In Meta on
5 June 2009 with no comments
Right now, the new blog is this:
But it’ll be up and running before too long. Most of the theme-modification heavy lifting is done, and now I’m just working on getting everything straightened out, writing the about page(s), that sort of thing.
I’m still debating whether or not I’m going to take the archives of this blog with me when I go—that is, launching the new blog with all of these posts already there—I’m leaning towards not doing that, and just leaving this blog up. Who knows. Anyway, I’m really proud of the new blog’s look and feel and I’m anxious to start posting there instead of posting about posting there here.
In Meta on
29 May 2009 with no comments
Dilemma
I’ve been having a hard time making myself post here, and that’s no fun—there’s no point in my having a blog if it’s a chore to keep it going. If it’s not something I’m interested in and passionate about, I have no business wasting your time and mine. What was it that Merlin Mann was saying? Oh yeah: “Good blogs are the product of ‘attention times interest.’” I’m not interested in writing about computers anymore—at least, not in the same context I’ve been writing about them for so long.
What I am interested in are books, and more specifically novels. I’m interested in writers and the lives they lead, and how they accomplish what they accomplish. I’m interested in telling other people about books that have brought me joy, and hearing from them about the books that have done the same from them. I’m interested in the way fiction tells truths that non-fiction can’t get at—truths about the soul, about the real underlying nature of the world, of the universe. I’m interested in my own attempts to get at those truths, and in documenting those attempts.
I’m not interested in trying to come up with clever things to say to make fun of things, or in talking about current computing trends. There are enough people doing that well enough already. They certainly don’t need my help. I’m not interested in not doing or saying anything interesting. I’m not interested in not making the world a richer, better place.
So…?
I’m re-imagining what I can accomplish as a writer and as a blogger, and more specifically as a writer who has a blog, and that necessitates some changes around here.
Firstly, “here” is going to change: this blog will move to its own domain name, possibly still called The Killer Poke but maybe not—haven’t figured all of that out yet. There are way too many good phrases in the Jargon file that could be blog titles, and I haven’t even begun to settle on one yet.
Secondly, I’m going to write about the things I’m interested in, and not anything else. For interesting links, funny pictures, quotes, all that, I’m going to be using my tumblelog. Right now it’s just links, but as I shift more and more of my ephemera there it’ll get better. Worth your time. But it’s not stuff that I want to devote whole, real blog posts to.
Thirdly, I don’t know how long all of this transitioning is going to take, but I’m going to take my time, do everything right. You may see this blog going in and out of maintenance mode over the next days and weeks as I get the new blog, whatever that may be, ready to go live. Whatever. I’ll keep all seven of my loyal readers posted.
Should be an interesting summer. I’m excited to start trying to do something interesting, something I’m passionate about, something that I really feel like I can be good at, something that, with any luck at all, will be enjoyed by people other than myself. I’ll see you on the other side.
In Life, Literature, Meta on
29 May 2009 with no comments
I’m thinking about taking this blog in a more consciously literary direction, since that’s where my head is at these days. I read a lot of books and I feel like I’m doing myself a disservice by not talking about them—and, presumably, other people would also like to read those books.
Case in point: I had a post ready to go about Vineland a long time ago, and it wasn’t the short little piece I published. It was a longer thing, about the collapse of the American radical tradition in the backlash against the Sixties, and I thought I made some points that would be good starting places for a discussion of the book and of what the book is talking about—but I didn’t publish it, because I have a rep as, primarily, the place where you can find out What’s in an .ipsw archive (which post still gets three or four unique hits a day, driving a good percentage of my site’s traffic, I think) and not as someone who reads and loves books. I’m going to change that, and I may have to change web addresses to do it. I’m still trying to figure out a plan.
I feel like I’m going to be writing better and a lot more passionately when I have a unifying theme behind the whole thing, rather that just relying on my own divine wisdom to get me through (or lack thereof). Hopefully you’ll see that change and enjoy it, because hopefully, you read books. If not, I’m afraid you’re not going to enjoy what I’m trying to do—but whatever. I’ve been posting more regularly, yeah, but my heart’s not in it yet. This is the change I need to make to make that happen.
Peace.
In Uncategorized on
26 May 2009 with no comments
So I’m going back through and reading Vineland again, and I’m struck, more than anything I think, by the narrative voice. Here’s Pynchon, far from the carefully-crafted beauty of The Crying of Lot 49 (which isn’t to say that Vineland isn’t carefully crafted—far from it, it’s just a very conversational style), talking like he’s sitting there telling you all of these things about all of these people.
This is a good book. I’ve known that since the first time I read it, but I missed a lot of the prose and a lot of the imagery the first time through. I can’t recommend it highly enough—it’s definitely a very good place to start if you haven’t read Pynchon.
In Interwebs, Tech on
11 May 2009 with no comments
Haven’t shown you any spam in a while, but this one jumped out at me:
Not that Angelina Jolie’s being in a street fight (or should I say FIGHT) has anything to do with “pilules” and supplements, but I have to give good old Renee Trumbore credit for putting some effort into his subject line.
This one, much to Gmail’s discredit, ended up in my Inbox until I reported it as spam. I guess Gmail would like to see Angelina get in a street fight as well.
In Life, Literature on
5 May 2009 with no comments
I found this letter written from Thomas Pynchon to his college roommate Jules Siegel in 1965 on the wiki pages for Against the Day. I thought it said something that I couldn’t have said better myself.
When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, ‘Southern California’s special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.
The letter was published in Cavalier magazine as part of an article, “Who is Thomas Pynchon… and Why Did He Take Off with My Wife?,” available for download here in issue 15 of Pynchon Notes.
In Interwebs, Tech on
3 May 2009 with 1 comment
This list from PC Authority features the “Top ten worst viruses” of all time, and besides having some marginally interesting blurbs about computer viruses through time, it appears that the writing itself has been infected by some kind of virus, one that I’ll call the Swine-Writing Flu (Strain SUX0R5). Herewith, the Five Worst Parts of PC Authority’s Top Ten Worst Viruses List.
5. In the discussion of the Creeper virus, the guys at PC Authority mention that the Creeper virus moved from node to node on ARPANET, which they describe as “the precursor of the Internet,” and then not two paragraphs later:
In computer years, 1971 was nearly prehistoric time. No Apple, no Microsoft and the Internet was still a wild, far-off concept.
Well, see, I’m not really sure how it could’ve been a “wild” concept if ARPANET, its precursor, was already up and running and transmitting programs between systems. That’s a little mind-boggling. Still, onward.
4. The other honorable mention virus, Brain, gets this gem of an opening sentence in its entry:
Brain was the first virus written for Microsoft’s DOS operating system, back in the mid 1986s.
I guess that’s somewhere between May and July, then.
3. The entry for the Melissa virus, which comes in at #5 on the PC Authority list, tells the story of how the Melissa worm was created, and cites a classic work of the Western canon:
It was a classic love story. Boy meets girl, girl dances for money, boy goes home and writes computer virus for girl, computer virus gets out of hand and causes millions of dollars in damage. It’s the Romeo and Juliette of our time.
Romeo & Juliette being a play by William Shakespeare’s kid brother Toby, who apparently enjoyed writing computer viruses for strippers.
2. The list of the Top Ten Worst Viruses, and I’m not making this up, gives two honorable mentions and then concludes with MyDoom at #3. There is no #2 and no #1. So, you know, whatever. This concludes our countdown.
Link (via Slashdot, of course.)
In Emacs, Linux, Meta, Tech on
2 May 2009 with no comments
So, maybe you noticed that I’ve started posting to my blog using
Emacs. So far this setup only
works on my Thinkpad X60 running Ubuntu 9.04, but I hope to create the
same setup under OS X on my MacBook Pro. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway, there’s a little bit of legwork that goes into creating this
setup.
Installing the mode
In order to install the weblogger Emacs mode, you have to have two
files, weblogger.el and xml-rpc.el. You can find both of those
here on the Emacs Wiki.
Everything you need can be found there.
Once you have the elisp files, you need to put them somewhere where
Emacs can load them on startup. For me, under Ubuntu, I put them in the
.emacs.d directory under my home folder, and then I told Emacs to load
all of the Lisp files in that directory by adding the following to my
.emacs file:
;; add ~/.emacs.d/ to load-path
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/")
And then, right under that, I tell Emacs to automagically load
weblogger at startup:
;; load weblogger stuff
(require 'weblogger)
Use It or Lose It
Once everything is installed, it’s pretty easy to get everything up and
running. If you’ve just added (require 'weblogger) to your .emacs, you
can place the cursor after that S-expression and hit C-x C-e to
evaluate it, loading the mode. Then type M-x weblogger-setup-weblog to
create a new profile for a blog.
weblogger-setup-weblog will ask you for a lot of information about
your blog setup. For wordpress, your "Server Endpoint" is the root of
your WordPress installation with xmlrpc.php on the end. When you enter
all of this, save it as a default and it will always load that blog when
creating a new post.
Once all of that is set up, type M-x weblogger-start-entry to create a
new entry. When you’re done, C-x C-s saves the post and submits it to
the blog, and C-c C-c pushes the post to the server as a saved draft
without publishing it.
Editing
You can load a previous post with M-x weblogger-fetch-entires and then
you can move backwards chronologically through your posts with C-c C-p
and forwards chronologically with C-c C-n and then the publishing
shortcuts still apply.
So…
If you’re really wanting to use Emacs to post to your blog—or, more
likely, if you’d just like to see if it’s actually possible or whether
I’m making all of this up, try it out. I can’t promise it’ll work on
anything but Ubuntu 9.04 with the emacs-snapshot package, but
anyway… Happy hacking!
In Uncategorized on
2 May 2009 with no comments
That’s right, kids, I just figured out how to post to my blog from
within Emacs. More on this as it develops—I’m working on a big writeup
of the whole thing which should be up later tonight. As you can see,
I’ve yet to work out all of the kinks, but I’ll get there.
In Literature on
26 April 2009 with no comments
I would really like to be working on a novel right now. I just feel like it’s time to try another one—the last one turned out to not be as terrible as I initially thought it was, but I’m afraid that the amount of revision required to whip it into some sort of good shape is something I just don’t have the time to do right now.
I have some ideas, though. We’ll see how it goes.
