Linda might be lecturing about some topics in World War 2, and I took that as an excuse to get this old and guilty pleasure down from the shelf. Griffin writes the same books over and over, but he does a nice job of capturing memorable characters and of bringing the Hollywood fantasy of the world war back into realism without casting doubt on apple pie and all the rest.
There’s a firm Reddit policy against subreddits dedicated to harassment -- at least, if the target is a Very Important Silicon Valley Investor.
Those charming folks at Gamergate have started a special subreddit dedicated to yours truly. I’ve now called Reddit’s attention to this three times. Apparently, a subreddit attacking me is fine -- just don’t attack movie stars or industry magnates.
Sometimes, I don’t see clearly what my own software can do.
I've been trying to sketch rough images of some characters from a hypertext fiction I’ve been playing with. The cast is large, and sometimes I find it hard to keep all the characters straight, and so my cork board of bad paintings helps remind me who’s who.
But I can do this right in Tinderbox. Drop a folder into the badges directory, and fill it with little png thumbnails for the characters. Now, I can badge notes with a face to remind me of the point-of-view character, or simply of who needs work in this scene.
No muss, no fuss, and no big images cluttering the Tinderbox file.
I’m experimenting with a new link style, broad links.
The source of the link is the wide end, and the destination is the narrow end.
Have a better visualization? Email me.
Alice is missing.
This is not headline news. Alice is often missing. She is missing, that is to say, when not underfoot, and when Alice is not underfoot, she is generally missing. Her parents are in the habit of sending her upstairs to play, or out to play, in the custody of her cat Dinah or of her elder sister Lydia or perhaps with the neighboring vicar’s girl, poor malformed Ada Boyce. It is particularly desirable that Alice not be underfoot today, because today Papa has a visitor: the famous heretic Darwin, a distant relative, come despite his feeble health to offer belated condolences after the death of Mama.
No one is certain just where Alice is. Soon, a number of the Oxford youngsters are even more unsure than her governess, for they have found themselves in a place peopled with white rabbits and tartless queens where one side of a door says KEEP OUT and the opposite side says OUT KEEP and where the best advice is not to take any advice at all.
A decade back, I have some talks focused on cultivating and nurturing the blogosphere. That failed; we allowed the blogosphere to be coopted by Facebook, and now lots of people think that Facebook is the Internet and that whatever Facebook thinks they ought to see is all there is to see.
Tom Webster and Mark Schaeffer have a nice discussion about the state of the Web from a marketer’s perspective.
An impressive and fascinating series about Storyspace by Howard Oakley.
Recommended by Michael Dirda (Browsings), who in turn got it from Thomas M. Disch. Walter Tevis wrote The Hustler, and The Man Who Fell To Earth, and The Color Of Money. This is a nifty book, too.
I’d never heard of Tevis.
Beth Harmon is an orphan, tossed into a ghastly orphanage where they feed the children narcotics to keep them docile. On the sly, she learns to play chess from the taciturn janitor. She turns out to be very good at chess, though she’s not particularly good at resisting narcotics and alcohol. Tevis does a wonderful job of sketching the characters of Harmon’s opponents – people who, in the nature of things, the book must rapidly leave behind – through their varied reactions to being defeated, unthinkably, by a young woman. That the author of The Hustler would be good at depicting losers is unsurprising, I suppose, but he’s really good.
This is a charmingly serious novel about serious category errors. Our protagonist, when young, was called a “thespian” in a school quarrel, and in consequence joined the drama club. There, the cool kids told her that she wasn’t a thespian; she was a lesbian. OK: the goes to the nearby Virginia women’s college that is famous for its lesbians, and immediately winds up in an affair with one of the school’s few male professors. We’re only getting started; we have gay men who aren’t gay, black children with ivory skin, black-skinned children who are white, people with Old Money who have no money, poor people who have plenty of cash but dare not spend it, lawless law enforcement, and cocaine that isn’t cocaine. This could be slapstick, but isn’t. A smaller book than Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, but touching lightly on many of the same problems.
New from Howard Oakley on Storyspace:
Structuring hypertext using rules instead of links
“My aim is to present the reader with an interactive map of the Piazza, in which each painting is placed according to the location from which it was painted. However, as there are quite a lot of paintings, and most readers will also be interesting in how those paintings changed over time, I am going to structure this in time too.”
Oakley is revisiting the stones of Venice, and using metadata like a painting’s age to structure connections among works. I think this is really more a Tinderbox task than Storyspace, but in this case the technique applies to either.
Just yesterday in the Forum, we were talking about using Storyspace to do some of the things Franco Moretti does in his little book on Graphs, Maps, and Trees for understanding literature. Here we are, the very next day, with a nifty example!
2015.
There’s a few days left in WinterFest: the festival of artisanal software. Great prices on Tinderbox, Storyspace, DEVONthink Pro Office, Scrivener, and lots more.
One Winterfest wit saw the “special requests” textbook in the Tinderbox order form and wrote that “a picture of a cat on my invoice would be awesome :)”. You’ll be pleased to know we managed to oblige; having real people process orders may sometimes be slow, but it has advantages.
