I just finished it. It’s called the Dice Word List book, and here is what it looks like:
It’s basically the book I’ve wanted every time I make a password with dice, and it’s not just a printout of the text file—it has some nice touches that make word lookups fast and enjoyable. (The book’s website explains all of this, so I won’t repeat it here.)
Producing this book was a middle doll somewhere inside my endless matryoshka doll of automated book-making; there were further projects inside it, which I describe in more technical detail in this post at The Notepad. Most importantly, I was able to write and publish a scripting library called bookcover
, which gives me a way to create print-ready book covers programmatically, rather than by clicking around in a graphics editor. When I do finally start publishing my sites as books, I’ll be able to do clever things with the covers of those books that I would never have had the patience to do manually.
I, a barely non-teenaged autodidact, found Dean Allen’s web projects Cardigan Industries and Textism while surfing public library computers sometime around the early 2000s. Everything he wrote sparkled, looked effortless, wasted nothing, inspired you, made you jealous, left you wanting more. Blog posts and essays, sure; but also (I later found) quick emails. Notes in support forums. Photo captions.
“For godsake just read his old About page. It’s so good, and so Dean.”
— John Gruber
Dean released his custom web publishing kit, Textpattern, in 2004, and it was like a little juice-shot into the sweet spot between my left and right hemisponges. Tinkering with that little piece of software taught me a dozen skills that bent the later arc of my career, and a lot about what was possible on the web. But this other thing happened, too: suddenly a little community of web-curious men and women condensed out of thin air around Dean and this thing he had made for us. Suddenly we could see and talk to each other; we found we were many, we had a lot to share, we were all over the globe. And we were Dean’s new best friends! Many of us are still in touch, or at least checking in on each other, fourteen years later. Dean started a web hosting company: many of us followed him there, chipping in for lifetime accounts and arguing or joking around on the forums.
I never met Dean in person. Imagine if you got to hang out with Stephen King or Kenny Loggins online, and three times in your life they dropped you a note to say you were cool. I wrote a short Textpattern explainer, and Dean responded, which by itself was probably enough to addict me to the rush of Writing Things That People Find Helpful; that he was so complimentary just about made my month. For fun once, I made a corny website (using Textpattern); Dean’s unsolicited signature on the guestbook is reason number one out of three reasons I refuse to change the site at all. When I first signed up with TextDrive, he chipped me a short email:
Joel,
Great to see you.
-dca
I’ve been thinking about what these memories means for me (maybe us) now. Here are a few notions, intentions, self-admonitions, still floating top-of-mind after a few days.
For God’s sake, Stay In Touch. I miss those years, and the community that we had together. Dean attracted some damn fine people. I’ve had a tendency to think, well, I miss those times, but those times are over. And now that we’re all popping out again to remember Dean, it’s clear our isolation is something we can end. We can be together if we decide to be.
I can’t bring that community back or hold it together or anything, but here’s what I can do: I can mute my fatalism and continue to stay in touch, keep the door open, open to that group, open to new groups.
A good way to stay in touch is: Keep Blogging. As the years went on and Dean’s sites decayed, I thought, maybe he’s just doing what Mark Pilgrim did. Maybe he’s just sick of fussy buggy computers and has found that he can live his best life only be going completely offline forever. Then I got married, had kids, and blogging became a real chore. Almost everyone else stopped blogging, too. I thought (very often I thought this), maybe Mark Pilgrim and Dean Allen had the right idea: maybe there’s a liberation that comes with erasing everything you ever wrote or made.
Now Dean is the gone kind of gone, and many of his friends and readers are kind of scrambling to revisit and hopefully preserve everything he ever wrote (more on this in a bit). If he hadn’t blogged, most of us would never have known him — or each other! Because he did blog, we have him still with us in a way that is, maybe, new to human experience.
Writing on your own site feels lonely these days. I have a bit of new hope that it doesn’t have to feel that way if enough of us are inspired to Keep In Touch (i.e., dig out our RSS readers as well as our keyboards). But also: even if it stays lonely, I’m going to keep doing it, because Dean’s writing — meaning, even just his simple aspiration-free practice of jotting and sharing his daily dog pics — shows me that, done with any consideration and heart, it is a Good that can’t help but help.
Be your whole self online. One thing about blogging, as opposed to clipping words into a stream of status updates, is that it gives you room to be your political self (say) without collapsing the rest of you out of sight. Dean’s politics were pretty clear to anyone who read him, and he was no stranger to the polemic, but he let himself be more than his politics, to such an extent that people who disagreed with his politics (including myself at the time) were happy to congregate together around him.
Maybe when we each have our own spaces to think and express ourselves, and when we Stay In Touch mainly by checking in on each other’s spaces, we do better at thinking together.
Politics (e.g.) are important. But, thanks in part to my experience with Dean and people at TextDrive, I can see that being inclusive, allowing ourselves to be and see more than our politics, happens to be good for our politics. The fact that they took this approach, and looked past my freshman twerpisms, was helpful for me at the time, and a factor in several changes-of-mind down the road.
If you’re so inclined, if you are able to pursue it: make the whole soup from scratch. One of the things that made Dean so cool to learn from was that he Did Everything, and he didn’t do it by halves. He made the words. He designed the layout and the typography. He took photographs. He made the code to publish the words and the photographs with the typography and the layout. He was an expert in every separate skill. He built tools to create, he shared his creations, and then he shared the tools, too. Then, he roasted the chicken.
This approach, of taking control of every detail of what you make, appealed to me quite a lot. It was a triumph of aesthetic magnetism, but it also made me curious and hungry to learn. That curiosity inevitably brought me into good company — and we touched off some of the same reactions in each other. So again it comes back to the people connections.
It takes a rare, magick constellation of time/space/energy/mentality to pursue even one creative skill, let alone several.
If you do have this opportune combination, use it. Even if it just feels like you’re using it for yourself, it has juice for others that you probably can’t see. Be patient.
If you know someone who wants to have and use it, help them.
But mostly: if you used to have it and don’t anymore, just know that whatever you made when you had it it still has value to someone.
Which brings me to…
Find ways to preserve your writing for each other. Give some thought to making it so that your writing will outlast you, that others can still have it when you’re done with it.
This is just an extension of Staying In Touch.
For those of you who used to read Textism, think how lovely it would be to have it in paperback. At the very least, John Gruber says maybe they can find a way to republish it online.
I started a project (a very whole-soup project) to do this kind of preservation for my own writing, and was able to resume working on it in November. My approach won’t be the practical one for most (maybe it would work for you though?). But please, think about it, in general. Look around for ways and tools to do it. If you find a way to make it easier, please share it. I will do what I can as well.
]]>— James
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>I tend to write poems very fast, and I tend to not revise them very much. The thing about writing a poem compared to writing a book — I mean obviously, it’s not as long as a book — is that there’s a moment where the poem is finished, and it’s really addictive moment: the poem suddenly snaps shut like a locket and you can’t do any more to it, because it has its own internal workings, like a watch, and it stops letting you do anything to it — it becomes this object on its own, and it’s really exciting when that happens. So I’d write the poem and then start to tinker around with it until it starts to work by itself, and then I just let it go.
This feels exactly right, not only for the few times I’ve written a poem, but for the experience of reading or hearing poetry. When a poem gives that clicking-shut sensation every time you read it, you’ve found a very good one.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>But it doesn’t have to be this hard to talk about. The path to a distributist economy is plain. It’s hard — maybe even ultimately indefensible — but come on! it’s at least straight-forward.
The Goal is that everyone have private ownership of some property that allows them to make their own living — and that everyone actually make their own living from their own property and labour. So how do you get there?
I’m just spitballing here. There’s probably more you could do. But if you want to convert a capitalist economy to a distributist one, this is how you start. I’m not going to defend each of these moves in this post — I don’t even personally support them as a set — except to say that any self-described distributist ought to be able to defend any one of them as a means of getting us to The Distributist Goal.
But this also makes clear why present-day distributists have a hard time writing clearly about how to implement their pet framework. It’s not just because it’s hard to get people to understand the idea of a third way between Capitalism and Communism (although it is very hard). It’s also because Distributism involves moves that most modern distributists, for various reasons, cannot stomach. It’s much safer and more comfortable to talk about Chesterton and Pope Leo XIII and the precedents of medieval economies than it is to propose anything that would begin, in 2016, to actually accomplish what you say you want.
]]>The present invention solves the problem by detecting the simultaneous occurrence of the cursor and a character at the same location and then accentuating that location by alternately tracing the cursor symbol and the character symbol. Thus, both the character symbol and the normal character over which it appears are displayed at normal intensity only one-half the time. The alternate appearance of the two symbols causes the position to assume a blinking appearance.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>Finally, the wind on Sunday was not an ice wind. In the afternoon, I placed myself in a lawn chair and found I could sit still, and read, without at all shivering. There were no cars on the road either, not by my yard, not on the nearby freeway. I could imagine we lived in a small town, and that I was not poor or rich. The air had the tang of smoke and soft dirt. The sun was so much in my eyes that being really upset with anyone was out of the question.
]]>We did make some progress since the first post, though. My goal was to be done with the framing by 2016, and I made the goal with about nine hours to spare.
Framing a basement is tedious business, especially when working alone. In general, first I had to build soffits around all the ducts in the ceiling, then I could build my walls around the soffits. But sometimes I’d have to build a particular wall before I could build a nearby soffit, and vice versa. It’s like building a three-dimensional puzzle — one in which all the pieces start out invisible.
The thing I dislike the most about framing in basements is the problem of fastening the bottom plate of each wall to the concrete floor. I’m convinced the universe notices when you’re attempting to do this and makes sure no single method will continue to work longer than an hour or two. I have a Ramset gun that fires fasteners into the concrete with .22 caliber gunpowder charges. This worked well for the first four walls, until the fasteners began bending and blowing out patches of concrete. Finally I bought some 2.5″ Tapcon screws and a set of concrete bits, and stole—er, borrowed my Dad’s hammer drill, and from then on I had to pre-drill the concrete in every place where I’d need to fasten a wall plate.
There are a lot of little blocks and cross-pieces that need to be installed, and most of them had to be pre-drilled and fastened with screws to avoid splitting the ends.
This was the year I finally bothered to learn the proper way to frame the corner on an angled wall. I wish I’d known this when I framed the rest of the house — the second floor in particular has several of these corners.
On the recommendation of neighbors, I hired Huber Plumbing to do the rough plumbing in the 3/4 bath, the ducting for the exhaust fan, and the forced-air supplies/returns for the rec room and bedroom. The drainage piping for this bathroom had already been laid back before we poured the foundation in 2008, otherwise I doubt I’d even be attempting to put a bathroom in down here. These guys finished up in a day and a half, scheduled and passed their inspections.
This photo shows just about all the waste from the project so far (except for a couple gallons of sawdust I’d already vacuumed up). You will typically hear that you should add 10% to a materials order to account for waste, but on a framing project this small I thought I ought to be able to get closer than that. So I just tried to estimate the actual material needed. It wouldn’t get me LEED-certified or anything, but for I thought I did pretty well. The remaining long pieces are very crooked and bowed (typical Menards; you get what you pay for). I highly recommend the use of a leaf bag for tossing small waste as you go: it stands up on its own and takes up less space than a garbage bin.
Next steps will be to do the electrical work and inspection, the rough framing inspection, sound-proofing, and drywall.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>Just this afternoon thanks to a Robinson Meyer tweet I was introduced to the poem Janus: Sonnet by one John M. Ford. Sonnets by themselves are hard to do well, but this is one of those poems that turns the genius level up to eleven. Not only does Ford weave some subtle and vivid truth into the standard sonnet form (an intricate job by itself), but he builds in an additional device that, when you see it, will astonish you.
If you understand what “Janus” refers to, you should be able to teach yourself how to read the sonnet. When you find Ford’s trick, you will understand the poem.
But it gets more interesting. Because Graham Sleight responded with another example of Ford’s genius: another smashing sonnet that he left as a comment on someone’s blog — !?! A later commenter notes, “This is, after all, the man who won a World Fantasy Award for a poem he wrote for his own self-published Christmas card.” (He has one several such awards, though I haven’t been able to figure out which one was being referenced here.)
Here, then, it seems we have a kind of Banksy of poetry, leaving little threads and tuns of treasure everywhere, not just in print but all throughout these quiet old places on the web that have just been sitting there for ten or fifteen or twenty years now.
]]>Here it is in its current, unfinished state:
This is some poor photography but it allows you to see a few of the project’s distinguishing features.
We’re hoping to have most of this project (except for the bathroom) complete by Christmas time so visiting kin can make use of it. That might be tough with the baby due in a month but we have a shot at it.
]]>The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.
You can’t count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. You have to know this.
…If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.
I can envision only one sort-of-practical way the web can be “preserved” in any meaningful sense of the word: a giant microfiche archive with a card index. Yes, it would be inconvenient to use. It’s also the only option likely to be useable at all in 100 years.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>What if, in addition to responding to 200s, 404s, 401 (unauthorized), 403 (forbidden), and 405 (not allowed), web browsers made it possible for sites to send the nascent 402 HTTP response code: Payment Required. The spec says this code is reserved for future use. Friends, I’m here to tell you that we’re living in the future, and it’s time to figure this out.
Humphrey gets several things right here. He draws the comparison between the “normal” web and proprietary markets like Amazon and Netflix, showing that users are happy to pay directly for content if the price is right and if paying is easy and trustworthy — and he understands that in order for us to accomplish this on the web, we need to build support for it into the browser itself.
The biggest rough patch for me was his concept sketch for a blog post demanding a payment, which could probably use some re-thinking:
This is exactly the kind of scenario I was trying to avoid when developing my own concept for web payments. For one thing, people don’t want a tin cup shaken in their faces every time they visit a daddy blog or a news article. For another, the real value of a pageview on an “independent food blog” is probably closer to $0.0015 than $0.15; direct web payments need to enable transactions at these kinds of price levels just as the ad market does for advertisers. Finally, payments should be voluntary (on the reader’s part) and price levels should be suggested. Ideally I’d be able to tell my browser to take a fixed dollar amount and divy it up between all the sites I visit every month based on visit frequency and suggested prices.
All things considered, though, I’m really glad more people are thinking along these lines. Spread the word.
]]>We stopped by The Book House last night where I thought I might find a Frost-approved translation of Kristin Lavransdatter (see previous note and no, they didn’t have one, and yes I checked and everyone else agrees with Matt about the translation thing). Instead I found Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the ‘new arrivals’ section. This will be my next lunch break book.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>Found this old copy of Kristin Lavransdatter available for $25.00 at James and Mary Laurie Booksellers in Minneapolis. Another classic I haven’t read yet. I seemed to recall Matt Frost likes to reference it, so I twote at him asking for advice. His response:
No, the older translation is no good. Get the Penguin editions, translated by Tina Nunnally.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>In 1921, a Canadian lieutenant by the name of Buster Brown drafted “Defence Scheme No. 1.” Despite “defense” in the title, it was “a full-on invasion plan,” according to Kevin Lippert, the author of War Plan Red… In the end, he proposed a five-pronged attack. In the west, Canadian troops would take Seattle and Portland. In the east, the Quebecois would occupy Albany. Maine would be reclaimed, as would the Great Lakes. In the Midwest, Brown’s plan called for “Prairie Command” to swing through Fargo and then head south to invade Minneapolis and St. Paul.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>Now: what do you call a person who publishes or packages paragraphs, stories and essays?
Listen carefully. I’m not talking about an editor. I’m not talking about a book designer or a web designer. I’m talking about a person who enjoys the activity of packaging and producing words in the same way that the writer enjoys writing words. This person’s interest probably includes things like editing, book design, typography, web design — even writing! — but is not limited to any one of them.
We have no ready word for this person. My first instinct is to call them ‘publishers’. This doesn’t work very well, because it suggests a whole commercial concern, not an individual enthusiast, but I’ll stick with it for now.
I’d call myself a ‘publisher’ in this sense of ‘publishing enthusiast.’ For a time I thought of myself mostly as a writer because I like writing. But in an amateur way I got quite caught up in all these other things as well — coding and typography and podcasting — because writing by itself isn’t where the juice is for me. The juice for a ‘publisher’ is in the design of the whole system for packaging words, distributing them, presenting them. It’s the Screech principle applied not just to the writing, but to all the corners, surfaces and edges of the vehicle of writing: whatever I can learn or invent to make the word not just acceptable, but lovely — I do so. Or at least, it's what I do for kicks in my spare time.
We don’t talk about publishing-as-amateur-pursuit because we don’t have the words for it. We probably don’t have those words because it wasn’t feasible as an individual pursuit until recently (yay computers), and because its activity is usually blended with the activity of writing. But now that the tools are everywhere, the pursuit is there.
A writing enthusiast can hope to make it as a proper writer — to get some recognition for their work, to earn a living at it. But as a publishing enthusiast I don’t know what to do with my interests; there is no cultural or economic market for them. Publishers end up as inveterate yak shavers and one-man bands performing in their own driveways. Our ingrained preference to control all levels of design, and the facility which computers give us for doing so, tend to preclude us from cross-pollinating and collaborating, which for most of us is a big developmental hazard.
]]>Now: what do you call a person who publishes or packages paragraphs, stories and essays?
]]>New Pollen tutorial: how to generate multiple outputs (e.g., HTML, plain text, LaTeX, and PDF) from one source file http://t.co/FEjq6bRv14
— Matthew Butterick (@mbutterick) September 1, 2015
I tweeted earlier today that this is probably the best web/writing news of the summer, if not the year. Yes, that’s subjective. But anyhow, let me explain why I think it’s great.
For at least a few years now I’ve been trying to figure out how a good way to generate a web site and a print-ready PDF book from the same source document (because reasons). Before Pollen, the best route seemed to be: write the documents in Markdown, and then use a tool like Pandoc to convert that source to HTML and to PDF (via LaTeX).
The biggest problem is that Markdown is not actually great as a source format. Yes, it’s readable. Markdown documents, being plain text, can have a good shelf life. But in practice it’s just not very smart, and no one agrees on how to educate it. For example, suppose you want to specify a class for an image, so that it floats right. Markdown doesn’t provide a way to do this. Some variants of it have added support for it, but no one agrees on what syntax should be used. Whatever variant you pick, you better hope that your whole toolchain supports it (in the future as well as now). Just about every editor and processor and previewer out there supports their own 92% of what you need from Markdown and they each pick a different 8% to leave out. As an author, you really have no facility for doing things the way you’d like. Brett Terpstra has some good advice for coping with this, but it basically boils down to “keep your source documents as simple as possible to avoid running afoul of incompatibilities.” I say boo to that.
To use a graphics analogy, using Markdown as a source format for web and print is like creating art as a GIF and then trying to upscale to SVG.
Pollen offers a completely different way of doing things:
Here’s an example excerpt of one of my documents in Pollen:
#lang pollen
◊(define-meta title "Two Voices in a Meadow")
◊(define-meta doc-publish-date "25/08/2015")
◊(define-meta author "Richard Wilbur")
◊margin-note{
In ◊hyperlink["http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/wilbur/
imageinterview.htm"]{an interview}, he said "the milkweed's speech is
indeed written in one of my voices and was used for the sister's funeral in
a genuine and appropriate way. But the other voice --- the 'slob' voice of
the stone, is also one of my voices."
}
◊verse{◊poem-heading{A Milkweed}
Anonymous as cherubs
Over the crib of God,
White seeds are floating
Out of my burst pod.
What power had I
Before I learned to yield?
Shatter me, great wind:
I shall possess the field.}
The ◊tags
above are all functions I write. The ◊verse
tag is a good example of an advantage of Pollen over Markdown, because Markdown has no facility for typesetting poetry (at least, none for setting it differently than source code). For now I’ve defined my ◊verse
tag to place its contents inside a <pre class="verse">
tag which I can style with CSS. Someday I might find or need a different way to structure poetry in HTML; if so, I can simply edit the function and regenerate the site, likely without having to change the source documents at all. Another good example is YouTube embeds. I could create a ◊video
tag that would take a YouTube ID and use their latest embed code. When YouTube changes I can update my code to match, the tag remains the same.
Pollen was compelling enough when HTML output was all it did. But as of today, you can specify multiple targets for your documents, and code the output behaviour for each. This means I could take a bunch of files like the one above and generate a web page, and a book-ready PDF, and a plain-text (dumbed down) Markdown version. If my requirements for any one of those target formats should ever change, I simply edit my Pollen code. The document itself can remain unchanged.
There are other things you could do, too. With some programming and some text-to-speech facilities, you could include .mp3
files as a target, and auto-generate an RSS feed, thus making everything you publish in written form into an automatic podcast as well.
With Pollen I finally have a tool I can use to publish to multiple formats where I have complete control over both the source markup and the finished result. Of course, you have to learn LISP programming to make full use of it, which is kind of daunting, but I’m having fun doing so.
]]>[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>On his site, Kiener states “This theory was first put forward by Paul Janet in 1897” but does not directly offer a source. This piqued my curiosity, so I emailed Kiener to ask about it. He very kindly replied that he had read it in an article by Steve Taylor for New Dawn Magazine: The Speed of Life: Why Time Seems to Speed Up and How to Slow it Down. Taylor writes:
This theory seems to have been first put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that, as William James describes it, “the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man’s life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life – a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.”
He also quotes Janet as saying:
“Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.”
Taylor is quoting from chapter 15 of William James’s The Principles of Psychology, which in turn gives the source of the Janet quotes as the Revue Philisophique, vol III p. 496.
[The above is a note added to an earlier post…]
]]>