I am going to vote for the first and only time in my life in an hour or so, and then I am going to spend the rest of the day actively avoiding social media, largely thanks to perhaps the most wonderful alternative to helplessly and senselessly dwelling in the stream anyone could have possibly given us: a 24-hour Chuck Tingle read aloud stream!
I’m currently reading Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, which mentions a whole host of things I would love to share (some I will on this site, I’m sure, in the coming months.) One of them which I could not find any video of on the internet: a project from either 1999…
I want to dream out words of anger / on this machine that states my mind
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote this poem on a word processor, or so we must presume. We don’t know exactly when, but it’s published (for the first time) in a 1994 collection called Going Out with Peacocks.
Of course it’s not really about word processing. Or is it? The republic of letters gives way to the war machine (which gave rise to the computer), and words themselves become processed as they are repeated and milled by the twelve short lines of the poem.
The ending, in particular, is scarily prescient these days:
The kind republic that we dreamed /
of building falls to night.
I don’t know very much else about Le Guin’s computing history. In Track Changes, I included the detail that she was not writing with a word processor as late as 1985, when she finished Always Coming Home; but she comments in a 2008 interview with Carl Freedman that she was:
… aware even back then that the computer might
encourage certain complex movements of narrative—recursions, implications to be
followed, forking paths, etc.—that were very much in my head as I wrote the
book.
An essay I wrote for school which I am not particularly happy with. Possibly worth revision in the future – I took extensive notes.
Among a literary culture verywell into its reactionary movement against perceived consequences of the technological wealth it so rapidly built in the past forty years or so, many of us who write have done our best to avoid thinking about the tools we use to keep…
The ENTIRE LIBRARY OF GRAPHICAL UNICODE CHARACTERS in a SINGLE PDF FILE that somehow doesn’t immediately break when you ask it to render.
Remember how I was shitting on PDF the other day? well… JESUS. imagine how impossible the existence of this document would’ve seemed like 15 years ago. like… there’s no way it would render in any other format, I don’t think. (that isn’t just a photograph, that is.) that said, you’d better believe I’m going to try to see if I can get anything to convert it.
I know it may not seem all that significant, but this digital magazine collection actually represents a lot of effort – years of web exploration, both active and passive. You’ll be able to find my Digital Magazine Collection here from now on thanks to Raindrop.
yes, I boughrt a mechanical keyboard… I am not a gaemer, but I type so much that it’s frankly ridiculous I haven’t invested in high-quality equipment until now.
alright…
it’s been addressed…
now I promise I’ll never talk about it again, okay?
definitely still havn’t gotten the hang of retouching in Photoshop yet…
the past month has been my first time ever trying the Adobe Suite and tbh… I legitimately, objectively think those folks saying GIMP is just a better tool in 2020 might be on to something.
anywho…
in case you weren’t aware, this is a rare example of a car Chrysler designed in the 1960s that actually ran off the driveshaft of a gas turbine… and it’s incredible I actually got to experience it in person just two hours away from where I live!
