,Flick-werk: zusammengestückelte Arbeit; stümperhafte Arbeit; Pfuscherei; Sy Flickschusterei (Wahrig - Deutsches Wörterbuch)
Blogs of note
Mark Bernstein++
Jill Walker: jill.txt++
Torill Mortensen: thinking with my fingers++
Lars Konzak: Ludologica++
Frank Schaap: fragment.nl++
Lisbeth Klastrup: Klastrup's Cataclysms++
Adrian Miles: vog blog++
Elin Sjursen: BLOGGERDYdoc++
Diane Greco: Self, self, self++
Grand Text Auto++
Hossein Derakhshan: EDITOR: MYSELF++
Meg Hourihan: MEGNUT++
Archives
[Links to Flickwerk v1 by month]
July 2003++
June 2003++
May 2003++
April 2003++
March 2003++
February 2003++
January 2003++
December 2002++
November 2002++
October 2002++
September 2002++
August 2002++
July 2002++
June 2002++
May 2002++
April & March 2002++
February 2002++
January 2002++
December 2001++
November 2001 ++
(c) Anja Rau 2003
please, condense The Little Friend down to about 250 pages. The current version has more detail than I can readily appreciate - esp. as about 80% do nothing to drive the plot to its climax. Creating an atmosphere is good and well, but do we realy need so much of it?
The Little Friend could be an excellent little story about subjective guilt (if it was little). Nice twist, indeed, not to tell us who killed the boy after all. But why turn the girl into an epileptic in the end? To account for her earlier insights as merely harbingers of the first fit? Or to single her out as a seer?
When, at the end of chapter 5, "The Red Gloves", you write "Later, when Harriet remembered that day, it would seem the exact, crystalline, scientific point where her life had swerved into misery." - this seems to be poignantly about guilt. Sadly, you make it be about sickness.
The Little Friend could also be about perspective: where adults can go and children can't, what adults can see and understand and children can't - and, more importantly, vice versa. But the omniscient point of view, the strangely precocious protagonist and the paleness e.g. of the house-bound mother quite ruin the effect.
Too bad.
Mark wonders whether fixed or liquid line-width is better and William replies, interestingly, that from various points of view, "form and content are inseparable".
Typographic standards (which are not usually universally applicable in web-design) suggest that lines 50 signs are most legible. With shorter or longer lines, legibility can be improved by de- or increasing the line-height. But beyond a certain level, the eye tends to lose its grip on the line.
Does Nielsen only think "line-length" when he calls for liquid layouts? In this case, he must have been thinking standard 17" monitors with a choice of 800 X 600 or 1024 X 768 pixels. Take a webpage optimized for 800 X 600 pixels and open it fullscreen on a 19" at 1280 X 960.
But the real point of fluid is not usability and line-length, it's accessibility and textzoom: write a page where browser-based textzoom in the common increments increases font-size as well as line-height and column-width.
Frank over at tin-the-fatty weblog has redesigned a la mode de Flickwerk. More precisely, it's a side-scroller, too, but color-choice, column-width and logo-position give it a completely unique and independent look.
The wider columns and larger font are more legible. too. + textzoom doesn't mess up the layout. Very nice.
I spent those 100 minutes at the edge of my seat, mouth open. Why? Can't have been the story (kid grows up a bit and parent learns to let go -- with quite a bit of verbal humar thrown in). OK, so I grimace when I read vividly described mimics. And with animation, one is always ultra-aware of how emotions are being represented. OK, so Ellen Degeneres did a great job. But that can't have been it.
My guess is: camera-angle. There must have been some sort of ubiquitous camera that put the viewer-perspective into the water with the fish. But N., who's more acute about stuff like this, says she can't remember any unorthodox camera-positions. German DVD-release is due April 2004.
Mark has a lot of interesting stuff in his blog this weekend. Try this, for example. Blambots' Dead Ends: hyperfiction horror. Very well-made interface. Nice & lean code, too. Plus, as far as can be told after cursorily skimming a couple of screen, the writing's not pretty awful, either.
Eastgate Systems was founded when I was exactly 12 years and 2 days old. At 12, I tried to nag and whine my parents into getting me a computer. After all, Claudia Stein had one. But my parents thought computers were tools, not toys, and that 12-year-olds had no business with them. Two years later, my teenage stance had turned to "computers - who needs them anyway". It lastet all the way into 94, when Landow's Hypertext and Larsen's Marble Springs crossed my path ....
Bryan Adams sponsort ein Hochglanzmagazin and no-one really cares. Zwischen Fotostrecken, die so ziemlich das unbryanadamischte sind, das ich mir derzeit vorstellen kann, verstecken sich Artikelchen, die so oder so ähnlich auch in jedes In-Flight- oder DB-Mobil-Magazin passen würden. Vielleicht um graduelle Millimeter in Richtung "posh" und "krass" verschoben. Yoga, Bauhaus, Grönemeyer eben.
Allen drei Publikationen gemeinsam ist die Satzläge knapp unter BILD-Zeitung. So verpasst man nicht den Moment für den Blickkontakt, wenn das Getränkewägelchen vorbeizuckelt. Denn gelesen wird ZOO wohl vor allem in ICEs und in der Warte-Lounge beim Coiffeur.
Solang es BAD davon abhält, weitere Superhits wie "If You Really Love A Woman" zu produzieren ....
The popping sound is *not* gone. It seems to happen less frequent, but this may be wishful thinking. With the cpu throttled to 533 MHz and mere 384 MBs of RAM, the machine is rendered almost immobile when Eudora checks my mail in the background. And then there's the icon-thing.
Yesterday, all folder-symbols had disappeared from Internet Explorer. Or rather, they got replaced by "empty holes"-icons that looked like bullet-holes or as if someone had jsut torn out the folder-icons. Today, the originial folder-icons are back, but the item-icons in LifeBalance are new and so are the finder-icons for Tinderbox.
In addition, installing Panther over Jaguar scrambled the registry. Stuffit won't work anymore and Darwin fails to open OpenOffice.
Someone's going to be formatted over XMas.
Installed Panther last night. Neat. Didn't touch my personal folders, applications etc. at all. I did a major back-up before, just in case, but that was due, anyway. No need to do it just for the update (if it's an update and 10.something is already on the machine).
Good news: The nasty popping sound seems to be gone. Yay.
The bad news: Updating to 10.2.8 throttled my CPU from 800 MHz to a lame 533. Which, by now, is a well-documented nuisance. I tried resetting the power manager (recommended), which didn't help and installing Panther didn't help, either. This is going to be my challenge for the quiet hours beneath the Weihnachtsbaum ...
I check old bookmarks every now and again to find forgotten gems and trash 404s (my bookmarks-file is currently 940kb). Recent check: a folder I collected about three years ago when I researched Investor Relations Online.
About two thirds of the best-practice sites, vendors of financial software, consultants for investor relations online etc. are simply gone.
(file under: news, not)
She made it! (Well, we allknew she would ...)
And of course I was so caught up in masing Umlaute in my comment to her blogpost (in German) that I forgot some suffixes. Like my German-skills are quickly approaching the level of my English ...
Bloggern.de has a neat distiller-tool that extracts all code + links from a site and returns the "Koeffizient der relativen Informationsdichte als Score", i.e. a value for the relative information rate of this site.
Top of the list are (apart from an ugly e-mail-spam-page) mainly blog-archives and other pages that go against usability-basics, i.e. require a looot of scrolling (and load very slowly). Add a bit of CSS instead of classic HTML and the coefficient of information and code soars quickly.
Guess this thing needs to normalize the results on the basis of length before the results start to say something.
On Terra Nova, the other day, Richard Bartle made point about the practicability (and desirability) of democracy in online games and spraked a discussion about self-governance in MMRPGs.
I'm sure he was just being overly provocative and obliquely ironic when he suggests that "in online games, maybe Fascisim is Fun." Surely, there's an ever so slight difference between Fascism and the avergage dictatorship Bartle and the comments are talking about for the rest of the time. Fascism is probably never fun, not even in a game.
Netter independet-Film über die Anfänge der Frauenbewegung in der Berliner atuonomen Szene Ende der 80er. Barbara Teufel fiktionalisiert ihre eigene Vergangenheit und setzt interviews mit ihren alten WG-Freundinnen und autonomen Freunden parallel neben Spielhandlungen. Die Frauen und die Figuren können nicht zugeordnet werden - das ist gewollt, verwirrt aber auch, denn der Film lebt zum Teil von der distanzierten Reflektion über diese Zeit. "Wir waren sieben ..." -- das sind zu viele, um in den Interview-Szenen die Gesichter zu merken und die Kommentare in die Reihe zu bringen.
(Auch mal interessant: war die Asynchronizität des Tons in den Interviews im Kino oder im Film und wenn letzteres: war sie gewollt?)
Erinnerungen werden wach: An genau die beschriebenen Hobby-Demonstationen der neuen Innerlichkeit. An Riten wie die Telefonnummer auf dem Arm, deren Sinn und/ oder Technik nicht mehr ganz klar ist. Völlig exotisch: die prügelnde, hilflose, angsterfüllge Polizei. Ich kenne nur noch Demos, bei denen ich von der Polizei freundlich bewacht worden bin ...
Zwei Kritikpunkte aber: Erstens, das kann es doch nicht gewesen sein, die Frauen-WG, die aus der autonomen Szene heraus die Frauenbewegung begründet. Zur Ergänzung empfohlen: Ute Gerhard, "Unerhört!"
Zweitens: würde ich gerne mal thematisiert sehen, dass ganz viel Bewegung in der Postpubertät passiert. Wo jede Liebe schmervoller ist und alle Farben greller sind und man ganz dringend heute noch die Welt retten muss, für sich und vor sich selbst.
Aber schön: Noch ein Film zur deutschen linken, alternativen, oppositionellen Geschichte, wie "Das Spiel ist aus".
... has entered the serious part of the Norwegian phd-pentathon. I always get so jealous when I read how those Scandinavians are turned phds, with presentations and dinners and local custome and sword-fights and talks by friends and fellow-scholars.
Maybe there are fewer phds in Scandinavia than in Germany where there's a dingy little oral exam and no party.
Anyway, good luck, Jill. Enjoy!
Allegedly, Microsoft are planning to enter the market for anti-virus software.
How does a Windows developer remove a virus? - He declares it a feature!
... is right. It's really easy.
... if it's the smell of the decaying roses or the uncharacteristically mild weather that gives me such a headache. I'll put it down to weather, though, as the scent of the roses, small and shy as it is, every now and then adds a waft of decadence to the colorless November-day that creeps in from the backyard.
- the movie. (Dick Kirky and Amy Ziering Kofman, USA, 2002). Was actually pretty funny. Who would habe thought that JD is really rather intelligible when he speaks. The wicked sense of humor, on the other hand, I'd pretty much expected.
Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
I am all for the Andersons. If Anderson had won, there'd pretty sure be no part IV. Now, there will be. Remember how the Oracle promised the little girl they'd meet Neo again? See. In part IV, Neo will finally learn how to program (if he'd done that in part II instead of making out with assorted women, he could habe spared us the endless fighting-scenes and used an elegant little anti-virus-routine instead) and "revive" Trinity. Then he'll probably figure out that Smith is a necessary subroutine to Trinity and we'll be back to somewhere halfway through part I.
Ein rundes Duzend deutscher TV-Helden stellt das Grubenunglück von Lengede in pastellfarbfroher Kulisse nach. Die Zuschauerin erfasst von der ersten Minute ein ein dräuendes Gefühl von Gefahr. Der Gefahr nämlich, sich beim eingeschlagen-vom-Sofa-fallen arg weh zu tun.
Problem waren eindeutig die vielen Stars. In den Credits hätt es völlig gereicht zu schreiben, wer nicht dabei war. Die Vroni Ferres und die Katja Rieman konnten diesmal leider nicht mitmachen. Punkt. Das waren ganz normale Bergarbeiterköppe da unten. Leute, die nach nix aussehen und auf einmal Helden sein sollten. Aber JJ Liefers und die Heike (Makatasch) sehen nun mal vor allem aus wie sie selbst. Schöne saubere TV-Darsteller. Ich empfehle das Bergbau-Museum Bochum und dort vor allem die Bereiche, die sich mit den gesundheitlichen Problemen der Bergarbeiter auseinandersetzen. Furunkel. Hammerarm. Staublunge. Taubheit.
Dabei hätte der Film durchaus Mythos-Qualität haben können. Z.B. wenn sich jemand mal kurzfristig mit dem wirtschaftlichen Kontext befasst hätte. Der Bergwerksdirektor war doch nicht nur ein reicher Arsch. Was heißt das denn, wenn in Deutschland eine Grube stillsteht. "Hier stehen 1.000 Arbeitsplätze auf dem Spiel" ist manchmal keine Floskel. Da wird gerechnet: Ausfallkosten + Kosten für die Rettungsmaschinen - Imageverlust (Funktion der Kosten für ein Bergarbeiterleben mal X) = 0? Und was war die Rolle der Medien, vor allem der ausländischen (die man im Film so gar nicht sehen konnte).
Und dann haben sie für diesen blöden automatisch flutbaren Tunnel (und die TV-Helden) so viel Geld ausgegeben, dass für das Drehbuch leider nichts mehr übrig geblieben ist. Also haben sie das Drehbuch fix für 12,99 EUR bei www.billige-drehbuecher.de runtergeladen. Daher diese voll überflüssige Liebesgeschichte (Makatsch/ Liefers), die irgendwie das Identifikationspotential des Zuschauers bündeln sollte oder was.
Hier schnell mal die Rahmenpunkte des Films, den ich gern gesehen hätte:
- max. 105 Minuten (Der TV-Hit Des Jahres Auf Sat 1 hatte natürlich 2x90, weil man sich gedacht hat, dass man bei so vielen TV-Helden gleich zweimal Höchstpreise für Werbeminuten ziehen kann)
- 105 Minuten hätten ohne Stars auch voll gereicht, weil man nicht jede Fresse gleich lang in die Großaufnahme hätte halten müssen.
- Damit hätte man sich auch den teuren, gefluteten und ausgeleuchteten Tunnel sparen können. Weil man ja keine Stars zeigen müsste. Da hätte man 10 Minuten Dunkelheit zeigen können (statt der krampfhaft herbeigeschwatzten Handlung) - und man hätte vielleicht einen etwas besseren Eindruck davon bekommen, was es heißt, tagelang im Dunkeln zu sitzen und nicht zu wissen, wo die Geräusche herkommen.
- Und dann hätte ich mir noch eine Perspektive gewünscht. Eine nur. Vorzugsweise diejenige des jungen Ingeneurs, der zum ersten Mal unter Tage war und ein Förderband installiert hatte. Denn der kannte sich unter Tage ungefähr so gut aus wie der durchschnittliche Zuschauer, hätte also prima aus Identifikationsfigur funktioniert (und eine Liebesgeschichte hatte er obendrein laufen). Außerdem hätte er den wirtschaftlichen Aspekt reingebracht: was Kostet das neue Förderband, was kostet es, einen Teich abzudichten, wie lange muss das Förderband laufen und der Bergarbeiter Überstunden machen, bis man sich einen neuen Klärteich leisten kann -- und im Kontrast dazu der Horror wenn man sich fragen muss, ob das eigene Leben dem Direktor die Tagesmiete für den Kompressor wert ist.
Das wollte ich noch anmerken.
I don't know what's so cool about the header-image on Dave Winer's blog. Erm. The last one. Seems he changed it since the last time it mildly annoyed me. ;-)
Anyway, in this picture, there's a man appreciating a piece of merchandise that another man seems to have just enjoyed. This piece of merchandise is a woman (Amsterdam, red light district).
Says N.: From this point of view, you neglect that sex-workers are business-women. You also deny the photographer's skill in capturing a whole market in one shot.
Hm. From this point of view ....
N. slept through most of Matrix III. Wish I could have.
Ich geb's ja zu. Ich schaue Hinter Gittern - der Frauenknast. Montags, Viertel nach Neun auf RTL. Nicht sklavisch, aber so regelmäßig, dass es ans Peinliche grenzt. Warum? Warum kann RTL sowas seit fast 10 Jahren wöchentlich senden? Und warum erzielt sowas Top-Preise für Werbeminuten - und zwar ohne große PR, Merchandising, Cross-Selling? Die Klamotten, die da getragen werden, sind unverkäuflich und man kann in Reutlitz fast nirgendwo Ikea-Möbel ausstellen.
Frauenknast - da denkt man doch sofort an Geimenschaftsduschen und Kampflesben. Die Titelmusik verspricht dazu eine gehörige Portion Schmonz in jeder Folge. Sowas guckt man nicht. Nichmal 1995, wo man alles guckt und es dann in einer Seminararbeit über Phänemone der Pop-Kultur verwurstet, für die man von den Heimlichfernsehguckern auch noch cool gefunden wird. Nur das mit dem Frauenknast kann man wirklich keinem erzählen.
Das Faszinierende an Hinter Gittern sind die Frauen - nicht die Geschichten der Figuren oder die "schauspielerischen Leistungen" der Darstellerinnen, sondern die Darstellung der Frauenkörper (nein, nicht in den Gemeinschaftsduschen ...). Z.B. Alexandra "Sascha" Mehring (Barbara Sotelsek). In jeder Din A TV-Serie sehen ja alle immer so aus, als würden sie direkt vom Frisör kommen (kommen sie ja auch). Sascha dagegen sieht immer original so aus, als würde sie nie zum Frisör gehen, mit angeschwitzen Nackenzotteln. Das sieht dem, was ich in meinem Spiegel sehe doch erfrischend ähnlicher als fast alles, was mich aus dem TV heraus anblickt.
Diesen Montag war es endlich soweit: Sascha und Kerstin (Meike Schlüter) haben "Es" getan. (Die Sex-Szene war übrigens angenehm nett und fast unvoyeristisch - keine Brustwarzen oder peinliche Mimik - kein Vergleich mit Semierrotick wie letzt Liebe und Verlangen - siehe unten, 29. Oktober). Die beste Szene war aber eindeutig: Auftritt Kerstin in engen Jeans und engem T-Shirt, mit einem gepflegten kleinen Rettungsring, der über den Hosenbund lugt und beim Gehen leise mitwippt. Solche Frauengestalten möcht ich gern öfters in Film und Fernsehn sehn, nicht nur digital nachbearbeitete Natalia Wörners.
Bleibt immer noch die Frage: Wer schaut sowas? Und welche Zielgruppe rechtfertigt diese Minutenpreise?
Tarantino tackles the difficult question of how a woman can have a career and a family at the same time ("Does she know her daughter is alive?"). (got to say this observation is N.'s, not mine) Looks like there are some obstacles to overcome. I'm looking forward to the second part.
Nice film. Very beautiful. Not as violent as I thought it would be. Not like, e.g. Identity which showed me once more that I've had it with realistically maimed dead bodies. And not like Hero where the fight-scenes fell shy of sheer aesthetics because they were embedded in tales of love and courage and duty.
Despite the backdrop story of Kill Bill, the killings in the realistic sections morph into beautiful ballets of shape and color. The really violent part is the Anime, the hurt little girl who kills in despair. But here it's the cartoon-style that creates the necessary/ aesthetic distance. And then the whole thing gets broken once more via the Western-style music. The whole violence-discussion seems to kind of miss the point.
In fact, the fights with the level-bosses (Thurman/ Fox, Thurman/ Liu) are less about killing and maining and more about celebrating women with unstereotypical skills. This is on one level with Sigourney Weaver in Alien 4, emerging from the smoke of a devastated room, standing in the doorway, backlit, slight worms eye perspective.
Schön, dass sie auch bei Anke Macs ans Set stellen. Schade nur, dass sie das gute 17" benutzen wollen, um darauf Outlook zu benutzen ... tststs
It's Halloween and for, well, actually, months now, German media have been lamenting the rising popularity of this unchristian, heathen, un-Western or too-Western (i.e. Amerrica-ha-han) trends. Threatening: people will party tonight for suspicious reasons, but the Reformation Day and All Saints' Day services in the churches will be empty.
Oh my. Get a life. The popularity of Halloween is not about one faith or another, it's about dressing up (btw no-one really bothers when they dress up to "chase away bad spirits" during the Karneval-season) - and it's about BUYING. Halloween is not the tip of an iceberg of New Heathendom that's sweeping central Europe. German Halloween has been created a) by Halloween-specials in US-sitcoms and more importantly b) the sweets-industry that has started to flood the pre-XMas market with a saisonal variety of chocolates and bonbons in 1999. The portfolio is broadening every year and this year, it seems, critical mass has been reached.
Why are the media complaing? After all, they preach ruthless consumerism as a way out of recession. Shaking the index-finger at Halloween is really, really counterproductive, guys!
Anyway, re spooky: on ZDF lunch-time news, they interviewed a church-representative (didn't catch his name & he's not on the accompanying website). When asked if he had sweets ready for kids who might come to his house to trick or treat tonight or whether he'd just tell them to go the the devil, he said: "I don't care too much about the devil. By the way: my regard to your wives when you go home to party tonight." WHAT? What is this man trying to say?
(He also said he'd have sweets for the kids because he'd think it unfair to fight the Halloween-fight on their backs. ? Not indoctrinate kids anymore? Fine by me. Next thing thing, they'll ban crosses from the classroom-walls ;-)
Dorothea Salo and William Cole have talked about their lives as accidental techies. Dorothea's post on misbehaving.net has so far sparked 24 comments. I know the original observation is about gender, and it's pretty thoughtful, too. But quite really, I don't believe the accidental techie really exists. If you end up in a techie-job, you probably had it coming ...
I don't believe programmign from a single-digit age is a prerequisite for becoming a techie, or an "intentional techie", either. In April 1993, I still believed that the department required us to computer-type out our term-papers out of sheer arbitraryness. I wrote my sit-down exams with a fountain-pen from the 1930s. In May 1993 I read Landow's Hypertext ...
The real prerequiste for becoming a techie is fearlessness in the face of technology. For me, "if it's broken anyway, I might as well open it" evolved relatively quickly into "might as well open this". 'course this attitude never landed me a job that entitles me to carry a screwdriver all day. But when A Friend recently dropped my new PS2, I kind of enjoyed the evening spent fixing the jammed CD-drive rather more than I think I would have had trudging through Silent Hill for two hours.
And a computer is not so difficult to be fearless about. You can't really break much that cannot be fixed with a clean reinstall (only, of course, if you remember to Save A Lot). Although, in the area of techiedom, fearlessness in the face of sysadmins also helps a lot.
Anyway, once you figure out you're an "accidental" techie, if you don't like it, you can stop, couldn't you? But if you don't and keep it up, you're immediately upgraded to an intentional techie. So.
Perhaps the thing is that women are quicker to concede that success (in any area, but esp. in traditionally "male" realms) are accidental, not merited, and that traditioanlly "male" occupations are not things they Just Do.
Soll ich was dazu sagen? Nachdem das lahme Rumstümpern von T.A.T.U. zuende gegangen scheint, haben Madonna und Brittnie im Verbund mit internationalen Medienschaffenden in den letzten Wochen ihr Bestes getan, den Frauenkuss in aller Munde zu bringen. Passend dazu hat das ZDF vorgestern abend "Liebe und Verlangen" gezeigt, einen echt voll authentischen lesbischen Liebesfilm.
Die Extremschauspielerin Natalia Wörner (die zuvor schon als renitentes Modell und ex-prostituierte Polizeibeamtin das Bürgertum zu brüskieren scheiterte) hat die letzte schauspielerische Herausforderung gemastert und - gasp - eine Frau geküsst und noch darüber hinaus. Jedenfalls wurde sie mit diesem Claim seit Mitte des Monats durch die Talksendungen gereicht. Der Höhepunkt (leider ist mir entfallen, welche Moderation diesen Ausspruch getan hat): Zum Glück nicht schon wieder so eine Lesben-Schmonzette.
Lesben-Schmonzette? Und "schon wieder"? Was war denn gleich die letzte? Das deutsche TV scheint voll zu sein von Lesben-Plot mit Pilcher-Niveau. Irgendwie verpass ich die immer ... Eine Schnulze war "Liebe und Verlangen" trotzdem: girl meets girl, es kommt zu Küssen und einem vagen Äquivalent von Sex, danach Verwicklungen inkl. üblem Mobbing gefolgt von Todesgefahr und happy end für das glücklich lesbisch Paar. Naja. Platt, vorhersagbar, mit Dialog-Diamanten wie "wovor wolltest Du mich bewahren?" oder "wir wollten uns doch nicht bei einander entschuldigen". Den Gag mit der Teeservice-Prämie für jede verführte Hetera gab's auch schonmal besser (US-Sitcom "Ellen", Coming Out-Doppelfolge, da war's allerdings ein Toaster). Völlig konfuser und verschenkter Nebenplot (wie war das mit dem Typen mit der Maske, der beinahe-Vergewaltigung und der neuen Freundin des Typen mit der Maske?) (Und warum muss eigentlich explizit jeder Mann in diesem Machwerk auf einer Skala zwischen Depp und Mistkerl angelegt werden? Die Logik dahinter will ich gar nicht erst aufschreiben.)
Aber vor allem: wieso bekam denn ausgerechnet dieses Machwerk den Hype? Ich hab die Geschichte schon mindestens zweimal gesehen: einmal ganz entzückend als "Die Kokurrentin" mit Ann-Kathrin Kramer und Charlotte Schwab (die als "Das Duo" schon zu lange nicht mehr zu sehen waren), einmal fast unterträglich schmonzig als "Lieb Mich" (1999) mit Julia Richter und Naomi Krauss. "Lieb Mich" übrigens mit fast 100%iger Plot-Identität zu "Liebe und Leidenschaft" (Lehrerin verliebt sich in verheiratete Hete mit Kind; der Mobbing-Plot hingegen ist aus der Konkurrentin kopiert).
Und wieso jetzt erst und wieso die Wörner? Warum wird nicht Julia Richter fürs Frauenküssen geehrt? Immerhin hat sie's vor "Lieb mich" auch schon in "Kommt Mausi raus" getan? Oder Isabella Parkinson (für "Alles wird gut" und "Das Hochzeitsgeschenk")?
Ich dachte, das Sommerloch sei vorbei, aber da wird wohl trotzdem gerade ein Trend-den-keiner-braucht zusammengebraut.
Almost unnoticed, it was Katherine Mansfield's birthday yesterday. Born in 1888 in New Zealand, she lived most of her creative life in London and died in France in 1923. Of tuberculosis. Or rather, of the then popular heavy X-Ray treatment which caused tuberculosis-patients to die of cancer of the lung, eventually.
KMM wrote endless notebooks and letters. Born 100 years later, she would've kept a blog. Famous for short stories that explore the wanderings of a mind or the enventlessness of a day at the beach, KMM might have written hyperfictions.
It is not clear, if, born a hundred years later, she would have ended up married to someone like John Middleton Murray, who "published her wastepaper basket after her death" (sorry - can't seem to trace this quote right now) - which she'd wanted him to burn - and also, according to some biographers, heavily edited her diaries for publication to make her look like the wifey she apparently never was.
Happy Birthday, Cass.
Been to Bochum, a while ago, and visited the museum of (coal-)mining. To think of lives spent almost entirely underground, the deafening noise of explosions and pneumatic hammers, lungs fille dwith coal dust, squeezed into a seam that might break in behind you any time.
D.H. Lawrence's quiet miners always seemed very, well, Lawrence. But how do you speak about 10-12 hours in the hot dark.
Film of the week: Margaret's Museum (1995, dir. Mort Ransen), with the adorable Helena Bonham Carter.
(Cynthia Freeland, 2001; on my pile: Oxford UP paperback, 2002, 231 pages, ISBN 0-19-285367-8). Via megnut, I think (it's been a while).
Nice book. Quick read. Good intro for art-oafs like me.
Gist. It's art if the cultural context says so. For "cultural context" insert "consensus" or "cash" to taste. Gist 2. "Nothing is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such." (Arthus Danto// 57)
Good quotes:
"A theory should help things make sense rather than create obscurity through jargon and weighty words." (xvii)
"Saying that something is art is not all the same as saying that it is good art." (58)
"A good interpretation must be grounded in reasons and evidence, and should provide a rich, complex, and illuminating way to comprehend a work of art." (150) (Coincidentally, this is also the spirit we are looking for for TEKKA.)
"Art is not just something to store on a shelf, but something people use to enrich their world and their perceptions." (166)
"... art is a branch of meaningful human activity through which people with minds can communicate." (174)
William Cole started a blog: Donut Age. Seems like decades rather than ages since we wrote this report from the HT'99 Doctoral Consortium together. Welcome William.
Jon Buscall/ Greynotebook likes Flickwerk's design. Makes my day - seeing as my earliest memories of kindergarden are the words: What's wrong with you kid - every child can draw. Thanks, Jon!
Just dropping in to say: Herzlichen Glückwunsch! (Germany is world champion in women's Fussball). Normally, I couldn't care less, but the team from the town where I was born has been German champion for years on end and I currently live in the with the best women's team. Many players from here have just won in LA. So I had to look.
I like women's Fussball better, anyway. Not that I'm qualified to judge. But there is less hype (yet), fewer scandals (= none) and the interviews are not quite as incredibly stupid. Still, I wish someone would think of something else to call the team apart from "unsere deutschen Mädels".
It's been a while since Beat Suter sent me the link to the "official" kunstradio-site and now I finally got around to adding the link to the htreadings-site. While the downloads are gone form htreadings, there's stuff to listen to on kunstradio.
Um endlich mal die Oktoberfarbe einzuläuten, hier noch fix eine Meldung aus dem September. (Oh; und ah: mal in Old Mother Tongue)
Die DE:BUG ist nun nicht wirklich meine monatliche Must-Lektüre, erfreut aber immer wieder mit sehr weitgefassten Interpretationen deutscher Sprachnormen à la "sehr abgehangene Angelegenheit" oder "ein unüberschaubares Füllhorn an Items" (gefunden in Heiko H. Gogolins und Nils Dittenbrenners "Das Neue Verweilen: Nieder mit der Arbeitsethik", Sept. 2003). Nice.
Der EyeToy-Review (auch Sept. 2003) lahmt ein wenig; dafür gibt's eine nette Kurzerwähnung der Game Face.
Wenn ich das Editorial hinter mir habe (dem Layouter der Ausgabe 2 gehört für einen Monat die Morgenzeitung auf diesem Hintergrunddesign serviert), freut mich die Game Face auch. (Wiewohl, Mecker die 2., Rechtschreibung und v.a. Punktuation ja primär den Zweck verfolgen, Texte lesbar(er) zu machen. Meine Toleranzgrenze ist das recht hoch, von wegen eigene Nase fassen und so, aber der durchschnittliche Game Face Artikel schockt selbst mich.) Trotzdem: Sieh da, es gibt eine deutsche Games-Szene und sie bewegt sich sogar.
Nur das Cover von #2: Was hat denn eine geairbrushte magersüchtige Nullachtfuffzehnbeauty mit Games zu tun? Vergleiche #1: Uwe Beneke, GF Yager, in grauem Sweater und verkniffenem Gesicht. Pluspunkte, weil: mal anders, mal n Macher drauf, mal unhip und unglossy. #2 dagegen, ein Presseshot (so gesehen auch auf der VIVA-Website) von Collien Fernandes (im Editorial dann auch direkt als "Fräulein" bezeichnet), VIVA-Moderatorin, die über die GC Leipzig berichten durfte. Werbe-Modell und Sängerin, aber mit Games sonst nix am Hut.
Also mal wieder: Die Jungs sind die Macher & die Mädels dürfen im Takt dazu hübsch ausschaun. Schnarch.
Open day at the Grossmarkthallte in Frankfurt. Crowded. Rows upon rows of stalls with drink, food, and more drink. Despite temperatures that reminded me of pool-side lunches in September '99, no-one seemd to have thought of making a big buck with plain water.
Amazing and beautiful 1920-building. Cool old paternoster elevator. They're closing down the hall for Frankfurts wholesale-market which moves some place closer to the autobahn (and out of what they're trying to turn into the swank East End). The EZB is going to move into this place and apartment-prices will rocket.
Here are some more pictures.
The newest issue of TEKKA is out. Besides Torill's already much-discussed Digital Juggler, we have insights into the Iranian Blogosphere (and other parts of life in Iran) by Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder.
We also have Donna Leishman's "Possession of Christian Shaw". Donna is currently researching Scottish witch-hunts and "Possession" is one varation on the topic. I'd call this (tentatively) hyperflashfiction: interlinked flashmovies. And even more so than traditional hyperfictions, "Possession" defies urges of sense-making. It's hard to turn this clip into a narrative text. But it's as hard to escape the atmosphere of sadness, fear and haunting.
btw - I'm not the one who's bashing the Robot.
Torill's made it! She's a Dr. now. Mark calls her Dr. Torill, but I like Dr. Mortensen better: it sounds more ominous, like something (someone) out of an old James Bond movie. Jill has an SMS transcript of the defense.
I'm teaching a class on basic web-design starting next Thursday. And I mean to explain about the usefullness of HTML with an example of incompatibililty between different programms or platforms. But how do you explain incompatibility to people who have grown up with MS Office?
These people will have basic user skills - and that means windows and Office. Every programm they have on theri computer is compatible & they won't even remember how it was when MS changed to 32-bit and documents made on a recent version of Word came out garbled on an earlier version. Let alone swapping documents between MS Word and Word Perfect.
Of course, incompability is only fun with applications of the same type. Guess I'll chicken out with different programm-types: what happens when you try to open a ZIP-file from within Word? (this is real life: I once had a client who insisted on opening ZIP-files via Word's "open"-dialog.
But if my students-to-be are any good, they'll notice that this simile is a crutch.
Last night, I saw David Bowie present his new album (Reality) for the first time. Not live, alas, but beamed live via satellite to a movie theatre near me. The presentation was supposed to take place in a studio, but in fact Bowie gave a small concert for friends, family and hand-picked fans in what looked like a semi-industrial basement and a stage made of raw boards (very effectfully lit from below).
And: WOW!
In the beginning, I found the whole thing a bit too rocky, but Bowie seemed to be simply in a very, very good mood and full of energy. He rocked, he talked to the audience, he joked a lot. In the interview-interstitial (with questions from the world-wide audience SMS-ed and mailed to him in advance) he was incredibly relaxed and funny. Don't know why I'd imagined him stuck-up and full of mature-stardom. More like: having done the work you love all your life, having the turmoils behind you and the ability to look at yourself with a tinge of irony, presenting to the people who love you the things that make them love you.
The da capo was classics the fans had voted for online. Imagine Hello Spaceboy and Modern Love rocking hard.
Beforehand, I'd wondered whether I'm up to date enough the judg whether or not his "material" is "fresh". But who cares, it's a Bowie.
When the voiceover runs against the image, the effect is usually funny or, well, ironic. In advertising, this can be quite risky.
Like the current Dell-advert.
Voiceover: You buy a new computer. Do you know how new it is?
image: old man shuffling down the aisles of a dusty storage room
voiceover: at Dell, we computer custom-assemble your computer
image: box is lifted from shelf and leaved behind outline in dust
voiceover: from the latest parts and ship it
image: shiny box rolls of super-modern conveyor-belt
What do you see? I see: this is what we tell you (voiceover) and this is how it really is (image). Ouch.
Movie by Daft Punk, animation from Leiji Matsumoto (who created Captain Horlock, not Captain Future) to the music of Daft Punk album Discovery. You know the protagonists from the video to "One more time".
Amazing and beautiful. Go see it - but make sure it's a big screen and a good sound system.
24 is a US-made serialized realtime-thriller. Kiefer Sutherland has 24 hours to protect the "first black candidate with a real chance" from a terrorist (of course) attack. The plot starts at midnight when Sutherland is told that there will be an assassination later that day. Every hour-long episode corresponds to one hour of that day. Nice concept. Not new. But nice. But not very well made. (btw. why 24? "later that day" probably means around 11 am or so, so the title should be "11" hours or something, shouldn't it?)
Ever noticed how many opening, esp. of crime/mystery genres credits depict actions in very finegrained detail with almost 1:1 timing, probably so the speed can pick up more notably later on. 24 is like this all the time. But it still looks like a TV series from the 90s, with too much time to fill (nothing like the newer seasons of ER). Whatever the "realtime"-trick is for, it's not for added realism. How often do you stand and stare ahead pensively after a meaningful conversation when you're under pressure?
Any anyway, the story's generic thriller material, the special agent's under pressure on a urgent job, there's trouble at home with his daughter sneaking out to a party a night and tension with his wife because he's had an affair with a colleague, who's on the same job, giving him a hard time too, and so is her new (weirdo) affair, another colleague, who, in turn, is giving our hero a hard time. etc. etc.
Not new. Nor is what they do to time. There aren't even axceptionally many clocks and timers in the story. And as there's no single perspective, we don't really notice that narrated time and narrating time conflate. Sometimes, a split screen is used to be able to show simultaneous actions simultaneously. But it's also used to show the same dull activity (like walking toward a house) from different perspectives in a vain attempt to make it appear less dull. Which utterly dilutes the effect of the split screen
Finally, the US-version has five minutes of adverts every ten minutes before and after this we see a digital clock-style insert of the current (narrated) time. What happens during those 5 minutes? There's nothing in the story that necessitates such breaks (like Sutherland going to the bathroom or someting). And also, in the German version, the adverts are at completely different times ...
Vatel (Roland Joffé, 2000) is opulent, saturated, almost surreal in a naturalist kind of way. Vatel (Gérard Depardieu) is master of entertainment to a small (and broke) coount who has the dubious honour of entertaining the king (THE KING, Louis XIV) in his country home.
Vatel is resourceful. He tries to surpass the sülendour of Versailles with cardboard and pumpkins. Vatel wants perfection. And he wants the king's latest favourite (in the rather handsome form of Uma Thurman). But he creates his most beautiful out of sugar and dies of the courts intrigues, conceit and greed.
[Vatel. F/GB 2000. Roland Joffé with Gérard Depardieu, Uma Thurman, Julian Sands]
Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (BRD 1957, Robert Siodmak) is sombre, sinister. 1957 - I'm not sure whether this movie is b/w by choice or necessity, but I'd assume the former. The film is black and white, but truth, justice, the law in Nachts are not - they're pitch black.
Berlin 1944, Kommissar Kersten gets permission to reinvestigate a murder case, with a convict already waiting for execution. This murder, Kersten finds, is remarakbly similar to an earlier case and the Nazi officials are eager to find a deranged "non-Arian" killer to support their race-theory. When it turns out, however, that Lüdke, the deranged killer is "Arian" and has committed 80 murders during the dictatorship of A. HItler, the powers decide that making this case public would only shakes the people's trust in Hitler and his Nazis. So they cover the whole thing up, send Kersten to the front and have the murderer killed.
The film starts with a man up to his man in a bog, clinging to a thin tree, hiding from a gang of Nazis.
From a narrative point of view, this man has to be Lüdke. But I just cannot recognize because it's all too dark.
[Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam. BRD 1957. Robert Siodmak with Claus Holm, Mario Adorf]
German weekly DIE ZEIT does not usually propagate mindless technophobia, but Nr. 32 came out in July, "cucumber time" as it's called in Norway, so what'd you expect - we call it "*sour* cucumber time" in Germany.
In "Aus dem Leben gemailt" Christoph Drösse, who should know better, writes about people with a sad addiction to their email. Drösser quotes a study from the University of Michigan that seems to show that self-proclaimed "multitasker" who have to write a letter and an e-mail at the same time take "50% more time to structure their task" than people who do one thing first and then the other. From here, it's only a short step to recommending a new book on "OnlineSucht" (online addiction).
Perhaps Drösser should have talked to the people Torill talked to for her new Tekka-article on "digital jugglers", flow-states, concentrations, multitasking and a different way of looking as ADS.
And anyway, writing a letter and an e-mail at the same time is hardly a realistic scenario. More life-like would have been writing an article on computer games while playing in a MUD while e-mailing with colleages abroad who you don't happen to meet down by the water-cooler while checking your favorite new-sites every now and again; listening to the TV optional. Scalable to all sorts of intellectual pursuits.
The point is not reconciling incompatible activities but getting more input about the things that are on your mind than you would through single-thread media-usage -- and the hightened concentration that can result from multitasking, if the multitasker is proficient.
A while ago, Vox TV showed a docu by Spiegel TV other a similarly "serious" magazin-spin off TV format. Title: Gameboy satt Gothe (gameboy instead of Geothe). However, except for a video game lying round in a dorm somewhere, no gamesboys, playstations or the like. Instead, the thing was about how "the media" (i.e. TV) make kids dull, uneducated and incapable of learning or education. Yadda yadda yadda. The media are bad because they don't require the kind of concentration books do.
What is it about computer games that they are used to spice up title of features that are not about games at all? Throwing TV and games in the same pot merits no comment - esp. when it's all about concentration, endurement and learning.
Striking, however, was the incapability of the interviewees to express themselves in full sentences. The docu was about kinds from schools in "bad neighborhoods" and from "elite" school. The reason given for the low language skills of the "underprivileged" kids was that their parents only know slang, so the kids have to learn proper German at school like a foreign language. While the privileged kids come from highly verbal homes.
But listen closely: the "elite" school kids may have expressed thoughts of liberalism and gratefulness, but they did so with half-sentences studded with filler-words jsut like their age-mates.
New on my blogwatch is William Gibson's blog. I'd thought he'd had to stop blogging because he'd entered serious novel-writing mode again, but curretly, he posts almost daily.
The first post I read was Another Baghdad Blogger, which linked to a blog that rattled my televised worldview.
But the real shake waited a bit further down in riverbendblog:
It's not (only) that he packs a gun before he opens the door - it's that he opens the door although he thinks he might need a gun.
Adrian is redesigning. Which is good, because MT blogs tend to look all the same to me.
But he's using a green, which is hopefully different enough from the one I'm playing with for the new wordwrap.
Thursday, Sept. 11 is the big day when Torill will defend/ celebrate her thesis. Her blog flows over with preparatory notes - and it has been full of awsome photos of Volda landscape all year.
I wish I could go.
At least I can cross fingers at 4.30 pm next Thursday. So can you ...
I always envied Mark for his subsrciption to netflix, but now I've discovered we've got more or less the same thing over here: netleih. For a monthly fee, you can rent more or less "all the DVDs you want". You create a wishlist from their database, they mail you the DVDs (2, 4, 6 to a pack, depending on your subscription), you send them back (postage paid!) when you're done. No detouring to the video rental. No late-fees. Huge selection.
My list is currently 128 titels long, with classics like Robert Siodmak's Nachts wenn der Teufel kam, recent movie-misses like Gangs of New York or favorite trash like Long Kiss Goodnight.
Yesterday, the first lot was in the mail. I was a bit surprised about the flimsy red envelope and the disks that come in felxible sleeves, not cases. But with cases and padded envelopes, I don't think the pricing model could have worked.
Dates Jan thru Juli in place again.
The Famous Sound of Absolute Wreaders, an online textproduction-project by Johannes Aue, Reinhard Döhl, Sylvia Egger, Oliver Gassner, Martina Kieninger and Beat Suter featured in the Hypertext Exhibition at HT03 in Nottingham (August this year). The site is still available.
I have disabled the downloads (4 files with together 30+ MB weighed heavy on my traffic budget), but if you want to hear & participate in the *real thing*:
WICHTIG // MITMACHEN:
Im Vorfeld der Sendung können von jedermann Daten auf den Projekt-Server hochgeladen werden (je bis 70 KB). upload: http://kunstradio.cyberfiction.ch
ORF Kunstradio, Wien: "THE FAMOUS SOUND OF ABSOLUTE WREADERS"
Konzeption, Regie, Website: Johannes Auer
Sendetermin: Sonntag 07.09.03, 23:05. - 23:45, Ö1 oder online: http://www.kunstradio.at/2003B/07_09_03.html
Projektseite: http://kunstradio.cyberfiction.ch
6 Netzautoren generieren Text über die Webprojekte der anderen.
1 Computer mischt den Text
2 Sprecher performen den Text als Collage, Remix, Dialog und Rauschen und berauschen sich
6 Netzautoren machen aus den Texten der anderen ein neues Netzkunstprojekt.
Die Radioversion dieses Webprojekts besteht aus vier Teilen, die zusammen ein Hörbild ergeben, das unterschiedliche Abstufungen an (menschlicher) Kontrolle repräsentiert: Teil 1 ist eine Art handcollagierte Fassung aus dem gesamten Fundus an Autorentexten und ist damit "menschlich" kontrolliert. Für den 2. Teil wurden die Textbausteine dieser Collage durch den Computer neu zusammengesetzt (zufalls-"generiert") - menschliche Kontrolle wurde aufgegeben. Im 3. Teil kommentieren die Sprecher diese vom Computer generierte Collage
wodurch menschliche Kontrolle wieder zurückgewonnen (die Autorschaft allerdings einmal mehr unterlaufen) wird. Im 4. Teil verlieren schließlich die Sprecher selbst durch den Einfluß von Alkohol die Kontrolle ...
Teilnehmer:
Johannes Auer, Reinhard Döhl, Sylvia Egger, Oliver Gassner, Martina Kieninger, Beat Suter
Sprecher/Performer:
Christiane Maschajechi, Peter Gorges
--
When the temperatures dropped mid August, the air put on an autumn-chill that the sun hasn't burnt off since. Summer was way too hot, but I remember lunch-breaks spent by the public pool down the road in *late* September.
Sometime this week, the first line of XMas sweets sneaked into the shops. Yuk. Seasons gone mad.
Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars is a staple of hypertext theory as a paper precursor of hyperfiction. How apt to have him write a hyperfiction, text-based, interlinked nodes and everything. The Glass Snail, published by Word Circuits, illustrated by Robert Kendall, Marjorie Luesebrink and Rob Swigart.
Nice little story, reads very well, but the linkage is a bit uneventful.
Why did Tinderbox forget my a custom ID I assigned to old notes? The ID was the original date-of-creation for those posts I'd imported from the old design. The dates were there when I made the new design and now they're gone from the very notes. Odd. Got to fix this- But later.
The Hypertext Readings at HT03 in Nottingham happened yesterday, largely unnoticed by yours truely, because, although I am/ was chair, I couldn't travel.
So, on top of missing all the fun, I have to pass on all praise that's coming my way to co-chair Donna Leishman who hosted the show -- and, of course, Simons Biggs, John Cayley, Talan Memmott and Noah Wardrip-Fruin who were the actual readers.
The Hypertext Readings have evolved quite a bit from (what I think) its beginnings (were like). The earliest I've seen were at Darmstadt, 1999, where disks had to be installed on available computers and projected against a whiteboard in a classroom. This year, we had laptops, video-beamers, a stero-systems and various cameras that were pointed at the audience to sample their reaction and feedback it into the works of art on presentation.
We'd tried to works based on the key elements of hypertext: text and linking. The only *real* hypertext submitted is Kenneth Payne's and George Simmers' Maze of Mirrors. Instead, digital art that developed in the tradition of hyperfiction seems to be turning away from the word, is becoming more and more graphic and visually enhanced. Audience-interaction goes way beyond choosig between two links. In fact, Aleksandra Globokar's and Jaka Zeleznikar's Manta rejects links outright.
In the upcoming US elections, Dave Coogan runs for Vice President. There are several Reasons NOT To Vote For Dave. And his campaign-site is worth a look, too. As is his sort-of blog (though the recent-articles features doesn't display well on IE5/OSX).
Every day from noon til whenever, Dave also runs the English Bookstore in Mainz. Which is a lot more fun than Amazon but further away than my mailbox. If your stranded and bored in Mainz, this is the place to go.
My current favourite feature in Tinderbox is Internet-Linking.
To make a, internal link, highlight the word or phrase to be linked, click the link icon in the toolbar and drag the link-arrow to the note you want to link to.
To make an external link, click the internet-icon, enter the URL, a target if you like (type and title are also optional). Done.
If you link from an URL that is to appear in the text, highlight the URL, click the internet-icon: Tinderbox enters the URL automatically. Of course, this also works when you highlight a URL from your browser before you click the internet-icon. Neat.
I've always been quite good at math, but I cannot really read formula, not in a way that includes any sort of sense-making.
Small surprise I find Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid extremely unreadable. It doesn't really help that the 1999 Basic Books paper-back edition has 742 pages + notes and index. I believe Hofstadter when he claims, in the last chapter, that that his line of argument has come full circle - butI can't deliver the evidence.
Beside being by and large unreadable, GEB is also a fun read for long stretches. Plus, every now and then, Hofstadter says things that make sense if applied to digital literature. E.g.:
"... intelligence ... is always looking for, and often finding, patterns" (37)
"One could suggest, for instance, that reality is itself nothing but one very complicated formal system." (53/4)
"How could a figure and its ground not not carry exactly the same information?" (72)
"... consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it." (94)
"The issue we are broaching is whether meaning can be said to be inherent in a message, or whether meaning is always manufactured by the interaction of a mind or a mechanism with a message ..." (158)
"'Style', 'outer message', 'decoding technique'--all ways of expressing the same basic idea." (167)
"You've undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories--but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hand can FEEL that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advantage warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels." (the Tortoise, 402)
"The transition between genuine story and padding material could be made in such a way that, by sufficiently assiduous inspection of the text, an intelligent reader will be able to detect where one leaves off and the other begins. Perhaps it will take him quite a while." (Achilles, 403)
[Come to think off it, this is where GEB really ends.]
"You fit your mathematics to the world, and not the other world round." (457)
- In fact, the next time you complain about the unreadability of a given hyperfiction, you better turn to Hofstadter first. For several reasons ...
Over the past two days, I've written Flickwerk v2. That's two days including 2 translation-projects and finetuning a client's website. So the relaunch didn't take that long, even with a few hours for the desing earlier this year.
In fact, I should have done this earlier, because the growing design is more effective if started in Jan or Feb. Means I'll stick with it at least till the end of 004. Though maybe I'll have to do something about the images (file-size). And probably change to displaying only the first 150 words of a post and then link to the full text.
I'd postponed relaunching so long because I wanted to switch to Tinderbox but was afraid it'd take ages to learn. Which it didn't (obviously), simply because Tinderboy lets you be as much or as little of an expert as you wish. I.e. you can use it like a text-editor and write lots of HTML into every note. Tinderbox will help you keep your stuff sorted, as it would for any other kind of note-taking. Or use any of its automatisation-features, which I'm only starting to tap into.
Still, Flickwerk now has about 75 notes and folder, a stylesheet and 8 templates, all pulled neatly into 1 output-file, permalinks, automatic time-stamping and everything. On most occasions I had the experience that if you want it, Tinderbox has it. And because content, styles and HTML-container are held separately, you can fiddle a lot without breaking much or losing the overview.
Of course this is no end better than what I used for blogging before: a text-editor and an html-document (for about a year now since Blogger refused to post into my mangled template). But it's also better than a web-based blog-tool. I'm taking notes into Tinderbox all day, anyway. Now I can blog into it, too, even when I'm offline, without having to log into a web-service first.
Of course, both the quality and the frequency of my blogging will increase significantly from tomorrow ...
And while I was being creative (see below), I also cooked one of the few recipes I do really well. Australian Muffins. (Don't know why they're Australian, the recipe is from a wine-magazine with an Oz-special.) (Don't know why they're muffins, either. They're not. But if you make them in a muffin-iron, they come out nicely snack-sized.) Here goes:
+ Take 200 grams of flour. I usually take 100 white and 100 brown
+ Add 1 teaspoon bakingpowder and mix.
+ Mix 100 ml milk - I usually take 50 mls milk and 50 mils. red wine
+ with 50 mls live oil and
+ 1 egg.
+ Add to flour.
+ Chop 100 gr. goat cheese and 4-6 dried (soaked) tomates. Chop well. The concepts "muffin" and "chunky" don't go together very well.
+ Add to above and mix till smooth.
+ Pepper, salt, herbs, basil is good, I also use a bit of chili
+ Put in muffin-iron (makes about 8 muffins) and bake at 180 degree (celsius!) for 20 minutes.
The muffins are good for a couple of days (if they last this long), but are best still warum with more of the wine you used earlier. Try parmesan-cheese instead of goat for a change. Enjoy.
I hate to admit it, but today I did my first website in Tinderbox. And I probably made all sorts of stupid beginner's mistakes. E.g. I put headlines and text and everything into a note used DIVs to format them and then exportet only the text of a note into the template. The tool offers a lot more, but it was a small site (coincidentally the pages for the Hypertext Readings at HT03 in Nottingham later in August - I'll post more as soon as everything is set).
I didn't want to go too deep into tool-handling for a site with only a couple of pages and two page-types, but what I used made even simple HTML-coding incredibly simple. Esp. linking. Esp. fiddling with the contends *after* fixing the structure and the layout. Export takes care of all structural changes. Neat. More.
The key scene in Sex and the City is when Carrie sits down at her Pismo to reflect upon her adventures. There's always a pan across the room, Carrie's face over the open lid of her Powerbook, Apple-Logo shining white, and then a close-up of the screen with letters appear as the protagonist types and reads out her writing in voice-over.
In last night's episode, Carrie was showing sitting in front of a mirror. What's this? The cathartic turn in the series where Carrie realizes it's not the men, it's herself. (After all, at an earlier point, Sam admits that reason for her bad mood is not New York, but herself.)
Of course, with the mirror-set up, we get to see the typing, hear the words and witness Carries' emotions expressed on her face a she writes. Very effectful. But also, with the set up, we don't get to see the Apple logo anymore. Have the producers failed to pay their coolness-fee again?
Which reminds me that on the title of her fictive book, Carries is depicted holding (well, more or less dressed in ) TiBook with a pink apple. Perhaps Apple have withdrawn logo-permission because the style of the TiBook had been tampered with. Perhaps the producers have gone on logo-strike because they want to get the PR people to give Carrie a G4.
It's too, too hot. Whenever a thought makes it to the surface of my brain, it dances briefly, hisses and evaporates before I find out what it is about.
Perfect wheather for a plot-minimized movie. Like Charly's Angels. Of course, if the movie theatre has airconditioning, you might start to think between two action-scenes and get hopelessly lost in one of the (estimate) 137 holes in the story. On the other hand, Angels quotes *so* many action movies, that the not quite astute mind will seamlessly associate a safety-net of plot-lines that ties up all loose ends.
The aside, Angels has fast action in colorful costumes, a very beautiful Demi Moore and fun with dirty language.
Does too much reviewing give you writer's block the way too much desk-works causes cramps in the neck? I wonder.
It is so hot that I can work on the balcony in shorts and T from before 9 am. Until the sun comes crawling round the house and drowns out the screen. When I go inside, I don't need a sweater, even though deskwork's not really the sort of occupation that keeps one warm. (Unless, of course, one happens to be writing about Sony's latest trick for the Playstation: EyeToy.) But the apartment never seems to heat up terribly, which as made this already rather long summer very pleasant. In the city ...
In the news, things look different. Crops wither (but who'd notice in the supermarket's grocery section?), glaciers melt. This doesn't look good. But it also feels unreal under an almost immaculate sky in the shade.
I'm reliving my youth in totally new ways: I'm learnig how to skateboard. Which I never did as a teenager. (Except for two weeks at 13 before I discovered black overcoats, spiky hair and Ann Clark's music.) So far, I've mastered the following wildly impressive stunts:
a. wearing of baggy pants
b. holding and carrying of skateboard in assorted cool manners
c. the above while wearing baggies
d. getting on, pushing off and rolling without incurring too much embarrassment through helpless flailing of arms.
Near-term training goal: wearing of baggies on incredibly lean and muscular body.
Mid-term training goal: use board for short short-distance errands to avoid chaining and unchaining the bike every 100 meters.
Long-term goal: find the money for a car.
The only bad thing about lying on your back in the sun making soap-bubbles: when they finally burst, little specks of soap get in your eyes ...
Today is the day of Lisbeth's defense. If you take some time out during the day to cross unused fingers, she'll be a phd by the end of the day.
I like the concept of defense, standing up before an audience, presenting findings from your dissertations and answering questions about it. It's better than what I had to do: oral exams about subjects I hadn't studied in years and would never even teach again, even if I'd stayed at the university.
I don't like the expression, though. Defense. Puts the defendand into the defensive from the beginning. Of course you'd worry about something like that. Can't call it laudation, because that's for someone else to deliver. But why not, simply, presentation. Or enunciation. Debut/ coming out. Dissertation shower.
Whatever you call it, Lisbeth, I know you'll do great!
Three weeks ago, I was so excited about my new 12" G4 Powerbook.
But even while I installed it, I noticed something was wrong. Whenever there was supposed to be a system-sound, there was a small popping sound instead, then the PB would freeze for a couple of seconds, then the expected system-sound, then business as usual. I ran First Aid. Nothing. I tried reinstalling the system and all software step by step to see if there was an incompatibility. Nope. I CD-booted and ran the hardware-check - which was pretty pointless because hardware-check doesn't cover the internal sound system (which is not documented too well in the first place).
I called the shop who agreed I had a serious hardware-problem there, but, no, they couldn't do an on-site replacement as Apple always insists on trying repairs on very new models first. It'd take a week. I told them I'd be dead after a week without a computer. They told me to return the PB (phone-order, two weeks unconditional return), they'd refund the money. And then I should just order another one. The good part: Between ordering the first one and ordering the second one, prices had dropped 15% ...
The bad part: the new one has a popping noise ...
First stage: denial. But just before I freaked after all, I took an hour out for research this morning and found this and a couple of comments in the apple.com forum. Obviously, the new G4 PBs have a battery issue. They don't load to 100% (btw don't try recalibrating, which sucks battery-life, 99% is normal for a fully loaded PB these days; no fixings on the horizon; check Apple support, though). Allegedly, batteries never make the promised 5 hours either. Plus, and here's the relevant point: the PBs put the sound system to sleep whenever they can to save power. You can adjust sleep-times for the screen and harddrive, but not the sound. 30 secs of silence and it's gone. A system sound wakes it up again, it makes a small popping noise, takes a couple of seconds to wake up complete and then plays the sound that woke it. The only workaround right now is to leave the PB plugged in and working under max. power at all times.
Annoying, but not deadly. But really bloody annoying.
KJS (which, for some reason, was released in Germany as Kissing Jessica) is a cute and funny movie, too. It's laudable because it takes a subject (love-affair between two women) which would have been problem-film-material ten years ago and turns it into an easy commedy. But it lacks the outrageous wit (and self-irony) of Bar Girls, the occasional eroticism of When Night is Falling and the girls-from-your-school charm of the protagonists of Fucking Amal.
BILB (which, for some reason, was released in Germany as *Kick* It Like Beckham) is a cute movie about becoming oneself against the plans and desires of family and friends. It also avoids and easy-to-step-into trap: The two (female) protagonists do not become lovers. It is good to portrait strong girls to love girls. But it's also good to have strong role models for girls who like boys or cannot be bothered one way or the other just now.
One might argue that the luke-warm love-affair between Jess and her coach and the ensuing fight between Jess and Jules was superfluous, too, and that we get to see enough girls fighting over boys alreay. But the whole movies hinges on love and relationships, on the choice of suitable partners as seperating element between ethnicities and religions - but also as the parent-generation's preoccupation that strikes the girls as not "such a big deal".
The motto of BILB is "Who wants to cook Aloo Gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham?" - but it should be "Who wants to bother about clothes that attract the right kind of boys/ marry the right king of man when you can bend a ball like Beckham". The girls can take on their football scholarship exactly because (unlike their mothers) they do not define themselves via they boys they can get. The various love-entanglements are necessary in order to underline this point. In the end, the girls set off for America together and Jess is easily distracted Jo's urgent question at the parting, whether there is something between them when, finally, she catches a glimpse of Beckham himself.
Frank makes es case for liquid or fluid website-design. He's right - a website is not printed page and if you try to control the layout as if it was, it'll always be at the cost other benefits of the medium. Like accessibility - you need a flexible design to accomodate e.g. larger fonts. Build pages that adapt to the user's screen-size and resolution.
However, fluid pages often do without fixed-width content. Many movable-type blogs with CCS-layouts I see these days have this problem. Display them on a 19" screen with a 1200 resolution and a paragraph will turn into a line. Increase the size of the screen font and a line consists of two or three words - or there'll be horizontal scrolling. All variants are hard on users who rely on their eyesight to grasp the content on a page. So you'd need paragraph-widths that adapt to font-size.
Yesterday, German TV channel Pro 7 aired the final episode of the not quite last season of Dawson's Creek. Towards the end of the episode, Audrey, who decides to miss her plane in order to give Pacey another chance and drive down to California with him, says to Pacey: "Promise to stop for the World's Largest Ball Of Yarn." And in the dubbed version, she said: "Versprich mir, am World's Largest Ball Of Yarn anzuhalten."
Ta-da! World-premiere! A German dubbing retains an original phrase. That's a first. Till this day, they've translated *everything*. Obviously, there's an agreement of media-translators to purge German publications from foreign language terms. Perhaps German audiences are incapable of understanding even an American TV-drama unless every single word is in their mother tongue. Duh. Which trend results in big ha-ha's of TVdom like "Schmalzkringel" for "doughnuts" and "Küchlein" for "Muffins" in the Simpsons - although said bakes are called "Doughnut" (or sometimes "Dunoughts") and "Muffins" in the shops. The translation of Terry Jones' Douglas Adams' Startship Titanic dedicates a whole page to explaining why they call the original bots Boter ("bots" comes form "robots" which are "Roboter" in German ...). Duh.
The Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) installed a new price-system last year. The advertising campaign highlights on massive savings, but the bottom-line is that whoever stubbornly continues to view the Bahn as everyday, flexible public transport, i.e. goes to the station, buys a ticket and hops on a train, has to face increased prices without better services. Those who want to benefit from the reductions have to fulfill ridiculous conditions like book 7 days in advance, book a return ticket, book seats for both trips, include a Saturday night.
There's only a limited contingent for bargain prices, too, which forces travellers to book even more in advance. Good-bye flexible transport. Good-bye affordable ticket. This way, the Bahn will never be an alternative to individual transportation, i.e. the car. Not to mention raising their inccome per available seat and see profitability before the centurey is out.
Last night, I tried to book a bargain ticket for next Sat. However, the booking system was down for maintenance till after midnight. Strangely, the system was well capable of showing me the new, higher price after midnight (7-day-period expired). Of course, that's a way of keeping as many people as possible away from the reduced prices and forcing them to pay more. Perhaps management hopes to improve the margins this way?
TEKKA issue 2 is out, featuring Mark Stephen Meadow's account of his visit to Basra and Baghdad. It's a gripping narrative of personal experience with great pictures, but above all it's a meditation on power and inforamtion.
"But culture can be changed faster than you might think. The easy way to do it is to cauterize a country's brain. Burn the administration and institutions that preserve the memory, and you have an infantile nation, ready for your new education."
The US troups follow this logic when they aid looters in libraries, museums, ministries all over Iraq - excluding the Ministry of Energy.
Meadows admints or claims a healthy distrust of the media, esp. US media, esp. re: the War in Iraq. But what he hears from his new friends in Basra and Baghdad changes his mind about the war.
"The only change was the source of my information. I started feeling as if my opinions were simply what I had been told, even though I had paid money and risked my life to get into the middle of The Reality and see for myself."
The irony is, that for the reader, this account turns into just another media(ted) opinions. As credible or not as any other non-embedded news-source. Meadows would say, go see for yourself and shape your opinion! Maybe that would change my mind about the war. But maybe if enough people were going places to see for themselves, the war would not have been neccessary in the first place (or, at least, not possible).
By the by, Meadows also proves the existence of Salaam Pax (or, as Mark would point out, someone who has access to Salaam Pax's weblog) and Jill declares the "is he real"-discussion finally over.
My new love is the compact, powerful type. Deep, resonant voice without high or metallic overtones. Smooth skin that I thought at first might be cold to touch (but is actually quite, uhm, nice). At first, too, I thought that 12" might be disappointingly small. But it's pretty well propotioned so you don't really notice. And I have an additional 15" to plug in should the need arise. More importantly, I haven't found a single dead pixel yet.
Of course, it runs OS X and I have found nothing to complain about so far. Au contraire. In my next life, I want to be a Windows user - just for the pleasure of being able to make the switch from zero.
I must admit, I don't quite know what to make of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (USA 2003, dir. George Clooney). Maybe it's because I haven't read the book (but neither has Ebert - thanks Mark) and therefor fail to catch the rich US-pop-cultural references. So this TV show-inventor and -host killed for the FBI on the side, using business trips for cover. We've seen that before. And this time, it looks like George Clooney had unlimited access to the dicareded props from movies like Catch Me If You Can or Boogie Nights. Perhaps Confessions is an ironic quot-o-rama of contemporary genre- and era. Well. It was not so bad that I wished I'd rented True Lies instead. And I was suspicious of Dr. Ross as a director in the first place.
But towards the end of the film, just before he does not die, Chuck Barris says this: "All my life, I wanted to write something that a lesser person would quote. Now I find out I'm the lesser person." Here's another persona (seeing as Confessions, the book, is supposed to be an autobiography, the Chuck Barris we seen on the screen is somewhat more than a character, yet less than a person) who's too dull even to play the lead role in his own life. So he does something that makes him stand apart from all the other extras. Kill for the FBI. No. Write a novel! Quite a postmodern twist. (Though quite unnoticed by the movie, which is borrowing and quoting so seriously it's rather post-post, if at all.)
Nick Hornby's 1995 novel High Fidelity is a lot like Benjamin von Struckrad-Barre's Soloalbum. Both novels are about the importance of compilation-tapes in the mating ritual of young(ish) urban males. Only High Fidelity is set in London. And Stuckrad-Barre's protagonist becomes famous in the end as gets laid rather more often than he'd wish. Or was that in the follow-up? Reading a couple of BvSB's novel is like watching VIVA all day and spooning Nutella from the jar.
Anyway, while Soloalbum-guy gets lucky, Hornby's Rob Flemming ends up with the woman who's left him before p.1 and who never really liked his compilations, to begin with. And he does so, not in frustration but with the good resolve to get a grip, this time. "Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it's done." This is because from reenacting love according the the Beatles, he has grown into the awareness that there are things to life that pop-music can't cover. E.g. death. It's the death of his (ex-)lover's father that triggers a catharsis which leaves Rob the college-drop out and owner of a disfunct record-store equipped to follow the script of his blatantly meaningless life almost cheerfully. So far so dull. Esp. the catharsis-bit is a bit too soppy for my taste.
But it's not the bland end that marks the difference between High Fidelity and Soloalbum, it's the embracing of meaninglessness. Rob Flemming is so dull, he can't even be the hero of his own book. "If I do okay with women it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have." (edition Indigo, 200) And this is the quiet tragic of HiFi: the life so insignificant that a heartbreaking chorus (+ strings) only provides momentary elevation. HiFi is different not because it offers escape into the exceptional but it is just as bad as it gets.
favorite quotes:
You need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actorsm and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to and who'd believe in this character then? (67)
I can see that now. I can see everything once it's already happened - I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand. (74)
But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to eascape and rot - how escape can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway. (114)
But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I'm unhappy, or whether I'm unhappy because I like it. (137)
I didn't say I was happy with my life. I said that I was fine, as in no colds, no recent traffic accidents, no suspended prison sentences, but never mind. (154)
"Ken didn't die for your benefit, you know. It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story." - Of course. Isn't that how it works for everybody? (189)
You might say, banal. But that's just what I meant ...
It's been a while since I last travelled for pleasure and recreation alone. So, when I had the brilliant idea to go away over Easter, the only affordable (and free) thing left seemed to be Last Minute Packages. The touristic no-no for enlightened individuals. But I did it anyway and flew to Rhodes with the budget brand of a budget brand. And it wasn't half bad.
Just make sure you stay out of the way of the travel agent's representative, who'd infallibly say things like:
"Don't go to a local car rental, book your car with us. We're a _bit_ more expensive, but they rip you off." -- According to the tourist information, car rentals on Rhodes have to take regular check-ups and report to the TI or the TI puts them out of business. So the car I had was a bit ratty, bit took me all around the island (ca. 80 kms length) in a day and the rental guy was friendly and uncomplicated.
or:
"Take our guided tour to the Kalithea Thermes, you can walk there but the only way is along the main road." -- Right. It's a 1-1,5 hr walk and the main road is a two-laner with soft shoulders. Don't know what it's like in the high season, but in April it was more like a quiet backroad. With a beautiful view. And anyway, you can easily scramble down to the shore-line and climb along the lava-banks. You'd need a bit of balance, but no hiking-experience required. The lave is sharp to the hands (if you must hold on to something), but solid (hardly any loose stones) so trainers just cling to them.
re Traffic: The travel-rep. warns of mad drivers. Ok, Rhodes City tends to be a bit cramped, but (again: this was pre-season) none of the traffic I saw came close to Frankfurt main-streets on a given afternoon.
re Food: It seems to be a strange Greek tradition to serve food luke-warm (at best) and not to use rechauds on buffets. Which is ok for many things, though cold poached eggs can be a bit trying.
Best gyros pita: Restaurant Obelix, Rhodes City, somewhere near the intersection of 28th Oktovriou and Ionos Dragoumi.
Greek coffee should come with a glass of water and may be lightly colored warm liquid on a dark powdery substance - or very very yummy.
re Weather: There are supposed to be (on average) three rainy day on Rhodes in April. I saw 4, so April next year should be perfect timing ...
re Ancient: Rhodes is full of history - antique Greek, medieval, early C20 - mostly in the form of buildings/ ruins. Road-signs point out the sights but that's usually it. An "ancient settlement" (as seen at the Southern tip near the land-bridge to Prassonissi (which btw. is underwater when the flood comes in)(the land-bridge, not the settlement)) can be a 6x6 meters fenced-in patch of thick shrubs. Or the really very much ruined castle of Feraklos. climb the sheep-paths up the hill, crawl into the caves (if you can brave the huge spiders), walk around the ruins (underground structures uncluded!) without fencing, warning signs or wardens who check that you don't carry off souvenirs.
That's nice. A change to well-kempt Northern European history. But also pretty frustrating because nothing is documented. Take the Kalithea thermes, an old sulphur spring, build into a resort by the Italians earlier in C20 and bombed by the Germans in the 40. Now being rebuilt, but the ruins of the bath-house are freely accessible. (Even the neck-breaking first floor ...). And no word about the history, the restauration concept, the styles used in rebuilding ...
Unlike Rhodes acropolis up on Mount Smith. They even have a small museum that explicates the site. Did you know "the old Greeek" had starting-mechanisms for runners in the stadiums, much like those used for horse-racing today?
re Symi: a tourist-must. Half a dozen boats leave for Symi from Mandraki each day. Every travel agency and every other car rental has a tour service. And yes, Symi is nice and quaint and in good weather both the trip and the stay should be ok. But you only get three hours which is not enough the climb the mountains on too much for ambling up and down the pier.
re Swimming. Well. I managed five strokes out and five in again (see weather). And there were kite-boarders at the Southern tip. Couple days later and the entire East Coast must have been swimm- and boardable. The beaches in the touristy parts are smoother, sandier (or vice versa), but the lava-edges e.g. round Kalithea make shallow pools that warm quickly.
And finnally: the pics. Here.
Saturday night, I tried to to live-blog the Nacht der Museen. It didn't quite work out the way I planned as there was no online-access to be had anywhere. (Except the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, but one was not supposed to put the terminals to other than exhibition-related uses.) Results here. In German, though.
Jane Joy arrived on Monday. Happy Birthday, Jane Joy! And congratulations, Diane.
So this was TIDSE (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) 2003. I was surprised to see that re: storytelling, the computer graphics people are struggling with much the same issues as the hypertext literary people. Or that the ht lit-people used to struggle with (while in the games-world, storytelling or narrative is currently a concept non grata, anyway). Story grammars, story patterns, the automatic generation of stories, plot-lines, virtual narrative are a thing of the 90s. A story is not the sum of Propp's story-elements. And honestly, using the computer's ever-increasing powers to create ever more life-like virtual worlds and choose-your-own-path stories of a scope and complexity that makes them appear endless, giving the reader/ user/ player the illusion of limitless freedom - I don't think this will ever by itself result in satisfactory, fulfilling reading experiences. As Clive Fencott said during his talk on "Agencies of interactive story-telling", sometimes it's the limits that make a story engaging.
Still, TIDSE had quite a few interesting project presentations and demos. Most intersting I found the Augmented Reality projects, notably Bolter's suggestion that not only are the production-costs lower (the background and props don't have to be rendered), but the experience is heightened by the "real" surroundings (of a museum, a historical battlefield, or a graveyard as in "Ghosts of Boston"). Add to this Fencott's suggestion that the player-character should not be the main character in an interactive fiction (because this makes identification with the hero impossible) but that the main character should be an extrovert and friend to the player - one who guides the reader/ user/ player through a story the latter more or less marginally involved in. The environment and the (apparent) free will of the main character should set enough limits to create a plotted story within which the user can walk and interact as if freely.
Had a chance to talk to Chris Crawford who sees Interactive Stories as the next genre besides and after hypertextual fiction and computer games; due in a few years.
I wonder how they'll open the market, though. The academic afficionados who are familiar with and enjoy the genre will not reach critical mass. Digital entertainment usually addresses a youth-market - like computer games. But will young gamers buy the boxes when the discs inside do not offer gameplay? On the other hand, as teenage gamers grow up, they may grow into the appreciation of a more diverse range of digital art forms while the more literary inclined are becoming sufficiently computer-literate to allow form of digital literary art into their shelves.
Aisling Kelliher, Ali Mazalek, Glorianna Davenport, Documenting Digital Dialogues: Engaging Audience in the Construction of a Collective Documentary Acress Time and Space
Aisling and Ali present a video-blog documentary they made during a Haytack Mountain School Workshop [it *is* weird to blog without the web to help you quick-research half-heard stuff]: short, briefly edited video-clips with commentary.
Aisling and Ali tried to maintened an online-community after the workshop, which, however, faded rather quickly. Some participants/ contributors also obviously had problems with making their posts freely available on the web.
I notice this reluctance to be "available online" in different contexts - which strikes me as weird seeing how people react towards a news-camera rolling in their local highstreet. The 15 mins of fame are fine, the 15kb are still frightening.
[10:10 AM]
Elisabeth Phillips and Alan Parkes, Building a Bridge between Video Clips and Stories
Phillips uses visual analysis of clips stored and clustered in a database (by state, status, location, personae, direction, length etc.) to generate short video-stories from user-input parameters.
"The generated story is always only as good as the clips you have in the database." says Phillips. The tool sure looks nifty (although I wonder how much of the indexing has to be input manually), but I suspect (we did not get to see a live presentation) that the Ohs and Ahs provoked by the final story will be directed more at the indexing and retrieval capacities of the machine and *not* the aesthetic, mimetic, cathartic or otherwise literary quality of the story.
[10:40 AM]
Not only did I have to miss the afternoon-sessions, now this:
Carry gets the bomb. Remember my obsession with Sex and the City Carry Breadshaw's G3 Powerbook? Almost every episode of S/C contains a long and loving camera pan across the shapely lid, slowly revealing a glowing white apple. *sigh*
In this episode, Carry gets the bomb and loses everything on her harddrive as well as her boyfriend. Ah for the appropriateness of this metaphorical conjunction (or disjunction).
But, I ask you, did the crash and breakup follow the script-writerly logics of matching main- and subplots (Miranda, in case you care, loses her mother) -- or did Carry just have to get rid of this guy who tried to replace a G3 with an iBook Blueberry?
Ahh, this is what happens with live-blogging: they made up. They're together again. At least, the G3 is back.
Elisabeth Figa and Paul Tarau, Story Traces and Projections: Exploring Patterns of Storytelling
Paul Tarau presents "patterns of storytelling" and the WorldNet lexical database. Tarau and Figa define many-to-many and world-to-sense relations within the database that make it possible to process the content-blocks of texts to lay open their semantic relations.
The current use is for NL recognition in chat agents.
[09:30 AM]
Clive Fencott, Agencies of Interactive Digital Storytelling
Fencott rehearses some of Barthes's theories of the narrative, then goes on to outline anaesthetics of Virtual Environments (VEs):
+ agency
+ narrative potential
+ transformation
+ co-presence
+ presence
... then states that agency is not a given, has to be designed to accomodate pirpose, genre, tec. and is restricted.
Acc. to Fencott, however, these limitations (the character "tells" the player she doesn't want to take certain actions at a certain point) actually givenarrative pleasure, the reward of agency. Agency and narrative are reconcilable.
[10:00 AM]
Nicolas Szilas, IDtension: a narrative engine for Interactive Drama
Szilas presents his project IDtension, an interactive narration with 3-4 tasks and goals for the user/ player can follow and choose between.
For this, Szilas, too, has developed a model of narrativity, consisting of three layers, discourse layer (intention, system of values), story layer (character, goals, obstacles, actions, transforamtions etc.), perception layer (cognitive factors, emotion).
[11:00 AM]
Anindita Basu and David Cavallo, Children as Designers of Full-Contact Poetry
The use of digital media for poetic expression has so far been open mostly to adults. "Full-Contact Poetry" is an authoring and shoring environment for children to produce digital poetry in.
[11:30 AM]
David Bolter et al., Three Angry Men: An Experiment in Augmented-Reality, Point-of-View Drama
David Boler presents Three Angry Men, an Augmented Reality abridged adaptation of 1950s movie Twelve Angry Men.
For the AR, the conversation of the jurors was recorded three times with the chracters played out differently each time to reflect the assumed pov/ perception of the position eventually taken by the user. The user wears a headset and sits in the chair of one of the juror, sees and hears the other two talk and hears "herself" talk without being able to speak or engange in the course of the discussion. She can, however, change seats while the dicussion is going on.
Bolter believes in the importance of the "real" environment in which the virtual action is played out, e.g. for applications in a museum or on a historic battle-site - or the virtual ghosts of Boston set in an actual Bosten cemetary.
[11:45 AM]
Peter Hoffmann and Michael Herczeg, Distributed Storytelling for Narrative in Spacious Areas
Peter Hoffmann presents Jeherazade, a networked learning kiosk system to be used in spacious areas like excavation sites or museums. Based on the observation that the average user requires teh greatest possible freedom and the greatest possible amount of information as well as someone or something who/ that guides her through the site, Hoffmann and Herczeg found that
- the State of the Art-solution is a multimedia kiosk, which, however, has not information about the users and
- the conceivably best solution would be a nomadic information system (however, PDAs etc. are still too fragile)
On the kiosk hardware, arranged on a site, a "story" could be installed that is built around the movements of the user/ visitor.
A reference implementation is in progress at Schloss Eutin in Northern Germany.
[12:00 PM]
Ido A. Iurgel, Automated Emotional Immersion in Interactive Storytelling
Iurgel introduces his project "Geist" (link: www.tourgeist.de, an augmented reality story that plays out in a "real-life" environment.
The main issue to be addresses for emotional immersion, according to Hoffmann, is the problem that in films or books, we identify with the hero, but in interactive fiction we are the hero, so we cannot identify. The solution, then, is to create a protagonist beside the playing character who is compelling and aimable and has a favorable relationship with the user-character. (Bit like The Great Gatsby - ar)
More links: www.art-e-fact.org
[12:15 PM]
I'll be at TIDSE (Technologies in Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) conference in Darmstadt Mon thru Wed. I'll try some not quite live "live-blogging", uploading stuff at night when I find a conncetion.
TIDSE is a follow-up to DISTL 2000, interdisciplinary workshop on Digital Storytelling. TIDSE starts from a recognition of storytelling in all sorts of digital media and aims at defining different genres of interactive storytelling and see if there are connections to industry and the market.
Nicely, the organizers put a lot of emphasis on the "having fun" and "mingling between sessings" aspects of conferences. They also have printed and laminated cards: 5 mins (yellow) and 2 mins (red) to make sure speakers don't run over.
Contrary to blogging customs, I'll write chronologically down screen within a day and start new permalinks for individual presentations.
09:50 AM
keynote Chris Crawford
Crawford, in what looks like a monk's habit only shorter (well, and jeans), outlines six conceptual obstacles that prevent us from solving the problem of interactive storytelling.
+ The Primacy of Interacitity
Interactivity is perceived to be revolutionary and therefore scray. But interactivity is the essence of computing. So put all your eggas into one basket name "interactivity".
+ Dichotomy between things and processes
Mentally, we prefers nouns, because verbs/ processes are much more difficult to grasp. But we're not working with inter-thing-ivity, we're working with inter-act-ivity. Concentrate on the process, not what things are but how they work.
+ Concentrate on verbs
Verbs are the manifestation of processes. Here's Crawford's first rule of interactivity-design: ask "what are the verbs?"
However, it only works when it reaches a certain size. C. estimates that 1000 words are the absolute minimum for storytelling; 2-5000 are more appropriate.
+ Creating the tools, the authoring systems for interactive storytelling is far more important than building the engine.
Think more about the tools than the products themselves.
Two worlds of "science" and "arts"
While computer games are being created by the programmers alone, they will always be awful.
+ Finally, there's a perceivable reluctance to shake hands an work with the business people.
In interactive storytelling, there are 3 cultures, the above + industry. Someone has to assemble and pay very large teams of designers, artists, programmers etc. etc. For this, you need some MBAs.
While in the US, scientists and artists mix less well than in Europe, in Europe, no-one is comfortable working with the business people.
These are personal, emotional issues, not intellectual issues.
C. clearly sees more openness toward overcoming these issues in Europe, mostly due to European cultural history; so acc. to C., Europe may well become to computer games, what the US/ Hollywood are to movies. He closes his keynote "We need you".
IMHO, Europe here may well be France (see Microids et al.), and be to computer games what France is to movies while Hollywood holds the mass market.
[11:00 AM ]
Sachindra Nath, Story, Plot and Character: Narrative Experience as Emotional Braid
Nath claims that top level control is the 'reality' definition in terms of causal laws. This leaves more freedom for the emergence of plot and beahviors. It also limits the cognitive freedom of the user.
[12:00 PM]
Jeff Rawlings and Joe Andrieu, Player-Protagonist Motivation in First-Person Interactive Drama : A Framework for Aristotelean Interactive Drama
Rawlings and Andrieu identify two central issues in interactive drama: a) that the player is inherently unpredictable and cannot be forced to do anything and b) that the player is at the same time also the audience. Based on R. MvKee's observations that in life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time, in art they are meaningful now, in the instant they happen, R. and A. set as their goal to produce meaningful experiences for teh player based on her actions in real time.
While a traditional story is defined by changes in the protagonist, in interactive drama a story is defined by changes in the player-protagonist.
And as the player's motivation is inherently unknowable, she has to be steered in some way. Usually this a done through assignment of a role or a task or by setting up an environment for relatively free improvisation.
In their company Realtime Drama Inc., R. and A. have developed a framework that addresses this issue via:
+ a Personal Narrative Agent (PNA)
+ Narrative Forms (NF)
+ Multiple Stories
+ Evolving Narrative Hypotheses
+ Story Transitions and Story Weaving
The PNA uses NF for offering the player different stories to choose from, seamlessly from within the active story, in order to meet their motivation and arrive at at story where the player's motivation and the protagonist's motivation are aligned. No dramatic destiny will be imposed upon the player.
[12:30 PM]
Sus Lundgren and Staffan Björk, Game Mechanics: Describing Computer Augmented Games in Terms of Interaction
aside: we break up into sessions here, so this blog will not cover the entire conference.
aside two: I blog this into the source-code because the relaunch is still in concept-mode, but I'm taking notes in Tinderbox and both activities play into each other very well. The flow of notes goes into the Tinderbox, digests and conclusions are wrapped up for the blog. I thought this might distract me, but instead I concentrate more.
Lundgren introduces the concept of "Game Desing Patterns" she and Björk are developing togehter with a colleague at the Interactive Institute, Sweden.
The idea is to identify recurrent elements (methods, problems, relations, solutions) in games, basis for specific rules in specific games, that help describe games better and to create games better.
Here are two links to their work: www.playresearch.com
[03:00 PM]
Marcella Stienstra and Jettie Hoonhout, Is every kid having fun? A gender approach to interactive toy design
Jettie Hoonhout presents a study conducted by the Mads Clausen Institute for Product Innovation and Philips Research about designing fun into interactive toys.
Three interactive, playful input devices were created that required hand-eye coodrination, cooperation and physical activity. Then kids were given the task to navigate a maze with first keyboard and mouse, then with the new divces.
The (to be expected) results were a) that although the new devices were harder to use they were perceived to be more fun because they were challenging and b) that boys and girls appreaciated the physical activity these input devicies required.
[03:30 PM]
Susana Tosca, The Quest Problem in Computer Games
Susana's talk quite nicely ("audience-friendly" is, I think, the term), does not read her paper from the proceedings but presents examples onscreen that did not make it into the paper.
Nice answer to the question what may go wrong when a game tells a story, why this story is always boring: it's not a story, it's a game, therefor it "fails" as a story. Right on, Susana.
S. picks one crucial element of games, the quest or mission, and ideitifies different sorts of missions from those where semantic and structural causality are very high to those where both are rather low, leaving room for players' improvisation.
Basically, according to Susana, the designer's plan is usuallay more tellable than the player's actualization, so the games that give the player a lot of freedom are less tellable.
[04:00 PM]
Jiyoung Park, Gichan Kim, Jungwoo Park and Juneho Yi, Realtime Interactive Boxing Game Based on Gesture Recognition
Jiyoung Park presents a "vision interface", an input device that relies on gestures, used, in this instance, to interact with a realtime boxing game.
The system uses "blobs" (fuzzy objects) to represent the hands the point (as action) either left, right, up, down or a combined movement. It uses bounding boxes to determine to position of the player in relation to a starting/ reference position.
The whole thing does not look like much, to a technical dyslectic like myself, but I suspect that the whole contraption is pretty smart. If the realtime translation of the gestures into movements on screen is as immediate both temporally and spatially, as shown in the demo-video, - well, and more versatile than just capuring boxing moves - this tool will push physical interaction/ input. If it isn't, it's not far beyond no-keyboard typing-devices.
[4:30 PM]
Dieter Müller abhors Blogs. Not only do the online "brainfarts" ("Gehirnfünrze") of everybody and their dog spoil his browsing-experience, he is also convinced that the cyberactivism of bloggers, namely webrings and mail-bombings (sic), is politically impotent.
How I know this? Dieter Müller has a new weekly column on multimedia.de (German webworker-community) where he flaunts his "personal opinions about netlife" (according to the editorial). The title, "Böse Bytes", translates into "Evil Bytes" - although the other possible translation, "Bad Bytes", might be more suited to Müller's unwitty and uninformed nagging.
And apart from some more conceptual differences, what distinguishes Müller's "personal column" from a blog is that while M. does not have to read my blog or follow anybody's trackbacks unless he wants to, his texting gets pushed onto the screens of 8392 unsuspecting readers who've originally subscribed to the multimedia.de-newsletter for serious business-information.
German proverb of the day: Wer im Glashaus sitzt, sollte nicht mit Steinen werfen ....
I took a while to figure out that Spielmaschinen mentioned in Marcus Hammerschmitt's article in telepolis is the catalog to the exhibition History of Games curated by the Computerspiele Museum Berlin. But it is.
The lyrics make about as much sense to me as Hatten Er Din, but Christian Kjellvander's Polish Daughter (click _discography_, then _Polish Daughter_) is definitvely my pick of the week.
For the first time in this year, today it got warm enough to take the bike for a spin to the outskirts.
Greg Costikyan's new blog on Games, Design, Art and Culture has a "section" (do blogs have sections?) on games he'd like to development but cannot or will not for certain reasons.
This issue, it's Great Patriotic War, a war-game that's not strategy-based but arcade style.
"How much actual strategy is there in running the Eastern Front, after all?" asks Costikyan and perhaps, I wouldn't know, if one aims for realism in a war game, arcade might be closer than strategy (or role playing). But why War Games at all? Why would one want to enact war in no matter how realistic an environment? From all I hear, those who are in it (the real thing), above anything else want to get out again.
What I find most disturbing about the Great Patriotic War proposal is that Costikyan makes light of an iconography that is painful to some and lothsome to others. Sure, there's a sarcastic edge to the entire concept, but the Horst Wessel Lied (I don't even want to think about who Google'll send to Flickwerk now) or "funny" You Lose-lines like "You are condemned to a concentration camp, and your emaciated corpse is ultimately covered with lime and interred in a mass grave of your compatriots." cross my line.
via Meg Hourihan (Megnut): The world's first ever (or something) film-blog is currently being written on the set of I Love Your Work.
Hourihan quickly dismisses this effort as "not a weblog" (not in real-time, no links, publicist-approved content) but welcomes the idea of a movie-website with actual content.
In her article for Salon.com, Alisa Weinstein finds more critical things to say and quote: Esp. Helen Jane Yaeger's accounts of what she is not allowed to blog lets one fear for a site with content, yes, but interesting content? I don't expect marketing-fluff from Yaeger - nor the stuff that would "make a People magazine editor wet his pants" (although this here post is pretty heretic, don't you think). But with everything else stripped, what remains?
In fact, I find the I Love Your Work-blog disappointingly dull. And sloppily done (the contrast is really awful, esp. the tiny red links on grey background, some of the external links open in self, some don't (how I hate it when they do), you can't tell internal and external links apart, subpages accessible through the left-side navigation lose the right-side navigation and the header). duh.
But I like the concept of Blogger In Residence. Invite an "A-list blogger", a specialist, a celebrity, a journalist of your trust to write a blocumentary of a concert-tour, a filming, the making of an exhibition etc. I'm thinking Thierry de Navacelle's Woody Allen On Location on the making of radio days. (disclaimer: I hope I am. Read it ages ago, forgot the title, but a little web-search tells me this must be it)
Navacelle also shows what you can write about inside a tight contract: how you choose location, how lighting is done, if the director's working close to the script or encouraging improvisation, what it means to produce a film. One can tell such things even if one has to leave out the numbers and saucy details.
Fortunately, Torill's blog is vague enough about dates (and then there's the time-lag from here to Norway to take into account) for me to be maybe on time:
HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY, Torill!
A few years ago, the thing to do for young hypertext-scholars, was to deconstruct Landow/ Bolter/ et al.'s conceptual enthusiasm. Kick free from the fathers. That should be through now. We should be able to take first wave hypertext theory for what it's worth. To trash Landow for the utopias that never came to pass is a bit like saying: Wordsworth, ok, but he's such a Romantic ...
The other "forefather", Michael Joyce's Afternoon has turned into a hyperfiction non grata (same with Myst for computer games), not because there's nothing (good) to say about it, but because so much has been said about these titles (and much of it merely reiterating well-worn phrases).
There's an awful lot of awful literary hypertext (or digital literature in general) around - but I have read and reread Afternoon and cannot help but say, it's not half bad. Neither is Victory Garden. While I'd question some of Moulthrop's design-choices, VG is above all simply very funny & a surprisingly good read.
Still, much hypertext-theory with a critical angle today thrives on trashing Landow & Bolter, Afternoon & Victory Garden. In the tradition of Sven Birkerts these texts often start with their author's confession: I've only read Victory Garden for about half an hour, but .... and then plunge into lengthy explanation of why the whole genre can bore a grown man to tears.
The recent issue of Dichtung Digital sports two specimen, Dennis G. Jerz's On the Trail of the Memex Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy (see Jill's and Mark's comments) and Henning Ziegler's When Hypertext became uncool Notes on Power, Politics, and the Interface. Ziegler tries to render a post-Marxist reading of hypertext-theory and popular GUIs. His article is convoluted and poorly structured and I have a hard time following his argument. But his wholesale trashing of early hypertext-theory and as early hyperfiction is quite pointless without a close reading and the (at least) terminological (if not conceptual) sloppiness of using _hypertext_ and _hyperfiction_ indiscriminately does not help either. Ziegler recognizes that the stability sought by user-application GUIs is not what hypertext-fiction is aiming for, but passes over this point in his attempt to declare hypertext _uncool_ on the basis of a personal dissatisfying reading-experience "on a hot day in late 1999".
Greg Costikyan blogs new MMG A Tale in the Desert, and a long and detailed post it is, too. I don't usually go in for MMGs, but after reading Costikyan, I'd try this one. What makes it sound interesting when I've never gotten past 10, 20 minutes in a virtual world, mostly because I get killed immediately & never muster the patience to get into the game far enough to gather the necessary skills to even survive? - It's probably that Costikyan makes it sound as if the skills you learn in ATITD are real-life skills: ATITD is looks like an animated museum of the history of technology - which sounds fun to explore.
I pass the US Ambassy twice a day. It sits comfortabely in an upscale residential area. The road has been closed for cars since September 2001 with US security personnel guarding access. The road that merges opposite the entrance has a real life road block, barbed wire and all.
Yesterday, four German police vehicles drove up, two on each side. This morning, they were checking approaching cars with machine guns at the ready.
The Princess Series - a site for sore eyes.
Susana Tosca and Jill Walker's new Hypertext Criticism-JoDI is out: Hypertext Criticism: Writing about Hypertext.
It's not a line-up of individual articles, but 27 nodes by 7 authors + an editorial; interlinked by the authors. Quote from the editorial: "We invited submissions consisting of one or more brief nodes which we would then link together to create a hypertextual journal issue: an interconnected discussion of a topic rather than disconnected articles. ... We hope that this issue can serve as a landmark in the way hypertext criticism is perceived by authors, theorists and the general public alike."
Great concept. So much better (and truer to the topic) than a collection connected only through a common URL.
But how do I read this thing? The typical hyperjump-technique (change nodes whenever a link looks attractive) will soon lead to confusion. Might be better to read through the nodes first and then explore the connections, who linked where and why.
A more convenient navigation could include markers for different link types: links to notes and references; links among nodes by a single author; notes made by the author of a node to someone else's writing; links made by someone other than the author of this node; external links. Probably not in in keeping with the JoDI styleguide ...
Note: Jill's Blog moved. JoDI still has her old address - remember to update!
It seems that Google bought Pyra, makers of Blogger. This piece of news has made the rounds this weekend, but no-one seems to be terribly excited. No-one sees monopolist conspiracies. Now, if Microsoft had ... But Google?!
Perhaps they're trying to "acquire" a user-base who are used to paying for services (Blogger Pro) as a basis against launching their own for-cash-products. Perhaps they're buying out the largest player in personal publishing because those highly interlinked weblogs have taken over the leading positions in Google search results - positions Google, like most other search-engines, might want to sell some day? (Or if not directly *sell* positions, at least a search-engine that list predominantly private pages isn't very intersting for commercial site-owners who'd otherwise use Google advertising-features.) (Just a thought.)
Possibly the best music-video ever. Song's a NiN-cover, though (did you know that?). (Romanek's site's not half bad, either.)
When I moved into this apartment, it seemed large enough to keep books and files in strategic piles spread across the floor - and small enough to benefit from bare walls. Now that, for various reasons, floor space has become limited, I broke my promise never to shop for Scandinavian "design" furniture again. (They got pretty neat stuff now. Not the rickety structures of my student days that had to be bolted to the wall. Magicker stands on its own.)
Anyway, shelves: Suddenly, I know what I know again. I remember how, when I wrote my thesis, I had a visual memory of where to find a quote. At times only that the relevant quote would be in the last quarter of a slim blue volume, left page, upper half. Just run my finger along the shelves.
And the spines lined up look (mind the cliche) like old friends. Not so much the individual books but the patterns and colors of volumes that have lived beside each other for years. When new books are added, the features change slightly, but remain familiar.
Tekka is out. I feel a bit like a first-time father who's been pacing the waiting-room. Mark's taken the programming upon himself (thanks!). But the baby's there - now you all go and have a look ...
ENJOY!
Tekka is all about enjoying new media. Think going for a coffee with your friends. Lots of talking and waving of hands. One of you coins the bonmot du jour with which you'll sign your e-mails for the next few days. Someone spills some coffee. Back at your desk, you dig into your work twice as vigorously as before and skribble notes for an article on the side.
Mayte Mari rubs raw pigments into oil-paint, creating rough, structured canvasses in earthy colors. Almost abstract, evocative of barren landscapes. Broken lines, like roads or rivers or furrows, meeting (or missing) horizons. Many of her pieces are collected in groups of three or four. Some are available as photographs on her site (click "Malerei", then the signature, then "galerie"). Her best works are the series of three or four where one screen is filled with a single color. (There's no photo of my favorite, three black on beige screens and between #2 and #3 one covered in white strcutured plastic.) The single screen disrupts the lineary of the series and forms a perfect Leerstelle for the (?) reader (?) to fill.
Jill, Torill and Mark discuss the correct syntax for Games in bibliographies.
I came across the same problem when I finished my thesis in '99 and went for the MLA-(4th edition)-approach: author (if given), title, release, publication medium, city of publication, publisher, year - leave out whatever information is not available. So basically, it was title, medium, publisher, year. Which, most conveniently, circumvents the question of personal or collective authorship.
-- Come to think of it, the bibliography is the only part of my thesis where the much-called-for disappearence of the author in digital fiction becomes a remote possibility.
And anyway, the reason for a bibliography is for people to find your references. With books, you choose the authoritative edition (because you don't want to base a thesis on a typo) and the combined information of publisher, year of publication (and edition) and page-number allows for the undisputable retrieveability to the quote in question. The decision to present the titles sorted by author appears arbitrary (although it allows the academic reader to find out if the writer herself has assimilated the relevant predecessors).
When it comes to computer games, however, hardly anyone knows names of authors, teams, or publishers even. It's easiest so find a game in a list of sources if it's filed under its title. And to trace a game, e.g. via google, you'd need title and, perhaps, publisher.
I agree with Mark that naming the chief authors/ creators would help building for game designers the same recognition as for authors - but is a reference-table the best place for this quest?
Quick check: Computerspielemuseum goes vaguely by publisher/ title, German entertainment-software database Zavatar goes by title (after a genre-filter). - Which is how most cheat/ walkthrough-sites work.
Seen the new Star Trek. Snore.
But ok, at least now we know:
+ we're all equal, but if you misbehave, Daddy will come for you
+ a clone will always be an individual because we are out experiences
+ cloning will never work because the cells used are already aged, so clones will age faster (this one's been in the tabloids about a week ago)
+ probably because of their origin in aged cells, clones are stubborn and less human in their failure to desire to better themselves (so despite (2), clones should not live)
+ while we're at it, the whole cyborg-craze has been (at best) a sentimental quirk and we better not get too attached to our silicone pals
(I said this was going to be dull...)
Must be ...
I don't want to see the "or used for only"-function for this one ...
Seen LOTR.
Ok. I'm late blogging this one, too. But still ...
New Zealand sure is beautiful. I'm really glad Adrian blogged what he did. Explains a lot.
Still I wonder why don't find LOTR more moving than I do. Because I don't. It's ok as far as a night at the movies goes. But beyond that? I mean, apart from the beautiful backdrop, it's just a pretty plain story about Good winning over Evil with a distinction between G. and E. so sharp it borders on the surreal. G. is good and E. is bad and bad is very much external to good. Hence Gollum's split personality. Hence little Frodo who can only get in touch with his mean side when he's putting on this ring. And then this "the very small ones can be great heroes"-plot. And then: war. Of course it's Evil and no-one wants it, but when your country and lifestyle (by definition: Good) are at risk, you have to do it and once it starts, it turns into everybody's business and cannot be ignored. A bit of ecosocialism cannot really turn this black and white story green (let alone multi-colored).
Come to think about it, I wonder why I don't find LOTR more offensive.
If you must know, yes, I missed the Frankfurt airplane-kidnapping two weeks ago. By the time I heard about it, put my shoes on and gotten my camera ready, it was already over. I hadn't heard the helicopters or the fighter-jets and the alleged road-blocks must have been installed elsewhere.
I am also unforgivably late in blogging this.
So, what's keeping me? a) Web Design Studios are not really known for regular 9-5 hours. Stress, says Matthias Horx, is the latest status-symbol. And stress, he says, is the incapability to reconcile the demands of job, family, friends and personal interests ("hobbies"). I could do with less status ...
Then there's this, initially meant to be just a little HTML-help for a friend. Requirements: a no-nonsense, newspaper-like layout using the baby-blues and pinks dictated by the Mainz university-styleguide. + easy-to-update content with minimum-demands on whoever maintains the site. I chose SSL over Dreamweaver and so far, it has proven the right decision - the pages load ok, no noticeable delay. Also, I included a search courtesy of whatUseek - free when ad-sponsored, but pretty neat. It's not Google - but it allows a site-specific search.
And then, of course, there is Tekka the journal that puts the fun back in hyperfiction (and a few other places). Mark is putting up the backend as we speak. We'll be online in a few days. And then the work really starts ...