bunny vs. fence

the other day, this lengthy stretch of fencing (branded nicely enough with so much black, white, and red to represent the construction company Sundt, whose slogan seems to be three standalone words, "Skill. Grit. Purpose.") went up all along the drive that goes between my academic office building and various parking lots between here and places off-campus.

I'm told that they'll be building a new dormitory somewhere on top of the rocky, scrub-filled gully on the other side. it'll have more student housing and more classroom space. so cool. so necessary. 

some of us in my academic office building are mildly worried that this new construction will block our most excellent west-facing views of Granite Mountain. we shall see, I guess. I remain hopeful that the slope of this gully will mean the top of the new dorm will be low enough for us to look over from our third floor offices.

as I walked back out from my office to my car last Tuesday, I noticed a little grey-brown bunny frantically searching for a way through the fence, up and down the hill in short bursts, back and forth over the blaring red curb, every so often sprinting for its life all the way across the road back to the unfenced rocks and bushes to the east.

I watched it for a solid few minutes. it hopped away in panic from my slowed footsteps, then dashed in further panic across the path of someone's big white SUV driving up past us both. 

I didn't see the bunny come back that evening. so I studied the fencing as I walked. surely one little bunny would eventually find a gap to squeeze under, I thought. (the creatures seem to squeeze through pretty tiny gaps in our back garden gate, after all.)

if the chainlink were bare of this black branded tarp, then could a little bunny more easily get through? or if the corners of each fence panel were less square and more rounded, that would surely help.

I wonder if any of the planners and facilities and maintenance people worried about the impact of this construction project would have on the non-human critters in the area. hopefully at least a little bit. probably not as much as they worried about other aspects though-- the costs of labor and fencing and other materials; the design and the blueprints and the building's whole physical footprint; and the timing and logistics and how soon they can start selling spots in the new dorm.

at the bottom of the hill, the fence merely ends,. for now. the sidewalks remain open and the parking lots in regular use. for now. if the bunnies are persistent enough, they will find their way back into their hideaways in the scrub-filled gully. 

and hopefully they will all find new hideaways once the gully is dug out and filled with a bunch of concrete and whatever else dormitories are made of.

and if not?

they're just bunnies. some of their cousins, whichever side of whichever fence they've ended up on, will replace them soon enough.

thread count (1/1132)

the "twitter thread" as a genre fascinates me. I have so many curious questions about it. when was the first cohesive thread of posts created on twitter? who wrote it and about what?

threaded tweets are a reaction to the restrictions of the platform. it's like adapting the limited microblogging form to serve a longer form of writing. combining a handful of tiny posts into something bigger-- like building a tower out of toy blocks.

twitter added an official thread-making feature to its platform not that long ago. but threads (in the computer/internet sense) have been a thing for way longer than that. although etymonline doesn't mention this newer usage--perhaps it's too new-- in its word history of "thread," Merriam Webster does, interestingly. I guess regular dictionaries have a stronger incentive to keep up with the times than etymological dictionaries do.

I learned the internet meaning of thread on online bulletin boards, where a thread is an asynchronous conversation contained under a heading within a specific discussion forum. multiple people can post to a forum thread. everyone's replies are timestamped, linkable, quotable, reply-to-able, and it's all very organized.

a twitter thread is different. sure, the usual "any string of posts-and-replies" does technically constitute a twitter thread... but that's not really what anyone is talking about when they use "twitter thread" as a specific noun. any old string of posts and replies on twitter is more likely to be referred to as a conversation or an exchange. the connotation of "a thread" (often with an introductiony colon, like "a thread:") on twitter involves a string of posts written by a single author, on some focused topic, typically (but not always) within a short span of time. there can be replies, but they feel separate from the twitter thread itself.

so if we want to delineate the twitter thread genre, what are its requirements and hallmarks? and what are its conventions? every genre has conventions-- sometimes very strong ones. memos and emails should have subject lines, letters can have letterhead, and academic articles have references lists at the end. twitter threads have their own rules, too.

we expect a twitter thread to include at least three tweets linked together by topic, structure, and the platform's formatting. there are usually twice that many, if not more. sometimes there is a narrative feel to the thread, and other times it's more list-like. often the thread is announced and introduced as such in the first post, whether or not the ensuing thread is planned out or more off-the-cuff. at the end, especially if the thread has been shared repeatedly and garnered a lot of attention, the author may add a concluding postscript with a link to somewhere readers can donate or otherwise compensate the author's writing work in some way.

but the really interesting and evolving convention I want to talk about is the numbering. there are different ways to number the individual tweets in your twitter thread. in my experience, the numbers most often come at the end of each post, as in the following variations:

[content of tweet...] 1/12

[content of tweet...] (1/12)

(when the total number of tweets is known at the outset)

[content of tweet...] 1/

[content of tweet...] 1/x
[content of tweet...] (1)

(when the total number of eventual tweets is not known-- this mode seems more common)

I've been collecting twitter thread examples (a whole sixteen of them!) for a while now in anticipation of exploring these numbering conventions a bit more. the end-of-the-tweet positioning is the most common numbering style I've seen, overall. but it's not the only one. on rare occasion, the numbers may come first. plenty of threads don't including numbering at all.

so I have sixteen tabs-worth of twitter threads open next to this blogpost draft right now (I'll link them all at the bottom, pseudo-reference-list-style), and while such a random sample of course can't be truly representative of all the twitter threads that have been created in recent months, they at least give me the beginnings of some general insights into twitter thread numbering conventions.

my main finding? the convention of numbering the tweets in a thread on twitter is dying.

at the very least, it's become a marker of formality, more than a useful signal to readers about the order or length of the composition. numbers seem to be less important to a thread's legibility now that the twitter platform supports and displays threaded tweets so smoothly for most people.

I'm surprised by this, for some reason.

but of these sixteen example threads, only 4 include fully numbered tweets (3 at the end as shown above, and 1 at the beginning). another 10 forego numbering altogether, and 2 include numbering for content within the thread, but not as a marker for each separate tweet.

so there you have it. some really, really informally-gathered data about a quirky little internet genre.

it's interesting, right? it is to me. twitter is a culturally powerful and maddeningly ephemeral discursive space. how conventions emerge and spread and morph a little over time is fascinating in any genre or medium. looking at how it seems to be working on twitter helps me think of twitter as not so special. sure, it's different, but it's mostly made of humans just the same way email chains and academic journals are.

and speaking of platforms and their power...author Robin Sloan makes a good argument here (and a cleverly presented one at that) about how social media could work vs. how it currently works.
 

as promised, the twitter threads I referenced in this random exploration of mine, listed here in chronological order. I'll add a note that linking them here like this takes them out of context. they may or may not make as much sense from outside the constant/endless/fast-paced nature of twitter as experienced by those who spend too much time scrolling around within it.

research-based lessons on ending police violence

thoughts on how women get written out of history

how to save the USPS

linguistics and news headlines

on white silence

on the enduring nature of white supremacy

being anti-racist and avoiding burnout at the same time

pixel art and crossstitch

on voting differently vs. persuading others to vote differently

linguistics and the general horribleness of college sports

teaching students how to format memos

real grammar is very messy

reflections on how colleges are marketed

on white fragility (the book and adjacent mild uproar)

how to fight back against crazy new legislation concerning international students

commentary on material vs. symbolic crises

Blue Apron: reflections

back in November, which feels far more distant in timespace than it really is, a conversation began:

@plaidsicle It looks like there's a link for a free box or something. I'll try it if you will!

— Patti Poblete (@voleuseCK) November 19, 2015

I mentioned a while back that Patti and I have been discussing food just for kicks, over in a messy google doc where I have too many distracted half-formed blabberings. it is fun though. we both love food and cooking, in our non-professional yet notably dedicated ways. so this fun idea to test out a meal subscription service fell right in line with the way brain was so increasingly fascinated by the things. they seem to be so popular, so talked-about. what does it mean?

this, "Is Blue Apron the Future of Home Cooking in America?" was one of the slightly more thoughtful, slightly (only slightly) less buzz-wordy pieces I came across. Jamie Weibe asks whether these sorts of mail-order services are "the future of home-cooked food" or simply "a mindless extravagance for wealthy Americans?"

do they have to be one or the other? likely not.

Patti and I scheduled our deliveries to come the same week, so that we could virtually cook together via Skype and talk through the one recipe our boxes had in common. she has a great write-up of her experience here. I have been slow about reporting back on my end, but I did take pictures!

they sent a little card with an apron-shaped bit of seedpaper. it's basil, it says. where shall I plant this thing? in a pot out by the back steps next spring? or in a shoe on my windowsill tomorrow?

the giant box I received had ingredients for three recipes, each one with a longer, fancier title than the one before. they are all in Blue Apron's online cookbook, so I've included direct links in case you are curious.

Tamarind-Glazed Cod with Lime Rice and Cucumber Relish (this is the one Patti also got to cook)

I had not heard of putting lime zest in rice before, but it was pretty delicious. that relish was great, too, but it made Way Too Much for the two pieces of cod and the little bit of rice. easier to precisely portion out fish and grain than whole cucumbers and jicama, I guess. 

it was fun cooking this one simultaneously as Patti did the same in her kitchen. there was a bunch of multitasking involved, and I remember we both did things in different sequences, slightly (I get very scatterbrained when I cook, sometimes, leaving things half-done and disorderly). I recorded our whole Skype conversation, in case I ever want to go back and look at it again for researchy purposes or anything. 

Beet and Barley Risotto with Swiss Chard and Goat Cheese (my favourite of the three)

this stuff was so good. but it took a good three times longer than the recipe told me it would. which knowing a thing or two about risotto, I suspected might be the case. perhaps it tasted so wonderful because I was so hungry by the time it finished cooking. strangely, my box had 3 whole beets instead of the 1 that was listed on the recipe card. not sure what that means, but I love beetroot so I will not complain.

I am determined to gather the ingredients for this one myself sometime, and make it again. perhaps I'll come back and do a price comparison when I do.

Roasted Sweet Potato and Caramelized Onion Pizza with Béchamel Sauce, Fontina Cheese and Arugula Salad

I quite enjoyed this pizza, and I could see myself recreating it on my own as well. at the end of it all, I had too much sauce for it--even though I stretched the dough pretty thin. in fact, I think there is still a tupperware thing of extra sauce doing nothing in my fridge. ah well. 

 

overall, I had fun with this. having a box of food to cook just show up on your doorstep is somewhat exciting, and it gives you every excuse to make a dish you've never made before. it is expensive though, as Patti's post mentions. she also pointed out just recently this breakdown comparison of Blue Apron's costs vs. other similar services. there are also the concerns about waste and carbon footprints; you can't not wonder about the environmental costs of shipping and of a thousand tiny plastic bottles, no matter how recyclable they are. 

the existence of Blue Apron and all the rest of these new companies raises plenty of questions besides those of cost, too. what gets me wondering most of all is what doesn't show up in the box, and what kinds of assumptions are being demonstrated by those decisions. how do all these lines get drawn? why is it assumed I will have salt and pepper and oil, but not oregano or ginger or a tablespoon of flour? who figured that out? why do the recipes leave me to chop and peel so many, many vegetables, but send me pre-mixed, plastic-wrapped pizza dough? chopping vegetables is counted more convenient than mixing up dough? maybe most people would agree, but it's still interesting to think about the factors behind that piece of the whole puzzle.

I may try out one more box of Blue Apron eventually, depending on what kinds of recipes show up in rotation this semester. it seems like a special-occasion sort of thing, to me. a reward or an escape from the mundane. new recipes, no need for shopping. no need to decide on which restaurant you want to eat at. an excuse to invite someone over for dinner. too bad Patti lives so far away now, or we could share Blue Apron in real life. that would be awesome.

usable pasts

one thousand blogposts. it would be cool to make a chart or map or diagram of them all.

I found these old sketches last week in old notebooks. the old notebooks will help me (presumably) study for prelims over the next six weeks.

the sketches are pretty much just there. not relevant to studying at all, really. I took photos of them and have thereby transferred some of their inky randomness onto the internet. I think they were drawn sometime late in 2013.

I keep coming across this phrase, "a usable past," in academic books, mainly, where authors use it to hedge around the reality that the true past is and ever will be inaccessible. our biases will always cloud our memories--personal and cultural. the biases of past peoples don't exactly help clarify reality for us either.

I wonder in another thousand blogposts how I will look back and read the things I'm writing here. already the ten years of this blog stretch off into foggy, familiar, fuzzy, foreign places. are they usable, now? will they be usable still in ten more years?

probably to someone. but it's hard to say what for...

costs

this is the price tag that came with the brand new bicycle wheel I bought the weekend before I moved to Texas. it was tied around the frame of the wheel with a little bit of white string. yes, I save random things like this. price tags often have a really cool blend of style and functionality that just seems interesting to me.

attached to the same bicycle wheel was this warning sticker, wrapped neatly around one of the spokes. back when my dad and littlest brother and I replaced the old bent wheel with this shiny new one, I cut off the sticker and tucked it into my pocket. two days later, I traveled with it and the little price tag (and the bike of course) all the way from the mountains through the desert, down to the windswept plains of west Texas.

I hardly have time here, as a graduate student, to ride that bike anywhere.

but I do somehow have time to contemplate the bits of technical communication that came with my bicycle's new wheel. in 5371 yesterday, we were talking about ethics. there is a lot to talk about where ethics and communication are concerned. despite the fact that stereotypical tech. writers create documents that don't often get read, technical communication really does make a difference sometimes. the example we keep reading about is the Challenger disaster in 1986, where a technical report somehow failed to convince the people involved that there might be a problem with the space shuttle. that's a pretty extreme example, and even in that case, there is no easy way to think about the ethics of it.

for most of class we just asked questions:

-what interests are we (should we be?) serving as technical writers?
-who decides what is ethical ("good") and what isn't?

-how might we fill in the gaps between what is/isn't legal, ethical, or valuable?

-how far do our ethical responsibilities as technical writers extend?
-how much risk of miscommunication (there will always be at least some risk) is acceptable?

I love questions.

about my little bike wheel warning sticker I can ask plenty more of them. when was the decision made to include these warnings? was it just because some lawyer told them it would be a good idea? who actually wrote out these paragraphs, and how many drafts did it take before they settled on this version? they can't really expect me to thoroughly inspect the front wheel every single time I go for a ride, can they? my new bike wheel didn't come with a manual--are they assuming I have one for my bike as a whole? what other assumptions are being made here? and has anyone ever really died from a mis-adjusted bike wheel?

musculature

you're talking about power. tara hunt is talking about power.

we all want to be powerful. to do stuff. to become.

yep. we are all caterpillars.

hungry ones.

a fork is not just a fork. it's the power to get those noodles from your plate to your mouth. my grandfather used to tease us, while we ate grandma's waffles in the mornings around her little round table (never with syrup. butter and jam yo.). he'd say "how come when you lift your arm up like that your mouth opens? every time? why does it do that? it's like you're a robot or something."

we looked at him funny. maybe we couldn't exactly explain why we opened our mouths at the right moment, but we knew why. we were just hungry little caterpillars.

a caterpillar doesn't need much to become a butterfly. nature takes care of it.

humans though... maybe we don't need much to grow up. nature takes care of us too. but we have such consciousness. that turns power into something complicated. we don't just chew on leaves and knit cocoons and end up flying around in the wind. we can think about flying. we can have motives for flying. we can see all the things we might do other than chew and knit and fly. we can tell stories. we can ask why.

so what do we need power for anyway? where do we find it?

we find it anywhere we can. we dig it out of the ground. we suck it out of the wind. we use it to make things happen.

and what if we don't want to be a butterfly?

power is choices. power is seeing more than one way to go about your life.

you can eat noodles with a fork or with chopsticks. alfredo or marinara. whichever. but once you've made the choice...

well, you can't exactly hold chopsticks the same way you would a fork. it all makes a difference. either way your mouth will open when you bring your hand to it.

it is finished.

it is beautiful. i am proud.

what next?

well, I'm working on the documentation for that lovely chunk of html, so those who come after me into the isotope office will know what the heck I did to make the website. Then I need to update the graphics and things for the next issue. Kathe, the graphic designer, mentioned crimson for the cover. I like. I'm excited.

In non-website related stuff, I'm going to be helping the editors sort out their filing systems. It sounds dull, yeah, but I'm excited because it means learning more about the nuts and bolts of running a magazine. That's something I'm very interested in. Knowledge is power. Possibilities. Options. Doors. Choices. Freedom.

Yeah.

usability

if you recall, i once expressed a general dislike of this whole concept of usability. despite how important it is, i just can't bring myself to enjoy thinking about it.

having said that, this usability report hasn't been too painful. I got the easy job of writing out our introduction and objectives/goals/procedures section for the memo. This involves less consideration of usability than the other sections on our results and recommendations, so that was cool. I finished that over spring break and haven't really thought about it since. We were supposed to meet on Tuesday but 1. I didn't feel like it. 2. Jamie and Kate forgot about it anyway. I ended up emailing them my section of the report and Jamie volunteered to stick each section together. We will convene before class today and make sure everything is as we want it to be before we turn in this thing.

I wonder if I will ever get used to thinking in terms of usability. I probably already do more than I know. Stupid question that just came to mind: What use is something if it isn't usable? I just hope that all this usability stuff becomes more interesting as I learn more about it and how to make it a part of everything I create/design/write/etc.

chapter 7

Most of the technical bits of this last chapter of the text were all old news to me. I thank BIS 2400 for that. I already know about meta tags, and how to make anchors/targets along a page. PDFs, RTFs and such are less familiar to me, but after reading this chapter I understand the differences, and hopefully through the work we do in class I will master the techniques of incorporating them in my web portfolio.
Today in BIS 2400 I paid less attention to Dr Pratt than normal and opened up not my site for her class but my site for this class and played with it. I'm trying to perfect the template design I will use for the rest of my portfolio. I hope it turns out well. At the moment my experiment with layers has gone a bit screwy. I'll figure it out sooner or later though. Once we finish the section on Dreamweaver in BIS 2400 and get on to learning Fireworks I'll be able to do cool graphics and such, which I'm sure I will have fun working on.

Usability Report stuff: Jamie and I met today and hashed out an outline of sorts for this project. We've divided up the work into a before/during/after type layout to document our Dreamweaver presentation & results; each of us will work on one section. It shouldn't be too hard. The only problem I see is that spring break falls right in the middle of all this work, so it might possibly be a struggle to make ourselves actually do it. I trust we'll get it done despite this though.

Anyway... I'm getting the impression (maybe this isn't altogether correct) from The Web Portfolio Guide and also from The Non-Designer's Web Book that image is really important when you're presenting your professional self to the world. That probably sounds like a really obvious thing to say; I only mention it because I have this fierce desire to be really good at this web design stuff just for that reason. Call it vanity if you like, I just want to look like I know what I'm doing. I want to have a perfectly polished image. Is this class going to help me acheive that? I have great expectations. Not that it all depends on Rylish and what he teaches us, of course. I know I have to work at this myself too. So--

step 1: learn to trust yourself,

step 2: and learn to trust everyone else,

step 3: but expect more of yourself than you do of them

Theoretical rubbish, I guess. Who knows if it actually makes any sense at all. I'm just typing here. I don't know if I've gotten up to 500 words yet or not, but this is about all I have to say.

yesterday's class

I find learning about usability studies somewhat dull. While the whole idea of usability is pretty cool, studying it in such technical nitpicky depth seems a bit... overkill or something. I'm not quite sure why I have come to such a conclusion, because I know usability is very important, and perhaps even the central value behind everything anyone ever produces, but for some reason it bores me a little. Kind of weird.

But, after all that lovely usability stuff was over, we played some more with dreamweaver. I'm a bit torn about how much I like it. People have told me it isn't the best html editor around. I have a good friend (randomlink & other randomlink) who hand codes everything and makes the most amazing looking sites. She says it's easy. Our professor says it's easy. Nevertheless I remain pretty much just as terrified as I was. I am unsure I could ever learn and remember all those complicated tags... But maybe I could. I want to try... I'm a little afraid but I want to try. I want to be good at it too. Very good at it. I envy all the people out there who already are.

design

It's a bit weird, but I've never before thought of a document as a thing to be designed. But really, all kinds of documents we use in today's society need the attention of a designer to make them look professional and aesthetically pleasing. Why such things are so important is somewhat obvious and yet not. I suppose as humans we value elements of design and beauty even in the most benign and meaningless parts of our lives.

I am excited to start learning how to build web pages for our portfolios. At first I was nervous and slightly worried that I wouldn't be good at it, but even if I'm not that good at first, it will still be fun to play around and figure things out as I go. The chapters we were to read for this week will be more interesting and meaningful, I'm sure, once I actually attempt to apply the things they talked about. Actually designing the pages and seeing them on the screen will be so exciting. I can hardly wait.

But first comes all the planning and organizing of information... this is the part I'm less excited about. Mostly I'm the kind of person who jumps feet first into projects like this, telling herself she'll figure it out as she goes and it'll work well enough the first time. Planning is for sissies, a rebellious little voice in my head whispers. I realize, however, that this is not the case here. Designing a web site is no easily managed project. Though they seem relatively simple and straightforward when you see them in their millions all over the Internet, web pages are actually pretty complicated creatures, and the collections of them which make up complete websites even more so. There are so many details involved that you absolutely have to sort out in advance if your website is going to work properly.

Planning what exactly I want to include in my web portfolio is one of the more difficult decisions I have to make. There is a lot of writing I have that may not fit into the overall purpose or tone of the site. While I may feel like including all of it, doing so would probably take a great deal of work. I will have to decide which pieces will work best together in my portfolio, and then from there decide how I want to present them. I so far have many many ideas and as usual am having a hard time not procrastinating making a final decision between them all.

Thinking about my audience is another rather difficult thing for me. I'd rather not have to consider how other people will interpret my portfolio, but I do know it is important to think about if one does not wish to be misunderstood or dismissed for being unclear or uninteresting.