[If you think the call was ridiculous] then write that it was a (expletive) ridiculous call. Write that it was a (expletive) ridiculous (expletive) call. Not just a bad call, a maybe call, a (expletive) ridiculous call. Write the (expletive) thing. That’s all. I protect them more than anybody. I’m not mad at the (expletive) umpires. But (expletive), it’s a ridiculous (expletive) call. Write it, (expletive), I don’t have to say it.
Spending a little time with docs.google.com
I’m writing this all in Google docs (or is it in my Google drive now? I’m not sure.)
Right clicking on a word gives me…a new context menu that’s really pretty nice. It gives me an option to do research on a thing I’ve just typed and selected.
Like, I saw Truman Capote in a YouTube video the other day and ended up referencing him a day ago when I saw a similarly-mannered man at Swill. So now I’ll just select Truman Capote, right click, and hit research. What I hope happens is that on this window, a bunch of easily-understood boxes of information will fly at me, ordering themselves by relevancy.
What happens is:
Oh cool. It opens a side panel, that slides out from the right, squishing my page down. Well, not really, there are still margins and I still have my document right here.
So Google knows Truman Capote is a person, gives me a few pictures of him, his real name, and a few things about him like where he was born and where he died, which, if you’re putting that information in any scholarly text, you might as well turn it in with 16pt font and 1.8em line-height. Margins anyone?
So we could probably provide more useful information about the man up front. How about a video? Google, you own YouTube, right, and what better use for what has previously only been a repository of racist comments than to help me learn about Truman Capote, and how he talks and moves?
Under that I’m given web results. Which I can scroll down. Then I click a link. Oh now, what I’m really afraid of is the website sending me somewhere else as soon as I hit the link. I hope it stays in the panel. I really…okay here we go.
Yep, makes a new tab and switches me to it, takes me to the Wikipedia page, which I DID NOT want.
Huh, also, if you squeeze down the Wikipedia page, you get a mobile version, completely fluid. Which means Google could have injected this Wikipedia page right into the sidebar of my doc! You guys can fake user agents, can’t you? Just make my sidebar a touchscreen!
Even if this only took place every once in awhile, like on Wikipedia articles, that would be extremely cool.
Anyway, let’s see if I can find that voice thing. Which, it should be here. Somewhere.
It’s not. Which is a bummer, since I know it’s supported in the browser.
So I’m going to write a quick script that gives the document the attribute we want.
Okay. So, and I would never recommend this, I found out the attribute I want to add to my things is “x-webkit-speech,” I’m going to add that attribute to every item in the DOM. Yeah, freak out.
$(‘*’).attr(‘x-webkit-speech’, true);
Let’s run that bad boy and see what happens.
Okay, apparently adding jQuery kills the JS on the page. There has to be another way!
This SAVING… thing is useless over the long term. After five seconds I don’t care if I’m saving. Just keep it a black box and make me believe I’m using something that just works without me having to see if it’s working or not.
Using Dev Tools, I’m going to manually add the webkit speech attribute to this page. The next thing you should see is something I spoke.
And so:
I failed. Looking at Google Docs on a div-by-div basis, it’s clear the Docs team has decided to go the div-as-molecule route.
And only one element on the page even has the attribute contenteditable. I’d have to simulate webkit speech by adding a secret textarea to speak into and then copying that to the page, or simulating a paste event. It would be extremely complex.
Ah well.
DC Pierson: Something That's Been Working For Me Recently
Something in the future (a show or an audition or a meeting or a dreaded cup of coffee or scary doctor’s appointment) is causing me some amount of anxiety.
I think: THIS THING (whatever it is) IS GOING TO HAPPEN.
AND THEN IT WILL BE OVER.
I try not to focus on the outcome of the thing. The…
This is how I’ve been doing life since high school.
Q:If you could have any superpower... ?
Anonymous
Well Nicole, I’ve always wanted to be able to fly. Especially since I never see you, it would be nice to not have to schedule when we saw each other.
Except I’d only fly when it was warm, so.
Q:What's some advice you would give a developing writer? Me, for example. I've just graduated college with a major in Creative Writing.
Anonymous
Easy.
First, know that the major doesn’t matter. You either end up writing or you don’t. Your job, whether you ever get a real one or not, is to make sure you do the former.
Second, you know how you always hear “write what you know?” Well that’s good advice. Also you should try to use what you know to fake what you don’t know. After a while you’ll fake it so good you practically invented it, so then you know it better than people who said they knew it to begin with.
Don’t tell people what you’re writing, like, ever. It’s the quickest way to kill the thing, even if you’re convinced there’s no way you’ll ever go back. You’ll go back. In six months you’ll think about the thing you were writing and all you’ll be able to remember about it is how Steve from work thought your milieu needed a little more thinking through.
“It did need thinking through,” you’ll think to yourself, “but I never got down to doing the thinking.”
Only, you’ll be wrong. It didn’t need thinking through - it needed writing through. As all things written do. Get it on paper first, first. And do it as fast as you can. The moment you had the feeling, or thought the thing, start. Write it down, and more often than not you’ll find you can get a whole something out of it. You might not use that whole something, or even part of it, but at some point people are going to ask you for things you’ve written, and you won’t be able to show them a piece with at least some potential without first having a piece.
After it’s on paper? Mostly up to you. I figure I read it a bunch, picking out little things that annoy me and adding little things to make a clearer picture of what I want the reader to see. Then I look at all the aspects of the thing - Theme, Plot, Setting, Character, Relationships, Flow, Speed, Voice, etc… and try to pinpoint its weak spots. Shore those up.
Then put it away for a real long time. Come back to it when you’re another writer. Let that writer see what you couldn’t, and polish it, and send it out.
And don’t save your rejection slips. Being a writer isn’t about souvenirs.
Last thing: Don’t listen to anything another writer says about how to write.
To see humanity and not want to study it is like finding the only planet in the the universe capable of life and thinking it’s unimportant.
The reason people care if God exists or doesn’t exist is because we humans are / have created some really cool stuff.
Consciousness. Language. Art. Philosophy. Science. Reason.
Which means that homo sapiens is the only one of 3 or 30 million things to have figured a specific thing out, which is like winning the intellectual lottery.
It’s clear dogs and cats think at some level, but doesn’t seem to be based on goals, or long-term desires. Is a dog diabolic? No. Their behavior is predictable. Here are incomprehensibly complex things that still aren’t able to function at the level of humanity.
And writers, especially science fiction writers, seem to operate under the assumption that humanity is just one of a very large group of conscious, intelligent, technologically capable species throughout the universe. Since space travel is a proven possibility, wouldn’t it make sense that in the 14 billion years leading up to Man, some equally complex life-form elsewhere would have spit up a better answer to tackle the same proven possibility?
But what if there are no aliens?
We’ve had no explicit evidence so it actually is possible we are the first ones doing any of this. Maybe we’re the first ones accelerating toward an exponential eventuality, of which there is little to expect. Wouldn’t it be nice to ask another celestial society about their singularity?
“So, how was it?”
“Robots are my blood but it doesn’t hurt as bad as you think it might.”
With no evidence, I have to act as if humanity is the single-most important thing ever created, and therefore as though every thing humanity creates as a stone’s throw further in importance. Which means you, reading this, have the potential to be the most important thing that ever happened in the universe, ever.
Doesn’t that excite you?
/thread.
//edit/addition:
I just posted that poster, you know, like agreeing with it. People DO keep remaking that poster. You know that, probably, if you have a Tumblr.
Why do I assume everyone has Tumblr?
So I was like, ‘man, I should provide some context for that poster, because like, without context something like that just makes people wonder what you’re trying to do since they only give like six websites a day a click, and for some reason they still have your website in their bookmarks folder marked “Daily.” ‘
That’s what I’m going to do.
In 2012 and even before that probably, people started remaking this poster. The original said something like “Keep Calm and Take Drugs.” No, it couldn’t have been that, because that’s not even true - the other way around, sure.
Anyway, the first poster struck some random guy as funny for some reason, and that person opened some program that allows you to paste images and type words and save the output of the work you did into the same kind of file as the one you opened up. The file is an image, and the program is Photoshop.
Listen, I’m trying to provide some context here, but it’s hard. How the hell else am I supposed to explain .jpgs to a guy from a thousand years from now?
Other questions I have:
- What if they don’t have .jpgs in the future? Violinists will have to figure out another way to plug their f-holes.
- What if, in the future, every file was the same file format and was opened by the same program?
- What if, in the future, people didn’t open programs to run robots, but robots running programs opened people?
Back (not at all, really) on track:
I hear the Singularity has been pushed up a couple decades to 2020, which only leaves me about 8 years to make anything of the world before it’s taken over by the nanotech (that will, at that time, will be) running our bodies and we all become the machines John Connor always feared.
Notice I didn’t say do something with myself, I said with the world. I don’t know, I guess the internet gives me that power now. I can (and you can, or you, you over there, behind the guy using the computer, can) make or do something today that will affect the world tomorrow and possibly for the rest of humanity’s time as humans.
When we’re robots though I don’t think we’ll care. Because emotions.
Slow clap.*
* - indicates an item the author intends for the reader to act out
ADAM
Nicole lives in Boston, and we don’t get to see each other that much, so we Skype a lot, and this is a photo of us being a two-headed monster.
Up & Down byClément G.
ARE YOU A DIFFERENTLY-HEADED PERSON? FIND FEAR, DISCRIMINATION AT EVERY TURN? BEEN DENIED BENEFITS OR JOBS DUE TO YOUR DIFFERENCE? BEEN UNABLE TO COMMUNICATE YOUR FEELINGS PROPERLY? CONVEY EMOTIONS?
THIS IS YOUR CHANCE.
“In terms of a wildly uninformed guess at our political future, it feels something like V for validation.”
Everything I know about anarchy as a political theory I know from comics, of course. But it’s arguable that a picture of a Guy Fawkes mask at Occupy Wall Street is not only the best, but really only adaptation of V FOR VENDETTA possible.
While OWS was and is equal parts inspiring, troublesome, invigorating, and embarrassing, the disorganization and lack of a single, authoritative agenda that its critics attempted to use to discredit it was in fact its elusive and maddening strength.
What I took from it, at least, was pure anarchy: at the heart of a financial system that seemed unaccountable even to elected government, humans came and said: your control is limited.
You don’t control us. You don’t fully control even this PRIVATE public park. And except by virtue of our consent—or your sheer force—you never did.
OWS denied their consent to governance, and they were met with sheer force. This was always, logically what would and perhaps even SHOULD occur. But the point was proved.
And you still see that mask around.
That is all.
(via areasofmyexpertise)
“Alone on Venus” by Frank Frazetta, in case anyone cares.
(via alloneecole)
