I like my new supernaut so much that I just want to write stuff here. It’s like Twitter on Blog. Shall continue on those bottles of wine. (#drunkwhileblogging)
Category Archives: internet
More or less done … all over but the screaming o…
Status
More or less done … all over but the screaming of editing the database by hand. (sure to find horridness though…)
A bit less of a Mess
Aside
Slight progression. Post formats work (as an aside, I am an aside). Different footers for single post pages. Discovering the horrible tension between ‘child theme’ and writing ugly hacks to cripple the parent.
Shall go and do proper work now.
A bit of a Mess, (continued)
Aside
… supernaut has been one-columnised. Most of the index page is done. Older stuff is broken (Oh! Images, why do you hate me?). Things have been lost/misplaced/sorted into piles for later use or discarding. Looking forward to hand-grepping the database.
(This is trying to be an aside but breaks things … Trying to use supernaut differently.)
A bit of a Mess, Really …
I was planning on slowly flopping supernaut over to a newer look … well, mostly the same old look but wrapped around WordPress’ default theme, so I could a) take advantage of all the fun new things like post formats, b) deal with some irritations of having slung supernaut through two or three platforms (WordPress, MovableType, and I think something else), and the general cruft of 8 years blogging and z) just because …
Slowly became quick because supernaut got hacked again. Not looking at you, DreamHost, too hard, but it’s getting kind of irritating lately. It’s probably not the very old theme supernaut is running on which is responsible for this, but having looked through the logs, gah! Keine ahnung!
So I swapped over to the new theme early. Severely unfinished. Much mess everywhere. Embarrassment? Yes! It’s going to take a long time before it looks all proper, like.
And this post was written using the Aside new post format. More of a Status really.
Fuck it, I’ve got six opened bottles of wine by me feet and a … what am I doing sitting all alone in the darkness in Alte Kantine Wedding?
Reading (2nd Time): Charles Stross — Rule 34
The first time I read Charles Stross’ Rule 34, I wasn’t writing about why I read certain books. So, taking a break from the recent binge of non-fiction before I plunged into the next cycle, I returned to some favourites, or rather some science-fiction I haven’t read three or four times.
I read Charles Stross because he is intelligent, bitingly witty, and one of the only science-fiction writers who manages to write about (very-) near-futurism without either sounding like a Boy’s Own tech blog or being embarrassingly out of date upon publication (both fates have simultaneously befallen two other writers I used to enjoy hugely, and are now departed from my reading list).
Along with Iain (M. or otherwise) Banks, and China Miéville, I have his upcoming books firmly in my reading list, partly because of the above, and also because all three of them take the subordinate place of women in society seriously and consciously write to address this. Charles also has one of my favourite blogs.
As for Rule 34, yes, definitely worth the second read, though I’m still slightly confused by the implications of the ending — which is to say, I’ll probably read it again just to grasp this better.
charles stross – rule 34thingswithbits updates itself
I’ve never been so taken by my design website, in respect to design having been thrown into a free template, and in respect to its purpose. On Friday evening, having just finished something or other, I thought perhaps I could just throw it into the template I use for francesdath.info, and had an idea I could use various images of various websites and so on as background.
Some enjoyable coding working out how to link the full-screen background image gallery code into WordPress using custom fields met with disappointment when I discovered the design idea in my head looked fairly crap in a browser.
Not one to shy away from excessive minimalism, I kept cutting things back until I was left with a large swathe of white and a single list on the far left. When I did the redesign for supernaut, (I forget when, I think early 2005 in Taipei), I was slightly afraid of the emptiness I’d uncovered. It was as if I’d taken a rococo edifice and levelled it until only the masonry remained. It’s an approach I tend to apply to choreographing also; I’m partial to an evening of killing one’s babies, it’s just the aftermath that makes me anxious.
So, thingswithbits.info has become perhaps an un-website, I feel slightly embarrassed to say. It’s intentionally empty, though without being a placeholder.
Now with three main websites, there is still a gap. I’ve been doing more photography in the last two years since getting a very good small camera, and yet this doesn’t fit into any of the sites. It may be that thingswithbits has to die so that it can be more inclusive. For now though, it’s at least a site of mine I no longer feel is the unmentionable one (which is good, considering it’s my work).
Was it something I said? (or, supernaut blocked in China)
I noticed a few weeks ago that traffic from China was low — single digits low instead of being in the top three countries for visitors. Even then I was fairly certain the cause. Today I was again reminded of this anomaly, so sent a message to a 广州人 who replied almost immediately, “yes, blocked on my end”.
A pity, really. I liked that supernaut was read in China, that all my writings on living there, on culture, politics, artists, dancers, places had some small (tiny) return.
Anyway, here’s a picture of a grass mud horse.
草泥马 cao ni maDaniel Schlusser — Ophelia
In the graben between late night and early morning, while scrabbling small amendments for something of Daniel Schlusser’s I hope I’ll be announcing around Monday, I received an email from him. How two months has passed without my awareness …
Early August, I was rising at an hour that was both refreshing and bleary, to rehearse with him and others via Skype to the opposite end of the world. They in Melbourne, me here in Berlin, teaching rope bondage, suspension, shibari, through a small portal I felt I could quite possibly slide through if I approached it right.
After these mornings, I would find myself alone with the convenient ring hanging from the ceiling, making demonstration videos, messing with my ideas and trying to convey them to Lily, wondering if any sense could be made; if this way of trying to make performance had any substance to it.
The video I found this morning … ah, what to say? Daniel is a theatre director I like very much, and I’m very happy to be working with him on Ophelia doesn’t live here anymore. The video is beautiful.
Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 1
Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 2
Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 3
Daniel Schlusser: Ophelia – 4Reading: Neal Stephenson — Reamde
There are five science-fiction writers — though this is a loose term, and none write in this genre exclusively — whom I will read whenever a new book arrives from them. William Gibson is the oldest of the lot; I’ve been reading him since some time around Neuromancer, though lately I’ve found him tired, his speculative fiction already out-of-date by the time it’s published.
Iain (M.) Banks I discovered next, and in truth, love the man. Some of his books don’t quite make it to the transcendental state I associate with him, but even the few I haven’t been so taken by, I’ve read at least twice. I don’t remember who came next, Charles Stross, China Miéville or Neal Stephenson, but the first two, though superficially different from each other and Iain Banks, I associate together. Certainly for their politics, which forms the core of their works.
Neal Stephenson is for me closer to Gibson: American, of a particular style and age, though equally not reducible to or interchangeable with. His Baroque Cycle was exactly that, the most colossal and ostentatious works of fiction I’ve read. It was very influential on me around the time I was first thinking about monadologie. Anathem I enjoyed not so much. Perhaps to say the colour of the work — if one could imagine the contents of the pages and their affect on my imagination being homogenised to an identifiable tone — was one I wouldn’t want a room painted in.
I was reading guest writer, Joan Slonczewski at Charles Stross’ blog, who has a new book out, and being quite taken by her ideas promptly went and ordered it. In the process of which, I discovered Neal Stephenson had a new bookshelf out, Reamde. I began it after class today. It’s uncomfortably large and will certainly cause anguish when it falls on my nose as I nod off. Still, if it’s anywhere within the universe of Cryptonomicon or The System of the World, I shall be quite distracted this weekend.
neal stephenson — reamde