Yesterday evening I happened across some signature gatherers canvassing for registered voters who reside in San Francisco. While the sheer volume of such campaigns in the Bay Area, and the often misleading information they give about the cause they’re representing, I often decline as politely as possible and move on. But in this case, I actually walked up and volunteered my John Hancock. Why?
Because the volunteers were out working for The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco. And before you jump to the conclusion that they’re right-wing nutjobs out to rename everything “Reagan this” and “Reagan that” (like I did when I first got an email from them), check out the site. Instead, it’s a gloriously involved piece of satire, the kind of well-planned joke that reminds me why I love The City.
See, they’re looking to get 10,000 signatures in order to qualify a ballot proposition so that San Francisco voters can decide if they want to rename the local Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, which, to put it bluntly, processes the stream of shit flowing from our sewage system. And the president they want to bestow this honor upon is none other than George W. Bush.
I can only hope the proposition, as written, stipulates a sign reading “George W. Bush Sewage Plant” in a size proportional to the man’s heroic legacy. Preferrably with some dramatic lighting, or maybe even in neon. Complain all you will about the over-legislation of The City and the volume of seemingly vain proclamations from City Hall and ballot initiatives from motivated cranks, but this one has my full support.
I will do pretty much anything to add a new byline to the ol’ writing bio. I normally joke that I’m a byline whore, but whores get paid — whereas I’m willing to give it up for free, which I think makes me just a slut. Plus, I’m definitely motivated by compulsion and enthusiasm more than strictly money, so again, it’s fitting. On the other hand, whores can have lovers, not just clients, so there’s that. But this week I did get paid, and added a new publication to the list, so it’s like the best of both worlds.
Thanks to editor Sarah Hromack for the opportunity. She’s left the door open for me to contribute in the future, and I’ve been sitting on a project idea that my friend Jason and I have been discussing since last Summer that I think would fit well, so you may just see me pop up there again.
So I’m spending the weekend trying to accomplish as much as I can towards getting a rough cut of my student film Dominoes done. When editing, it’s always good to have at least a temporary music track to use as a timing reference. I’d also thought about adding music as background ambience — as though a radio were playing in the distance.
Of course, I’d never be able to clear rights to commercial music. So instead I dropped by ccMixter and used the search tools to browse for tracks tagged “hip-hop” that could be used freely with attribution. I turned up about ten choice tracks, of which I used five, and mixed them together using Traktor so that they segued seamlessly and maintained a steady tempo.
While you’ll probably barely be able to hear it in the film, I figured I’d post it here to let you in on my process as I’m working, as well as an example of the quality work that people publishing under a Creative Commons license so that it can be re-purposed by other artists.
Looking through my bookshelf for something I hadn’t read a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. I have to say that as someone who has played writer and designer on the Web, it’s a life-changer I only wish I’d discovered earlier. The edition that ended up on my shelves (from where or whom I know not) is the 1997 printing. But it’s at least as timeless as Strunk and White, and Bringhurst’s poetic prose measuring considerations of reading on, and writing or designing for, computer displays are still quite apt. An excerpt, emphasis mine:
“The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertizing [sic] and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.
“The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance. At text size, subtle and delicate letterforms stand little chance as well. Superscripts and subscripts, footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes disappear. In the harsh light and coarse resolution of the screen, such literate accessories are difficult to see; what is worse, they dispel the essential illusion of speed. So the links and jumps of hypertext replace them. All the subtexts then can be the same size, and readers are at liberty to skip from text to text like children switching channels on TV. When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. Forms bred on newsprint and signage are most likely to survive. Good text faces for the screen are therefore as a rule faces with low contrast, a large torso, open counters, sturdy terminals, and slab serifs or no serifs at all.”
If you’ve ever designed anything, from pages to packages, web sites to billboards, it behooves you to pick up this book. If you’ve ever written anything, and are curious about the history and the future of text, it behooves you to pick up this book. And if you’re just curious and want to read a master discourse deeply on a rich topic, it behooves you to pick up this book.
With water up to my waist and waves rolling in, I made the decision that I should go no further. I’d mustered enough courage to get over any immediate fear, but I was already cramping in the cold and I’m not a particularly strong swimmer. The decision I made not to dive in and swim further out was a rational one, as doubling the number of men struggling to keep from drowning wasn’t going to help anyone. I was helpless, and though I wasn’t responsible for any of it, I could sense the grief on the horizon, and I was making a conscious effort to numb the feeling.
When the surfer ran up I knew that if the man flailing sixty yards from shore hadn’t drowned already, he’d probably be alright. And the anxiety eased — I wouldn’t have to live with being the helpless bystander who looked on while someone drowned.
For some reason, I’ve been garnering a few followers a week on Twitter lately, which is kind of insane, since my Twitter stream is pretty inane (especially the attempts to be profound). It’s gotten to the point where I have more than 400 followers, which is not to boast (a lot of my friends have many multiples more than that).
But a few months ago I pruned the list of people I follow back to only people I’ve met in person (with a few exceptions), and the number’s hovered around 150 ever since. While I could pretend to be all “Well, that’s the watershed group-size number cited by social network theorists,” really its because many of the people I follow are heavy users and that’s about the size of the information firehose I can drink from without drowning.
While I started to consider it, I won’t set my feed to private because I do like to share links and I have friends who follow my Twitter feed but aren’t actually users themselves (thanks to the RSS feed on my site). And if you really need to get in touch with me — say, about a story idea or a job offer — it’s not like there aren’t lots of other ways to reach me.
So yeah, it’s not that you aren’t different or special or deserving of my attention. If it’s any consolation, there are lots of folks I have met, do follow, and don’t follow me back. Which I agree kinda smarts, but we all have different levels of attention we can give to any one service.
Every six months or so, I try to prune my list of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Partly to delete dead feeds, or those that I don’t read, and partly to make sure feeds I want and need to read are grouped and stacked to make it easy on me to keep up.
Well, it’s been nearly a year, and since I’m prone to stumble on something cool, hit “subscribe,” throw it in a folder and move on, I’d managed to accumulate nearly 1,000 feeds. No one can keep up with all that noise! And, frankly, there’s a lot of echo in that chamber.
I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I figured why not take care of this mundane task. I have been using Google Reader for the last year, and I’d had issues with the subscription management page in the past. With 900+ feeds and the default display set to “all,” you can imagine the kind of server and client power needed to render that huge list in all its AJAX-y glory. Too much, it turns out, for Google to handle.
So I exported the OPML file of all my feeds and edited by hand in TextEdit. Good times. The problem is, to delete all my existing feeds and replace them with the new set of feeds and folders, I have to get into the “manage subscriptions” page that’s borking. I could set up a new account, but guess what — since Reader is tied to my Google account, I’d have to sign out and log in every time I went from GMail to Reader, for instance.
So I went back to Bloglines, and while I struggled with the regular version a bit, the Beta version worked great. The fact is, if you’ve got an assload of RSS feeds, Google Reader just can’t handle ‘em. I haven’t given up on the service — presuming I can get the settings page to work properly I will take a stab at re-uploading my new feed set — but they really need a feature to delete all subscriptions (possibly on import), if not manage multiple OPML files.
As luck would have it, my old friend Topaz is playing a show in New York the night before I leave town and in San Francisco the night I arrive, making me very, very happy and giving me excuses to say hey on either end of my itinerary.
Hell, maybe he’ll play guitar. I didn’t even know he could do that — that’s how good he is.
Update: Due to popular demand, and a meager bank account, it’s looking like burritos in the Mish followed by a houseparty in the Dogpatch. Taqueria San Francisco at seven?
It’s 7:52 in the morning, and I haven’t slept in sixteen hours. I’ve got a journalism paper already two weeks late and a documentary proposal final due tomorrow, I have to present footage from my student film which looks worse and worse each retrospect to class in a few hours, and I have two physics books and have a dozen problem sets to plow through before the final test that will basically determine my grade in a week. And all of this to make good on the college degree I already spent about eleven semesters not getting the first time around.
I am fucked.
That, however, isn’t news to anyone who knows me particularly well. I seem to exist in a perpetual state of fucked-ness. This is what was on my mind as I walked down the block for a coffee and a lox bagel meant to be the special treat that gets me through what promises to be a shitty, anxious day — and that’s if it’s productive. The little Brooklyn nabe I’ve called home for the last few months was quiet and grey, with working people going about their business completely unawares of the coffee-sipping, cigarette-smoking walking crisis in their midst.
It was the perfect walk to make that kind of random mental connection that I’ve always taken unsubstantiated pride in: A scarily apt metaphor for the seemingly endless bouts with writer’s block I’ve been experiencing the last two years is Steve Sax Disease. Unlike Lou Gehrig (and if I’m anything, I’m unlike Lou Gehrig), this isn’t a tragic yet noble actual disease — Parkinson’s, in Gehrig’s case. No, instead it’s a mental block that makes what was once the simplest of tasks a neurotic torment, and makes the sufferer look like a complete buffoon.
I'm a writer and web geek living in beautiful San Francisco, California. Here I occasionally post things that cross my mind. You can find my professional work at Valleywag... (more)
