Gimlé

Here in some stranger’s room
Late in the afternoon
What am I doing here at all?
Ain’t no doubt about it
I’m losing you
John Lennon—“I’m Losing You.”

I hate this place.

The few people who were reading my ’blog over Christmas must have noticed how my posts were increasingly cynical, bitter and harsh.

Sort of the internet equivalent of watching milk turn into some sort of rancid gelatinous bile.

It’s this place that is annoying me.

Not my Dad’s home or any place my family lives in at all. Not their homes. I love my family. I’d visit them in the wastelands of the Kalahari desert if they lived there.

It’s this country. Iceland. I’ve got plenty of issues with the place. Bad vibes.

But Iceland is in vogue, popular, in the new Bond film, populated partly by UK popstars, has got decent musicians of its own.

Somehow the wires have crossed
Communication’s lost
Can’t even get you on the telephone
Just got to shout about it
I’m losing you
John Lennon—“I’m Losing You.”

Iceland’s cool. Literally as well as, in the minds of those who think they matter, figuratively.

It has a very active party and club culture (you can find people to party and booze with any time of day, any day of the week, all year round).

We make around 2-3 films each year (note the word, films not DV based semi-coherent crap).

We have a novel-writing culture dating back to around the year thousand. Quite a lot of it is really good stuff.

And we export most of this stuff.

But there is one thing we just cannot ignore:

It’s a sparsely populated, barely habitable shithole.

This little piece of nowhere foreigners love to visit and leave only has around 280 000 inhabitants. A small town pretending to be a country. You can’t do anything without everybody knowing about it. Privacy is a piece of science-fiction.

It’s corrupt, nepotism is rife. Take the worst example of nepotism you can think of and magnify it by a thousand and you’ve base level of honesty in employment here in Iceland.

You can’t get decent English beer here and the nation fanatically believes in the idea that any place where you can buy yourself an alcoholic drink should have ear-piercingly loud music.

My hearing is a couple of notches worse than your average person’s which means that I’m effectively out of the loop in any bar, club or pub that plays loud music. The result is that I pretty much go only to quiet pubs where you can have a conversation without shouting. A rare breed here.

And those that do exist have crap beer.

You say you’re not getting enough
But I remind you of all that bad stuff
So what the hell am I supposed to do?
Just put a bandaid on it?
And stop the bleeding now
Stop the bleeding now.
John Lennon—“I’m Losing You.”

Tiny-town vibes.

The worst part has to do with how I felt when I lived here. I lived here, in this country, during the worst periods of my personal and emotional life. Some of my problems were exaggerated by the small-town nature of the country.

This place will always remind me of the darkest emotional pits I have experienced.

And it’s a shithole, which doesn’t help.

If you are a lager-drinking party-animal then you’ll love this country. It’s populated by like-minded people.

If you are a fan of geology and landscapes then you’ll love this country. It’s populated by like-minded people.

If you are both, then this place will be heaven.

Anybody else shouldn’t really come here unless they have a really good reason to come. Most of the good stuff that you’ll like is exported, these days.

Me, I’ll continue to come here once or twice a year to meet my family.

I will write more later about the Icelandic New Year’s Eve.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

I love Film.

I hate TV.

Now before you go for my jugular and remind me that TV produces good, quality storytelling as well—

Yeah, I know that.

That’s cool.

TV does produce good, solid storytelling and characterisation.

But it’s not the individual programs that annoys me, it’s the principles of TV I dislike.

Hours and hours of programming a day. Low margins which push the production values down into Inferno’s inner circles. The true industrialisation and componentisation of our entertainment culture. The values of mass production.

These are the principal values of television. Film and music and novels don’t have that role to the same degree. The role of mass-producing hours and hours of entertainment.

Somebody working on a film is working towards one story, two hours of entertainment, often a production of three or more years leading up to just those two hours.

Compare that to a group of workers, often a smaller team, working on producing thirty or fifty hours a year, ninety to a hundred and fifty hours in the same period of time a film team will make two hours.

What I hate about TV is not its output. If that was the case I’d hate Film and Music with a passion.

It’s the fact that the fundamental principles—ideals—of TV go counter to the basic principles of good storytelling.

Good stuff comes out of the idiot-box in spite of TV, rather than because of it.

There are only two things media mass-production can accomplish, things we’ll henceforth call the “Two Dissappointments.”

The first one is a consequence of the mass production principle I so dislike in entertainment. That principle should push production costs down far enough to make experimentation dirt cheap. TV should be able to match every single hour of experimental Film with a hundred hours of experimental TV.

Trust me, it doesn’t.

The second Dissappointment isn’t as total as the first:

Training.

TV should be prime training grounds for content producers. The BBC used to be. TV, unfortunately, has delegated that responsibility to the advertising and music video industries.

Look at where most of the new Film Directors in the last five years came from.

Decent industries that generally do what they are supposed to do.

Too bad they don’t tell stories.

So content producers today are not trained to tell stories but to sell products.

Filth—plastic crap—as a result permeats every single particle of our culture.

Television’s legacy.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

The aurora borealis is strong here tonight.

The sky is covered.

From horizon to horizon.

Like glittering waves in the sky itself.

And the stars are the glittering pebbles just under the surface, on the dark rocky beach covered by shallow water.

I’ve just returned from my grandmother’s annual Christmas gathering in Kópavogur.

Yesterday (the 25th) I was at my Dad and his wife’s do here in Garðabær.

Today’s do was for my Dad’s family. Yesterday’s do was my Dad’s wife’s family.

The contrast between the families is noticable.

Not that one’s nicer than the other. Nothing like that. It’s like when you sit in a bean bag for a while. You leave a groove.

My Dad’s new in-laws is a seat that doesn’t have a groove for me.

Not that they wouldn’t make some space. Lovely people. But becoming a new member of a famly like that is hard work, takes time.

And it requires you to be there.

But neither me nor my sister live in Iceland anymore. And won’t for the next few years.

Which leaves me only with a few precious moments to even connect the faces to the names in her family. And less time to get to know them as a part of their family.

But that is exactly what my Dad has done, and a very remarkable job he’s done as well.

The proof was in the Christmas cards.

My—I suppose I should call her my step-mother or something, like I tend to refer to my mother’s partner as my step-dad—she has a tradition in her family.

On Christmas Eve, the main day here in Iceland, she curls up in the sofa with her kids, and the three of them open up and read all of their Christmas Cards.

Of course, her son, the same age as me, has just bought a small flat with his girlfriend (just about the nicest couple I’ve met, and I’ve met a lot of people) so he’s not partaking in that tradition anymore. Leaving just my Dad, his wife, and her daughter (who is almost the same age as my sister, strangely enough).

This year I was there as well.

It was nice, to hear my dad, his wife and her daughter referred to as a family, as a whole so many times, on so many cards.

But in a strange way it only hammered in that my Dad has formed a new family here. A fully functional whole that everybody acknowledges, knows and loves.

It’s different from what happened on my mother’s side. I got to know her partner and his kids very well before I moved.

His family is much smaller as well.

My Dad has formed a fully functional family unit.

A new whole.

Almost as if I had never been a part of his life.

Of course I realise that that is not true. Not even remotely.

I’ve always been a very family-oriented person. When I lived here in Iceland I used to see my grandmother almost every week. My cousins, aunts and uncles populate a large proportion of my social world.

But this makes me think about what you can lose when you move away from your family.

It also makes me think about how much more of a family oriented culture Iceland is, than the English one, which focusses almost exclusively on the tiny unit of a married couple plus kids.

I’m not a part of my relatives’ regular life anymore. Not like I was.

I guess that’s just something to get used to.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

I’m a cynical bastard.

On the 23rd of December, as has become a tradition over here, a large number of people participated in a “peace march” which goes down Reykjavík’s main shopping street.

People who on every other day of the year don’t give a rat’s arse about peace or the poor, don’t recycle, vote the usual bastards into power, don’t support fair trade, think that the World Trade Organisation is something run by Nestlé, and are generally inane, shallow consumerist twats, participate in this mass fantasy that their Christmas has something to do with peace on Earth and goodwill towards all men.

They rush down the shopping street in their GAP gear and Nike shoes, walking past the shops where they have spent the money they don’t have using the credit cards they shouldn’t have, for goods put together by a bunch of people in China, Taiwan or Korea working for a few cents a day.

Then they go home to drink their coffee, grown by impoverished farmers who slash and burn rainforests to be able to grow a cash crops because that’s what the government and the market wants.

Christmas as a celebration of friendship and love for those near and dear is something I get. The idea that this consumerist free-for-all does world peace and world poverty any good is something I don’t get.

Going to the cemetaries to put flowers and such on your relatives’ graves, making your kids aware of the large number of good people their family has had and lost, instilling in them a sense of history, respect for the dead and pride of their family—

That I get.

And that is what we do (as do many other Icelanders).

Near and dear.

Tomorrow I am getting up early in the morning. I’m heading off to the main cemetary in the Fossvogur valley with my Dad, Grandmother, six year old cousin and a couple of other relatives.

We’re going to walk around the cemetary. Make sure the graves and stones for our relatives look fine. Light some candles for them.

And tell each other stories about all the cool people we have had enrichen our lives.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

Maybe I’m just paranoid but I can feel my English deteriorate while I’m here in Iceland.

It is a process—which repeats itself exactly in reverse when I return to an English-speaking country after being in Iceland.

Makes me worry about these posts I’m writing, resulting—of course—in a lengthened writing process where I try to check and double check everything I write.

It’s not just that I’m in an Icelandic environment with little to no English about. One of the reasons is the fact that I don’t have the time to do my regular daily reading (both online and offline) which I’m sure would have delayed the “language switch”.

Today we had my grandmother’s pre-Christmas do where I did my studious best to avoid eating roasted sheep’s heads, preferring the smoked and salted lamb.

Family gatherings like these always seem to be teaming with children, running about and screaming. More every year.

People, without fail, put up an expression of shock and horror when I call the little monsters “monsters” (or “skrímsli” in Icelandic).

Thankfully, most people have given up on the expectation that I should father a few myself (not likely, my dears).

And the perpetual “what do you do?” problem continues to plague most people who work and study away from their family.

On one hand when somebody is actually interested you are likely to put the rest to sleep or, worse even, somebody might actually view themselves as a bit of a “specialist” striking up a conversation on web design and media just because they’ve made a web page in Dreamweaver and are capable of firing iMovie up.

Cringe.

Vapid, superficial party-speak is unfortunately an international problem.

The 23rd of December is the last day before Christmas over here. Traditionally everybody wanders downtown in the afternoon to take care of the last minute shopping as well as simply to see everybody.

Running into friends and family is guaranteed.

One of the main traditions on this day, though, is on the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service’s Radio One (roughly equivalent to a mix between BBC’s Radio 3 and Radio 4).

After the 13:00 news the announcer begins to read the Christmas Greetings.

These are short 22 word greetings that the public can buy for a small amount of money to send their best wishes to all and sundry.

This year they are over forty four thousand words in total.

That’s a lot of goodwill.

Baldur,
Garðabær, Iceland.

I don’t know how it is with most people but Icelanders tend to spend their Christmas with their close family.

The problem is that “close family” in Iceland generally refers to your siblings, parents, your parents’ siblings, your parents’ siblings’ kids and grandkids, your grandparents as well as some of your grandparents’ siblings.

And their dog, if they have one.

Today we had the do that was on my mother’s side, with her siblings and all the lot that comes with them.

Good fun, a buffet, as well as the usual family gathering sort of thing, complete with the bored teenagers in the corner.

No alcohol, but apparently my family’s unusual in that regard. This is probably because my grandfather on my mother’s side (who has now passed away) was an alcoholic.

Tomorrow, we have the routine last minute Christmas shopping as well as a traditional Sunday meal at my grandmothers’ on my dad’s side.

The dinner will consist of sheeps’ heads and a large leg of lamb smoked in stuff you don’t want to hear about as well as salted.

Traditionally, then on Monday, people eat fermented ray (a kind of flat fish, I think it is also called skate) and get absolutely smashed. Probably because you have to be drunk to tolerate the taste.

Thankfully, Iceland has imported a few dining traditions from abroad so that I can get away with eating turkey on the 24th, which is the main day of celebration over here.

More later.

Baldur.
Reykjavík, Iceland.

I’ve been awake for almost 22 hours now.

Met up with my sister in London. Spent the afternoon there.

Heathrow was… well, Heathrow. Security definitely a bit tighter than it was this summer. More checks, and each of them more thorough.

Flying’s going to be more difficult over the next couple of years, but I think everybody and their dog knows that at this point.

It is dark and cold back home here in Iceland, no false advertising in the name here.

Tomorrow, the first family Christmas gathering takes place, my mother’s side this time. Her mother, sisters, their children and grandchildren.

Just the close family, y’know.

But I’m knackered.

I also hate the Icelandic keyboard layout (doing this on my Dad’s computer in the middle of the night).

More on Icelandic Christmas traditions later.

Baldur.
Garðabær, Iceland.

Does anybody else get the impression that I have listened to at least one too many Churchill biography?

I mean “the sky is thick with a cloud of patents” indeed.

Sheesh.

Baldur.

Ned Beaumont mumbled something about Fedink and sat up. He was in a narrow bed without sheets or bedclothes of any sort. The bare mattress was blood-stained. His face was swollen and bruised and blood-smeared.

Dried blood glued his shirt-sleeve to the wrist the dog had bitten and that hand was caked with drying blood.

He was in a small yellow and white bedroom furnished with two chairs, a table, a chest of drawers, a wall-mirror, and three white-framed French prints, besides the bed.

Facing the foot of the bed was a door that stood open to show part of the interior of a white-tiled bathroom.

There was another door, shut.

There were no windows.

Dashiell Hammett—“The Glass Key”

Everybody’s talking about the Creative Commons.

I won’t waste my effort at doing another executive summary, apparently there is a flash animation which describes the concepts perfectly (Danny O’Brien has provided us with a mirror of the file).

The irony here is that I can’t watch this ingenious presentation because it is in the flash file format.

The Macromedia Flash Player is closed source and recent versions of the file format include a proprietry patent-ridden movie codec which makes the task of making a Free Software equivalent impossible.

So, my poor Gentoo/Linux-ppc ibook can’t play flash files.

This also highlights why—while the Creative Commons licenses are definitely A Good Thing—other issues in the content world are far more important.

Who cares if it is legal for me to do funky things with your mpeg4-encoded short movie if the mere act of playing it on my linux laptop is illegal?

Why should I remix your remix-friendly, CC-licensed mp3 tune if the mere act of installing an mp3 player on my machine places me in violation of patent laws?

Control over content is being enforced by other means than traditional copyright law.

The Creative Commons effort is necessary so that we have an alternative to putting our content under an iron-clad lock and key for a duration likely to exceed a century.

It is, in the current climate of copyright tyranny, an innovation.

But the sky is thick with a cloud of patents. Sucking the life out of our culture like a carpet of bloodsucking insects crawling over our exposed, frightened skins. Their serrated little beaks gnawing into our pores, leaching. Eating into the skin of our eyes.

Leaving us as blind, illiterate invalids who are spoonfed the babyfood of merchandise tie-ins and blockbuster slime.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

For the next few weeks – until he abruptly disappeared from both L.A. radio and TV – Sahl would read the occasional line from my column on his program. One that he quoted came when I wrote a line that was, for about the first 50% of my life, the best-received thing I composed. It went, “Every political movement has an idiot element. If you can’t see the idiot element in your movement, you’re it.”

I was very proud of the line and, like all authors, I complimented myself on being the first person in the history of mankind to think of it. Then one day, I was reading a novel penned in 1933 and I found this line about playing poker: “When you sit down at the table, look around. And if you can’t spot the sucker, you’re him.” Apparently, it’s an old saying. Oh, well.
Mark Evanier—“Doonesbury”

I’ve been in bed, taking it easy, trying to get rid of the cold.

The best way to kill time when you can’t really do anything or concentrate on anything is, in my view, to browse the web.

It’s a medium that suits an ill person’s shortened attention span.

One of the things I’ve been reading, on my laptop, in bed, has been Mark Evanier’s website “POV online.”

A short introduction for those who do not know Mr. Evanier:

He is best known, in all likelyhood, as the Laurel to Sergio Aragonés’s Hardy in comic book series such as “Groo the Wanderer” and lately, the funny and kindly-hearted “Space Circus.”

He has also done a lot of work in TV and Animation writing as well as—and these are the works that have been entertaining me today as I lie wooly-headed with a cold—quite a few columns on comics, animation and tv.

In those columns he tells us stories about the people involved in the entertainment industries, telling us, in an anecdotal style that manages to be both understated and sincere, the things he’s heard of those people as well as his own experiences of meeting them.

It is easy to imagine these sort of columns turning into shallow, frothy nostalgia, but he deftly avoids that.

Even saying that he avoids it gives off the wrong impression. He means what he says and what he says is quite often spot on. He doesn’t have to avoid blubbering sentimental hindsight simply because the ground he’s treading on isn’t anywhere near that.

The tales he tells remind you that—while most of the works that came from the industry at that time certainly aren’t high art—some of them are the results of good honest hard work and in many ways possibly the finest piece of craftmanship the western culture has given the world.

It also reminded me that a good story is a good story. Some of the people Marc Evanier writes about are people I don’t know and do not interest me particularly…

…but Mr. Evanier pulls out a good story, an anecdote or two, gets our interest and manages to give us a glimpse of good people doing good work, the sort of honest breed which, it seems, is a rare species in today’s entertainment industry.

Nostalgic? Sure, a bit. But Mark Evanier tells stories about people—characters.

I’d like to see one good novel by the guy before I die.

I know he can do it.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Just listen to the Archers, damn you.

Best damn soap. Anywhere. Anyhow.

Been down with a cold for a couple of days.

Still pretty much out of it.

In the meantime, check out Elizabeth Lane Lawley’s responses to some of the recent posts here. Mainly the post on what weblogging is. And stuff.

Feeling poorly, but making the best out of it by reading a couple of Raymond Chandler novels.

At least I’ve done most of my Christmas shopping (presents for some of the Icelanders).

Baldur.

How then can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can one use the author-function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals? Saint Jerome proposes four criteria:

(1) if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author’s works (the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value);

(2) the same should be done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author’s other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence);

(3) one must also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer’s production (the author is here is conceived as a stylistic unity);

(4) finally, passages quoting statements that were made, or mentioning events that occurred after the author’s death must be regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events).
Foucault—What is an author?

Elizabeth Lane Lawley asked her students what they thought a ’blog was, using the class weblog to collect their thoughts and ideas into a single space.

Weblogs according to the students are for the most part either a way for “people to share information or thoughts” or “a forum in which many users can share there opinions about any given topic and discuss.”

What most of the comments and views have in common is that weblogging seems to be a group process. It is always a part of a community, group topics, a gathering of ideas.

Your writing is, if they are right, always presented in the context of what others in your group say about it—it has no life, no meaning, no relevance on its own. Your views are assimilated into the groupthink which is derived from the amalgamated lowest common denominator.

Frequently mentioned in the discussion there is the message board and the blog as an evolution of that kind of community-owned discourse.

The popularity of this view is understandable for many reasons.

The first reason is that of experience. Most, if not all of the students, are very familiar with the concept of the online discussion via message boards and mailing lists.

The second has to do with the way we have all been trained from childhood to create our identity only in relation to groups.

Who we are is supposed to depend on what group we belong to.

What we think is more important if it coincides with the groupthink.

Our opinions only matter if the group agrees with them.

It can be argued, and if my memory isn’t playing tricks with me, has been argued that the online message board and online discussions in general allow for higher quality discussions and freedom of speach.

But we do not generally associate multiplicity and diversity of opinion with sites such as Slashdot and Metafilter.

OSnews, another discussion site which has come close to suffering from groupthink, has been saved so far from the “Slashdot” fate because it has been formed for the most part by a single strong voice. Something that is unfortunately (for OSnews, not for Eugenia) about to change.

It is Matthew DeTurck that makes the most important point in the thread, a point that should never be underestimated:

I think a blog is a convienient way of posting to the web, to be accessible to be read by anyone.

Weblogs are tools, a gathering of lightweight content-management systems that make updates, linking and cross-referencing easier so that most people can have a regularly updated website without making it a full-time job.

Message Boards, and their evolutionary descendants such as Slashdot, Metafilter and Advogato, are tools for communities. They enable the group to exist—engage—over a distance, with its components spread all over the world.

That tool enables the group to create and maintain an identity in a way that was impossible before.

But that doesn’t highlight—reveal to us—what weblogs enable the normal user, our average citisen, to do.

This is my voice.

The weblogging tools I use to maintain this site allow me to recreate my voice—my thoughts—as an online body of work with all the baggage and meanings that the author-concept brings with it.

It is a multitude of voices, independent, discussing, creating, engaging, that the weblog brings forth into the world.

Voices that, if not for these new tools, would otherwise have been prevented from coming into existence by the economies of print.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

Trackback Thoughts.

I originally took down the Trackback implementation on this site when I found an error on my part which was screwing things up.

Since then I’ve been thinking about the whole thing and have decided not to put the Trackback stuff back in.

It just doesn’t feel elegant to have a bunch of xml non-integrated in a comment, and as far as I can see that is the only way Trackback can be integrated into a blosxom blog.

Project Thoughts.

My Phd project has been my primary focus for the last few days. Been giving the practical side more thought, been mapping out implementation details as well as hierarchical structures.

On the theory side I’ve been following up on and clarifying what I scetched out in my earlier notes, mostly following up on the conclusions me and my tutors came to in my recent tutorial.

More on both later next week.

It was cool to see Dorothea Salo’s kind words on the project notes. It is in very early stages still, but who knows? Be careful about making offers, I just might take you up on them? ;-)

Course Thoughts.

The course I’m a teaching assistant on has had a series of lectures on all things interactive over the lact three weeks.

Interactive Fiction(my lecture, which I promptly screwed up), Interactive Film (by Tom Abba, another UWE Phd student) and Games.

I’d like to write up summaries of the points and thoughts raised in these lectures if I find the motivation and time (read: don’t count on it anytime soon).

Christmas Thoughts.

My Icelandair ticket to Reykjavik has arrived in the mail, which means that I’ll be spending Christmas in Iceland.

Beginning with a day in wandering in London before the flight (on the 20th of December) and ending with a tired evening flight back on the third of January.

It might be fun to keep a thorough journal here during the festivities. The Icelandic Christmas differs a bit from the traditional western one so I’m going to try my best to weblog it.

People might enjoy reading that.

Chilli Thoughts.

Looks like my chilli is ready.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

Civil partnerships could give homosexual couples property and inheritance rights for the first time.
Gay couples “to get equal rights”—BBC News

But:

Any bill would be likely to run into opposition in the House of Lords.
Gay couples “to get equal rights”—BBC News

No matter… if the lords misbehave too much they’ll just be voted out—

Wait… that’s not possible.

Makes you wonder if the English have understood what a democracy is about. The House of Lords has a nasty tendency to veto civil liberty laws (read: anything that involves change).

What part of democratic implies that the laws of a democratically elected government, which have been passed by a democratically elected parliament can be stopped by a bunch of people exercising a birthright?

The very existence of the House of Lords is insulting to the rightfully elected politicians in the House of Commons and insulting to the voters that elected them.

The very existence of the House of Lords is a disgrace.

Baldur.

It seems that the link from Dive into Mark’s further reading section (which, if I remember correctly automatically links to relevant posts from its referrers)only goes to the trackback listing for my post.

It is always a bit entertaining to see what sort of bugs crop up in automated systems ;-)

The reason, as far as I can see, is that I incorrectly set up the Trackback related RDF in the site.

That should be sorted soon.

Dorothea asks about the nuts and bolts of my Phd project.

I’m sort of thinking out loud here, so please bear with me.

I’m supposed to be focussing on the theoretical foundation of the project only now. Apparently, this year should be spent only on thoroughly evaluating the relevant theories I intend to use as well as evaluating the test text’s—the control so to speak—applicability as a subject of the kind of adaption I have in mind for it.

So the implementation of the test cases shouldn’t begin until around September 2003.

On the other hand, my personal opinion is that only a lunatic would start a research project in interactive media without having a clear idea regarding implementation.

And since my bouts with insanity don’t extend into that area, I’ve been doing a lot of preparatory research work. My idea is to avoid the historical trend in interactive media and hypertext of sticking with proprietry unified approaches.

Most of my colleages here come from the multimedia industry where you use a single monolithic tool to produce a single monolithic file format which can only be used on the exact platforms you feel like implementing and testing on.

Classic examples are Macromedia’s Director, Hypercard, and to a lesser extent Flash. The problem with the .swf format (published by Flash) is that it is not really as open a standard as you’d think. The published specification tends to lag considerably behind what is actually implemented in the Flash Player and Macromedia’s authoring tool.

Plus its most recent version is burdened with a proprietry codec for its movie file format.

DVD-Video effectively falls in this category as well due to patent and licensing restrictions.

Opposed to this approach you have a way of doing things which is a combination of markup and scripting. This approach has resulted in the only really successful genre of interactive media, namely the web.

Lightweight and simple is better than heavy and comprehensive. Many small tools are better than one big, multipurpose tool. Intelligence should be pushed to the edges.

So my approach is to use open royalty-free standards, preferably only those with a clear specification and implementations as well as being independently controlled (not controlled by a single biased corporation, that is).

The basic idea for the project itself is that we have two structures:

One is the narrative work itself, each test case is a subset, a volume, of this narrative work.

The second structure is the commenting structure (Derrida’s “frame” concept of a structure which contains, comments upon, defines and limits the contained structure).

The intention is to use weblogs to organise the authoring and publication of the two structures (I tend to view weblogging tools as simple but effective content management systems optimised for a very small number of authors).

One weblog would be the narrative work, serialised publicly. Since hypertextuality and intertextuality are fundamentally network concepts it would be counterintuitive for a project of this nature to be developed in private and offline.

The second weblog would contextualise the narrative weblog.

All very simple so far. Looking decidedly mundane.

Things only turn interesting if you author the two structures using a metadata rich markup format. Then you can create the various interfaces simply as separate representations of the same data.

My current idea only coalesced today. This is all completely speculative and subject to change over the next two years.

Each entry in the projects would be semantically correct xhtml with embedded metadata marked up in YAML.

The reason why I’m thinking about using YAML is partially that it is less intrusive. Nobody really has a constructive approach to embedding xml metadata in xhtml in a backwards compatible manner. The primary reason, though, is that I “get” YAML. The YAML model ties closely in with scripting language constructs. My brain parses the YAML model better than than it parses any of the XML DOMs.

RDF for example is a very effective and powerful tool. The problem is that it’s too effective and powerful for what I want.

The cool bit only struck me today as I was browsing “Dive Into Mark”.

XFML.

Classic lightbulb scenario.

The XFML format provides you with an easy way of creating conceptual categories and topics for your website and then associate your webpages with the various topics it touches upon.

So in my case I would create XFML maps for the two weblogs.

The interfaces would be on one hand xhtml, browser-based, weblog-style constructs on one hand (leveraging links, trackback and all those weblog tools for intertextuality and hyptertextuality).

On the other hand you could have XFML based interface where you could, for example, in Egilsaga browse first to the “Family” category and then to the “Loss” topic and there you would find all the entries relevant to that theme in Egilsaga (actually quite an important theme in the story).

So far so good.

Then you map all the entries in the narrative weblog to topics in the commenting weblog’s XFML file, and to that you add topics which discuss important overarching themes in the commented weblog.

You read an entry and the interface automatically lists all of the other entries belonging to all of the other XFML maps which list that entry id as their topic of discussion.

The power comes from the fact that you can link topics between different XFML maps as well as the fact that XFML is an open standard.

Let’s say that an academic interested in Icelandic sagas provides an XFML topicmap feed for his weblog.

I can then in the XFML map for my commenting weblog connect the topics in my map that I find correspond to his.

And so, when I browse the XFML adaption of Egilsaga in my interface his posts automatically start to appear as relevant posts amongst my commenting posts.

It all happens automatically after I initially connect the two XFML file’s topics.

Multiply that by a dozen and then add in the fact that all of the other XFML maps can link their topics to corresponding topics in other sites which the XFML tool can automatically download and import as well.

All appearing automatically in the corresponding relevant post list when applicable.

That’s what I’d call proper intertextual contextualisation.

This is classic Yin kind of power. Introverted, the primary focus is to know yourself (marking your data up properly, thoroughly and with care, this part can’t really be automated).

Once that is done, the rest is easier and can be automated much more effectively than the content part.

While my main focus for the next few months will be on the theoretical foundation of the project, I think that I’ll start work on a simpler prototype in the new year.

Just thinking out loud.

Baldur,
Clifton, Bristol.

Below is a table which outlines the foundation concepts behind my Phd preparative work.

The basic idea is to test out the applicability of select traditional narrative theories to text-based hypertext works.

The goal is to attempt to bridge the artificial divide between new media hypertext works and traditional literary concepts and traditions.

These are blatant generalisations. An attempt to focus on the foundation ideas behind the research.

Theory—Test Schema:

Notes:

All test works will be based on the same pre-existing work.

The most likely candidate at this point is “Egilssaga”, one of the Icelandic Family Sagas.

The fact that both the Icelandic version as well as its English translation are freely available and extensively studied makes it a good foundation for this particular study.

Neither Bakhtin’s theories on the novel nor Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas on binary oppositions necessarily presuppose a linear representation.

Rather, they focus on structure in terms of a narrative process and tension between structural components.

The narrative process, while linear in their examples, can be nonlinear without disrupting the basis of their structural theories.

It is very unlikely that anything substantial can be learnt from each individual test project.

The meat of the research is in the comparative phase when the five hypertext adaptions are compared with each other as well as the original texts (both Icelandic and English versions).

Baldur,
Clifton, Bristol.

Just got given an old Powermac 7100. The main reason that’s useful is that it came with a very nice Apple Laserprinter (also for free). Been hitherto printer-challenged.

Now I just need to sort some sort of ethernet connection for the thing.

I also made the mistake of digging up old copies of Warcraft 2 and Civilisation 2.

Lost the whole day playing the Human campaign in Warcraft.

One thing to note though. This machine’s screen as well as the CRTs up at college. They give me a headache after longterm use (can’t work a whole day on them). Which is not a problem I have with my ibook’s LCD screen.

This is doubly annoying because you can see a definite difference in colour display.

What surprised me was how well the 7100 performed.

Good computer.

Baldur.

In the depression caused by the sagging of the floor, pieces of animals manifested themselves, the head of a crow, mummified hands which might have once been parts of monkeys.

A donkey stood a little way off, not stirring and yet apparently alive; at least it had not begun to deteriorate. He started toward it, feeling stick-like bones, dry as weeds, splinter under his shoes. But before he could reach the donkey—one of the creatures which he loved the most—a shiny blue crow fell from above the perch on the donkey’s unprotesting muzzle.

Don’t, he said aloud, but the crow, rapidly, picked out the donkey’s eyes. Again, he thought. It’s happening to me again.
Philip K. Dick—“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

People on the internet have been debating gender issues recently.

The observation that started it found that not only were traditional gender prejudices strong but those biases were being used by a growing number of women.

The sentiment noted (it bears mentioning that the original observer was simply that, an observer) seems to have been this:

“We’ve been fighting to change attitudes, but it isn’t working.”

“So we’re going to use those prevailing attitudes to gain the equality we know we deserve.”

I’m not quoting anybody here, simply trying to summarize the attitudes written about by Halley (the initial observer) in the original post.

To outsiders, this trend would seem to be a win—win situation. The “Girlist” girls exercise some sort of power and the rest don’t have to change their behaviours or attitudes. And the rest of us, who are a bit sexist here, bit unfairly treated there but in general we get to live and let live, just like we want to.

Life, unfortunately isn’t that easy.

Actions bear thinking.

It’s not about obstacles, fights or standoffs. It’s about friction.

Biases mean that your work is made just that little bit more difficult at every step. All the obstacles, the main barriers of entry and promotion, have been paved away.

But there’s friction all the way. Friction that comes from the very same attitudes that the “Girlists” rely on. Careless, nasty words. Generalisations. And the fact that, despite all we’ve worked for, all we’ve been striving for throughout the years, and as the “Girlist” trend demonstrates, people still make decisions in life and work based on those old prejudices.

No wonder this realisation makes people angry.

Railing against Halley for her post is like shooting the messenger. It’s not her fault things are going this way.

But the “Girlist” trend assumes a status quo in attitudes and it assumes that those attitudes only affect attractive women.

But those attitudes make life difficult for so many others. Only a minority of the people on the planet fit into the indoctrinated definitions of “beautiful”. Then you have gays, lesbians, transsexuals…

And those suffering from AIDS.

One out of every three young people in the UK think that there is a cure for AIDS.

HIV infections are on the rise, a 25 per cent increase here in the UK last year.

All of this, the rise in HIV infections, the change in gender attitudes—it all seems absurd to those who remember the safe sex campaigns in the eighties as well as the very active and strong equality discussions at the time.

But the attitude changes, the largest HIV infection vector, is amongst those aged 18-30 (gay, straight, whatever).

They haven’t been taught that some things in life bear thinking.

How you treat other people, how you talk about people. How you talk about sex.

How you have sex.

They need to be aware of how their actions, their behaviour, affects the rest of us.

Keeping in mind our youth-obsessed culture, the 25-30 year old graduates are probably either our managers or our near-future managers.

Managers who think that “girly” behaviour is proper and women who don’t act like that are weird. Who think that AIDS is mostly a poofter’s disease, and who cares, it’s cured anyway.

People who think that they don’t have to think and that the rest of us will simply step in line with their attitudes.

That’s why we need days like this on a regular basis. An excuse. A cause. An occasion to remind ourselves. A day when we sit down and think a bit.

It’s not that difficult.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.