Hello everyone, I know that this is supposed to be the “Meta” Series for Station Keeping where I talk about my progress on the station keeping project and my thoughts about the prospect of blog fiction, and the intersection of storytelling and blogging. I have, however, begun to view this Monday entry, as a sort of “editor’s notes,” section like you might find on the inside of a magazine, and I think it’s a nifty way to start off a week and a Monday¹. So here I am.

Wither Station Keeping

I actually have news of Station Keeping: I wrote another installment, and while it isn’t stunning prose, I think it helps establish a few characters, and is by far better than the other two installments that I’ve written so far. It’s nice to know that with a little practice I can get back into the fiction writing mode: it stretches muscles that I’d almost forgotten that I had. These installments are necessary background and serve to establish characters, and the situation that our story is set in. They’re pretty standard fiction, and while I like them, they’re not “short stories” in any normal definition of the term. I have three more that I want to lay out at some point, but for the next little bit I’m going to be working on some funky not very plot(ting)posts, and a little bit of character documentation for internal use.

I realized, this week, that I do a great deal of character development in my mind, and sort of expect the other writers to be able to pick up on this. Thankfully they can’t read my mind (there are dark corners that no one needs to see), but this means that I have some writing to do. We also sectioned off the wiki, so I hope that we can use this as a place to develop the story a little more. Still looking for 4 writers, at least, but the more content I/we are able to write, the greater our overall success. I hope. Stay tuned.

This week, on TealArt

I have some great content this week for you. Including free instructions for designing your own knitted sweater (brain power not-included), also now that the hypertext series has formally wrapped we’ll move on to our new series. I wrote another one of the friday series’ articles today and it was a blast. What is this series you ask? Wait and see. Friday has typically been the home of a more academic-related essay, and that will remain for the moment.

So lets recap where we are on TealArt these days: Mondays are for letters from the editor, and SK, tuesdays are for knitting, Wednesdays are a grab bag, Thursdays are geeky, and Fridays are for academic stuff.

It’s almost like I have a plan, and five blogs. That said, I’m actually pretty pleased with it all. I’m still trying to figure out how to boost our readership (other than imploring you to tell your friends, which you should,) but someday it’ll work, in the mean time, I’m having some fun with the site, I hope you are too.

Stay tuned and be in touch.

Cheers, Sam

Dear loyal reader(s),

As you’ve probably noticed although I wrote earlier today of TealArt as a magazine, the truth is that it is a perverse sort of magazine. The other character of TealArt is that it’s basically epistolary. This isn’t really a problem, but has produced a somewhat (un)interesting question in my mind of late…

How should I sign letters.

For some now unknown reason, for many years I signed my letters, emails, and blog post with “cheers,” which was somewhat quirky, for someone of my age and location, and I came to like it.

Then, recently, as in the last couple of months. I’ve begun signing my emails “best.” The origins of this is equally unknown, but I musts say that I don’t like it very much. Best what? I’ve always assumed that the answer is “wishes,” but I think it’s kind of dumb.

The sad thing is that it’s kind of automatic by this point.

What are you signing your emails with? What do yo prefer?

--tycho

Initially, it seems that the term “hypertext” served as general classification for any kind of dynamic text with “hyperlinks” (which of course we just call links these days). In 2007 (as opposed to 1987), hypertext is ubiquitous, and we’re constantly interacting with hypertexts, to the point that it’s just “the web” or “text,” and “links” are assumed to be intuitive at this point. As a result, the main time I hear someone say hypertext these days, they’re artists exploring the creative possibilities of the medium separate from normal (relaxed?) text. That wasn’t my intention, and thus the reason I said “hyperdigitaltext,” the expressive possibilities aside, I’m interested in the day-to-day practices of consuming and producing digital-text, and in a lot of ways, this series is a trip back to the first usages of hypertext in an attempt to think about might happens next.

Not being, you know, psychic, I’m not sure how successful this project has been. But in any case, it I have enjoyed the space to think about these issues, and I hope that you have too. This is just a roundup post, a sort of directory of the hypertext posts on Tealart for your referencing pleasures.

• Wiki Hyper(digital)text
• Hyper(digital)book Futures
• Publishing Hyper(digital)text
• Writing and Producing Hyper(digital)text
• Reading And Consuming Hyper(digital)text
• Intro to HyperText

I’ll be back next week with the introduction to the next Friday series!

Best, tycho

I have a confession: I’m really bad at watching television. Well not really. I’m just too good at it. For most of my life I haven’t grown up around a television, and so I’m not used to having TVs on, so when they are on I tend to give them my undivided attention, which is a deviation from the cultural norm where television becomes a backdrop to life. Actually the truth is that the family television spent a few years in my room, because there was space for it there, and at most I watched a couple of SF shows when they aired every week but there were periods where I wouldn’t turn it on for months.

Because of this, I really enjoy television, but these days I watch almost all of my television on my computer, usually while I knit. I also feel as if this puts me in a unique position think about the fate of video/film in light of the internet. So as customary for me here on TealArt, I’m going muse at whim! So there!

I remember collecting digital videos, usually ripped from VHS recordings of television broadcasts with commercials edited out from way back when (long before bit torrent). It wasn’t feasible for mass consumption because the files were huge, and bandwidth was narrow, but with the broadening of bandwidth, and better compression schemes, to mention nothing of phenomenal like YouTube, iTunes, pod-casting ’the web has become much more amenable to video. This of course changes the way that we interact with video content. No longer do we have to watch the content on demand, or rent physical disks, or go to a theater, but rather download and watch, more or less at whim.

In the end, I think that this makes us more active consumers of television, because counter to conventions, watching TV is really an activity in itself worth doing, rather than something that we half-expect ourselves to be doing other things during. This is compounded by the fact that while bandwidth is wider today than it was even 3 years ago, a “hour long” (40-45mins) television show can still take several hours to download, especially at higher qualities. So independent productions tend to be significantly shorter which means that the kind of purposeful watching doesn’t take as much time. The downside is that dramatic video hasn’t really found a home on the internet outside of the traditional media via iTunes, which doesn’t really change the model very much.

With the video iPods and the apple TV (but also the Zune and PSP, I suppose,) it’s become possible for digital video’s to become more accessible, clearly portable, in ways that traditional television has never been able to be. I wonder how the on-demand aspects will interact with the portable aspect of contemporary digital video. I’d also think that there’s a space here for audio only content, I can’t imagine that video podcasting, would ever really present a challenge to audio podcasting (much less the textual blog,) in the same way that TV really superseded radio.

New technologies and media consumption practices take time to mature and grow, and I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years. Will YouTube begin to have longer and more substantive content? Will we be able to get more content into smaller packages? Will production costs go down so that there will be more content avilable? And of course the question that lingers in the back of a lot of people’s minds, how will the money work out? I don’t have answers, I just know that it’ll be interesting.

best, tycho

I’ve gotten so caught up in the “I’m home again” mindset that I forgot that I didn’t have a blog post schedule for today. But never fear, in the TealArt of the future (and present) tycho the ever present blogger is here to save the day with some thoughts about moving back home, his battles with sudo, and his projects for today and beyond.

I spent yesterday, my first full day back in hometown getting situated. Because I haven’t been here for more than a couple of weeks in 3 years, “my room” is mostly devoid of furniture, so I have taken over my mother’s desk in retaliation¹. In addition to accomplishing a number of important tasks related to finding summer employment, I was able to get a couple of computer related tasks completed.

I’ve had a long running feud with the sudo command, which has made it difficult for me to do a lot of things with the command line. Luckily my issue was relatively minor, and now I have rubygems and maruku installed on Zoe², and I really couldn’t be happier. Rubygems is a package manager that is required for a number of handy ruby scripts, and maruku, is a command-line translator for PHP Markdown Extra³. Conveniently it also translates into LaTeX and XHTML, and looks really great doing so. I need to work up a good LaTeX template for day to day usage for shorter documents that that I can push a lot of the kinds of things that I need to output, but that’s for another day, right now I’m just happy.

In other news, there isn’t a lot to report. I spent a long time driving and unpacking and what with the pomp and circumstance of graduation rituals, didn’t have a great deal of free time to write blog entries. My projects for today: write more, revise resume, write a future professor, and do some more unpacking. Other on-going blog related projects: work on growing and developing the reader/particpant base for TealArt. I think part of this has to do with my writing style, but part of it has to do with promotion, and I’m working on both of these aspects of the site, and hopefully there’ll be comments a plenty in the near future.

best, tycho

I’ve been thinking that, while the articles I write for TA are great and should continue to be a pillar of the site, shorter and more pithy posts are also worthy content. Also, I do a crappy job of interacting with other blog posts. So here’s something I saw whilst plowing¹ through my blog posts today: expect more.

Things Change:

“As I was working out in the garden today, my first thought was that as a society, we still haven’t figured out how to manage the intersection of mortality and migration.”

(from Easily Distracted.)

I think this is an incredibly well put observation. The internet, and aviation, make the world smaller in a lot of important ways, but it’s still a big place that most of us find difficult to move from place to place. As a developmentalist-to-be this is right up my ally and I think a quite interesting location for some interesting research some day. Very quickly though, my next thought is of a few science fiction books that deal with some of these issues. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, address the migration issue (among other things), and Cory Doctrow’s `Eastern Standard Tribe <http://www.craphound.com/est/>`_ looks at the effect of the internet (and “world shrinking”) on another “material reality:” sleep. Interesting stuff.

Discuss!

Cheers, tycho

As we speak, I’m finishing the second sleeve on a sweater that is much like all the other sweaters that I knit with one major difference: it uses knitted-in hems (turned hems, they’re sometimes called), rather than ribbing for all of the edges. While I think on the whole that it works for this sweater, I’ve always been rather fond of ribbings of a couple of different types. The truth of the matter is that, if knitting were perfect, if stocking stitch didn’t curl or flare without special attention, this would be moot. As it is, one must do something to one’s knitted hems so that garments to flare or roll (too much).

The options are actually pretty slim (these instructions are basic, they may vary a bit in actual practice). I’ve also included a pro-con analysis.

• Knitted-in hem: knit the hem facing on smaller needles, purl a row/round, knit the pattern. Sew down the hem facing when you’re done.
  • Pro: the pattern starts at the bottom of the sweater, the sweater’s edge doesn’t normally pull in unflatteringly.
  • Con: Hems can flair or gather really easily, and can be a bother to work.
• Knitted Ribbings: alternate consistant numbers of knitted and purl stitches.
  • Pro: Looks good, often helps shaping when you want a tappered edge. Ribbings are highly elastic.
  • Con: Can pull in too much, doe not work as well for stranded work.
• Double Sided stitches: A number of stitches look the same on the front and back, like garter and moss stitches, and won’t curl.
  • Pro: easier to work than a hem and should produce the same result.
  • Con: I’ve never been able to mange one of these without an undesirable welt or flare. Sometimes the designs can be too much for a plain sweater.
• Lace: This isn’t technically a solution, because you’d probably still do a few rows of garter stitch, but generally open work stitches will block flat without rolling.
  • Pro: Might work, and could look nifty.
  • Con: It’s lace, also not particularly suited as a cuff.

My standards operation procedure is to knit 1x1 ribbings on plain sweaters and 2x2 corrugated ribbing on stranded sweaters, and 2x2 ribbing on plain sweater cuffs.

There are of course endless variations on these themes, and this is what makes designs unique. I’m interested to learn what your preferences are. What kind of hem treatments do you prefer on your sweaters? Other sorts of garments?

Cheers, tycho

Sorry for posting this so late in the day, I spend the day driving “home-home” from “school-home” and didn’t get a chance to cue up the post last night. In any case, there’ll be a nifty post tomorrow about something knitting related, I’m sure.--ty

With school out of session this last week and a lot of free time where I didn’t have a great deal of things to do other than pack (which I desperately wanted to avoid) and worry about the future: I got a lot of writing done. I had basically eaten through my stash of TA posts, and it is once again replenished, although my cushion isn’t as big as it has been. Some of this writing is even Station Keeping related, so I can offer you a proper “Keeping Meta” post!

I drafted my first two SK installments. With luck, they’ll post as 1.1 and 1.3¹, with 1.2 as a story by one of the other authors. They’re both in the setup-prologue model, so they’re not gripping, but some measure of that is needed. This is part of the reason that 1.2 needs to be there: to break it up.

In a lot of ways this is the first time that I’ve written fiction. Sat down in front of a text editor and written fiction. In years,² really; and it felt great. I think I’m a better writer this time around, but we’ll all see in a little while. I’m not yet sure about the June 1st launch date, but I’ve made some progress and I feel like we’ll be able to start soon, even if we don’t have a writing team that’s as large as I might have wanted to start. I’ll have to see how my time falls this summer, but I’m feeling optimistic about the series even if it means that I won’t be able to write as much non-fiction/blogging stuff for TealArt as I’ve grown accustomed--this might actually be a good thing.

In addition to the drafts that I wrote, I also did some work on the writer’s wiki and made some space for discussion of character development and longer range plots (ie. story arcs.) I’m also working on permanently blocking off the writer’s wiki from public consumption, because I can’t imagine much that there is that much that wouldn’t be spoiler-y for the wiki, and frankly PMWiki’s native security system sucks. Hopefully with that enacted, things will go better. Anyway, one of the things that I wrote will, I hope, be interesting for you, gentle reader, and I’d enjoy hearing what you have to say about this:

Science Fiction, as I’ve always experienced it, is a genre of ideas. While I think dividing and separating one genre from another is not a productive venture, I think that this definition is useful for the moment. What I mean is that the reason why we write stories on alien worlds, with fantastic technologies we can only imagine, alternate histories and futures, and yes even on space stations orbiting far flung space colonies is to present an idea about the future, about the present in a digestible form. It’s also fun, and I don’t think that we should be ashamed of the “fun factor,” in SF, while remembering that it can be distracting.

If we were only interested in character development, literary games and development, representation, and so forth the space stations, fantastic technology, and alternate timelines would be distracting and superfluous.

That’s all I have folks. I’m writing this entry a bit early because this sunday (yesterday by your reading) I am graduating from college, as I’m sure you’re sick of hearing by now. Expect posts in the next few days from both hadarah and myself regarding this experience.

In the mean time, be well, tycho

As promised, though somewhat later than I had initially intended I am here to provide you with a list of links for things about hypertext that I think you might be interested in. Kind of a “further reading” section, if you will. Some of these pieces I have thoughts about and i’ll include notes regarding this, but for the most part I just have some resources that I found helpful and/or interesting. Enjoy!

• Steam Punk Magazine

• This, ironically, is what started the series. I really like what SPM has done, and their publication is really quite good looking. It’s all PDF and not “digital” except under the strictest of technicalities. This isn’t a bad thing, but when reading it I thought, “if this is the best digital production around these days and it’s not really digital, what does this say about the possibility for digital production?” And I continue to think that this is an important question to ask.

• Cory Doctorow Writes About digital Reading

• Cory Doctorow, is I think working from the very front of a lot of the questions about digital media consumption and production. Most of his work, at least what he is known for, is all about digital intellectual property, but this article about reading from computer screens is quite good.

• Persistent.info

• This is just another blog, written by a Google employee, and I include it here because I like the way that the blog posts arrange themselves in columns if the window width gets to be too big. The CSS wouldn’t work if the text were much longer than it is in the posts for this site, but it’s a nifty idea, none the less.

• Textual Instruments

• A site that has a couple of nifty looking hypertexts, worth checking out. I haven’t actually had time to read them yet, unfortunately.

• Fiction Markup Language

• This is an example of an XML-based langauge for fiction writing, and it has classes and items for characters, settings, as well as book/chapter level organization. While I really like the idea here, I fear that it could be really constraining in terms of form, and structure. At the same time, the strength of these sorts of things is in the parser, and I haven’t seen one yet, so who knows. It might be a good format option for editing software like Scrivener or other software intended for fiction-like writing.

• Hypertext Community

• Swooter, books via twitter

• Swooter is a script that will regularly serialize, via twitter, any plain text file. Someone’s using it to serialize James Joyce, but the implications and possibilities here are pretty nifty. It’s like the “read classics via email” project, but I think the aspiring hypertext author could do some rather nifty things with this tool.

• institute for the future of the book blog

• if:book is a project out of the Annenberg Center that explores and works on the future of the book (I love good naming schemes), and their blog is really top notch.

• Company Therapist Hypertext

• Academic Hack Open Access

• Academic Hack talks about open access, which I think could frame the academic discussion regarding academic publishing in a productive way. In a lot of ways, I’ve come to believe that however the academic publishing “problem” resolves itself will have important implications for how the mainstream market reforms in the future, and I’m pretty cofident that academic publishing will see reform before the mainstream. But you can argue that, if you want.

• Savage Minds: Open Access your Diss

• I think the idea of making dissertations open access is a wonderful idea. There is so much research that gets done as part of people’s doctoral programs that never sees the light of day. While I think a lot of people would cringe at the thought (and frankly I can’t go back more than a semester without cringing), it seems that getting the information out there is worthwhile. If a dissertation is supposed to form the basis of your first book/series of articles, then, indeed the instinct is to clamp down on the diss text; but having said that I think having dissertations available might make it easier for people to more productivly move beyond that text, and that could be a good thing.

• Making MediaCommons

• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, one of the creators and driving force behind MediaCommons, an interesting and very forward thinking model for academic publishing. At the present time, it’s a Media Studies project, which makes a great deal of sense, but the model can and likely will be ported to other disciplines, and I look forward to that with great anticipation.

• Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

• Allin Cottrell explains/explores the ways that the word-processor model is ineffective for constructing text in digital communication, and I think that a lot of these general themes can be extrapolated to a discussion of writing.

  Ok, that’s all I have for this time. If you have other hypertext/digital (textual) media sources, I’d love to read what you have to offer. This entry also marks the end of the regular hypertext series here, I’ll post a round up next Wednesday, but there’ll be the intro to the new series next week.

Thanks for Reading, tycho

In lieu of having anything particularly useful to say about technology, I’m going to write a version of an entry that I write every now and then that goes over the application and work flows that I use in my day to day computer life. These things change, a bit every now and then, and I think it’s interesting to keep track of these things. As always all these programs run on OS X 10.4 (tiger), and my 15 inch PowerBook G4, Zoe which I cary around with me almost all the time.

1. NetNewsWire

   This is the worlds best RSS/feed/news reader and I’m quite pleased with it generally. Because of NNW most of my reading of the internet these days is via RSS, and NNW is the program to use, and so I can’t speak too highly of it, at the same time, I feel as if the program hasn’t had many very good developments in a really long time. Having said that, it’s really stable. Because I’m so invested, I have a list of subscriptions that numbers about 500. I could probably tone this down a bit, and not all of them are active, but still, it would be hard to transition to any other program given the way that my reading habit is so centrally focused on NNW, so while I might like some other features of the program, I don’t really think that I can move away from it. I would still recommend it though. Good stuff.

2. DevonTHINK

   This is totally the mother of all applications. It’s a persona database tool, and any description of the program really doesn’t do it justice, and there are so many different ways to use the program which further complicates it. I use the program, basically, as a notebook/folder for all the things I write, all the scholarly articles that I read, and clippings from websites. The program has “AI” features which help you organize and find things when you need to, and it’s really splendid. It also works as an outliner, and it has great import/export features. I tend to use the program as the storage bin for all the textual things that I deal with day to day, and it works great. I sometimes feel as if I’m not doing enough with this program, but it’s nice to know that it’ll grow with me.

3. WriteRoom

   This program has become a key part of my workflow. I tend to write many of my drafts (like for this very article) in WR and then save it elsewhere. It’s just a plain text editor, but it works full screen, so I have it set up to print fairly big green text on a black background in a font that I’m comfortable drafting in, so I can work distraction free (also there’s a hotspot on the screen which lets you check the word count, which I find helpful), and I find that this has really helped my writing productivity.

4. Quicksilver

   This is the killer app, and I think that I’ve written enough about it here already. I use QS to do everything from updating my twitter, to organizing my files, to appending text files, to powering a host of quick “trigger” commands (combinations of keys that are asigned various specified commands), oh yeah, it’s a program launcher. QS ties everything together and it’s awesome.

5. TextMate

   This is sort of the power-editor program. I use it more for editing than for drafting, but it’s a very powerful program without being bloated and overdone. It has “packages” for Markdown, Multi-Markdown, Blogging, HTML, PHP, and just about any other programing/markup language you could think of. I use it for posting to TealArt, I use it for maintaining my todo list, for preparing files, and most of the day-to-day editing in my workflow. This is the program (along with DevonThink) that has allowed me to finally start working in text files/markdown. Because of this I have a working “text” folder that contains a bunch of text files, it’s good stuff.

6. Adium/Colloquy

   These are the basic chat programs. I don’t kid when I say that AIM is basically my cell phone. It’s how I keep in touch and contact folk. It’s almost always open, and having Adium lets me maintain connections to all the major (and some minor) networks, without having to think about it. Colloquy isn’t quite mIRC, but it’s a great program, it does everything that you could want, and I like being able to be on IRC again. That’s what internet community is all about, and I’m a big fan.

7. Mail.app

   Most of my email these days is handled through Gmail anyway, but since I always have my computer with me, and I’m more likely to have my computer, but not have internet access, than I am to have my computer but not have internet access.

8. Camino

   This has become my web-browser of choice. I like having a browser that works with the OS X service Menu and other OS specific features (firefox doesn’t), but I’ve always felt that Safari was a bit off, and Camino does a fine job at being spot-on and still working with OS. As you can probably tell from this list, I’m a big fan of mac-y programs, that have really tight integration features, hence the browser choice.

9. VLC

   It’s the video player that plays anything and everything. It’s reliable, and on top of that, it has the best software amplification of any app. This is a must-have free APP, and it really does play anything.

10. Pukka

    Pukka is just a little app that makes it easy to post to del.icio.us, which I don’t do nearly enough. I tried using another open source app to do the same thing, but I’ve found that Pukka is just a hair faster and it has a smaller visual footprint. The other program also ate several weeks of bookmarks a few times, and I haven’t forgiven it yet.

11. Think

    This is a new program that I think I will be using more in the future, although it won’t replace WriteRoom. Basically this program puts a screen behind the program that you’re currently using and all your other open windows to make it easier to concentrate on the task at hand. It’s great because it deadens all the other programs so that they aren’t as distracting or you can’t click on them as easily, but you can still see them a little so you don’t feel “out of touch”

12. Growl

    This is the master of all program distraction. Growl is a unified system notification pathway that all sorts of applications can pass messages to that float on top what ever you’re doing to let you know whats going on. You can change the style duration and type of the notifications that growl takes. I get notifications when I get a new email, when someone sends me an instant message, when something changes in an IRC channel, and when there’s a new post to twitter, among other things. You’d think that this would be really distracting, and while it was for a few days, I’ve found that knowing that I’ll get a notification (even/especially one that I tend to ignore/miss) means that I don’t check for email/IM/instant messages/etc. as compulsively or as often, so in a weird way this particular distraction means that I’m a bit more productive. A lot of “mac” programs use growl notifications, and it’s really a great little “feature.”

Ok, Folks, I fear that I may have blathered on to long. If you use another program that I’ve missed, or have any questions please leave a comment or send a message. I’m always looking for more and better programs.

cheers, tycho