P-wire

Reading

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:40:28 -0600

Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir. (translated 1986, Barbara Brey). A short collecton of pieces by Duras about the period between Liberation and VE Day. The first piece, “The War”, is a journal from spring 1945 when Duras awaited the return of her husband, Robert L., from a camp. Robert L. had been arrested and deported about a year previously and was feared dead; the statistics showed that only 1 in 50 detainees ever returned from Dachau. Then, he’s back, picked up in Germany by Resistance associates with forged papers, and driven to Paris. He lies near death with a 106 degree F fever for nearly 17 days. He recovers, but is weakened for years. Duras divorces him and marries another Resistance veteran. Plent of tough and simple writing about what the war did to people. “Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier”, is a memoir of an odd Gestapo agent who had a personal interest in Duras and her husband. He’s not a good officer, and has strange ideas about opening an art bookship in Paris after the War, as if the war would have meant nothing. Duras is encouraged by her Resistance colleagues to maintain a personal relation with Rabier, which is a rather frightening thing to do. After Liberation, he’s shot by the Resistance. Duras refers to his “illusion that a person may exist solely as a dispenser of reward and punishment”.

Four short pieces follow. “Albert of the Capitals” describes an incident where Duras tortures a collaborationist. “Ter of the Militia” is about the fate of another collaborationist who joined a pro-German militia simply because it made him a big man. “The Crushed Nettle” may be about Ter after he escaped detention. The very short “Aurelia Paris”, about an abandoned Jewish girl, is slightly fantastic and deserves to be read twice.

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Twitter vs. LambdaMoo

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:02:32 -0600

Andy Pollaine had an interesting point about Twitter a couple of years ago:

I was watching the general tweeting going on from those I follow on Twitter and have started noticing a lot of “goodnight everyone” kinds of tweets. That along with the @reply made me realise that Twitter is really just a giant MOO, just without the rooms.

Or is it really without the rooms? I think that the ‘rooms’ that people used to make in places like Lambda MOO are now personal blogs. When you ‘look’ at a person in Twitter, you go to their Twitter page and then usually onto their blog, much like you used to see a description of them in a MOO and then maybe visit their room/space.

Twitter is a bit more public and gives you the ability to follow people, but it’s amusing to see that people are still the most interesting content online just as it was in the earliest days of the internet.

Chatroom, forum, MOO; Twitter has bits and pieces of all three.

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Lives

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:39:46 -0600

Patricia Travers, a violin prodigy, died in February, age 82. Between ages 10 and 23 she performed extensively. After a 1951 performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Boson Symphony, she disappeared by hiding in plain sight, by living with her parents in Clifton, NJ. She seldom spoke of her career. Sudden disappearances are actually quite typical of prodigies. According to Ellen Winer of Boston College, “What it takes to become a prodigy is very different from what it takes to become a major creative adult”.

Henri Salmide died, age 90. Salmide was a German naval officer ordered to stockpile explosives to destroy the port facilities of Bordeaux in 1944. Instead, he followed his “Christian conscience”, blowing up the storage bunker instead and killing 50 German personnel but saving the port from great devastation. He hid out for the rest of the war with a Resistance family and became a naturalized French citizen after the war. He was given the Légion d’Honneur by the French government only in 1994.

nevver: DIY 1961

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:12:39 -0600

nevver:

DIY 1961

Jason Epstein and Digital Books

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:37:59 -0600

Jason Epstein is no Luddite. One of his recent projects is the Espresso Book Machine, a print-on-demand device that produces a library-quality paperback book at the point of sale. Epstein worries about the implications of digital publishing:

That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

Digital books migh facilitate unparalleled central control over content; as Amazon.com recently proved, the end-user never really “owns” a digital text.Physical books are likely to survive, though, if only because authors will require some such artifact in return for months or years of solitary labor.

Epstein proposes an interesting revenue model where ebooks would be sold by subscription. Since DRM isn’t going away (writers have to eat), the “lending library” model “more accurately reflects the conditional relationships, enforced by digital rights management software, between content providers and end-users”. Such models were common in the Great Depression and in 19th Century Great Britain.

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Databending

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:55:50 -0600

A nice way to waste time on a Friday afternoon is by databending jpg files. Open any jpg picture in a hex editor and mess around. Usually, you’ll change the picture in glitchy, unintended ways. Sometimes, you get something interesting. Once in a while, the jpg is corrupted beyond repair, so make sure you’re working on a copy. stAllio! has a decent and simple primer, and there is a databending photopool on Flickr. stAllio!, bless his heart, also has a primer on editing an image file in a wav editor designed for music (like Audacity). Here’s a couple of original images and databends:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Norwegian Curling Pants

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:52:53 -0600

Seattle Times:

Nothing says “I’m An Olympian, Take Me Seriously” quite like red, white and blue argyle pants.

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vanesa: Questionable Content: New comics every Monday through...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:14:38 -0600

vanesa:

Questionable Content: New comics every Monday through Friday

What I read when I was a kid

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:26:45 -0600

How and Why Wonderbooks:

HOW AND WHY WONDER BOOKS were written mostly in period from 1960 to the early 1970s. The audience for this collection of books was young people. All of books followed a similar format and were typically written in a form of a question followed up by an answer paragraph. Virtually all of the illustrations were hand art (not photographs). This page serves to document these books and is provided primarily as nostalgia. The content of many of the books is quite dated by today’s standards (for example the How and Why Wonder Book of the Moon), however it is still fun to read through them to see how many of the future predictions were actually realized!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Moonbow

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:49:53 -0600

Mars rising over Haleakala Crater Moonbow. via. According to Wikipedia:

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow, lunar bow or white rainbow) is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon rather than from direct sunlight. Moonbows are relatively faint, due to the smaller amount of light reflected from the surface of the Moon. They are always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon.

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Steampunk Blunderbuss

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:25:19 -0600

Doesn’t run on steam, but actually shoots rubber balls really really hard. via

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barbarabot: thedailywhat: Screenprint of the Day: “Art history...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:45:30 -0600

barbarabot:

thedailywhat:

Screenprint of the Day: “Art history (part one - version C)” by Vuk Vidor.

This owns me.

[swissmiss.]

Gnome Press

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:15:46 -0600

Gnome Press was a US small press running from 1948 to 1962. Edited by Martin Greenberg (an “outright crook” according to Asimov), Gnome published early hardcovers of many pulp era authors, like Howard, Heinlein, Asimov (who never saw a dime for the Gnome edition of the Foundation Trilogy), Van Vogt, and so on. Several notable fen and pros worked for Gnome: Andre Norton, L. Sprague deCamp (Gnome was where he got his start on rewriting the Conan opus), and David Kyle, who was best known, perhaps, for doing the Conan maps. Earl Kemp’s eI47 has a brief history of Gnome, along with a check list of the 86 titles and ephemera, as well as scans. It’s the last chapter in Earl’s Anthem series of articles on early SF small presses.

As an aside, Martin Greenberg is not to be confused with Martin Henry Greenberg, who had a long and fruitful professional relationship with Asimov. The latter wrote a humorous bit about his confusing the two.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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art-documents: Gerhard Richter

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:34:53 -0600

art-documents:

Gerhard Richter

artnotartnot: Gerhard Richter, Rosen (Roses), 1994Oil on...

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:02:13 -0600

artnotartnot:

Gerhard Richter, Rosen (Roses), 1994
Oil on canvas, 18 X 20”

Zeldman on posthumous webhosting

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:36:00 -0600

Zeldman frets about the preservation of personal web material, which usually disappears once the hosting bill goes unpaid. He has an idea:

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

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Feisbuk

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:59:20 -0600

From Technabob:

Getting tired of wasting all your time online on facebook? Well, I discovered a great solution to your problems. The feisbuk notebook is a real-world, pen and paper manifestation of facebook, letting people jot down their info and draw a profile picture, as well as putting down something on their “wall”.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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barbarabot: tape bird by barbara

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:33:31 -0600

barbarabot:

tape bird by barbara

Posterous opens up post.ly as a destination site for sharing media

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:21:05 -0600

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"Corporate Media is the Problem

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:50:37 -0600

Dave Winer:

The Internet is the most powerful communication medium ever, but we’ve chosen to give up some of that power to get it for free. It’s still the most powerful medium, even with the power reduced, but (this is very important) eventually we’ll use it up, and be stuck without the ability to communicate at all, if we don’t change. And further, we won’t know how we got there, because the record won’t survive.

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