My contest entry
June 16th, 2008
CONTEST: WIN THE NEW RHODIA WEBNOTEBOOK!:
“‘Check out this cool site dedicated to finding Moleskine alternatives called blackcover.net’or
‘Here’s an interesting site run by an obsessive compulsive nut who has an unhealthy addiction to stationery products! Check it out!‘”
(Via Black Cover.)
Interestingly, the second blurb sort of applies to me. I have a much greater addiction to fountain pens than notebooks, but I still have tons of notebooks around and a fairly unhealthy relationship with paper. The point of this post is mainly as an entry in a drawing for a free Rhodia Webnotebook, because Moleskines ain’t what they used to be. I am finishing an old lined one and looking for newer better alternatives. Hopefully I’ll win an alternative.
At what way?
March 13th, 2008
“I found myself pondering easy choice, supermarket paralysis and internet addiction in the context of the exciting promise and strange underwhelmingness of much hyperfiction. Then, yesterday, interactive game creator and SixToStart ARG writer James Wallis said something that flipped the light on. ‘Writing for interactive is different to print writing,’ he said. “
Apparently so.
(Via if:book.)
Written on the body
February 8th, 2008
Ariana Page Russell has a skin disease which enables her to write and draw on her own skin:
My own skin frequently blushes and swells. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph.
It’s simultaneously creepy and beautiful at once.
(Via Kirsty Hall.)
The uncultivated odd
November 13th, 2007
Frank Viola, Leader in Sport of Racing Pigeons, Dies at 87 - New York Times:
Today, pigeon racing is mostly an old man’s game. In the postwar years, there were scores of racing clubs in the greater New York area; perhaps a dozen survive. But even now, on certain fine Saturdays and Sundays, one can see men tautly poised on the city’s rooftops, scanning the sky for a few distant specks winging home.
I liked that last sentence a lot; it put me in mind of Joseph Mitchell. That New York City - the NYC of the mundane, the quirky, the unself-conscious eccentric - seems lost forever.
Level of comfort
August 11th, 2006
We need time to think; we need (metaphorical) quiet to get into the flow. A tool that shouts “spelling error” with every typo is providing more distraction that help. Yet it feels good to make those red squiggles disappear — “We’re making progress!” — it feels good to play with fonts and shift the format. A computer is a far different beast that Heidegger’s hammer: it can be at hand in many ways simultaneously.
Having had to do some writing for MPOW lately, I’ve found that I’ve been getting good results by forcing myself to ignore the red squiggles and just plow on. It was a revelation of sorts - at first it’s really difficult to not correct immediately, but if you can get over that initial resistance, it gets easier to ignore the squiggles. Then when I come to a natural break in my thoughts, I can go back and right-click the errors into correctness. It’s very easy for me to fall into the trap of letting font-tweaking and margin-narrowing - the virtual equivalent of pencil sharpening and squaring the pad with the desk - keep me from getting to work.
Test post
February 11th, 2006
doing some testing on the just-finished wp 2.0.1 upgrade, some new plugins. getting ready to transfer most of my writing over here. stay tuned.