Hypercompendia

Love this: Siri shuts down any questions about dividing zero by zero

When Eliza first came out, then Facade everyone absolutely had to test them out with mind games and stress them with dopey questions and manipulations.

For a man is a moment
like rain on a mid-summer day
a white blinding Nor’easter
the paintbrush of autumn
and burst buds of
the spring lilac tree

Or a man is a moment
like the flash of volcano
washing waves of flood waters
shaping hands of a dust storm
the tornado sweeping
the land

Some few moments endure
some few men live forever
known by their art on film
and on paper and
the touch of their hand
on your heart

I’m excited about a new literary journal “Awkward Papercuts” that’s being formed. Currently dependent upon Kickstarter funding, it will be another of very few journals focused on audio/visual poems and narrative and as a new media enthusiast, I’m donating to the project and encourage other artists, writers, poets, musicians, to help out as well.

Michael Dickes is a talented lyricist, musician, poet, and friend from Fictionaut where I’ve had the pleasure to view his work. Michael is dedicated to expanding his own artistic endeavors and has always supported the work of others as well.

Check out the video samples that are on the Kickstarter page.

Technology has given us social networking and social networking has given the audience (of any medium: newspapers, internet, television, telephone, etc.) a voice. That voice of the reader/viewer has just broken through the literary fourth wall.

This morning I received two emails from WordPress to approve two comments made on a 2006 Spinning post entitled, “Similes that Sizzle, Fizzle, Drizzle Out Your Ears” that was merely a point made about metaphors and similes by adding a visual.  The comments:

“I wanted to describe drizzle”

“Not to sizzle/fizzle/drizzle out my ears”

Both comments were made within a minute by the same person from Dubai. She/he evidently used “similes to describe drizzle” as the search term in Google.

My initial reaction to the comments was, “So?” I mean, what am I supposed to do about it? Go complain to Google. Refine your search terms. Learn something about description and simile and make up your own.

But there is more going on than a student’s frustration with the internet and the fact that the more we use it, the slower and dumber it seems to be. Like a microwave oven that amazingly heated a meal in two minutes, two minutes fifty years later seems like too long.

So that didn’t surprise me but what did is taking the time to respond by entering a comment. Prior to the internet it was rather tedious to research through physical books to find what you were seeking. On all the wrong leads as well as the good ones, you didn’t leave your mark, no one knew you were there, there was no one on the page to respond to, no ears or eyes to vent your frustrations or even your eureka! moments. Online, even a blog represents a person and while both the writer and the commenter are unknown to each other, there is communication of sorts, particularly when a comment is made.

But I rarely get comments on weblog posts, though there is heavy traffic on literary reviews I’ve posted over the years. Spam is easy enough to filter out but the school semesters are thick with online searching as literary critique via class papers comes due. The comments above took time to type up, fill in the form, go through approval. There appears to be a tendency to blame the post, as written by me, for not providing the proper information the commenter was seeking. This doesn’t truly surprise me either as it seems the norm in society today, but still, when you think about it, here’s this student (I’m guessing) looking for the easiest, fastest method of finding a way “to describe drizzle” and getting upset enough with what’s being laid at her feet (or rather, within her fingertips on the keyboard) and feeling somehow gypped in the process.

Interesting. The new media technology is definitely effecting a change in our way of thinking, of interaction, of learning.

Thanks to HLit for a link to Labirintexto which gives us a nice listing of new media works and informative articles and books according to timeline.

Labirintexto

None of my work has been listed nor have several others that are really important to the development of the genre, but this does give a wealth of links to some of the great pieces in the field and I’ve added it to my New Media category link listing.

Just had a thought this morning after responding to a long-growing thread of commentary involving several friends on the Facebook site. Since it was a lively, interesting, and informative discussion, I was thinking of copying the whole thread to one of my websites, likely Spinning since it was more relative to literature, reading, and writing. Why? Because at a site such as Facebook, the main driver behind the purpose is being up-to-date, the latest statement or news, and the rest seems to roll off into oblivion after a few days. I didn’t want that to happen to this discussion. Damn technology, I thought, completely disregarding that weblogs have longer, searchable archives, true, but are as transient in nature as anything online, even as it is everlasting. For while it may be online for all eternity (we don’t know that yet), in anything that is geared towards regular updates or postings, the old news becomes the past and usually goes unread.

But there was another path to this theory of constants. Before the internet and its blooming crop of social networking sites, this conversation and all other online 1) would be unlikely, since the participants are globally located, and 2) even in a sit-down, face-to-face discussion, unless someone had thought to bring a recording device, everything said is instantly lost except to memory. Interesting.

With a few little glitches of memory and some software changes in Text Edit (Mac) that I wasn’t aware of, I still managed to complete a short little hypertext story and post it up on site here: Little Lives

The first four text boxes (pages) are directly taken from the Tunxis New Media class project called “Apartment 9”, run by Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I believe this piece began in an earlier semester and when I visited a current class, the students were being asked to jump in at some point in the work and continue on with a separate trail from that point. I chose to start right from the beginning and focus on three characters already introduced (though I’ve assigned a name to one of the characters that was nameless and I’m not sure somewhere in the huge project she hasn’t been killed off).

Here’s the map, from the Tinderbox software which I use and which is being taught in the classroom.

It’s a really silly story that I’ve chosen to continue, but the important part was merely getting back into the style of writing a hypertext non-linear piece. It seemed natural to me to choose the two sisters and the husband of one as a good basis for story.

With the story unfolding, I knew that each sister served a purpose to the story and the husband of one was a necessary tie-in. Another was the theme of food and cooking. I had some fun with that. I threw in online gaming, and of course, a contest, and managed as well to come back to the concept of recipes which was also part of “Apartment 9.”

Then I ran into a problem with exporting from Tinderbox to html files for uploading to a website. What I found was that my simple little free text editor that comes with Mac suddenly didn’t look at all the same as I remembered it would and I needed to change colors and sizing and add some info to the text that wasn’t necessarily in the Tinderbox stage of the piece. It took a little bit of searching around and checking settings, until I found the “ignore rich text commands” on the text edit under “Preferences” and that got me back to the view I could work with, to change and add tags.

I didn’t do anything much new with this piece, instead followed the css and html I’d used on the 100 Days Projects, Blueberries, and a few other pieces. It was just that first step towards getting back into the game.

Not as impressed at all with the photo mix feature. While I did not select maybe the best to work from and don’t have the experience yet to have that in mind prior to selection, it seems that while features such as nose, eyes, mouth, can be spot on, the rest of the images just sort of overlay each other and end up looking weird. The samples provided in the tutorial look to have some more work done on the backgrounds that I haven’t quite figured out, so practice may be the key. The other possibility is to first make the images more alike via Photoshop, then put them into Morpheus. Then again, I think Photoshop may already have a morph feature.

Anyway, here’s the layout with the final in the preview window at the bottom right. I think I’ll play a bit more with the warp feature, and maybe a little with the morph again before I stock this experience for the future.

Just played a little with the warp feature of Morpheus, and though it might be a neat thing, I still firmly believe that Photoshop may be the more flexible method of distorting a photo to get the effect that is wanted. However, I will try it for something in the future, using the points at perhaps a more selective, carefully plotted progression. The triangles that show up when the points are moved could be done in a “slower” or more “frequent” series, to achieve the effect.

That said, here’s a quickie:  Window Warp