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In his March 26 weblog entry, Bret says:
"I like how stepping on the escalator [on the way out of the subway] the white light flashes up from below the metal steps through the crack. I feel like I am on an over-sized copy machine"
Well, Bret, that's exactly what is happening. Each time you go up that escalator a duplicate of you is being fed out of another tunnel below. They are automatically being sorted, collated and stapled into small armies.
Escapism is what I need right now, and Forgotten Futures helps me escape into a world of quaint Victorian literature. Airship catalogs, what if the world were a tetrahedron, flying ships, the future that was and never was, the ancient version of modernness.
A weblogger with a twisted, yet wise and insightful sense of humor and perceptiveness is Bret.
Life must be difficult if you are A Talking Fish. You have such awesome responsibilities.
For more about talking fish, see HERE (animatronics deconstruction), HERE (the Eddystone Light), and HERE.(An emigre in Hungary)
Looking for plot ideas? This action movie trailer generator will think of one for you
For the new age of words over the wire, here is a guide to how to write telegrams properly.
Of course, you might wonder if a machine can do a better job of saying the words for you. If so, check out the Blog Drone.
If you have trouble telling the real stuff apart from the mechanical spoof, check out what Alan Turing says about that.
There is nothing new under the sun.
If you happen to be passing throough Paris, check out a real live gathering of French surrealists as described here and specifically my buddy Mick Cusimano who is in town to exhibit his work.
The Sea-God Poseidon is now writing a cooking column. This appetizer tastes better than Smargola (see below) any day.
Web page displaying treasures of early printing from China, including the world's earlest printed book. I wish I could print like that!
Go HERE for an exhibit of the game design work of Sid Sackson, author of lots of good stuff
Find yourself! The entire USA in aerial photos at the Acme Mapper. You can run but you can't hide.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is an endangered species. They are so rare, very few people have ever seen one. I wonder if they are related to the Smargola (see below)
I actually remembered to write 2003.
Here is a timeline of the history of media from the invention of paper many years B.C. to the present.
You know that you are really culturally literate when you can pass the King William's Quiz created for King William's College, Isle of Man. See how you stack up against the scholars. Answers next month. Here's a challenge, though: If you don't know all the answers, use your research skills to find them on the internet.
Sorry about the.................................................hiatus.
Here's something the Boston Globe had to say about us bloggers; that we get the credit/blame for the fall of Trent Lott.
(begin quotation)
Trent Lott's downfall had implications not only for the nation's politics, but for the media as well. According to a number of observers, the events following his remarks about Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential bid put the swelling ranks of online "bloggers" on the media map in much the same way that "Operation Desert Storm" ushered in the era of cable news and the Gennifer Flowers/Bill Clinton tryst focused attention on supermarket tabloids.
(end quotation)
Are we really that influential? Or is someone just looking for scapegoats here? Don't blame me. I didn't do it..
Homebrew literary technology of bygone centuries: This page explains how to make your own ink
Here are some instructions therefom:
"To make common yncke of Wyne take a quart, Two ounces of gomme, let that be a parte, Five ounces of galles, of copres take three, Long standing dooth make it better to be; If wyne ye do want, rayne water is best, And as much stuffe as above at the least: If yncke be to thick, put vinegar in, For water dooth make the colour more dimme. In hast for a shift when ye have a great nead, Take woll, or wollen to stand you in steede; which burnt in the fire the powder bette small With vinegre, or water make yncke with all. If yncke ye desire to keep long in store Put bay salte therein, and it will not hoare. Of that common yncke be not to your minde Some lampblack thereto with gomme water grinde"
And see also here.
A great source of book reviews of what's up in science fiction publishing is The New York Review Of Science Fiction A printed paper, so I was disappointed I didn't find a way to read back issues on line. But get your hands on an actual physical hard copy and it's well worth a read.
Look how talented all those 3-d Computer Graphics Artists are! I am extremely jealous.
More random-senseless-sentence generators, this time from the Brunching Shuttlecocks page.
More stuff about eating in medieval times which seems to be a topic I like coming back to. Did knights have table manners? What did they eat?
One question that has been a bug in the ear of all governmental types since the dawn of time is "quis custodiet custodies" or who watches the watchmen, who controls the control freaks. In an anarchist society, it would be the job of the watchman to watch himself, which sorta sounds like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. In this spirit, we offer the Citizen's Self-Arrest Form in case you ever need to place yourself under arrest.
The Hasbro "Queasy Bake Oven", a sort of a self-wackypackagization of a proven marketing concept. Compare to the "medieval" style of playing with your food, (below) and tell me which one is grosser.
One webcomic with key things to say about cyberculture and the answer to the question "what's in it for me?" is The Guy I Almost Was, on a site full of web comics by one guy, who almost was, and indeed, is, named Patrick Farley. All very witty. Some better than others.
Check out this awesome (or aweful) collection of medieval recipes including fire-breathing peacocks, chickens in suits of armor, &c.
You might not be allowed to do these thinngs after a while if the major provider of search engine technology decides that it's a thing to be used not abused and stops letting you. But check out what this guy is doing with banner ads and what this guy is doing with search engine queries made automatically. I wonder what Raymond Roussell (see below) would have been able to do if he had had that technology available.
I just visited the metaspy.com website, where you can get a window on search engine queries various people are trying. I saw that the most common query (in the small sample I had time to look at) was "food". So I figure if I include the word "food" a lot in these pages, search engines will find me. Here I go: food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food food Okay, just in case you found this page because you were looking for stuff about food, I'll be a good sport and show you once again:An interesting timeline page on the history of food , brought to you by the Morris County, NJ library.
More on cliches. Thanks to Flaubert, via the filtering editorial eye of Jorn Barger, for the Dictionary of Received Ideas. The dust of an earthy today is the earth of a dusty tomorrow, as W S Gilbert once said. Some of them are outdated, but some are still current. Still current runs deep.
Here is a fascinating discussion of various kinds of bridge construction complete with diagrams. Hats off to whoever designed the diagrams, they're brilliantly simple, yet very detailed.
It's hard to say in a short paragraph what's up with all the new electronic copyright legislation et cetera but this writer succeeds.
For more on the philosophical question of whether computer-generated "art" can actually be art, a researcher analyzes the following question: Can a computer design a mobile? If computers can be creative too, is creativity worthless? Well, Man is an animistic creature, who anthropomorphizes the elements, and computerdom is a new element to be animistic about. So if we are calling the computer an artist, this is perhaps a repressed way of saying that an artist is what we really want to be.
Here is a paradox: John Sundman's new novel _Cheap Complex Devices_ purports to be written by a computer, and so we feel cheated when it turns out to really be a work of fiction by a good writer instead, a sort of a caricature of computer-generated prose. In a way, then, he is sort of akin to Roussel(see below). Roussel tried to use symbolic-deterministic methods to come up with ideas and passes them off as products of the imagination; and it seems like a rip-off when what he feeds us looks like random junk; why, then, does it feel like a rip-off when Cheap Complex Devices turns out to be the product of the imagination and not random junk? Because Sundman lied to us and that's a gimmick? Sundman and Roussel are exploring the same ground in opposite ways; what is it about humans that makes them capable of authorship? And how do you recognize authorship when you see it?
Good writeup of magazine cover design history. Other good pop-culture commentary on the site, which seems to come from Tennessee.
Radio station features dated pop culture reference of the day.
Check out this informative timeline on the History of Video Games
History in the making: History of the first post on a bulletin board in which the email smiley is being invented.
:-)
Be sure to read the thread of messages that puts it
in context.
Here is a definitive collection of trite one-liners. You may think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread and more fun than a barrel of monkeys, but wake up and smell the coffee, you should avoid them like the plague.
Another good article about Raymond Roussel.
Here's an English newspaper article with an interesting take on the concept of authors-for-hire to write someone else's message, both currently and historically.
Is nothing sacred? Are we making hash of history? Or just selling it out to the highest bidder? If you have money, be medieval! Go buy yourself a castle at Castles For Sale. Somehow I thought the sellout would look more tasteful.
For those who appreciate small computers, in terms of both physical size and memory size, read this: Window Manager for handheld Linux devices. But it's 50mb! You can do better than that! The original Macintosh had only 128k of memory, and a 400k floppy disk had room for Finder, an application, and several data files. So why does a utility that does a fraction of that much stuff take up 50mb? [Later Note: Sorry, I read that wrong. Really says it runs in 50k, which is about normal. What a difference a digit or two or three makes.]
I always fail to remember, what's the right method of construction for a Sestina, and I have to keep asking someone. Well, here's where I can look up this piece of information and a lot of others: the Glossary of Poetic Terms has everything I am looking for.
Literary parody department: corporate annual reports in the style of various famous authors.
Geometry! It goes on forever, and there's still always stuff you don't know. So here is a page to go to for geometry stuff of all sorts, the Geometry Junkyard, a compendium of interesting facts about space tilings, polyhedra, convex hull problems, graph theory, paper folding, volume optimization and other miscellaneous stuff.
Here is an amazing poetic tribute to the World Trade Center.
If you are a very twiteral-minded thinker, you might be disappointed to learn that the Chrysler Building is not actually made out of Chryslers. However, if you still must have your experience of auto-no-longer-mobiles as a structural element, why don't you go and check out Carhenge, a replica of Stonehenge built entirely out of old cars spraypainted silver. Become a member. Buy the merchandise. Visit it if you are ever passing through Nebraska. Does it accurately predict solstices and equinoxes, or does the timing need to be adjusted?
Look here for more on palindromes (of the verbal sort this time) You have to scroll down to find the links to other interesting palindrome pages.
Here is a page on a brute-force approach to answering a certain question about a number: as follows, take that number, reverse its digits and add the two. If the result is palindromic, you're done. If it is not, take that result and do the same thing again. Does this process eventually halt?
It takes a very long time for the number 196.
All right, maybe million-digit brute-force arithmetic is not your idea of fun.
But what I would like to know is, has anyone ever taken a more looking-for-the-keystone type of approach to arriving at a proof? I would suggest taking a look at the number of carries in the addition, or some other property of them like which digits need to be carried or whether the number of carries is odd or even, or various other properties of the digits you can think of, and try to prove inductively that something is invariant from cycle to cycle. Has anyone ever tried working on the problem that way?
An interesting timeline page on the history of food , brought to you by the Morris County, NJ library.
Witty, minimalist html-and-stuff from Ellen, Architect of Change who should set an example for all people who want to write non-boring websites. Check out the thing on her site known as "Presents." If your browser is a very old one like mine, you will be able to get something out of her older "Presents" creations even if the newer ones don't on older machines. Small is beautiful.
For more on random text (de)generation go to Dadadodo
For a good romp in the potential of experimental hypertext, check out The Therapist, which is a collaborative effort in hypertext story building. Fiction in the guise of case files of a therapist who serves the employees of a big company. This allows authors to build story lines in many directions at once. Think of it as a soap opera, but more multidimensional and explorable.
The myriad games at this chess variants page are worth a check. However, I rant about the following: the game downloads are all for the PC and not written for a Mac. This really disappoints me as a Mac user. They have this thing Zillions, which is a generalized game-playing program that any game can be a module for, BUT I CAN'T USE IT SO I CAN'T TELL YOU IF IT'S ANY GOOD!!! To whom it may concern, please port Zillions into the Mac, and if you do, can it read the same modules or do they have to be re-written too?
Sorry about the hiatus. I haven't been entering entries on the page because I have been busy reading this in real life. Dear reader, if you are reading this, (if I have any readers yet) can you forgive me?
Today's entry is an interesting article by Janis Ian about what free downloading means to artists. Nice to have an artist talking about what it means to artists for a change instead of having the record companies do the talking for them.
Cryonics is fashionable lately. Imagine coming back hundreds of years from now and finding it isn't? Here's someone's take on the subject: This cartoon has something to say.
Check out the webpage of Dan Tobias with photos of places that matter, links all over the web, and tips for web design.
I know what's missing from this weblog. The News. Because the News is so awful these days I don't like to think about it. The News is a story so farfetched that nobody (at least nobody mortal) could make it up. But I can tell you a site that can help you get a handle on the latest news. It's The Red Rock Eater News Service , which will e-mail you a list of interesting pointers to what's up. Or, if you would rather not stuff your mailbox, you can get the archive of the same thing on line at this archive site.
Interesting review of a retrospective of comic book artist Bernard Krigstein by Art Spiegelman
For an interesting perspective on the dotcom boom-and-bust, see this archive of interviews with various people with stories to tell.
For some interesting automatic writing, try this random scrambler of 19th-century prose samples that writes almost as well as Raymond Roussel. (More on Raymond Roussel below).
For lively Go discussion check out the collaboratively-edited website Sensei's Library
All language manglers check out language mangler wrangler Pseudodictionary and look up all the words that aren't good enough to be in the real dictionary!
Computer-generated caricature HERE.
Another of my favorite artsy hangouts, the Out of the Blue Gallery
Visit the Joel on Software site for interesting perspectives on software development and other topics.
For an excellent survey of all the computer programs that play go, read this.
The trouble is, though, that it takes the wind out of your sails. One feels so intelligent and creative figuring out the basics of go by onesself, and then an upstart machine pops up and does it better than one, and one sees it's not exclusively the process of the mind at all. This can be annoying. What is creativity for if a non-creative process yields a similar result?
This thought, interestingly enough, is akin to my reasons for being fascinated by Raymond Roussel (see below). He tried to pass off mechanically-generated "ideas" as creative ones, with his word-association methods, and it is fascinating to see just how that succeeds here and there and fails here and there.
Are you bored? Try bored.com
You can have your name written on an asteroid Of course, there's no way to proofread it.
Why does this obscure writer fascinate me so? I am referring to Raymond Roussel whose writings have been described as "works of the imagination derived solely from linguistics."
Winkfield, whose article is found by the above link, says that he plays a b c with the quintessential, raiding the nursery to conjure up adult myths, not exactly as a puppet master but one who shuffles his characters around to serve the same purpose as words. Their belongings as a result can be more animistic than their owners.
He vanity-pressed all his writings, being someone who could afford to do that, and it is said his money provided insulation between himself and reality.
Perhaps then he has value as a metaphor phor the direction we are heading in lately. With the web we trip around in random hash, because we can. The stuff we come up with by lots of random hopping around tends to be a projection of ourselevs, and yet soul-less, deprived of direction. And yet that can be sometimes a fertile nesting ground for the subconscious, whose talent lies in projecting meaning into the meaningless. What would Roussel have been capable of if he had been a web page author?
One of my favorite web authors, the Australian cyber poet Komninos Zervos
One of my favorite coffeehouses is Squawk Coffeehouse
I have never seen a better recipe for smoked smargola.
I have respect for programmers who can write tight instead of writing Bloatware. If you can afford a new, bigger computer you might not care that your software is hogging more resources than the last version did, but some of us might want to avoid buying new stuff too often, so efficient use of whatever you've got is a plus. So for this reason hats off to the 5k awards for a contest for whoever can create the most creative thing that runs in 5k or less. People are being really creative in a minimalist kind of a way here.
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