The Local Yarn

∞ · Thu Jan 16, 2014

I first published Taming of the Tigger on this site fourteen years ago; today, I posted the first comment on that page. It’s not the first time something like that has happened, but it’s probably the most extreme example.¹ I mention it because it offers occasion to take another stab at describing my pet alternative model for online writing and commenting.

There are a couple of sites that used this model before I did, but the prime example is Edward Tufte’s online forum/blog, ET Notebooks. Each of the posts (check out, for example, the post about Philisophical Diamond Signs) has the same basic two features:

1. The writing style of the opening material, which usually takes the form of an illustration of an isolated concept (vs. laying out arguments in essay form).
2. The comments (both from ET and from readers) which accumulate immediately after the opening material. Comments are cherry-picked and heavily moderated based on how well each adds its own self-contained substance to the thoughts already collected.

The result looks very different from a normal blog post, and also feels a lot heftier in terms of “signal strength.” The point of this model is that, when done properly (and when the writing justifies it), it allows each page to become its own little reading room, a long-term collector of related information. The timing doesn’t matter: comments can have equal value whether they are added ten minutes or ten years after the publication date.

I took inspiration from this model when I enabled comments on The Local Yarn in 2011. I don’t have the readership needed to attract a high level of participation at this point, but that’s the beauty of the ET Notebooks model: each page² feels complete and self-contained whether there are fifty comments, or two, or none.

It would, I suppose, be more ideal if more of the comments were submitted by readers (as in Plans of the Psyche, which is so far the best result produced by this experiment in terms of what I envisioned for reader participation). But even when I look back on an old post like Water the Transcendent Lens, which (as of this writing) has three comments, all written by myself, I still think the model works well.

I’ll be continuing to use this model on this site, digging up years-old posts and adding notes to them as occasion warrants.

∞ · Tue Jan 14, 2014 · 1 Notes

This piece by Alison Milbank is well worth reading, and will do more to inform your perception of both Christmas and The Hobbit than two thirds of the articles out there about either one, but I’m going to zoom in on just this bit here:

And like the Christmas burglar and chimney invader, Santa Claus, he is a distributor and gift-giver. For The Hobbit takes us modern capitalists — and Bilbo too with his formal contract — on a journey into more ancient economic models of exchange, in which society operates through the giving and receiving of gifts. […] Bilbo himself is offered huge amounts of treasure but accepts only as much as one pony can carry, and then proceeds to donate jewels as he travels. Once home again in Bag End, he spends the rest in presents too. Tolkien makes all this central to hobbit society, in which one gives as well as receives presents on one’s birthday.

The answer to dragon-sickness is not just simple generosity but giving as a mode of exchange, which unites donor and recipient, and which prompts reciprocity. Tolkien unites here gift-exchange practices of traditional societies with the Distributist political vision of his own day, which sought a more equal and just society not by removing private property but by distributing it as widely as possible.

— The Gift Half Understood: Tolkien and the the Riddle of Christmas

The notion of a society based around gift-giving is immediately appealing to me, and as a defining characteristic of Bilbo and of Hobbits it certainly rings true. That said, I have two doubts: first, is an economic model based around gifts really workable? Secondly, is this really a Distributist idea?

As to the first, gift-giving doesn’t seem like a great centerpiece for an economy, because of the “deadweight loss” problem: material gifts have a high risk of being worth less to their recipients than an equivalent amount of cash¹. It would also become tedious as a continuous way of life, unless we as a culture could settle on certain kinds of acceptable “default” gifts that would be universally appropriate, and which had practical value (I can see various kinds and arrangements of food possibly fitting the bill here).

I would genuinely love to read any sources regarding these “ancient economic models of exchange, in which society operates through the giving and receiving of gifts”; a few footnotes on the alluded-to history would have been nice.

Finally, Milbanks links this idea with Distributism, “which sought a more equal and just society not by removing private property but by distributing it as widely as possible.” I have to say this is not quite the whole story; Distributism is mainly concerned with wealth-producing property — land, money, tools of trade — and not so much with stuff. A society isn’t any more Distributist just because its people are constantly exchanging doodads as courtesy-tokens; it might even be less so.

It’s lovely to think of Bilbo spreading the wealth as he returns home from Erebor, but I seem to recall that, most of the time, when Hobbits give gifts, they are giving away trinkets, party favours and baubles, not money or items of real value.

That said, there is one good real-world example of all this that comes to mind, and that is the culture of the Midwestern farming community². You could very well say that, among the family farms, at least, there is a culture based around giving and receiving gifts — in the form of favors and loans of time & equipment. They always seem to be doing things for each other, giving and accepting assistance as a basic way of living, to a degree that would cause acute embarrasment in most urban communities; and it works out really well for everyone involved.

Continue reading…

∞ · Sun Jan 12, 2014

It sounds unpleasant, but sitting in the coffee shop the other afternoon I caught a glimpse of the coming day, when coffee shops would be old hat, something that old people do out of habit, like going to Perkins. I felt myself already an old man but aware of his youth, like I was a black and white photo on the wall of someone who has already said his piece. Myself is one thing, but it’s not just me, it’s all of us. Look at the girls in the corner talking with each other over their lattes. They may still be there in fifty years, when Starbucks is the new Perkins, an ancient franchise hanging on in leftover parts of town, playing frowsy music, while their granddaughters – do what, I don’t know, probably don’t see the point of going out anywhere at all. Not living the present, but remembering it as though it had already happened fifty years ago; when I was twelve, I was as old as I will ever be in my whole life, I hope.

∞ · Fri Jan 3, 2014

I had just had my coffee when it was six thirty in the morning. The arm of my jacket sticking out from the closet, pinched in the door, no longer signified anything. It was just the arm of my jacket.

The headlights of cars leaving for work played around our kitchen and dining room walls like theatre spotlights during a shipwreck scene, and then the sun was up. The Christmas tree stood upright at the end of the driveway, waiting to be picked up by the garbage man. My scarf very nearly saved my life that morning.

∞ · Fri Dec 27, 2013

The very old typeface Computer Modern was designed in 1978, and was last updated in 1992. Which is to say, it evolved during the Precambrian period of digital typography.

And now, Computer Modern has a web version, so you can use it on your site.

There are a few good reasons why you might want to do this:

• Your audience is mostly academic people used to publishing theses and journal articles with LaTeX (which has used CM as its default typeface since the 1970s)
• Technological anachronisms for their own sake are your thing
• You are thinking of changing your site’s default typeface from Times New Roman but still want to keep things pretty generic.

Serious question: is there any work for which Computer Modern is supremely appropriate — keeping in mind that we are now almost in the year 2014? Practically the first thing I did when I started using LaTeX for book publishing was to find a way to use something besides Computer Modern, or any of the other included TeX fonts.

I can appreciate that it has a sound technical implementation and was a critical part of Knuth’s master plan. What I haven’t found are any thorough defenses of it as a timeless example of great type design.

∞ · Mon Dec 23, 2013 · 2 Notes

I read Prominent Blogger Jason Kottke’s piece about the death of blogs, and I admit I was kinda bummed about it. Suspicion: your passion is yesterday’s news, and everyone else has moved on to other things. Quibbles with Prominent Blogger’s piece notwithstanding, the mere fact that he wrote it is like writing on the sky: Suspicion Confirmed. Bloggerton is no longer a boom town. Gravel roads from here on out, folks.

It fits well with Alex Wild’s famous quote that he made up twenty hours ago:

Being a naturalist in the 21st century is like being an art enthusiast in a world where an art museum burns to the ground every year.

— For ‘naturalist’, substitute ‘personal publishing enthusiast’. See what I mean? Sadness.

Then, this morning, I read a lovely post by Prominent Designer Frank Chimero.

Folks, we’re going to have a new neighbor. Merry Christmas.

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∞ · Mon Dec 23, 2013 · 1 Notes

John Gruber talks about one of podcasting’s unsolved problems:

What’s the biggest problem with podcasts, in general? I have one specific gripe, and it applies to almost every podcast I’m aware of, and it’s the lack of transcripts. For a couple of reasons: one, for me selfishly, wouldn’t it be great to have a searchable archive of all the shows that I’ve done? … and then the other big thing would be, it’d be Google-searchable by everybody else, not just me…

— The Talk Show, Dec 13, 2013, @5:57 mark

He’s right: podcasts aren’t text. You can’t search them or scan them.

This daydream of Gruber’s is one shared by many web publishers: to give every recording a text equivalent that can be indexed and searched and infused with Google-juice. Maybe that would be nice; podcasts could become full-fledged citizens of the web again, instead of the distant satellites they are now.

An even more important consideration, though, is durability. Historically, text has a far higher long-term survival rate than recorded audio. Every book or magazine ever printed can still be read; but every radio broadcast ever recorded is trapped inside a tape. The same is true of digital text and audio. Any text you put on the web, no matter how casual or insignificant, is granted eternal life pretty much by default — you don’t even have to give a thought to preserving it. And even text that predates the web has a good chance of getting broomed into an online collection somewhere. The same is not true of recorded audio. Because audio isn’t searchable, the vast archival machines of the web ignore it altogether.

At some point, voice recognition will improve to the point where it can make perfect transcriptions from recordings of casual conversations, even to the point of distinguishing between speakers, and then folks like Gruber can have their cake and eat it too: zero-preparation podcasts and complete transcripts.¹ Almost no one will read any one transcript, because a zero-prep podcast is usually fish-wrap after a few weeks. But as a whole, the “long tail” of artifacts made by podcasters and broadcasters has great future value; textifying them would keep them around in useful form long enough to realize it.

Meanwhile: podcasts that actually have some preparation put into them already have plenty of accompanying text. Because preparation means organizing your thoughts, and that means writing, which means text. Whether you’re concerned about utility or durability, the best way to ensure either is still to put some care and craft into your work.

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