Overspecialization?

by

With all the different specialized blogging, pseudo-blogging, or linking websites and services available these days, I’m starting to lose track of how I’m ‘supposed’ to do this one-to-many online communication thing.

It used to be easy. Back in the ‘old days,’ you’d hand-edit a simple HTML file with whatever you wanted to put on it, whenever you wanted to put something on it. Maybe it’d be a link, maybe it’d be a screed. Maybe people would see it, maybe they wouldn’t. Pretty simple.

Then blogging arrived to make everything simpler. Gone were the days of hand-editing HTML and managing pages directly, now you had specialized software that handled the details for you. Databases to store the information, automatically dynamically generated pages, comments, the whole shebang. Still, content-wise, it was still a grab-bag. Some posts would be long, detailed, and in-depth; other posts would be a single small link or quip; sometimes you’d get lists of links that caught someone’s eye.

Now, however, you’ve got a veritable plethora of specialized sites to handle all the different types of information you might want to share. The ones that I either use (in some fashion) or have pinged my radar strongly enough to trigger this little round of rambling, in rough order of depth:

  1. Twitter: 140-character messages originally meant to be IM-style ‘status updates,’ but now often used for ‘nanoblogging’ — short, pithy messages. No more, no less. Since brevity is the soul of wit, we will all tweet brief.

  2. del.icio.us: Social bookmarking that has evolved far more towards the social side than the bookmarking side. While I’m sure there are plenty of people that actually use their del.icio.us account as a substitute for the ‘bookmarks’ menu in their web browser, I see far more who use it as a ‘microblog’ (often displayed as a sidebar to their main weblog) wherein each post is a single link with short commentary.

  3. Tumblr: “The easiest way to share yourself,” according to their splash page. I’ve not bothered setting up a ‘tumblelog’ for myself, but this appears to fill in the ‘miniblogging’ niche, with an emphasis on simple link and media inclusion. Apparently, “this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” Honestly, I’m still a little confused by the niche that this one fills (or attempts to fill).

  4. Weblogs (the usual suspects): Finally, the sites and software packages that used to be simple ‘blogging’ tools are now…what? Is this still ‘blogging’? Or is it now ‘macroblogging’?

I’m starting to feel like I’m losing track of what kind of post is ‘supposed’ to go to which service, and I’m more and more wondering if it’s even worth continuing to keep them all separate. However, there are occasional advantages to the specializations of the services (del.icio.us’s tagging and quick bookmarklets, the dedicated clients that are available for many of the services) that keep me using them instead of just using ‘old-school’ weblog posts for everything.

If I had the time (which student life prevents) and design skills (which simply don’t exist), I’d love to put some effort into seeing if I could assemble an über skin for my site that would streamline everything into one stream-of-consciousness approach (along the lines of what I see on Daring Fireball and kottke.org) but still allow me to use those services that I find useful. It doesn’t seem horrendously complex: plugins (some of which are probably available in some form or another) that would automatically convert each post at one service or another into its own post on my weblog, default posting options for each type of post (perhaps tweets don’t need comments enabled, for instance), and possibly some CSS work that would distinguish the types of posts.

But then, would that still be too complex? There’s always the question of what happens when one service or another is having connection issues (which I keep running into with Twitter — apparently there’s some avian flu going around over there). Perhaps I’d still be better off just coming back around to using my weblog for everything. Consolidate everything in one place — after all, there’s absolutely no real reason why I “have” to ramble on for a certain length for the post to be worthy of going on the blog, rather than being posted as a tumble, del.icio.us link, or tweet.

There’s a few things I’d miss, though, which may keep me from doing this. The in-built social networking of places like Twitter are nice, though not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being able to have my tweets and del.icio.us links show up on my Facebook profile is nice. Sometimes I like the compartmentalization (on the weblog, for instance, ‘big’ posts in the center, tweets and links over in the sidebar), sometimes I feel like it’s unnecessarily over complicating things.

Meh. I’ve gone on to just rambling now. Maybe that 140 character limit isn’t so much of a bad thing, huh?

Ancient Technology

by

16mm Film ProjectorMy anthropology teacher had shown the class directly before ours a movie using an actual 16mm film projector, and was rewinding it when we all came in and sat down. I got a kick out of seeing one in use — heck, I was the A/V geek in elementary school who always volunteered to run the projector when I could — but the look of confusion, wonder, and near-horror on the face of one girl in the class was absolutely hilarious.

“What is that thing? How old is it…when was it made, the forties? Thirties?” She watched, absolutely fascinated, as the teacher ran out the last few minutes of film and we listened to the clickety-clack of the gears and rachets and the warbling, jittery audio; as he raised the rear reel and threaded the trailer back in to the hub; and as he patiently waited for the ‘whap-whap-whap’ of the leader slapping against the projector that signaled that the film was done rewinding.

Just a quickie

by

A couple brief bits — I’m actually trying to do this one-a-day posting thing, but I’m also just home from work and ready to get some food in my system.

  • Yesterday went really well for the birthday girl. She’s already blogged about it and posted pictures. She’s getting to be better about all this geeky stuff than I am! ;)

  • As You Like It, the latest Shakespearean film adaptation from Kenneth Branagh, was gorgeous. As with any Branagh adaptation, definitely worth a rent (or, in our world, a buy).

  • A (slightly late, but still on the right day) happy birthday to Candice! We need to hang out again sometime soon!

And that covers it for the moment. I’m off to find some leftover Chinese food and watch some Will and Grace Amazing Race (I almost forgot — tonight’s the premiere!) before bed.

Happy Birthday to my girl!

by

It’s Prairie’s birthday today! Right now she’s in the kitchen, making brunch with her sister Hope while we wait for her mom to arrive. Tentative plans for the rest of the day include some family shopping for presents, a good dinner somewhere, and probably some Shakespeare in the evening (since we just discovered that Kenneth Branagh has sometime recently released As You Like It, which we hadn’t even heard about until we stumbled across it in the video store).

Us at Kīlauea

Happy birthday, Prairie! :)

NaBloPoMo

by

A couple years ago, I made a rather weak stab at participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Unsurprisingly, given how I constantly seem to have multiple projects going on at any one time, I didn’t get very far. I’d still like to try again at some point, but I think that’ll have to wait ’til I’m out of school.

NaBloPoMoThis year, I think it’s worth trying for something a little more possible: NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. Inspired by NaNoWriMo, it presents a much more feasible goal for most people. Given that my posting lately has been rather sparse (assuming that my del.icio.us links and my Twitters don’t count), I think it’s worth a shot. Here’s my profile, since this drops me into yet another social networking site….

Of course, I’ve already missed a day, since I didn’t find out about NaBloPoMo until today (indirectly through cygnoir, more directly through Thom), but better late than never, right?

Spamalot (And Some Etiquette Grumbling)

by

Sunday night, Prairie and I headed downtown to the Paramount to see Spamalot. We’d been hoping to get a chance to see it ever since it opened on Broadway, had happily memorized the soundtrack after it was released, and snapped up tickets as soon as we heard that the touring company was coming through Seattle. We even sprung for expensive seats, on the main floor of the theater, rather than our usual far more affordable seating (somewhere in the vicinity of the Scottish highlands).

First things first: overall, it was a good evening. We enjoyed the show, and it was a lot of fun to get to see the sets, staging, and choreography — all the bits that just can’t be conveyed through a soundtrack album. The jokes were fun (even though, as long time Monty Python fans, there weren’t really any major surprises in store), and seeing how they translated some of the film’s sight gags to live theater was a real treat (specifically, the Black Night’s dismemberment and the attack of the Killer Rabbit). The performances on the whole were quite acceptable, with the standout performers being Patsy and Sir Robin, with the Lady of the Lake and Lancelot not terribly far behind them.

However, the night was not without a few disappointments. Firstly, a few that are pretty much connected directly to the show itself:

  • Arthur forgot his lines! Well, okay, line (singular), but still. Goofing up the lyrics to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” the opening number of the second act, to the point where not only does the line not rhyme, but it doesn’t even quite make sense anymore, isn’t exactly impressive. Overall, both Prairie and I got the feeling that Arthur was well and truly ready for this run to be over — his entire performance came across like he was bored, tired of the part, and just sleepwalking his way through it. We were quite unimpressed.

  • Also at the beginning of the second act during “ALotBSoL,” and possibly triggered by Arthur’s flub, one of the nights (the tallest of the troupe) stumbled and fell, landing on the umbrella that was being used as a prop, breaking it so that it didn’t open and close properly for the rest of the number.

  • The sound in the theater (or at least in our seats) was horrendous! It was balanced so horridly that rather than sounding like the actor’s voices, only louder, everyone sounded like they were being piped through the old PA system used for assemblies at your elementary school. On top of that, it was mixed so poorly that during the company numbers, the principal voices (Arthur, the Lady of the Lake, etc.) got completely buried in the ensemble, and you couldn’t hear them at all.

Overall, as much as we like Spamalot — and we do — this was far from our favorite show at the Paramount. In hindsight, if we could go back and re-do things, we’d have been quite happy with using the cheap seat tickets for Spamalot, and splurging for floor seats for Young Frankenstein.

Then, of course, there’s the frustrations you find when you have to deal with the general public.

  • It’s truly distressing how few people think of theater as Theater (with a capital ‘t’). Both Prairie and I were brought up to see a night out at a show as something special. It’s not something that happens every day (or even every week or month), and so it’s not something to be taken completely casually. It is something that should be dressed for: I’d argue for good business work clothes at the minimum, if you’re not actually going to take the time to dress up. Above all, jeans and t-shirts? Not acceptable!

  • While we’re eternally grateful that most people have finally figured out that cell phones should be turned off (or at least silenced), if you have to hold your iPhone at arms length to snap a shot of you and your (jeans-clad) buds before the show, and end up waving the phone in front of the face of the person sitting beside you, coming perilously close to knocking them in the head…maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be fiddling with the damn phone.

  • While she probably isn’t, if your girlfriend is so stupid that she just won’t understand any of the humor without your explaining it to her…then she’s just going to have to suffer and cope with a little confusion. Keeping up a running commentary for the entire show consisting of saying the jokes along with the performers on stage and then explaining each joke, why it was funny, and which Monty Python episode or movie it originally came from, making sure to point out any notable differences between its original incarnation and its current stage version…is NOT acceptable. Honestly, I’m surprised Prairie just didn’t smack the guy midway through Act I (except for the fact that she knows how to comport herself in public).

  • One last thing: a standing ovation should be given for extraordinarily good performances. Not for every performance you happen to be at. Not for slightly above average performances. And certainly not for performances with flubbed lines, broken props, and bad sound. I’ve noticed this trend a lot lately, where it’s more rare to be at a performance that doesn’t get a standing ovation than to be at a performance that does. That’s really not how this is supposed to work, folks. A standing ovation is something special, to be reserved for those truly stand-out performances, not used for every performance you bother to attend.

People really amaze me. And not in good ways.

So, wrapping things up: people suck, can’t (or won’t) behave properly in public, and most of them really shouldn’t be let out of the house. The show, while suffering from some very notable rough spots, was generally very enjoyable, though in the end, not quite the experience we were hoping for. For another view, here’s Prairie’s look at the evening.

‘Family’ Entertainment

by

Something cool I just ran across: Muppets for adults (and no, this isn’t Meet the Feebles…). Apparently the Jim Henson company is creating a new show featuring a homesexual couple: a pig and a bull.

The puppet sitcom centers around a homosexual couple – Bobby Vegan (a pig) and Samson Knight (a bull) – as they work to balance their careers, relationship, family and lives in Hollywood. Bobby is a struggling entertainer whose best days are probably behind him. He is a very outspoken individual, and occasionally finds himself in embarrassing situations due to reckless “self-medicating” to deal with stressful situations. Luckily, his understanding and supportive life-partner and soul mate Samson, who also happens to be Bobby’s manager, is there for every storm. These two puppets also have family issues to deal with, as the couple has a 13-year-old human foster son named Foster. There are also issues with Lena, an ex-wife; and Arturo, a limo driver and masseuse. Everyone in the show is a real person except for Bobby and Samson – those two are puppets.

Sounds to me like it could be a lot of fun. It’s on a cable channel I’ve never heard of (but then, I don’t have cable, so that’s no big surprise), but perhaps it’ll start turning up on the bittorrent networks once it starts broadcasting. Worth keeping an eye out for, at least.

Parenthetically…

by

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with by the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))).

— Lewis Thomas, Notes on Punctuation

On the Internet, No One Has to Know You’re Insane

by

While the details of the deception are in many ways quite different, the mental disturbance and the emotional rape described in this LA Weekly article are far, far, far too painfully familiar to me.

A bit of background, so that the following excerpts make sense: The author’s friend Audrey became friends over the ‘net with a woman named Janna, who introduced Audrey to a man named Jesse. Over the next two years, Audrey and Jesse fell in love, helping each other through tragedy after tragedy — all over the ‘net, without ever meeting. Before they got a chance to meet, Jesse suddenly dies from liver cancer. Some time afterwards, Janna comes out to visit Audrey…

This past February, I got a phone call from Tania. She told me two things, one I didn’t know, one I realized I’d known for a very long time. The first was that Janna was in Los Angeles. She had arrived the previous Saturday and was in town for a week.

Then Tania tells me that she and her boyfriend Will had been doing some digging. And man, they were intensive. They spent two whole days on the Internet, doing stuff with Google that I didn’t know was possible. They got piles of backup, but the instant she said it, I knew down to my toes that it was true.

There is no Jesse.

There never was a Jesse.

Jesse never existed.

Ever.

Jesse was supposed to be a volunteer fireman in Colorado. It’s not hard to get a list of every voluntary fireman working in the state of Colorado. His name never appears.

He’d supposedly had surgery at a teaching hospital in Colorado. A quick check confirmed that this hospital had never performed any kind of operation on anyone. Ever.

They checked the death records in Colorado for the day he died. Nothing. So, they checked that week. Nothing. That month. Nothing. That year. Guess what?

Nothing. And they had more. Piles of stuff. This guy should show up in about a dozen places, and he doesn’t. Neither does his supposed son or his purported ex-wife.

Which means that Janna, the woman who was Jesse’s friend, who met him years ago when she hired him to do some work for her, who visited him in the mental home, who filled Audrey in on the details of his funeral, who’s staying in the house with Audrey as we speak . . . It means that Janna is

completely

absolutely

one hundred percent

out of her goddamn mind.

Not just a liar, but bugfuck crazy. Because this has been going on for close to two years, and it’s clearly not about money. This sounds like some sort of weird variant on Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental illness in which a parent induces an illness in a child so he or she can be the beneficiary of sympathy.

Audrey’s friends get together to discuss the situation.

I suggested a fairly direct plan of action, and people hemmed and hawed and went back and forth. It was drastic, and it was decisive, but there was some notion that Audrey should be allowed to decide what to do, as though she could possibly process the information we had and make a calm, rational decision in the moment. I pointed out that when someone’s being raped — and this was, indeed, emotional rape — you don’t ask them if they’d like you to pull the rapist off. You make that decision for them and face the consequences later.

The strange thing about something like this, about an encounter with a genuine monster, is that our minds tend to default to what’s normal, to what we know. We found ourselves talking about the situation as though Audrey had simply made friends with an eccentric person we didn’t like. Surely, it’s Audrey’s business whether or not she wants to be friends with Janna, isn’t it? Then someone would remember that a potentially dangerous lunatic was in the house with our friend.

An intervention is staged, Audrey is called away and informed of the situation by one group of friends while another confront Janna, who leaves.

As horrible as this article is to read for most people, imagine actually being in Audrey’s place — that’s essentially the situation I’m in. In our case, however, we didn’t have friends who could see what was going on and intervene on our behalf. We had to discover the deception for ourselves, and we’re learning how to deal with it on our own.

Of course, some days, the thought that makes it most bearable is simply that the people who live their lives like this, taking advantage of other people’s trust, are putting themselves at risk.

There’s also this — someday, Janna will prey on someone who is not capable, and strong, and possessed of smart, strong friends who care about her. And that person will snap, and Janna will end up in a ditch somewhere. Call it karma, or call it the natural progression of things, but Janna will end up her own victim. It would be immensely satisfying to witness it, or at least read about it in the paper, but we never will. You just have to learn to accept that these things happen, and that you rarely get to be there for the big payback. Just trust that it’s coming, and take what solace you can from that.

At the end of the article, a photo is posted of Janna, as a warning to others she might prey upon. We thought we were doing the right thing when we took the opposite tack — removing our predator’s name from my weblog, changing her name on any entry that mentioned her, and hiding any photos with her in them. Some days we wonder, though. Are we doing the right thing by trying to avoid damaging the life of someone who used to be a friend, and who is apparently suffering some form of mental illness? Or are we merely endangering those who still know her and who she may be spinning a whole new web for?

Neither possibility really makes me comfortable.

At the insistence of her friends, Audrey hasn’t contacted Janna to confront her, and she’s not pursuing legal action (if it’s even possible). The drama has to end. She has to leave it behind and move forward. I hope she can. I think she can. But she has the impulse to try to make sense of it, to try to make it better. She told me she wanted to stop Janna not for her own wounded feelings, but so she doesn’t prey on anyone else. I suggested that if she really wanted to be selfless, she should help Bosnian refugees, or orphans in Darfur. She needs to let go.

This is a struggle we’re still dealing with. We’ve cut off all contact, mainly because we know that no matter how many times we ask, we’re never going to get the most important question — for God’s sake, why?!? — answered. At times, we just want to do our best to forget the whole thing. At other times, we want to shout her name from the rooftops, take out ads in papers detailing what happened, warning people to look out for her. We don’t know what the right answer is. She hurt us, and she could very easily hurt others later on. But how can we warn others without opening ourselves up to more drama, more trauma, and more stress?

I’m tired of the stress. It’s time for it to stop.

And I hate her for what she did to us.

We’re working on moving past what happened, on letting it slide away into the past and continue on with our lives, and it’s better every day. Eventually, it will be a distant, unpleasant memory. I just wish that day was here already.

Why We Had to Move

by
Why We Had to Move

Why We Had to Move, originally uploaded by djwudi.

After returning home from Hawaii (no, those pictures aren’t done yet, I’m just busy with work and school), Prairie and I found out we had to move (here’s my post and here’s Prairie’s on the debacle).

This shot is of what used to be our cute little apartment.

We’ve got a new cute little apartment now, sure, but…(sigh)…this one was our first. Not so cute now, is it?