I’ve been posting and thinking about what conventions and styles separate TealArt and tychoish over on tychoish, and I think this post will likely be the culmination of those thoughts. This has been on my mind of late because, I’ve felt this week that running both sites more or less on my own on a daily basis (which I want to do, don’t get me wrong,) is more than I can handle in the current format. So I’ve been giving more thought to this, and I think that describing the differences between the sites and what I hope to accomplish on both sites.

TealArt

TealArt is (ideally) a collaborative “blog,” that posts slightly longer “essays” or “articles” in contrast to many blogs that tend toward exclusively biographical pieces (journals), short moment-to-moment reflections, or various kinds of punditry (political blogging, technology blogging, etc.), although, at some points in its past TealArt has fit into various aspects of these typical blog categories.

TA posts tend to be in the 500-700 word range, that is slightly longer than the typical blog entry, and are posted 5 days a week. Though there are certainly stand-alone posts, many fit into ongoing series' on loosely organized topics. Thus, in some respects TealArt mixes the maga(zine) and blog metaphors, although it would be incorrect to take this too far. Our posts are often off the cuff opinion-pieces, that aren’t throughly polished. TA posts are experimental, though perhaps this is more from the writers' perspective than from the readers: we’re here trying ideas and concepts out on TealArt, to see how they sound outside of our heads.

Topically, TealArt has a history of being all over the map. These days, TA tries to focus on technology, science fiction, and various aspects of hyper/digital text, with occasional dabbles into the realm of knitting. In terms of technology, we’ve tended to think about how we use computers and how technology interacts with culture and individuals. We’ve approached science fiction, through the Station Keeping and commentaries on the genre like this. Though I tend to conceptualize it in reverse, digital/hyper-text discussions on TealArt as been a place for me to think about how we consume and produce text in digital environments. And the knitting content is fairly straightforward, though unlike most knitting blogs, TealArt Knitting content, is more commentary on the craft and often less focused on what I’m actually knitting.

~/tychoish

In contrast to TealArt, tychoish is just me, and I often think of it as a kind of “failed tumble log,” Tumble Logs, like Anarchaia are quick and dirty blogs that collect various kinds of input from around ones travels on the internet, not much commentary, and no commenting. Mine is failed, mostly because I don’t seem to surf the internet in a way that is productive for tumbleloging, and I tend to be a little more verbose, and I thought it would good to have comments. So in the end, I sort of have blogging circa 1999 when I first got into it (but could never get my ass together to do right.)

Initially, the idea for this site was to have something that is basically a reflection of the kind of note taking that I tend to do in my paper/bound notebook, and It’s grown to be something of a reflection of my internal monologue, with various records of things. I post todo lists, brief ideas for writing things, thoughts that are a bit too long for twitter, and other bits of miscellany. Where I aim to have a new TealArt post every day, depending on what I’m doing in real life, I probably post anywhere from 1 on a light day to about 3-6 posts on a heavier a day. The posts are even less though out, and tend to be in the sub-250 word range.

Moving Forward

I really like how things are set up at the moment, and I like the model that both sites are working in, so they’ll likely stay the way they are. I’m not sure how things will work out in the future, and I’ve posted a quick list things todo for TealArt in the future to help figure out a better way to manage this project. I may have someone lined up to be a more serious co-editor in 2008, but that’s a ways off, and I have a lot on my plate between now and then, but I’m still looking a little more seriously for folk who might be a good fit here. I think also, if there were someone writing two regular posts a week, I’d have a lot more time and energy to work on behind the scenes stuff here, like: promotion and design, and other cool projects that need to happen. For the moment, however, nothing’s changing.

I’ll see you next week.

Cheers, tycho

I didn’t bring knitting for class today. I think this might prove to be a problem for me, but it’s only a couple of hours, and my battery should hold out for that long, so it’s probably not a huge issue.

In other news, I had an attempt to get a blogging set up through TextMate, but have had less than satisfactory experiences with the options there. My issue is that I’m quite spoiled by the wonderfulness that is Mars-Edit (yes, it is old software, but it just works, which is nice), and anything that doesn’t quite measure up is somewhat painful. While I’m always a little peeved when I have to click “edit in external editor” or ⌘-J, it’s better than nothing, I suspect.

Maybe if I could figure out how to make a TextMate command that would send a file to MarsEdit, this would make the workflow a bit better for me. Ideas folks?

I posted something on the 43folders board, about reorganizing and keeping track of my massive (seemingly, massive at any rate) PDF collection. With a little more thought on the subject, I’m thinking that perhaps it would be a good idea to use something like BibDesk, but I’m far from decided on this fact. The first time I looked at this problem, I hadn’t made the leap to LaTeX and I didn’t really know what to make of it, but I think I’m probably in better shape these days.

I’ll be in class and then on the road for the rest of the day, so updates will be spare, this weekend will probably be pretty spare as well, but I might figure out a way to post pictures from a trip to yarn barn. Maybe.

Cheers!

I want to start listening to the GeekCred Podcast because it looks cool, and he’s on my twitter list, as well as The Garnet Murray Podcast at Dave’s suggestion.

I also need to figure out some way to get some fiction writing in this week(end). Chapter 3 awaits.

I’m at this place where I’m looking for a new job, and also taking advantage of an upheaval of my plans to reflect and think as I collect myself in attempt to move forward. Continuing a trend that I started at the beginning of this year, I’m writing more. You’ve all noticed that I’m writing more for TealArt, but at the same time my writing load for school was much higher than it had been in the past, and since the summer started, I’ve also been writing fiction again, and I’ve taught a couple of knitting classes for which I’ve written what amounts to a book chapter on the topic at hand.

I’ve also been paying attention to, and thinking a bit about copyright and what it means to be a creator in the digital realm. I think I have a particularly interesting perspective on this, as both a knitter, and thus someone whose products are very material, and a writer whose work exists--at the moment--as exclusively digital artifacts, but I suspect that the worth of these ideas are for you to decide.

Seeing no better place to begin, lets start in the middle: Over the past few weeks I’ve been tossing around the idea of putting together an anthology of science fiction with a group of friends whose writing I quite enjoy. I enjoy editing and typesetting, oddly enough, and I think that there should be opportunities and avenues for new writers of science fiction to publish their work. Also, with the advent of really good print-on-demand options like Lulu, I figured that it would be easy enough to make a financially viable publication, that would hopefully be able to seed a volume two.

In short: this would be difficult at best. In order to keep the price of reasonable (12-15 bucks), the take from the publication is under 2 dollars, and I think more or less, that’s what the authors take for a book sale is no matter how they publish it. (The advantage is that if you go with a bigger named press, they can sell more, which gives you more 2 dollar bits.)¹ Book length works do a little bit better, mostly because you don’t have to divide the take, and some publishers can get away with selling books for prices that are frankly absurd.

The larger problem for people who write, is that “selling” pieces of writing to a consumer, a “reader,” can never generate enough income to sustain even the sparest of lifestyles. Same, likely with knitting. You can’t sell knitting for enough money to make it worthwhile (who’d buy a 1,200 dollar sweater, which frankly would probably still be a steal.) So writers, knitters, and other creative types: come up with other ways to generate income: master knitters teach classes, design and dye yarn, operate yarn businesses, design patterns², and so forth. Writers (by this I mean, fiction writers and essayists) either make money from bigger book deals, speaking engagements, and book tours if they’re “big” enough, or get day jobs of various kinds, if they’re not.

Thus it strikes me that the problem we need to be addressing, is not, how do we turn the two dollar take you get from writing a book about knitting, to 3 dollars or 4 dollars, or even 10 dollars (though that would certainly help), but rather how to expand the “byproduct” income from teaching and speaking, and even how to create new sorts of such “auxiliary income.” There isn’t one kind of monolithic “auxiliary,” for a given kind of creative pursuit, but I if we think about it enough, I’m sure we can think about the many ways that creative types are able earn livings while still working on their creative projects.

I think the larger goal is to have the auxiliary gig be something that feeds the other, more important pursuit while still leaving enough time and energy to do serious work in what you really want to be doing. Consider academics, particularly say, academic physicians, whose real work is research (and writing for the humanities folks and writing), but whose money comes from seeing patients or teaching classes. Consider Knitting luminaries like Alice Starmore, Sharon Miller of Heirloom Lace who sustain their work by selling yarn and kits for their design. Similar I have to speculate that schoolhouse press makes its money, not on their excellent catalogue of books and patterns³, but rather through their knitting-camp, and selling yarn. Let us also not forget that bands have always made more money from touring, rather than selling recordings.⁴

This theory, of using something like a design as a way to sell an auxiliary, I think is really pretty strong: if you tried have your take from things like patterns, or a podcast, or a blog (etc.) be “enough,” no one go for it because it would be absurd (cite: 1200-1400+ USD sweater), but if it’s sort of complex advertising, and you’re willing to take a cut on profit so that more people see the book/story/pattern it probably works out. There is of course Tim O’Riley (a technology/computer book publisher,) whose oft quoted for saying “obscurity, not privacy” is the biggest problem facing writers today.

Now I’ve used the term “advertising” loosely, because I don’t think that you need to be terribly proactive about it, in order for it to work, writing a good story with a tag that says “tycho also gives workshops on productivity and hypertext creation, and his most recent book is “…” is probably enough. The key is to be right on top of whatever the best next auxiliary is.

And before anyone goes of and says “it’s a shame that there isn’t a middle list, or that it’s a shame designers aren’t paid more, etc. etc.,” I have to suspect that this is more or less how it’s always worked. That’s all, thoughts anyone?

Cheers, tycho

Despite my recent graduation, I’m taking classes this semester. In part to “stay in shape” and maintain a student like mindset, and in part because I’m at a stage where I find it hard to do academic in my field of choice independently, and I’m totally ok with that.

Having said this, I’ve come to a conclusion. I don’t need to take notes in any particular sort of way. Today in class we got the “intro to cognition” lecture that I’ve seen a thousand times. And I dutifully wrote down what working memory is, as if I’d never seen it before.

Sometimes not taking notes is better than actually taking them, I think.

This, at least for the moment, is one of those times.

Ok, this isn’t an actual meme, so much as a discussion of memetic activity in my life. specifically in the website designs.

I’ve done a little bit of tweaking of the font and commenting template here (and I changed the tag-line) because I’ve become a big fan of Gill Sans, which I think looks very modern/deco, and I like the effect. It is perhaps no the most accessible, but then this is what Grease-Monkey and RSS are for, if that’s a problem for you. I’m mostly kidding about the Grease Monkey, but if you’re having problems with reading the font here or on TealArt, then RSS lets you have a lot of control over the display of the content, and I think that’s probably the way to go.

I just realized that I don’t have it set up so that you can see what categories entries are in with the post. I had been laboring under the impression that you could. Weird.

I’m probably going to write a meta tealart entry about the difference between the “magazine” approach that TealArt has, and the “failed tumblelog” approach that tychoish has. I’d enjoy it at least.

Have a good day!

• work on the podcasting thing
• get microphones working
• figure out how to use skype
• get a crew together
• chris
• dave
• sk people
• others?
• weekly “other awesome blogs that you could be reading” features.
• pictures in posts.

Dear gentle readers,

Don’t delete things, ever. It’ll just cause grief if you do.

This has been a tragic week for me in terms of deleting things that I don’t mean to. Thankfully today’s miss-hap was quickly recovered from. I need to work on getting a subversion system, or something( implemented, hardcore, because this is wild, and to be avoided.

I usually pride myself on having a fairly organized “system” for resources and files and what not, but I’m realizing that it needs some serious rethinking. Alas.

I’m also in that part of the week where my brain is utter mush. My goal for the moment, then, is to figure out a way to plan to have enough groundwork laid for the next few days of productivity.

Also, I realized that I have a whole slew of essay that are dependent upon me posting a particular essay that I haven’t posted yet. So I have to rethink something. I might have to kill the Friday TealArt post. But It’ll all work out; sorry for reveling too much of my thought process: I’m forever walking the line between interesting full disclosure and taking the magic away from whatever it is that I do.