Gimlé

Tim Bray apparently noticed an inbound link to his site from Már and wondered what Már was saying.

The answer is simple, Már was trying to style his RSS feed with CSS and was running into problems with Internet Explorer (go on, click the link, that styled web-page is his RSS feed).

And so he sympathetically linked to Tim Bray’s recent anti-IE rant noting that Tim agrees with him.

The reason why I’m posting this here, instead of e-mailing it to Tim Bray is that I can’t for the life of me find any sort of contact info on the Ongoing site.

Besides, other people might be interested.

Some might have noticed that I’ve been doing small sort of design tweaks over the last couple of weeks.

Those who noticed probably did so because this site did something violently nasty to their computer. I had a crasher bug going on Safari for a couple of days on the individual post pages.

It had something to do with FORM CSS code—couldn’t isolate it because it didn’t appear when pages were displayed from file and working on a server from college (where I have access to OS X machines) is a pain.

Also, some of the :hover code (got the idea from Design Meme, found via Zeldman only works on kthml- or Gecko-based browsers.

The reason why I applied it is that it is “the right thing to do” hypertextually speaking. Pick up any old book on hypertext theory and design, preferably one that that predates the web (they did a lot of research on the subject, y’know) and you’ll find out that using constant typographic distinctions for links leads to added emphasis at inappropriate places, as well as a whole host of other unwanted side-effects.

This would be alright if you are doing an “outline-style” weblog, where you post your short and fairly succinct bullet-pointed thoughts on a regular basis. But it’s not quite what you want when you’re writing longer passages.

Mark Bernstein’s and Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace has, if memory serves me, a state switch thing. Normally you read the posts without any typographic distinctions for links. Then you hold down a key on your keyboard and all the links appear in the post (I hope that I’m not making this up, been ages since I last read a Storyspace hypertext).

This :hover business, when it works, makes sure that links you haven’t followed are only subtly distinguished when you’re reading and that they pop out, underlined and obvious, when you hover your mouse pointer over the text’s body.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes.

I might start working on a project next week that just possibly might get half a dozen interesting non-techy people weblogging on a regular basis.

Again, we’ll see how that goes.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

A few links I haven’t seen on other journals:

• Tim O’reilly talks about Apple as an Innovator (or more to the point: why Apple is percieved as an innovator). The O’reilly Publishing weblogs are worth checking on a regular basis in any case.

• Anytime anybody asks me why I think comics are capable of being literature I throw the Fantagraphics catalog at them. They are to comics what Eastgate Systems are to hypertext…

  …It, that is.

  The most insightful and analytical critics, the theorists, the artists and the writers.

  If it’s comics, intelligent and matters, nine times out of ten it’s also Fantagraphics.

  The reason why I mention this is that they need your help. Go over there and buy some books from them.

  Them’s good readin’.

• Tim Bray says smart things about the Iraq War that I wish I’d have said.

• Wait… there’s more.

  Tim Bray points out that it isn’t CSS that’s difficult but Internet Exporer’s buggy implementation that’s a hassle.

  (Yes I know Dave Winer linked to this one, but I think he completely misrepresented the post as an anti-CSS post. And as we all know, only about one person in five actually follows a link to see for him or herself.)

• I’m here in the complete Garfield archives online.

My Icelandic metabolism is telling me that it’s tropical out there and barely tolerable.

The English around me are saying that the weather’s rarely this good and that I should savor it.

And they stare at me when I say that I’d like it to be about three or four degrees colder, at least (centigrade, of course).

And it’s too humid, but then again, the UK is always humid.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

My sister landed in Iceland yesterday evening. The flight was alright. Everything leading up to it was semi-disastrous, as is to be expected.

After having got used to being able to call my sister on a regular basis without going bankrupt having no family members in the country will be a bit of a change.

This sort of thing is probably something that people in the US are more used to handling, given the size of the country and the mobility of the workforce.

The difference being that long distance calls to Iceland are prohibitively expensive for a student like me, forcing me to rely on e-mail and text messaging.

But other than that I’m pretty sure that this is a growing cultural phenomenon here in Europe that will only be more common as the EU grows and stabilizes (the Euro, for example, is still settling).

Anyway, I’m planning a three week trip to Iceland sometime this summer. I’m starting to need a hefty dose of Icelandisms to cope with some of the silly things the English do.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

For the last few weeks I’ve been asking anyone who will listen if it isn’t weird that our economy is based on software, more and more, yet users don’t want to pay for software.
Dave Winer—Who will pay for software?

Mark Bernstein and Dave Winer have been throwing out several interesting comments on the value of software in the last few days.

Dave’s comment, quoted above is, unfortunately, to the point and truer than we’d like.

People don’t value quality.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about innovative software, inspiring and moving books, mind-bending and touching world cinema—

Or music.

Of course it doesn’t help that they are only confronted with rubbish. Microsoft’s software is notorious for its security problems. Mac Classic crashes like a two-legged doberman hound driving an SUV without a driver’s license. Mac OS X is slower than a salted snail stoned out of its mind on pot and 50 kilos of pure, unadulterated swedish granite wielded by a brat on ritalin.

The book industry pushes stories with plots so thin and wispy that they’d make a jellyfish self-conscious.

The movie industry pushes chunky shit so smelly that X-Men 2 and Matrix Reloaded qualify as the artistic and intellectual highlights of the year.

And it’s a catch 22. Developers and creators don’t make well crafted stories and software because they see a distinct lack of demand for the stuff in the marketplace. Those who could appreciate the craft can’t find or aren’t exposed to it due to the dominance of the large players in the marketplace.

Just the appreciation factor is bad enough. The fact that most people aren’t willing to pay a small amount of money for your hard work that, as Dave clearly demonstrates with regards to software, is actually a small fraction of your actual task-related outgoings…

That has to be one of the most despiriting things that can happen to any sort of developer or writer.

A new paperback is half the price of a DVD, will work in any country, provides many more hours of entertainment and yet qualifies as a bestseller if it moves 100 000 copies.

That’s in the US, a post-industrial, wealthy, high-tech country.

The sales of a single volume of Byron’s Don Juan sold over ten times that, easy, in what was an industrial country in its infancy, with a fraction of the current US of A’s population.

Sure, you can give away free copies of the software you commissioned. The recipients don’t pay you – the software seems ‘free’. But, sooner or later, value of some sort flows back up the system. If it doesn’t, nobody will do it again. And that value is always something convertible to money: that’s why they call it money.
Mark Bernstein—Costs

While I do not necessarily agree with Mark’s statement that value, in software or craft (and storytelling is a craft), is always convertable to money, the point needs to be hammered in that there is both immense value and work in GPL-compatible software.

(Otherwise called ‘Free Software’, I use ‘GPL-compatible’ here for want of a better term, “Free Software” is too ambiguous, and GPL-compatible unambiguiously includes popular Open Source licenses such as the BSD and X11 licenses).

Software under GPL-compatible licenses are frequently distributed, deployed and used as if it had little to no inherent value.

The point and purpose of GPL-compatible software is to give the user the freedom to participate in the software development process.

It is one of the few things that can promote a general understanding of programming in the general populace as well as amongst the craftsmen of creative artifacts. Which is something that, according to Mark, needs to happen if computer-mediated works are to mature.

Free Software (capital ‘F’, capital ‘S’) such as Ruby, Python, Mozilla and GCC is much more likely to promote a general understanding of programming and programming skills than proprietry software.

The fact that some of the features of the Ruby programming language are implemented in Ruby, meaning that a humanities academic like myself can learn about the language by reading through the files of the implementation, is mind-blowing.

That ability is such a basic and fundamental thing, granted and protected by GPLed software and is, by definition, impossible in closed-source software.

That alone is of immense value, monetary or otherwise. In fact, it makes Free Software much more valuable to me and other content creators than closed-source will ever be.

Again, monetarily or otherwise.

Which makes it especially disheartening to see how few people are willing to pay money for GPL-compatible software.

Would I prefer that my University spend my tuition fees on GPL-compatible software rather than closed-source software such as Director or Peak?

Even though the GPL-compatible software could, in theory, be deployed for free, without payment to its developers?

Yes and yes.

The value that the students and lecturers of an Art, Media and Design faculty stand to gain from being able to participate in the process of software development as a part of their courses, research and content creation—

That value far outweighs the value and benefits of more ‘sophisticated’, bug-ridden and unreliable industry-standard software such as Macromedia Director.

But for that to happen, Arts and Humanities people would have to get over their fear of code.

Which is about as likely as Britney Spears writing a literary masterpiece on par with Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I still haven’t made up my mind about this ‘moblogging’ thing at all.

The institution of personal journals or logs is a fairly established one. It’s a tradition, art, skill and craft.

But recently that act of noting down one’s thoughts in a fairly literate and considered manner has been instilled with an urgency that rivals that of the most sensationalistic journalistic traditions.

It has to be blogged NOW.

It can’t wait until you get back to your home, have time to gather your thoughts and sit down with a coffee. Hastily jotted scribbings pecked into a website form or messaging interface using a cramped mobile phone keyboard is evidently superior to thoughtful ideas and measured words.

Why? Because it’s, like, NOW! Not later.

‘Later’ is passé.

The primary usefulness of a GPRS phone like the Nokia 3650 in the context of weblogging is not the ability to jot your thoughts down, live, on a numerical phone keypad or even the infinitestimal qwerty keyboards on some of the more text-oriented phones.

It is, in all honesty, a poor man’s wireless ethernet. Instead of relying on my phone as an interface I should have viewed it as a glorified modem and used my laptop to type and post thing. My mistake, to be sure.

Had I not been afraid of having my laptop stolen by a gang of fat, sleazy ‘Comic Book Guys’ looking for money to pay for their collector’s edition Transformers toys, that is.

Apart from the fact that, unlike the Dust Or Magic conference a few weeks ago or the San-Diego Comics Convention, the Bristol Comics Festival simply isn’t interesting enough.

Most of us, as well, have no need for this artificial urgency, the need to weblog and post on events as they happen. There is enough stress in our lives already without the addition of another layer of subdued panic and hurry on top of the layers of stress stemming from work, society and family.

I did meet a lot of interesting and entertaining people at the social events surrounding the comics festival. It’s just the festival itself that instilled images of barren cultural wastelands in your mind.

The rise of ‘smartphones’—our first true mobile computers—is a good thing. Picture messaging and multimedia messaging is much more fun than it should be and the capabilities of the phone itself means that it is an interesting and exciting target platform for developers of content and applications.

It’s just ‘moblogging’ that I’m not sure about.

Maybe I’ll get into it with time.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

Yesterday was a bit of a bore, but that’s to be expected of launch parties and award parties. My fault for forgetting how boring these things can get.

Just about to miss Jeff Smith’s special event due to an attack of lunchtime hunger and caffeine craving.

Let’s see if I can find anything interesting around here.

Well, I’m off to have a pizza with Tom Abba before we head off to the launch party. If this doesn’t get updated or commented upon by yours truly then you can assume that I’m either too drunk to ‘moblog’, or that the launch party is boring as hell.

As I flail about and try and figure out a direction for this weblog (suffering from a bit of a malaise in that regard) something has surfaced that I simply have to try.

Y’see, I got myself one of these on an offer from Vodafone.

It does XHTML, audio recording, video recording, picture taking and e-mail.

As well as being a mobile phone of course.

So I figure that I’ll have to give mobile weblogging a try, starting with this week’s Bristol Comics Festival.

Well, starting with this evening’s launch party, to be more specific.

Initially I’ll just be using the comment form to update posts as things happen, but in a few days I hope to be able to set up an e-mail to blosxom gateway thing. Doesn’t look too difficult to put together.

It’ll give me something to play with while I figure out what else to do with this weblog thing.

I’ve also put together a preliminary ‘mobile’ version of the weblog. It’s just xhtml so it should work in most browsers. Blosxom’s playing weird on me so it’s being served up as text/html for now. Should end up being served as application/xhtml+xml eventually.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

The fact that Happy Tutor was once a self-hating loser is an interesting point and shows the vast difference between the the old ‘loser’ Tutor and the current excellent writer.

I already regret that half-hearted swipe at Happy Tutor. Shouldn’t have, really.

But it does highlight the difference between this sort of post and Dorothea’s complaints.

Dorothea describes her experiences, her dad’s experiences as well as the problems she sees inherent in the system.

And then she says “I know others have had similar experiences,” or something to that effect.

It doesn’t rule out the possibility that others might have had different experiences.

It doesn’t rule out that some universities might not have these problems.

It doesn’t broadly insult a large proportion of the participants in the academic culture.

It states that the university system failed her and others.

Some questions arise from that.

Why did it fail her and why does it continue to fail a large number of people on a regular basis?

And…

What can we do to change that (or if nothing should be done, explain why)?

Stating that it works for you doesn’t answer either of those questions.

Nor do insults or broad, sweeping dismissive statements.

The discussion of academia continues, tracked and started by Dorothea.

The irony here being that I agree with most of what Dorothea has said on the matter (in fact, have found it rather hard to find specific valid criticisms of her slating of academia that doesn’t sound like “but I like it”) and yet I am studying full-time for a PhD. I’ll have to explain that some day. I know my reasons. Might be useful for others if I told them.

I’m not, on the other hand familiar at all with the situation described by The Happy Tutor. The words “self-hating losers” and “$150,000” especially don’t ring a bell.

Maybe your average European university is poorer than your average American one (outside of the few like Oxford, Cambridge and selected new Universities like East Anglia, you can call them the celebrity Universities).

The point being that very few people in the universities I’ve gone to earned something like $150,000. And given the industrialisation of University production (the mass-manufacture of qualifications) the number of universities where somebody does will drop fast in the next few years.

And I’d never ever even contemplate using the phrase “self-hating losers” about my Comparative Literature students. Intensely proud. Fanatically stubborn. And capable of drinking any old English academic under the table.

Then again, that describes most Icelanders in any case. Academic or not.

That, I guess, is my only real criticism.

This discussion has treated the word “academia” as if it is only a part of the American economic life and culture.

The system is similar all around the world and will only grow more similar as the Americisation of Europe continues.

But…

Pride. Satisfaction. Rage. Self-doubt. Confidence. Them’s words of culture and psychology. You can talk about the similarities in the system all day long. But the people and nations differ, as does their handling of the system.

So talking about the system and how it treats people is a valid and necessary thing. But the talking about what sort of people come into the system and what they are like when they come out of it—

That’s something that varies wildly depending on the country and culture. Generalising wildly will be a blatant lie at best and a gross insult at worst.

Talk about how you came out of it to your heart’s content. The fact that Happy Tutor was once a self-hating loser is an interesting point and shows the vast difference between the the old “loser” Tutor and the current excellent writer.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Something else I’ve been reading as a part of my attempt to kickstart my brain into anyother sort of gear than neutral is Isaac Asimov’s Azazel.

So instead of working on things I should’ve (like that project I’m working on with Tom Abba) I’ve been laughing at Asimov’s witty short stories that are distinctly not standard Asimov fair (in a good way, like the way that his standard fair is standard Asimov fair in a good way as well).

The best way to describe it is to say that he is “doing a Wodehouse.”

Again, in a good way.

Not quite the comic genious that PG Wodhouse was, but witty and smart in its own way.

A pleasant surprise that I found in hardcover for 70 pence in a “Save the Children” store.

Pleasant and charitable. Like most good things.

Baldur.
Clifton. Bristol.

I remember this guy I once knew. Boy, rather. Or teenagers as we were at the time. What you called the ages varied according to your maturity at the time.

Our elders called us boys. Those frightened called us ‘teenagers.’

I can’t recall what we thought about ourselves. I guess we hadn’t gone that far in thinking about the issue.

Kids. Guys. Geezers.

That sort of thing. Adults was something we pretended at being. Some better than others—but we were all pretending.

And we were quite aware of the facade, the societal illusion—the faux maturity—that societal teenagedom had instilled upon us.

…

I remember this guy I once knew. Cute as hell, attractive enough to those of us partial to that sort of thing. Cute, but guyish enough to qualify in all the right circles. The socially important circles.

Guyish enough for all the right circles but with just enough of that thing—that other thing—to qualify for all the wrong circles and groups as well.

“The wrong crowd” you could say.

His sister was an athlete, and he had just enough of her qualities to make him qualify as a jock, the kind of athletic and energetic person that ends up as a part of the ruling class in every single school you’ve ever come close to.

Slender. Athletic. Tall.

Beautiful.

He also had just enough of her qualities to make him interesting in other ways.

To other people.

He could have stolen every single one of his sister’s boyfriends had he been inclined to try.

Had any one of them ever dared.

Tried.

Touched…

What would have happened, I do not know.

Whether he is married today, I do not know.

Whether anybody eventually tried…

Or whether he tried himself…

I do not know.

…

I wish I did.

Now and then.

You ever have days where, no matter how hard you tried—how you felt—you felt dumb (well, in my case, dumber than usual)?

As if your frontal lobe had just gone numb and the rest of your cerebral cortex had wandered off somewhere and is watching the Simpsons on a tv in a shop display downtown.

Leaving you at home feeling stupid.

No? Must be me then.

What I do to try to jump-start my brain is read stuff.

Stuff like Colin’s Gulf War Diary.

It’s a sort of cartoon strip weblog. Mainly Colin trying to make sense of things around him, using the comic book strip as a tool.

Flooding with emotional logic, it’s likely to be shredded to bits by our more rational, logically minded weblogging pundits.

But to people who appreciate a story well told and enjoy reading somebody’s personal perspective on events that barely make sense to us anyway—

—To people who need an alternative to the two extremes of callous and rational punditry on one hand, and hyperbolic melodrama on the other, Colin provides excellent reading.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

Mark Bernstein speaks of the theorists at the conference he’s at:

I have already learned a good deal about educational theory, architecture, and the materiality of the book. Pop culture index: Buffy is generally (but secretly) known. The Archers is known but unpopular. In fact, Ella is big. Also Kraftwerk and Koolhaas. Narrative is not very popular, and nobody has taken my van de Wetering pawn.

My, oh my.

Mark Bernstein—…’round midnight

I’d suggest that liking (but not really admitting it) Buffy and not liking The Archers (if it’s the BBC Radio 4 soap here being referred to) is a logical consequence of not liking narrative.

But then again, I’m an eccentric bastard who thinks that self-referential, pop-symbolism-infested, contrived, teenage horror comedies are about as related to storytelling as Babylon 5 is to simplicity, conciseness and narrative brevity.

Making an uninteresting, mundane and small farming village interesting day after day without resorting to artifice such as serial killers, deaths, rebirths, deaths again, science-fiction, murders, guns or sharks—

…That’s craftsmanship.

May not be literature or art, but it is storytelling.

More than I can say of the episodes of Buffy that I have been forced to watch by overeager fans of teenage girls stabbing at vampiric hunks with wooden dildoes.

Sharpened, wooden dildoes.

The only difference between Buffy and the garish, masturbation-pamphlets for the socially inept or underage called superhero comics (think X-men, before Grant Morrison got his hands on it), is that the latter is shifted like crack cocaine in seedy-alleys, by dirty people with foul body odours in dimly lit places that the police raids occasionally for porn and other illegal goods.

Both are pop-culture-garbage that can only maintain any sort of coherence in the mind of the viewer by relying on cacky biblical and mythological references and the sight of skimpily clad teenagers.

With the latter outweighing the former in almost every conceivable way.

(Just warming up for the Bristol Comics Festival I’ll be going to next week.)

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

Finances sort of sorted. Got a clear plan for the next couple of weeks and a couple of interesting projects going. New CAT walking shoes.

I love solid, good walking shoes. Rarely give in and buy them, though. This would be the second time in my life I’ve bought a pair.

Might not get the summer student loan I had hoped for (missed the deadline due to confusion on my part), so I’m certainly not living in a Panglossian paradise… but there is less stress all around which leaves me more mental space to write.

Been reading like a madman in the last three weeks. Started out by reading three books by Tom Holt (Here Comes the Sun, Odds and Gods, Falling Sideways).

All three are good, solid entertainment. Fun to read, with a bit of thought for that contemplative laugh towards the end. Stuff you read when you feel bad and plan to feel better.

Also read Isaac Asimov’s The Currents of Space. It was exactly like any other Asimov novel, and I mean that in a good way.

Then there was Philip José Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg… While I always find Farmer’s games with pulp fiction characters and concepts entertaining, this story was overshadowed by Alan Moore’s ingenious and more recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which plays around with some of the characers of that era in a much more cohesive and loving way.

Which is probably the reason why Hollywood insists on ruining things by adapting the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as what looks to be a misguided and most likely horrible movie (“it’s like… 19th century X-men, y’know”). If the trailer is any indication it will suffer from the usual Hollywood lack of any sort of subtlety.

I also borrowed Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men which was funny. It’s a 300 page long unsubstantiated, biased, slanted, simplistic and unfair piss-take. Funny, but still a piss-take.

The man gets a couple of laughs but if it’s sharp and witty political commentary I recommend you go and get some recordings of Richard Pryor’s old stand-up routines or some of Chris Rock’s. Both of them are everything that Michael Moore wants to be: Funny, relevant and enlightening.

I also read The George Sand—Gustave Flaubert Letters off the screen of my ibook, something that people think is impossible to do in a satisfying way (hint: pump the font size up to the wazoo and lean back into your chair).

Go read The George Sand—Gustave Flaubert Letters. The parallels between that correspondence thread and trackbacked weblog threads are more than coincidental.

Which leads me to a thought. Maybe, like the original letters, the weblogs today are not what the eventual cultural artifact will be?

Today, weblogs may be a social thing, social software and a whole host of other things that have nothing to do with storytelling.

But maybe in a couple of decades’ time we will be reading the Shelley Powers—Jonathon Delacour letters as a single, cohesive cultural artifact. Maybe as a hypertext. Or possibly interactive in some other sense. Or maybe not…

But it’d be good writing in any case.

Baldur Bjarnason. Clifton, Bristol.

Mark Bernstein writes in response to a New York Times rant on new media (more on that one later):

Any tool for creating computer mediated work will either be a programming tool, or it will be a crippled toy.

I can pretty much quarantee you that most people that disagree with this statement have never put together a medium to large-scale computer mediated project, have never earned a living putting together works like that (or teaching how to put those works together)…

… Or, more likely, they’re selling you something.

Flash is a half-way decent animation tool that used to be a broken toy when it comes to authoring computer media. It has gradually been turned into a schizophrenic programming/animation tool that happens to sort of preserve the sanity of both sides.

The graphic designers are lulled into a sense of security by having all of their usual vector-graphics drawing tools and layers built in.

But before they know it they’re using Flash’s fairly nice programming tools to put together Actionscript control statements and event handlers.

Director is another schizophrenic tool. But instead of being, like Flash, a loony of the “kindly, softly, gently” type (think James Stewart in “Harvey”), the schizo nature of Director evokes memories of Hannibal Lecter or Michael Myers of Halloween fame (the experience of long-term use being akin to crawling legless, still bleeding from your oozing stumps, over three kilometres of broken glass and rough sandpaper, only to be run over by a large truck two metres away from escaping).

Simply put, long term use of Director and Lingo leads only to the schorching pain of frustration, anger and desperation until you simply give up and let yourself sink down into the tarry pit of compromise and bug workarounds.

Sit down with Python or Ruby for a day and you’ll only return to Lingo under the threat of having your eyes plucked out and your frontal lobe fried to a formless stew.

And you might actually prefer having your eyes plucked out.

I hate Director and Flash is comparative sanity.

Director’s main problem is Lingo. As a language Lingo has to be one of the most haphazardly created language in history. Every release Macromedia slaps “feature of the day” onto the language with little thought about internal consistency or language coherence.

Even if Macromedia replaced Lingo tomorrow with a comphrehensive ECMAscript impementation (compatible with Actionscript) it would still mean that Director is just a more extensible Flash with Quicktime support, and without the XML support Flash has built in.

In the long term, though, what holds us back are not the bad tools or silly toys that the software companies think we want.

It’s fear.

Throughout the digital media field, everybody—from the enslaved students to the bankrupt producers—is frightened of code.

That mythical code.

Even just getting students to “view source” in a webbrowser, or to look at a simple stylesheet is practically impossible.

They think Dreamweaver represents all there is to web-design and that, citing Dreamweaver as evidence, web-design sucks.

They ask for help on the simplest problems if it involves Actionscript, not realising that if they just tried it would turn out to be much easier than the timeline-twiddling they are used to.

Even Director and Lingo aren’t rocket-science. (I just happen to hate the application, that’s all.)

Imagine trying to tell a group people who are frightened of code when Macromedia’s holding their hand that “y’know, pygame’s cool, and python’s xml features sound like exactly the thing you’re looking for.”

The look of horror when you tell them that they’d have to code

Followed by an immediate dismissal of the suggestion that it might actually be a bit easier than some of the stuff they are already doing.

I despair sometimes.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

I took a break from weblogging these last few days to think.

Last Sunday, as I returned home, still worrying about money and finances as usual, I found out about two posts that had linked to Gimlé in the last few hours. Both caused me to stop and think about what I have been doing with this weblog.

Been pondering on it—hence the silence.

First of all I read Jonathon’s reply to my nasty, vitriolic anti-everything rant and realised how much of an arsehole I’ve been here on this weblog.

It’s not a nice thing to wake up and realise that you’ve become one of those angry, argumentative and contrary internet pundits that pollute the web.

Also it finally sunk in how badly structured and horribly written most of my recent writing has been.

The second post to make me think was Dorothea Salo’s reply to my budding thoughts on this subject (namely: why am I writing this?).

She scribbles on her weblog because scribbling is one of those things she does.

Made me realise that I’ve been using this weblog as a soapbox (or pulpit) because being a loudmouth is one of the things I do.

Which is not at all what I had in mind when I started this weblog (public correspondence would be closer to the mark).

So I set about changing a few things.

I apologise to Jonathon, Stavros, Dorothea, Jeff Ward and others for being a git.

My friends would tell you that I tend to be a prat at times but a swift slap on the side of the head would usually do the trick of bringing me back to planet Civility (alternatively a short “Baldur, you’re bullshitting again” comment does the job as well).

So in the interest of making it easier for people online to remind me when I’m being an arsehole, I’ve added a comment facility, courtesy of Rael’s writeback plugin to his excellent blosxom weblogging system.

I’ve also changed the base URL for the weblog to http://www.unishade.com/gimle/ (although the old url should continue to work as well).

And I’ve installed John Gruber’s SmartyPants plugin for that added typographic touch I like so much.

So, fewer speeches and more thought and discussion.

I feel that I’ve come out of this week with a better handle on this weblogging thing but I’ll be damned if I can explain it coherently.

Do let me know if you find that something isn’t working on the site.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I don’t know how the rest of you do it but it seems that I only update this weblog when I’ve got something pointed to say.

Sometimes its something harsh and nasty. Sometimes just a sharp jab at something I find silly.

But the vast majority of the posts have a bit of a “bad vibe.” You can feel the negativity dripping off most posts.

It makes you think about people’s motivations. What gets you to post on your weblog? Is it when you see something really cool? Or when you have an idea and want to share it? Is it linked to specific events?

Or are you like me and primarily feel motivated when you read or see something you disagree with?

But today, the weather’s wonderful, life is good and I thought that I’d drop a note here on the site to add a mildly positive counterweight against this weblog’s general negativity.

The sun beckons.

Baldur.

There are, in my view, three kinds of theoretical writing.

1. Analysis and debate. Analyse an idea, story or event using all the theoretical and rhetorical tools available to you.

2. Bullshit mumbo-jumbo. Pie-in-the-sky intellectual masturbation. Everybody who’s been in academia has encountered this. I figure that it accounts for at the very least ninety per cent of academic writing. Others might be more generous.

3. Provocation. Overstate your position to such a degree that people will have argue with them.

The best example of 3. is Roland Barthe’s Death of the Author. Suddenly after a relatively short essay by Barthe’s, the whole focus of literary debate had shifted. By pushing against the boundaries Barthes had changed the goalposts and forced people to at least consider a new alternate point of view.

I’m so-so at 1. too good for my own health at 2. and enjoy writing 3. more than I should do. Although I don’t pretend to be as good at aggravating people into action as Barthes was.

It’s about wandering off into one direction, going as far as you can until you find a wall, leaning towards the wall and then pushing with all your might. “Death of the Blogger” was one such essay, good fun to write, pushed a particular point I believed in as far as I thought it would go.

The fact that it was not even more extreme just goes to show how conservative in these matters I really am.

Another example would be the “In So Many Other Ways”. As Jeff Ward rightfully points out it would be very hard to imagine language and culture separate in any shape or form. Which makes quite a few of the arguments and points in the essay rather suspect.

As language is the carrier of culture it is downright impossible to find out where one ends and the other starts.

But anybody who thinks that language and culture are autonomous things is very badly mistaken. Culture and language are human products. They are by definition affected by human actions. And many cultures are fighting for their survival these days.

Unless you suppose that language laws, word councils, name laws, dubbing, legally mandated translations, word and language quotas, subtitling by fiat, film funds that only fund films made in the national language, strict teaching laws, language officers that read through every single script for every single radio show…

… must all be some sort of quaint European custom.

There is a cultural war going on. The winners’ cultures get to stay alive.

It is fairly likely, if the current trends continue, that Europe in two hundred years will be a Europe with only six or seven languages. The number of languages in Europe that went extinct in the nineteenth and twentieth century is frightening.

The reason why Icelanders and the Icelandic authorities behave as if the Icelandic language is under siege is simple.

It is under siege and losing simply isn’t an option.

Kinda puts a slant on how you view all these linguistic and cultural debates. I’ll be damned if I’ll let people continue to believe that language and culture are these symbiotic autonomous juggernauts that waltz over foreign cultures “just because.”

If you drive a car and run over a baby, you don’t put the SUV in chains and plonk it in solitary confinement.

No, you put the driver in the slammer.

A healthy respect of foreign cultures and domestic minority cultures in the American and English public would go a long way towards changing the slant in the English language culture. Even today the enlightened academics I work with, who are around foreign students every day of the week, treat foreign cultures in the same way you’d treat a friends’ new, cute pet doggie.

“Oh, really! How nice. I’ve always thought that those fairy tales of yours are soooooo charming.”

And I won’t repeat the vitriolic things some of them say about the Welsh language.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.