Do you confess?
Does it ease your way?
Do echos of the words and thoughts and deeds linger at all or are you clear and clean?
Offload your worries -burden another's ear.
What does it do, this confession, that makes it enticing?
Why do we only talk about it in terms of guilt?
Listen. You'll hear it everywhere around you.
Is it a meme we're infected with right now?
Maybe we all* subconsciously feel guilty?
(* Who are "we all" anyway - Australians? Westerners? I don't know what I really meant there.)
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Italicise me
I have just remembered how excited I was to get a typewriter for one of my early teenage birthdays. It was sleek, it was modern, it would make all my writing seem implicitly better. And it did, but for one little thing... it could not do italics. Oh how we take the simplest formatting for granted these days! You want italicised type? BANG There it is! Howabout bold or underline? BANG BANG you got it!
In the early days of my typewriter and privately cherished dream of being a journalist (the only type of writer I thought was allowed in Queensland) twas not so easy. Underline could be achieved by the heavy manual process of retyping over the same line - wonky as it was you could get it done but that was the full extent of formatting options. Even creating an exclamation point required the delicate positioning of a period and the straight-up apostrophe (which, by the way, worked ok in my modern machine's san serif typeface, but looked bodgy as all get-out on the older machines with ther serif fonts). You had to kindof squint to make it look like an exclamation mark, the two objects barely nodded to each other on the page. It was tedious, and yet one persevered - I had no editor to teach me markups and no typesetters fixing my typos (the source of the phrase of course, being 'typographical error' which I've seen rendered recently as 'fat finger entry'. Look, there's that straight up apostrophe masquerading as quotation marks or inverted commas. But I digress.).
I saw a posh typewriter once - it had a duo tone ribbon (black AND red!) for the accounts so the all important debts could get their visual importance. Then of course electric typewriters started to come in with their crazy spinning balls of decadent font formatting availability. I wasn't sure about those vast, lumbering and even noisier electronic beasts, and for all the wrong reasons, my gut instinct was right because hard on their heels came the Apple 2e. Oh and do you remember that amazing Orwellian ad? It was exciting and bewildering and waaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive and you couldn't do much on it, really, could you?
I kept holding out. The typewriter saw me through a lot of assignments and in senior year the school even had some computers which we were allowed to put our yearbook together on. It was then that I got that all-important first taste of rework and frustration that only a computer can deliver (thus preparing me me for a lifetime in cubicles swatting ineffectively at computer monitors). Leading, inexorably, to where we are today, endlessly writing and reading on screens and barely ever handling paper. Just for fun, you can translate any text you find into a completely different language - I couldn't have ever imagined that. It took me four years of diligent study to be absolutely useless at reading, writing and speaking German, or 'Deutsch' as native speakers might prefer it. Which made any German produced on my typewriter equally useless. Let alone the formatting issues of all those exotic letters.
Anyway, later when you're tweeting or texting or emailing or blogging or tagging or sharing or pinning, have a little smile to yourself and enjoy all the formatting options we can enjoy, and all of them without tiny little carved letters or manual arms or even ink. How clean we are, how modern, how very very lucky.
In the early days of my typewriter and privately cherished dream of being a journalist (the only type of writer I thought was allowed in Queensland) twas not so easy. Underline could be achieved by the heavy manual process of retyping over the same line - wonky as it was you could get it done but that was the full extent of formatting options. Even creating an exclamation point required the delicate positioning of a period and the straight-up apostrophe (which, by the way, worked ok in my modern machine's san serif typeface, but looked bodgy as all get-out on the older machines with ther serif fonts). You had to kindof squint to make it look like an exclamation mark, the two objects barely nodded to each other on the page. It was tedious, and yet one persevered - I had no editor to teach me markups and no typesetters fixing my typos (the source of the phrase of course, being 'typographical error' which I've seen rendered recently as 'fat finger entry'. Look, there's that straight up apostrophe masquerading as quotation marks or inverted commas. But I digress.).
I saw a posh typewriter once - it had a duo tone ribbon (black AND red!) for the accounts so the all important debts could get their visual importance. Then of course electric typewriters started to come in with their crazy spinning balls of decadent font formatting availability. I wasn't sure about those vast, lumbering and even noisier electronic beasts, and for all the wrong reasons, my gut instinct was right because hard on their heels came the Apple 2e. Oh and do you remember that amazing Orwellian ad? It was exciting and bewildering and waaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive and you couldn't do much on it, really, could you?
I kept holding out. The typewriter saw me through a lot of assignments and in senior year the school even had some computers which we were allowed to put our yearbook together on. It was then that I got that all-important first taste of rework and frustration that only a computer can deliver (thus preparing me me for a lifetime in cubicles swatting ineffectively at computer monitors). Leading, inexorably, to where we are today, endlessly writing and reading on screens and barely ever handling paper. Just for fun, you can translate any text you find into a completely different language - I couldn't have ever imagined that. It took me four years of diligent study to be absolutely useless at reading, writing and speaking German, or 'Deutsch' as native speakers might prefer it. Which made any German produced on my typewriter equally useless. Let alone the formatting issues of all those exotic letters.
Anyway, later when you're tweeting or texting or emailing or blogging or tagging or sharing or pinning, have a little smile to yourself and enjoy all the formatting options we can enjoy, and all of them without tiny little carved letters or manual arms or even ink. How clean we are, how modern, how very very lucky.
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Are you docile enough to slip through the surveillance?
I did think of something interesting to share, but I forgot to bring my brain with me. Thankfully, Club Orlov has posted a fairly extenisve rant I think is worth sharing, so we'll go with that. He doesn't normally just free-form like this, and you can either read it for the content or just marvel at the flow and dance of the prose.
It is a bit darker than I had planned on being today, not wanting to follow-up the last post with anything dire. i'm pretty sure I had been going to talk about how nice pets are, or something equally docile (I'm also cautious about assuming that viewers are readers and readers are returners).
Instead I'm making sure I'm on any general watch-list that might be forming in some software somewhere, and now maybe you are too.
Enter Dimitri:
"People now tend to communicate via cell phone voice calls, text messages, emails, posts to Facebook and tweets, all of which are digital data, and all of which are saved. Relationships between people can be determined by looking at their Facebook profile, their email contacts, and their cell phone contacts. If your phone is GPS-enabled, your position can be tracked very precisely; if it isn't, your position can still be determined fairly accurately and tracked once your phone connects to a few different cell phone towers. All of this information can be continually monitored and analyzed without human intervention, raising red flags whenever some ominous pattern begins to emerge. We are not quite there yet, but at some point somebody might accidentally get blasted to bits by a drone strike while texting when a wrong T9 predictive text autocompletion triggers a particularly deadly keyword match."
and
"Thanks to vastly increased computational power, the emphasis is now shifting from enforcing the law to flagging as aberrant any sort of behavior that the system does not quite understand. That is, it is not looking for violations of specific laws, but for unusual patterns."
Thanks Dimitri.
It is a bit darker than I had planned on being today, not wanting to follow-up the last post with anything dire. i'm pretty sure I had been going to talk about how nice pets are, or something equally docile (I'm also cautious about assuming that viewers are readers and readers are returners).
Instead I'm making sure I'm on any general watch-list that might be forming in some software somewhere, and now maybe you are too.
Enter Dimitri:
"People now tend to communicate via cell phone voice calls, text messages, emails, posts to Facebook and tweets, all of which are digital data, and all of which are saved. Relationships between people can be determined by looking at their Facebook profile, their email contacts, and their cell phone contacts. If your phone is GPS-enabled, your position can be tracked very precisely; if it isn't, your position can still be determined fairly accurately and tracked once your phone connects to a few different cell phone towers. All of this information can be continually monitored and analyzed without human intervention, raising red flags whenever some ominous pattern begins to emerge. We are not quite there yet, but at some point somebody might accidentally get blasted to bits by a drone strike while texting when a wrong T9 predictive text autocompletion triggers a particularly deadly keyword match."
and
"Thanks to vastly increased computational power, the emphasis is now shifting from enforcing the law to flagging as aberrant any sort of behavior that the system does not quite understand. That is, it is not looking for violations of specific laws, but for unusual patterns."
Thanks Dimitri.
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