claims to be the “milk brother” of Jon Snow, because Jon’s mother, Wylla, nursed him. Ned reveals that he is Edric Dayne, a lord, and that Wylla was his wet nurse. He also tells of his Aunt Ashara Dayne, who met Arya’s father Eddard and threw herself into the ocean “for love.” Later, the priest Thoros tells Arya of his vision that the Lannisters will burn the castle of Riverrun. Arya tries to flee, but Sandor kidnaps her before she can escape and carries her away from the safety of the Brotherhood party.
Both Arya and Jon attempt escapes from their respective situations in this section, with mixed results. As Jon’s ties to the wildlings, and Ygritte in particular, have grown stronger, he’s felt increasingly conflicted. He never seems in danger of abandoning the Watch permanently, but neither is it clear that he could turn on the wildlings. It’s clear that he likes many of them, including Mance Rayder, and genuinely cares for others, notably Ygritte. When they demand that he kill an old man to prove his loyalty during a scouting mission, however, it forces him into a decision between his loyalty to them and his desire to leave. He obviously finds the act of killing the old man repugnant, and once he chooses not to do it, it seems likely the wildlings will question whether they should continue to trust him. He uses the opportunity to flee, though he’s wounded in the process. Arya, on the other hand, has no hesitations about getting away from the Brotherhood. What she lacks is only the chance to do so. But Arya is still young and not yet able to defend herself, so when she flees she is essentially helpless to defend herself against Sandor, who knows she could be of value to him. Thus she escapes the captivity of one group only to be taken captive again almost immediately after.
The apparent resurrection of Beric Dondarrion is one of the few instances of genuine magic we’ve seen in the novel, and notably, it is tied to the god R’hllor, which is the same god Melisandre worships. Prior to Sandor’s trial by combat against Beric, Arya hears numerous stories of how Beric died. The suggestion is that these are all unfounded rumors since no man can die in all these different ways. But when Beric reappears after losing in battle to Sandor, and having suffered a blow so lethal that no one could possibly survive it, it’s clear that something supernatural has taken place and that the various rumors may have, in fact, all been true. Arya learns that it is Thoros of Myr, a priest who worships R’hllor, who has been resurrecting Beric each time. In the series, there have been few instances of genuine magic, and even fewer in this particular novel. But some of the most notable cases in which we see actual magic have involved Melisandre, who also happens to worship R’hllor. Whether this coincidence means anything is uncertain at this point, however.
The Brotherhood’s meeting with the dwarf woman that Arya overhears foreshadows a number of important events to come, though what exactly all the events might be and what their ramifications will be aren’t yet clear. The dwarf woman talks about these events she foresees very broadly and almost exclusively in metaphors. She says, for instance, that she saw “a burning heart butchering a golden stag.” The burning heart is the symbol of R’hllor, and the stag is the sigil of house Baratheon, so the event she refers to is Renly’s murder by Melisandre’s shadow assassin in A Clash of Kings. Many of the other events have not yet occurred, leaving the reader to puzzle out their meanings. Those meanings become evident, however, if the reader returns to the prophecies after reaching the end of the book.
Daenerys shows herself to be a shrewd strategist, both in conversation and as a military commander. In her meetings with the leaders of Yunkai’s hired mercenaries and again with the representative of Yunkai she allows the men to think what they want of her. She points out that she’s a young girl with little experience in war and lets their prejudices against women fool them into thinking they have the upper hand. Yet she can see that one of the leaders of the Stormcrows doesn’t agree with the two others and that they will spend the night arguing, that the leader of the Second Sons will bring all the wine she gave him back to his men and that the company will spend the evening drunk, and that the representative of Yunkai will think he has three days before they attack so the city will wait to prepare its defenses. Meanwhile, she has all along planned to attack the city that night and has simply been misleading them. As a result, she is able to take the city quite easily.
Bran for the first time uses his ability to try to control something other than Summer, and the attempt shows he’s becoming more proficient with his psychic skill but also has a great way to go. Bran has previously only slipped into Summer’s skin as an escape or to gather information. It’s never been a matter of necessity. Here, on the other hand, Bran finds himself using his ability in an emergency as he tries to use his ability to quiet Hodor. It turns out to be much more difficult than Bran had perhaps anticipated, however. Unlike Summer, Hodor has no spiritual or psychic connection to Bran, and when he feels Bran encroaching on his mind, he treats it like an invasion. Bran can feel his panic and discomfort, and because he has no deep connection to Hodor, he finds it hard to control him. What essentially takes place is a mental wrestling match between Bran and Hodor as both try to control Hodor’s body. But even though the attempt isn’t wildly successful, it does show that Bran’s abilities are improving, and it suggests that soon, maybe just with more practice, he will be able to slip his own skin and inhabit that of another creature at will.
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0.019343 | <urn:uuid:b8b7ebce-ef1a-4a39-b8ae-fa33c401d39e> | en | 0.890665 | Showing All "Yeasayer" Posts
Why all the nudity in 2009? Well, look at this way: The affordability of video production technology has made it easier for everybody to get in the game; the unceremonious death of music television… Read Story »
When we posted our most anticipated albums of 2010, there was a reason we decided to illustrate it with a Yeasayer thumbnail: It's clear the playful psychedelic Brooklyn group's second full-length… Read Story »
That technologically advanced NSFW preview does indeed get fleshed out in the official Radical Friend-directed video for Odd Blood's excellent teaser track "Ambling Alp." The psychedelically… Read Story »
This year in music was great and we'rea gonna let it finish (sorry), but in terms of notable album releases the ship has sailed. No offense, 30 Seconds To Mars. While the Gummys' virtual poll booth… Read Story »
There's a progression at play here. There was Sigur Rós filming hairless young things frolicking in the woods for "Gobbledigook," surpassed many months later by Girls' XXX "Lust For Life" video… Read Story »
Here's yet another look for Yeasayer's excellent Odd Blood-teaser track "Ambling Alp," courtesy of the magic seeking Philadelphia sound man Dayve Hawk aka Memory Tapes. It's an official remix,… Read Story »
Last Friday, Yeasayer offered the first drop from their forthcoming Odd Blood LP in the form of "Ambling Alp," a chirping and fuzzing, horned and harmonized left-field upper that's as polyrhythmic… Read Story »
On the same day they unleashed the rather awesome "Ambling Alp" MP3, Yeasayer headlined the latest installment of the Guggenheim museum's It Came From Brooklyn series. Opening were Tanlines (the… Read Story »
The chanted, harmonious Brooklyn-via-Baltimore psychedelic-pop troupe told Jessica in a Progress Report that they were, essentially, trying to "make you feel inadequate, like you're not cool enough… Read Story »
Save for "Tightrope," it's been a while since we've heard anything from Yeasayer beyond its members' cameos (SMD, B4L), production work, and remixes. That'll change in early 2010 (not 2080) when the… Read Story » | http://www.stereogum.com/tag/yeasayer/page/7/ | dclm-gs1-423935528 | false | false | {
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0.032936 | <urn:uuid:eef2f931-eae3-490a-930c-4bbcced8d5fb> | en | 0.933913 | Money Matters - Simplified
Top Story
The Baseball Player Who Mastered the Market
There is one ball player out there who has cracked the nut of
investing -- a guy who grasps the underlying complexities of the
financial world with astonishing ease. Even though I've never heard him
utter even one market catch phrase or a single financial buzzword, it's
clear that this guy just gets it.
Nothing's Changed in Banking
After a financial meltdown that left the global financial system
reeling, executives in the banking sector should have taken a page out
of the Talking Heads' playbook, and asked themselves questions like
"How did I get here?" If they had, perhaps I wouldn't have that darn
"same as it ever was" refrain running constantly through my head today.
Today's 5-Star Movers
investment decision on the daily gyrations of the market. But the
market's daily price movements can be useful when looking for new stock
Goldman Makes It Rain
Three weeks ago, it was reported that Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) was on track to pay
its employees the biggest bonuses ever, corresponding with what was
shaping up to be the best quarter in the investment bank's history.
Windows 7: Doomed on Arrival? Not So Fast!
Untruths come in several flavors (in order of heinousness): lies, damned lies, and statistics.
And then there are survey results from a source with a self-serving axe
to grind. You can put any spin you want on such reports, as long as
it's done with a straight face.
4-Star Stocks Poised to Pop: Delta Petroleum
Based on the aggregated intelligence of 135,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS, the Fool's free investing community, oil and natural gas provider Delta Petroleum (Nasdaq: DPTR) has earned a respected four-star ranking.
Companies with Killer Price-to-Sales Ratios
We all want to find solid companies, and we want to buy them at
attractive prices. But that's easier said than done -- some of the best
methods of estimating a company's true value are rather complicated.
That's why many people love the simplicity of the price-to-earnings
(P/E) ratio, or its cousin, the price-to-sales (P/S) ratio. The latter
is especially handy when a company has no earnings.
2-Star Stocks Poised to Plunge: Pool Corporation?
Based on the aggregated intelligence of 135,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS, the Fool's free investing community, swimming-pool-equipment supplier Pool Corporation (Nasdaq: POOL) has received a distressing two-star ranking.
4 Reasons Why Netflix Will Say No
Amaflix? Netazon? The Microhoo-esque amalgamations don't quite fit, and neither do yesterday's rumors that (Nasdaq: AMZN) might want to acquire Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX).
Wall Street's Buy List
Actions speak louder than words, as the old saying goes. So why does
the media focus so much attention on what Wall Street says about
companies, instead of what it does with them? | http://www.themoneytimes.com/section/top-story?page=2035 | dclm-gs1-424495528 | false | false | {
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0.040933 | <urn:uuid:d90a2cfa-c107-40cf-91bc-4b59851873e0> | en | 0.941404 | Freeloader ships in UK
Game Cube region protection hack
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gamesindustry.biz logo The much-delayed Freeloader product for the GameCube- originally scheduled for release long before Christmas - has finally been shipped by UK-based cheat products specialist Datel, and should be in shops at the end of the week.
The disc, which is not officially sanctioned by Nintendo, allows Cube users to play games from any region - effectively blowing the region coding system on the console wide open, and making importing games possible for even casual players who don't want to have to modify the hardware of their console.
Games such as Metroid Prime and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker are expected to be widely imported from the USA following the release of Freeloader. Currency and price differences between the USA and Europe mean that imported games are not significantly more expensive than new releases in the UK, and can sometimes even be cheaper.
Nintendo has been widely criticised for its failure to bring key titles to Europe until months after their release in the USA, and much of the dismal performance of the GameCube over Christmas in Europe was attributed to the lack of hit titles such as Metroid Prime and Resident Evil Zero, which drove sales of the console in the USA. The ability to easily import such titles may hurt retail sales of GameCube software in the UK even further.
Freeloader will not encourage piracy, however; it merely removes the region protection of the console. At present, it remains impossible to produce pirate versions of GameCube titles due to the unusual format of the discs used by Nintendo.
© gamesindustry.biz
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Saudi Petroleum chooses Tegile storage solution | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/05/freeloader_ships_in_uk/ | dclm-gs1-424525528 | false | false | {
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0.054418 | <urn:uuid:dd7d0835-3028-41a3-aed8-d8f542e48a57> | en | 0.965119 | Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/17/ms_legal_threat_derails_foxpro/
MS legal threat derails Foxpro on Linux demo
You run our stuff where we say
By John Leyden
Posted in Software, 17th April 2003 22:23 GMT
Microsoft has enraged the developer community after a Redmond executive last week threatened a software developer to prevent him from demonstrating a Microsoft application running on Linux.
Whil Hentzen, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was to have presented a seminar showing how to run Microsoft's Visual FoxPro on Linux at the Bay Area Association of Database Developers last Wednesday.
But prior to the demonstration Hentzen received a call from a Microsoft marketing manager telling him that he would be in violation of the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement) for VFP if he demonstrated (or ran) the development tool on Linux.
After the brief conversation with Ken Levy, Microsoft's Visual FoxPro marketing manager, Hentzen decided to abandon the practical demonstration from his talk. Levy had contacted Hentzen after reading a paper on the subject, which Hentzen had edited.
The situation is confusing because Hentzen had done the demonstration before, with no problems. Also other developers had been led to believe from Microsoft that "as long as licenses were in order" running VFP on Linux as a developer environment was permissible.
Hentzen has written to Microsoft asking for clarification to this conflicting advice. He told us this afternoon he was yet to receive a reply.
Hentzen wants to know firstly if developers can run VFP on a Linux as a developer environment, providing the appropriate license has been paid. He also wants to know the terms on which applications developed using VFP can be distributed.
The suggestion every Linux machine running VFP-created aps would need a VFP license. For Windows, only the development machine needs to have a VFP license.
"It appears that Microsoft is trying the tie its applications (developer tools) to their operating system," Hentzen told us.
"Given the legal difficulties that Microsoft has encountered over the years, we don't believe that this is legal, and thus we don't believe that this is the intent of the EULA," he added.
Microsoft is trying to get people to use Visual Basic, instead of FoxPro, because the former is a bigger money spinner for the company, Hentzen believes.
FoxPro is a database and development language purchased by Microsoft in 1992, and now known as Microsoft Visual FoxPro (VFP).
The technology allows developer to create an executable which can then be distributed (along with a support library dll) to an unlimited number of end users.
Reg reader Nick Causton tells us: "Within the FoxPro community there has been a lot of discussion recently about running VFP applications on Linux instead of Windows, no one seriously believed that Microsoft could prevent them from doing this."
Hentzen's demonstration follows on from work by other developers who have been able to get VFP to run on Linux using WINE.
"This now works quite well with the last few problems currently being addressed and there are now a number of people demonstrating this at seminars/conferences," he adds.
Developer Chet Gardiner, who attended the meeting, writes: "MS won't market it [VFP] for Windows applications, even those for which it's the best tool. Now M$ won't let us run it on any other OS, especially the one that's going to kick their butts."
"They are so interested in owning everyone's desktop that don't they see that in this way they could sell a whole lot of VFP stuff to other programmers and make some money out of it," he adds. ® | http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2003/04/17/ms_legal_threat_derails_foxpro/ | dclm-gs1-424535528 | false | false | {
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0.107478 | <urn:uuid:1663143f-8982-434b-a5b9-7eed5c93df11> | en | 0.85623 | 1. Not the first time a guy has tried to pick up a mannequin.
2. Terminator dude! Terminator!!!
3. “All the boys, think she’s a spy she’s got…Brandon Davis face.”
4. This is a robot, right?
5. “You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.”
“I’d kill it.”
6. cc
When did she pass away?
7. Michael Jackson Lives!
8. John Travolta
No. Thing. In. Side.
Leave A Comment | http://www.thesuperficial.com/photos/the-crap-we-missed-friday-4-5-13/the-crap-we-missed-0405-27 | dclm-gs1-424625528 | false | false | {
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0.737022 | <urn:uuid:88410a96-02ce-4fa8-bd13-103decdb5a8e> | en | 0.964305 | look up any word, like blumpkin:
2 definitions by stevos skater balls
A Newtown, CT, local police officer, who comes to this town from some other town and think they own the place. Nobody liked them in high school, they didn't go to college, and they don't like to see anyone being more successful then themselves. The most action they see is hassling teen agers for hanging out, and there only job duty is to drive around tailgating people and running there plates in there stupid computers, then for whatever reason they want, they will pull you over and because there jealous and nobody likes them they will hassle you, saying your eyes look blood shot, they will say they smell smoke/alcohol because they want to search your car and bust your ass so you get kicked out of college, because they where to lazy/dumb to get a real degree, they don't want you to have one either, then maybe they will get promoted so they get bumped up on the bacon scale to oink oink.
Could this plate runner tailgate me any closer? I'm going to slam my breaks on him so he can see if my break lights.
by stevos skater balls January 14, 2007
Its an enormouse industrial sized toilet clogging 1 piece fecile log, clogging treasure trove.
I left it there for a lucky person to find, I believe that janitor found a sizable treasure trove and flushed my trophy.
by stevos skater balls December 12, 2006 | http://www.urbandictionary.com/author.php?author=stevos+skater+balls | dclm-gs1-424895528 | false | false | {
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