Roto-blog

there's always a wind-up

Saturday, September 04, 2004


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Friday, September 03, 2004


Chapter 5 Tags Posted by Hello

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Chapter 5 In A Nutshell

You want to know what I did today? I reckon that's one function of a blog. I
sit here at the end of the day and natter away on the keys. Anyone who cares
to drop by can get a little look-in on my activities.



Did I go out? Briefly. Down to the village to stretch my legs. On the way
back I saw someone I know sitting in a barbican. Well, if it wasn't a
barbican, I'm calling it one. I'll get a photo of it soon and paste it here.
Diane. She was sitting on one of the benches eating her lentil sprout salad.
She and her partner live on the other side of the city, so I didn't believe
my eyes at first, but did a double take, and sure enough, it was Diane. So I
stopped to chat for a while. I told her I was just out
stretching my legs. I added that I spend too much time standing or sitting
in one place, so I'm trying to do things that involve some flexing of the
torso.



"Hula Hoops" she said. "Get yourself some hoops."



Good for Diane. That's the kind of suggestion I like. Totally practical,
easy as mud, and silly enough to be fun. So where can I get me a hula hoop?
Woolie's? I'll hafta go look. From there we decide that what we needed to do
was make an exercise video for people of a h~f'mbffm age. She said she does
five minutes of skipping when she feels the need for exercise. I thought
that sounded like something worth getting on film, so I asked her to make
some snaps and send them along. If I find a hula hoop, I'll make a web page
with undignified but thoroughly happy people hopping, skipping, twirling and
wiggling. Hop, Skip, Twirl & Wiggle: Exercise For Your 2nd Childhood. Then
it will be a children's book.



Eventually I left Diane and got back home and back to work on Chapter 5. I
am not gonna upload the thing here, so I figured out the chapter concordance
of keywords, and made a screenshot, and then a JPEG of that. I wish there
was some way of making those words into tags, and having them connect to
various things on the internet but I'm not gonna take the time to figure
that one out. Not today.



That's the short version of my day.



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Thursday, September 02, 2004

Unexplained, part II

I invented a game in 1992, and tried it out with a few friends. They didn't get it. We're talking about creative people, people who should be good at working with concepts, particuarly aesthetic concepts. But I guess they weren't using their minds in the way I do.



Here's the game. Get a bunch of photographs. They can be of anything, but they need to comprise a range from abstract to concrete, and it's better if they are not familiar to the players. My original set had no close-ups of people. The point is to give players a moment of uncertainty while they decid what the photo is about.



Once the photos have been assembled, put them on backing paper, or boards. This backing should be a lot bigger than the photograph, so that players have a big card to handle as part of the tactile experience. These cards should then be put in a nice box, face up, and lifted out one at a time.



The order of the cards is not important, but I occasionally changed the order so that a different sequence of images might prompt different kinds of response.



A player takes a card from the stack and has a few seconds to say what experiential quality is evoked by the photo. Most of my photos were of landscapes: buildings, canals, woodlands, skylines. Some distant, but most close-up. I was interested in seeing what qualities of feeling people gave to

each scene. It's a game of phenomenological interpretation.

Like I said above, most of them didn't get it. But now I can kind of play that game again. I don't have the original set. I think it's in a barn in Red Hook. So the pictures here and at Flickr will have to suffice.



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Unexplained

Last week when Linda started asking about putting photos in the blog, she said that the images would be the entire post - there would be no words of explanation. I can relate to that. So in my own image-posting, I've been aware of the pretentiousness of saying what the images is about, or even where and when it is from. So I've been calling every image Photo, aside from the ones that are in series. But over at Flickr, there's a cool feature called tagging, which is an indirect means of linking to other photos with the same tags.

So I broke my own 'policy' and started adding words of explanation. I've been deliberately using adjectives in my online profiles for about a month to describe myself and my interests, so I stuck mostly with that approach. It gets around the 'factual' description (who, what, where, when, how and why). It does more than that.

more later... life interrupts.

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Wednesday, September 01, 2004


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Tuesday, August 31, 2004


late afternoon Posted by Hello
Late Afternoon

Comments?

Do people actually want coments in response to their blog posts?
On Roto-blog I can disable the option for comments. I could use the blog as a soapbox, without wanting any feedback. I don't know if this is possible on eTwine. It makes me think twice about whether the other bloggers want comments on their posts. It even makes me wonder if people are seeking conversation, or if they would rather avoid it.

So that leaves three distinct things to consider: that bloggers want interaction; that they want comments, but not conversation; or, that they want neither comments nor conversation. Hmm.

I do not think that just because someone posts things that they want feedback about them. But this case is probably the exception rather than the rule. I would gues that most people are happy to get a little feedback, and some people look forward to carrying on a conversation.

Of course, you'll always have the pretenders - people who really would rather not have any feedback at all, but who are too polite to stop people. That's what great about bulletin boards - people get into the strangest moods and start slagging each other.

I think I better hold it right there....

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Roto-blog

I am calling this the Roto-blog because it's about going from there to here and back again.

I post an internal blog at eTwine, but the site facilities are bothersome: clunky site layout, word limits on comments, pre-set subject headings, word limits on email, secretive censorship (asterisks on words), and so on. The people who use it are interesting and funny, and the overall site concept is a smooth one, so there's no point in just walking away from the place. But I'm not one to put up and shut up. I'm not that sheepish. My solution is to blog here and put links to it from eTwine and links from here back to eTwine. Visitors can rotate from there to here and back again.

http://www.etwine.com/blog/?ID=3377&Entry=269

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