Centuries of colonization, growth, and settlement have left scores of small and mid-sized human outposts on as many worlds. Rather than continue a disorganized and largely unnecessary program of expansion the League, or what remained of the central government, decided to concentrate its resources on developing existing outposts and supporting smaller and established populations. With good reason, many doubted the intentions and abilities of this project: resources were limited, and the mostly irrelevant mandates of the League did not inspire confidence.

Hanm Centre was one of the first outposts that the League and its often laughable Navy established as part of this project. In high orbit of the small colony world Hanm, the space station was to be the focal point of the League’s efforts on several worlds. Despite the possibility of growth many on Hanm worried about the effects of the attention on their way of life. Some object to the League because they figure better to leave well enough alone‚ “Hanm, like many outlying settlements was basically self sufficient and the larger issues of humanity’s unification were largely irrelevant‚” but there was another, more vocal faction on the colony that wasn’t strictly opposed to the effort to federate the outposts, settlements and colonies; they were simply opposed to the potentially hegemonic League.

These circumstances left Hanm Centre, and it’s residents, in a unique position to observe and act in the outcome of this debate. Life would go on: there wasn’t a group of any importance that advocated for a “retreat,” to the “core-side” worlds, neither was anyone particularly opposed to the existence of the Hanm Centre station. Many expected that whatever happened on Hanm Centre would have no profound impact to the planet below and the progress of the Leagues development.

Despite the potential truth of these prognostications, the residents of Hanm, and the later the station, mostly laughed or scoffed when they read the kinds of statements made by the syndicated news commentators: everyone was keen to point out that the news services were based on different worlds.

The station was still new, so new that construction wasn’t even completely finished. Much of the permanent staff had yet to arrive, even. So, although everyone in the universe with a connection to the news-feeds thought that the situation on Hanm‚Ä"the planet and the station‚Ä"was the shape of things to come, the residents were of course more concerned with the construction schedules and the pending arrival of the next automated delivery transport. These concerns were complicated by the fact that a predominance of the station’s occupants were transitory: there for temporary work, or pausing for a moment on the journey to other colonies and outposts. Despite this, there could be little question that everyone‚Ä"-the League, the colonists on Hanm, the station’s residents, the settlers on the neighboring worlds, and observers on dozens of worlds were eagerly waiting for further news of Hanm Centre.

…and I hope you too are waiting for news of Hanm. This “trailer” was written by me to kick the series off. This project will be written by many contributors, in addition to myself, and is an on going experiment in hypertext/digital story telling. IF you’re interested in participating please contact me, `tycho <http://tychoish.com/tycho>`_. I look forward to hearing from you, both in your contributions and in your responses/feedback to these stories. Next week’s episode will be slightly more conventional, I promise. So stay tuned!--ty

This week promises to be an enjoyable little span for all of us: Station Keeping debuts tomorrow--mostly--with a project trailer. I’ve been debating throughout this project whether or not to spend some time up front setting the scene, or to jump right into the story. I seem to have decided to go with the later. I think that setup can be a problem when when you’re telling a single story, or when the setup gets in the way of telling a story. In this case, my intent is to provide a fun, escapist, and grounded story to entertain (and hopefully say something interesting about the world,) for all of our entertainment on a weekly basis. This is in part following the TealArt mantra of “have fun,” and part of an experimentation with the form.

Now that I’ve sufficiently lowered your standards, lets move on to the rest of the week. Wednesday will be a wild card, as it so often is, and Thursday holds some interesting tech content from Chris, but I’ll let him tell you more about that. I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.

Finally, on Friday there’ll be another Deleuzian essay. Or rather, an essay about Deleuze (and Guatteri) and Anti-Oedipus. I have to say that these are extremely fun piece to write, and from a personal perspective, having the opportunity to write science fiction and reflections on Delueze--arguably, not dissimilar from science fiction--for TealArt is really a great pleasure.

Every now and then, I lament the fact that we really don’t have a strongly entrenched readership, the way that many blogs that are 5-6 years old are. Having said that, really, I don’t care about entrenchment, just readers and commenters. Now in fairness there are a lot of things that we didn’t do right: we haven’t posted regularly, our entries have been unfocused, we’re both shitty proofreaders of our own work, and so forth. Still, I think, really, come on now. But then I realize that I write about knitting--without pictures, or Giles Deleuze, and suddenly it makes sense.

In any case, you’re reading this, and I thank you for that. I hope you enjoy this week, in addition to keeping track of things for TealArt, I’m doing some more serious job hunting (ug!) and prepping for an upcoming family reunion (yay!). And writing as usual.

cheers, tycho

I will admit freely and openly, that I haven’t finished reading Anti-Oedipus. In fact, at the beginning of the series I was only on page 148. I suspect a large part of the passages that I “present” will be from where ever I happen to be in the book, (likely pages 150-200, at my current rate) but from time to time, I think I’ll also pull from the first 150 pages if something strikes my fancy. All this by way of saying that this week’s passages will come, not from Deleuze, but from Foucault’s preface to the book. He summarizes Delueze and Guatteri’s project:

“How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the Body.”

I have to say that I think this is why I like this book so much. Rather than say “fascism”¹ is all in the individual and/or “collective” “unconscious,” “soul,” or in the historical moment, the statement that fascism is “in” our “behavior,” “speech” and “acts,” I think makes a great deal of sense. This makes it at least vaguely observable², and it means that we can take what they say about “fascism,” and apply it to other features of our actions, behaviors, beliefs, and speech. While I think leads to all sorts of other problems, like “are all cultural/social constructions and conventions then fascist?,” and the more basic issue that fascism is a rather unspecfic and imprecise term that I think could get in the way of the text’s ability to be applied more widely. So while this is, very much a book about fascism, I’m finding it helpful to ignore “the fascist” part of statement, and instead think of “it,” as “culture,” and “society,” because this seems to both be more widely useful. Also, the body of research on culture and society is I think more accessible and wide than the body of research on “fascism,” however variously interpreted.

In a related point, I’m really drawn to theories of embodiment, and I like the way that they, both in Foucault’s estimation in the preface, and through what I’ve read, continually ground their work in an understanding and acknowledgment of the body and material reality (such as it is.) The sort of endless metaphysical crap³ for the sake of metaphysical crap is irksome, and not incredibly productive in the application. Having said that, D&G spend a lot of time doing what can only be described as the metaphysics of the body, in attempt to synthesize psychoanalysis and materialism, and that can be hard to take. But in all the attempt to locate all these theories in the context of the body is, I think productive.

Later, Foucault speaks of the book as a kind of “manual” for anti-oedipal “non-facist” living, and I think that I’ll likely return to his tenets in time, but the principal that strikes me as the most interesting and important at the moment reads: > “Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”

As an ethical statement, I think this is one of the more important ones. I’ve been known to complain a great deal about “positive psychology,"⁴ and I think there are ways that this “ethical” statement mirrors that “movement,” but I think that it also goes further, to explore diversity, difference, and the ways that we (as individuals and groups) change. I think that’s a really productive goal and point, and reading the book with this in mind I think makes it a more productive enterprise. Furthermore, the edict to think about diversity and change, rather than conformity and certain truth, I think has productive implications in other debates: in favor of publishing null-hypothsis data, and in-favor of qualitative and grounded theory approaches to research.

In conclusion I have to say that I think that Foucault’s preface is really interesting, because we are able to see a side of Foucault (almost certainly late in his career,) where he looks a lot more like a philosopher and an intellectual historian than any of the other fields that he’s sometimes associated with (eg. history, psychology, sociology etc.). It’s also a really clever bit to read, and particularly going back and reading over the preface, I’m struck with how well it encapsulates and frames the book. Because my root⁵ to this theory is through women’s studies and queer theory, I’ve been consistently more exposed to Foucault, so the relationship and dynamic between Deleuze--who I find inspiring, in a way that Foucault never is--and Foucault has always been intriguing.

Anyway, that’s all I have space for this time, I look forward to hearing from you⁶ soon and I’ll pick something cool for next week, I promise.

Cheers, tycho

As you might know, we at TealArt, use a program called WordPress to run the back-end of the site. It’s a nifty program, and I’ve started to see WordPress blogs all over the place, and it seems like WordPress might even be the blogging software of choice for most folks these days. I had the pleasure/distinction of having to upgrade the software the other day, which has started to keep wordpress pretty firmly in my mind.

Thing is, most of the time I don’t really interact with the software: there are so many programs and options that make it possible to post and edit a blog without ever actually having to go to the website, these days I use MarsEdit and a plugin for my text editor, TextMate to post to the blog. This is of course super interesting to you so I’m going to move on.¹

I remember when WordPress was the rogue stepchild of b2/cafelog (another wonderful piece of blog software that TealArt proudly used), and even when the thought of having a site as dependent on a mySQL database as WP sites tend to be was absurd. These days, Word Press is one of the successes of the open source software scene. Tons of people use it. It works great, it’s polished, there’s an active developer community, and somehow the leaders of the project are able to support some sort of business model. There are probably a lot of reasons for this: PHP/mySQL are easy languages to learn, the back end and the front end of WP are basically independent of eachother, and the way that WP does plugins makes it easy for people to contribute to WP, and also for WP developers to roll-in particularly successful plug-ins as features.

I’m not versed enough in this, but the WP.com/WP.org distinction is I think a great model for distributing and monitoring “free” software. Basically they develop a product that they give away for free (WP.org; what TA uses), and then they take that product and offer a service related to that product (WP.com) that they can generate revenue with. You can read the Automatic website for more information, frankly I’m not sure about the particulars, or if it’s really a viable business model but I’d like it if it were, so I’m going to continue to pretend.

Interestingly, also, they’re enough different from their major comerical competitor (SixApart, the people who do LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad and most importantly MoveableType,) that they’ll probably not run into problems there. I’m not entirely sure about MoveableType’s long term success, but at this point that’s not a very big issue.

Anyway, enough yammering for now… I’ll be back tomorrow with the intro for the new series! Don’t go anywhere.

Best, tycho

This is my last, regularly scheduled weekly knitting essay. The remainder of the knitting content on TealArt, at least for the foreseeable will be either project reports, or quick notes, or other similar pieces. I’ve started to feel like the knitting content is a bit tried, and isn’t really reflecting what I or you are interested in reading, very much. But I hope you enjoy this little homage to Shetland Jumper Weight yarn. -- ty

I want to tell you a secret: Shetland sheep are magic creatures to be feared and revered.

“Shetland?!?!” you ask in amazement. “Isn’t Shetland yarn rough and hard to work with?”

Why yes, indeed they are magic, and while you might think that it is rough, I’m here to explore why you may have the wrong idea about the shetland sheeps¹. In the style of the meaningless top x-number list that is so popular with the folks at digg, this post will be in a list format. So there.

1. Shetland not really as rough as you think it is.

   Shetland yarns and wool isn’t cashmere, quiviet, or even merino yarn, and when people feel shetland yarn it doesn’t feel comfortingly soft like like luxury yarns, that’s true. Shetland’s magic is that when you put it near your skin, it doesn’t irritate. This is because shetland yarn doesn’t have guard hairs like some other yarns, so it isn’t prickly, and feels comfortable as you where it. This isn’t to say that I’d recommend making an unlined-skin-tight cat-suit out of shetland, but for most wear situation, you’ll feel comfortable. In the equation is the fact that shetland tends to be (I believe) woolen spun, this means that--among other things that the wool is lofty and light. So not only does the yarn not attack you, it doesn’t weigh you down, and magically keeps your warm. What more could you want out of yarn.

2. Shetland yarns are available,

   While most yarn stores don’t stock a full range of shetland colors, the three major suppliers/mills for shetland yarn (Jamieson’s, Jamieson’s and Smith, and Harrisville Designs) are generally incredibly available, either directly from the mills, or from third-party stores. Since these yarns are incredibly consistent, once you have a color card and idea about what you want, ordering these yarns is really easy.

3. Shetland 2-ply is incredibly versatile.

   People’s first response to seeing 2 ply shetland is often to say that it’s too fine. And it is fine yarn, but there are a lot of things that you can do with 2-ply. For instance you can: knit lace work, knit socks at sock-gauge, knit stranded work, or even double the yarn for something a little heftier. Also HD, at least, makes a dk/worsted that’s double weight yarn, if you really can’t cope with the fingering weight.

4. Shetland has the best color selection around.

   Because of I think that a lot of shetland mills, HD in particular, generally produce for weavers (and fair isle knitters) there are just more colors around for this kind of yarn. It’s great.

5. Shetland wears well.

   I think that Shetland wears particularly well because of the properties that I mentioned in number 1. It’s lofty and tends to fairly firmly spun, and all of the mills mentioned above are just good. That kind of thing matters.

6. Shetland felts well.

   Shetland, because it’s so lofty, and because it’s magic felts well. This means that it steeks well, and that the fabric wears really well and tends to find your body shape and form to it. This means that you have to be careful when washing this fabric. It also steeks well as the yarn almost felts from the sweat and friction from your hands as you knit it. This is one of the great joys of this yarn.

7. Shetland Actually Knits at Sport-Weight Gauge

   I can’t explain this one at all, but I know it’s true. I keep looking at the shetland and expecting the gauge to be about what I get for other fingering-weight yarn. When I cast on for projects expecting this gauge (yes, I’m a strict-non-swatcher), it’s always too big. When I try and trick the yarn, and pretend it’s sport weight and cast on with this assumption, it almost always works. This goes for situations where I’ve tried to knit both both stranded and plain. I have no good explanation other than magic.

8. Shetland Stranded stitches are actually square.

   This is actually an observation of Meg Swansen and EZ, because even though it’s not true, I tend to assume this of all color work knitting, and its usually pretty close. It’s even closer with Shetland, though. This makes picking up around armholes particularly fun, and it makes it easier to design using charts.

9. Shetland yarn lets you be more frugal with yarn.

   Ok, this might strike you as unlikely, given the fact that shetland is perhaps not the most inexpensive yarn around. But it’s true. The fact is that shetland yarn is pretty standard, I mean sure, HD is a microd² finer than Jameisons and J&S, but they’re all close. Also as with any yarn, if you’re using the same kind of yarn for more than one project, it’s easier to use leftovers.

10. Shetland doesn’t pill like merino and other yarns.

    You’re right, I’m stretching for a number 10, because I think this technically should fit under “wearing well,” but it stands that shetland doesn’t really pill because of the way it’s spun and the way it tends to felt. Shetland doesn’t pill and seems to wear like iron. This is a good property in yarn. In contrast, I’ve yet to find a merino that doesn’t pill.

I hope these were insightful and fun. Questions? Comments? Thoughts? I’d love to hear them!

Cheers, tycho

It’s been an entire day since I’ve finished dancing and my body is slowly starting to feel almost normal. I’m still tired of course, but soon I’ll stop aching so much and be able to just remember the great time I had. The truth is that I’m not in ideal shape for this kind of dance¹, because I’ve basically been away for so long, but another truth is that this was that I danced many times as much by quantitiy (and quality). Because sections of my “team” hosted this event (I was virtually uninvolved by virtue of the circumstances of my education) this even in addtion to being hard on my body, presented an interesting political situation. Time has yet to tell wether my predictions were correct or not, but initial signs indicate that I may not have been far off.

In terms of Station Keeping I laid out some of the back material that I’ve been walking around in my head for the other writers. I’m trying to find a balance between some sort of structured/organizational model that will allow us to write effectively and efficiently as a team, but that will also allow us all to contribute to all aspects of the development and production. It’s a fine balance between not saying very much to give people freedom to come up with brilliant solutions, and creating an environment with deadlines, productive feedback, and a coherent (series) of stories. I also didn’t want to feel like I had ideas about where stories and characters were going to go that I hadn’t/didn’t tell the other writers. With this out of the way, I think we might be able to move forward more effectively.

bI was playing around with PMWiki for the Station Keeping writer’s wiki, and while it’s a good program and really versatile, I’m not convinced that it’s right for our purposes. I’m thinking about changing the way I do this so that it can serve as more of a refrence space rather than a workspace, but getting more of the project written is also crucial, and really this is just one of the things going through my mind that I need to think about in relation to this project.

Anyway. Time to get the day started, and spend some time doing some chores and maybe actually working on Station Keeping.

Cheers, tycho

I realized, I think, a bit too late in the process that my last post really was kind of the letter from the editor post for this week, even though I posted it last thursday.

An update: (actually there’s not much, as I just wrote that other post a few hours ago, like I said, morris dancing all weekend, and I won’t be done till later this afternoon by your reading.)

• We’ve started to talk about a podcast option, I have some nifty ideas, and we’ll see how that turns out.
• I hope you enjoyed the intro to the Deleuze series (I know in fairness I think it should be Deleuze and Guatteri, but I think of it as just Deleuze. attack me later). I’ve only written a few of them, but I quite enjoy the concept space. There’s a lot of material, and I find it really fun to write about.
• The new TealArt plan: letter from the editor on monday, Station Keeping Tuesday, knitting/tychoBlathering on wednesday, ChrisTech Thursday, and Deleuze on Friday. It’s rocking.

See you later in the week!

best, tycho

I’ve been talking for a while about a new series on TealArt because I think that I’ve basically warn out the hypertext topic. Like the productivity/rethinking gtd series that I wrote during the first part of the semester, I’m not foreclosing the possibility of occasional essays on hypertext when something important comes up or strikes my fancy, but on a week to week kind of basis, I think any more would sort of defeat the purpose. Additionally, I think in a lot of ways, I’d rather work on actually writing some sort of digital text (ie. Station Keeping) than blather endlessly when I’m not sure that there are good answers to the questions that I raise. Someday there will be answers¹, but that day isn’t today. So I’ll move on.

One of the guys at pro.jectioni.st quoted the following twitter message the other day:

i’ve not met anyone whose favorite philosopher is deleuze who is not also an ass-hat."

While I protest the implication I certainly can understand the type. I hope, in this series, to explore at least for starters, Deleuze and Guatteri’s Anti-Oedipus the first volume of their capitalism and schizophrenia series. I would suggest to the twitterer, that, the asshats are the ones that think that A Thousand Plateau’s² is their favorite book of philosophy are the real asshats. It’s cool stuff, from what I’ve read, not perfect, clearly, but then again folks keep reading Decartes, and Hegel, and no one seems to mind very much.

My other edict for the new revived TealArt is that it must be fun, and though certainly my style and amount of effort that I put into my academic research and writing is quite different from what you see on TealArt, they’re similar sorts of tasks. I don’t mind this, but I think it’s also good to have some balance in ones life. This series is sort of a departure, but let me rationalize for you a bit:

I’m a social science guy--developmental psychology with leanings toward cultural and linguistic flavors of anthropology--and while many of my friends are humanities issues, and I feel fairly connected and intrenched in humanities issues and debates, the way I theorize and approach the work I do is really quite different from the way that they do, and my tendency is to think about theoretical issues and tradition far more than my current discipline. This is alright, but as I get more involved in my own field and less in history and literature, I think that I would still like to play around with cultural theory a bit. Yeah it’s heady, yeah it’s probably useless, but there’s possibility there. I figure anything I can do to start looking at things a new way is probably helpful. And reading theory and writing about it on TealArt, is about as far as I can get from reading the literature that I will also be doing this summer to prepare for the future.

My interest and background in this is complicated: last fall, I did a reading project where I read some of AO, and I took a historiography class this semester (for fun, mostly) that also engaged theory, so I have a bit of background, but not much. So in a lot of ways I’m an outsider to a lot of these debates, which I think can be a good thing. One thing you’ll note is that I call all this “theory”, rather than philosophy, because I’m less interested in figuring out the logical conclusions, questions, and problems with particular ideas and more interested in the implications and applications of ideas and theories. So that’s going to be my focus and attempt; and yeah, maybe that will piss of philosophers.

It seems that these series at TealArt are inspired by my reading of a new segment of the blog world³ and interest in contributing to the discussions at these blogs. This series is no different, in fact I was reading Larval Subjects, where they have been posting Spinoza quotes and commentary as part of a series for that blog. I thought the format was cool, and so I thought that I would borrow it, in my own TealArt sort of way. In the direction of locating this series in context of other blogs I’d like to provide an esoteric list of links to the theory/philosphy blogs that are in my news reader and that I’ve been reading, at least cursorily for the past few months:

• Larval Subjects
• RoughTheory
• Foucault is Dead
• Differences and Repetitions
• Read Thread(s)
• The Diff√©rance Engine
• schizzes and flows

Enjoy, and I’ll be back in a week with something more substantive!

‘till then, tycho