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.

here there be dragons

opening match #8: Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire 

this final opening round match-up review one has taken me a bunch of extra time for many reasons, firstly being that our mini-campaign of A Song of Ice and Fire spanned 5 whole weeks, plus a delay or two and a good session zero. thank you very much to friend Caroline for joining in on that game-- it was a most intriguing whirlwind of an adventure!

secondly and thirdly: I had been rather intimidated and hesitant about grappling with the notoriously labyrinthine Shadowrun book again. and I am a tad busier now than I was in August.

I last played Shadowrun many years ago now-- 2018ish I suppose? we and some friends ran through a short 3-session arc once in Indiana and once again in Louisiana; both were quite fun. and since 2019 I've been a fan of a narrative podcast performance version of Shadowrun called Fun City. it's good stuff. Mike Rugnetta is awesome, as are his roleplaying friends, and their voices plus marvelous sound design all come together to make the system look impressively manageable, somehow. (sidenote: I also found their Float City story arc, a pandemic side project using the indie RPG system Stillfleet, extra extra cool. someday I may need to check out Stillfleet properly. I notice it calls itself "grimdark," too. interesting.)

anyway, along with all that in-person and vicarious storytelling fun, I remembered Shadowrun being supremely complicated and overwhelming. it took me a while to work up the energy to face it again with a (hopefully, sort of, somewhat) more open mind.

the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, conversely, was totally new. I've watched the HBO show (much thanks to all the friends who ever shared their HBO subscriptions and/or couches and homes to facilitate that endeavor), read three of the Game of Thrones books, and this past summer we watched House of the Dragon, too. there is much about Mr. Martin's world that is utterly vivid and iconic. I'd say it deserves its fame. Jeremiah and I were excited to have this tournament as an excuse to actually try out the RPG system based on it all.

once more I've kept the same outline of sorts for this review: a tidy table of metadata, summaries of the few characters I've made in each system, and then thoughts on their aesthetics, mechanics, approachability, and preliminary(ish) judgements.

SYSTEM	Shadowrun (5e)	A Song of Ice and Fire
tagline =	"Everything Has a Price"	"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros"
publisher =	Catlyst Game Labs	Green Ronin Publishing
pub. date =	2019	2014
cost =	$59.99	$49.95
length =	11 major sections / 496 pages	13 chapters / 320 pages
my exp. level =	some	none prior

---

previous characters

sadly, I have very thin memories of my two prior Shadowrun characters. both appeared in different renditions of "Mr. Sandman vs. the Dragon," Jeremiah's tried and true 3-session adventure. and I know both were riggers, created as such on recommendation from my husband GM, for the sake of that character type's relative simplicity.

one was named Kitza and I think her character sheet is kicking around somewhere in a box... likely buried beyond any easy reference. the other was a dwarf, I think? maybe named Pablo... or something like that? I remember something about some family of his being trafficked by a megacorporation and somehow, for better or for worse, were able to crawl free from a shipping container on some crowded docks at the end of the story. maybe. 

all in all, not much to reminisce about here. onward to the fun new stuff!

new characters

when I (finally) got around to re-reading Shadowrun and wading through its differently-unique character creation system, I came up with a mystic adept half-inuit half-Japanese elf chick named Ingyaka. she's sort of secret agent-y in my imagination-- like a stealthy, nature-loving, spirit-whipsering Jason Bourne or something. since we didn't plan a Shadowrun one-shot for this tournament, I have no idea how she'd show up in actual gameplay, and indeed I confess that I called her finished enough once I'd chosen her many magic spells. the tedium of figuring out what gear and eqiupment to purchase with even just six thousand nuyen (6000¥)--the lowest amount you can possibly start with-- didn't seem necessary just to write about it for this review.

-

character creation in A Song of Ice and Fire is much less an individual affair than it is in most other RPG systems where one expects to play as a member of an adventuring party. in this particular game, players first collaborate in creating a noble house-- perhaps one as great and powerful as the Starks or the Baratheons, or perhaps one of lesser renown, one bowing at the feet of some grander pillar of Westerosi history. ours was built along these lines-- a smaller house under the protection of and bound by honor to the great and wealthy Lannisters.

we called ourselves House Portayne, a wealthy house ruling an island of silver mines just off the west coast of the Reach, south of the Iron Islands. Caroline primarily played Lady Alasta Portayne, and I primarily played her second-born child, Tobytha. we had some input on the Lord (the chaste and humble Elrin Portayne) and other children (an older brother, Ethon, and a younger girl, Joryssa), as well as some side characters associated with the family. together we came up with a name and some basic info for our family's maester, Maester Bridon (hailing from house Wylde). later on, for my second official character, I created Gwenna Fallside, a rough castle guard who quickly earns the family's trust and becomes castellan of Silverfont Castle. for a few highly intense B-plot scenes inbetween the primary roleplaying action, Caroline and I played as Gwenna and the Maester. one of us may have gotten forcibly tossed out of a tower window to their death. very Game-of-Thones-y, isn't it? the B-plots were all very neat, adding to the deep and expansive feel of the game. 

our mini-campaign was set to span the reigns of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel, and we knew ahead of time that House Portayne would not survive. it turned out that we were all utterly doomed to be poisoned by jealous Lannisters and chased down by pirates trying to escape the inevitable seige of our island. little Joryssa did grow up and get married off to a son of House Reed, so maybe she and her line will survive to remember her origins. exploring the long-ago past of the Song of Ice and Fire universe like this was incredibly cool, even if all evidence of our House was hopelessly erased in the end.

aesthetics

these two games both come with quite intricate worlds-- one explicitly grown from the richly detailed, sprawling civilizations in Martin's novels and the other from the remix of almost everything else a person could want to tell a story about. both are alternate versions of something like western civilization, in a way. in A Song of Ice and Fire, we have an alternate history of European geopolitical conflicts, with zombies and magic and dragons and extra murder on top. in Shadowrun, it's an alternate near-future, with ruthless megacorporations and magic and dragons and cyberpunks all the way down. 

A Song of Ice and Fire, as an RPG system, seems to me like a vast, ornate, and orderly library of fairly traditional fantasy ideas-- spacious yet organized, and more or less tidy. it may have dozens of secret passages and a skeleton or two hidden in the corners, but generally it's presentable and logical, even if there's a lot going on. its illustrations have a soft realism, not lacking in the violence you'd expect from this particular setting, but lit by torches and candles so it all seems not quite mundane, but not quite so shocking or garish either. the book's design feels monestarial, with a tinge of rennaissance, maybe a little bit fancy-Shakespearean on the edges. there is a lot of all-caps, angular and serifed, strong and delicate at the same time, perfectly high contrast and comfortable to skim through.

conversely, the Shadowrun system feels like a massive kitchen sink full of influences. some of the art reminds me of Paul Kidby's style, which does seem fitting somehow (he's the artist who illustrated plenty of Terry Pratchett's work). other pages and spreads are more evocative of comic book and/or videogame art. like I said-- it is a mishmash. in a good way.

if this system were a physical room it would be a somewhat grimy, mostly abandoned, very magical attic full of random knickknacks, old photo albums, broken electronics, weird porcelain figurines, and wildly colorful posters, all collected over many decades and now surrounded by a tangled sea of wires and cables and spikes and jewelry. it's got all the neon-and-fishnets and glossy high-tech punk style of Cyberpunk mixed in with an animistic spookiness. we could say Pathfinder and Mage and Werewolf got put in a compost heap with all the other urban, cyberpunk techno-fantasies you've ever heard of, and Shadowrun is what crawled out, dripping with lightning and breathing fire. here, orcs and elves and magic and machines coexist with normality just like anything else that ever might have evolved on the planet Earth.

funnily enough, dragons and dragon imagery show up far more prevalently in the Shadowrun book-- little tattoo-ish line-art dragon symbols glow red in the bottom corners of every page, next to blocky page numbers and footer text-- than in A Song of Ice and Fire. Shadowrun gives us 8 lines of index entries under "dragon(s)," whereas "dragon" doesn't even show up as a unique entry in A Song of Ice and Fire's (much shorter) index; over there we only see Dragonbone, Dragonglass, and Dragonstone. that's interesting, eh? what if we wanted to play Targaryens?

mechanics

summing up the game mechanics and rules for these two isn't going to be easy. but I'll do my best. at least they have one wonderfully simple thing in common: rolling a bunch of d6s all at once based on your rating(s) in whatever skill.

for character creation, Shadowrun gives you 5x5 grid of options, across which to prioritize various character elements: metatype, attribute points, skill points, magic abilities, and extra funds for gear/equipment. for each column, you can only choose from the options included at one of the 5 priority levels. 

{ the Shadowrun 5e priority table. choose one option per priority level A-E }
 

within the basic constraints of those priorities, you'll then assign ratings to 8 core attributes, a few derived stats (Edge, Essence, and Magic) that I still don't totally understand very well, and however many relevant skills you can afford. and good gracious it seems like there is an almost infinite list of skills. the actual rules even allow for making up your own skills if you find that the pre-written lists don't fit what you want to do. so how's that for flexible? if your character uses magic, a you'll also take a magic ability rating and choose some related skills and spells. there are plenty of spells to choose from, too, and they can be learned in any order.

finishing touches for your character will involve choosing qualities and spending some of the 25 Karma you start with. Shadowrun qualities work kind of like the advantages, merits, and flaws in World of Darkness-- adding positive qualities costs you a few Karma, but adding negative qualities (like addiction, a bad reputation, etc.) can earn you some of it back. Karma is one way you'll level up as your game progresses, so you don't have to spend it all at character creation, but you have to spend at least some. 

once gameplay gets going, it's pretty action focused. the whole concept of Shadowrun is that you and your party get hired as Shadowrunners-- fairly unscrupulous folks taking on dangerous semi-legal jobs on the fringes of society, hoping to get away with it every time, earn an excellent reputation, and rake in millions of nuyen (¥ = the currency of this particular dystopian future). no matter how sneaky you might be, things are bound to go wrong.

combat works using very short "combat turns" of 3 seconds each, during which each player acts according to their initiative score. for some reason, there are also 6 types of initiative depending on what kind of combat is going on-- are we in the real world, or in the matrix, or in the astral plane somewhere? the various initiative options provide different numbers of d6s, so you'll roll that number of initiative dice, add your initiative attribute rating, and that total is your initiative score. whoever has the highest score goes first, and so on, til the end of the round. then everyone subtracts 10 from their score, and those who still have a positive number can act again.

actions are divided up into free actions, simple actions, complex actions, and special "interrupting" actions. very Pathfinder-esque, overall. whatever the action or test, you'll add your ability and skill ratings, then roll that many d6s. a 5 or higher is a hit, and depending on the task difficulty, you'll need some number of hits to succeed. rolling a 1 means a glitch in whatever you're trying to do. and usually that's bad.

as your team completes shadowruns for all their shadowy clients, you'll earn cash rewards and Karma, with which you can then purchase more gear and any upgrades that make sense for your story, according to whatever you can afford.  character progression is all quite customizable. 

-

I've briefly mentioned the group House creation aspect of A Song of Ice and Fire already. once you've created your House, each player creates a character, either working from scratch or starting with one of the provided archetypes. the system here reminded me a lot of the Wrath & Glory character creations options, except there are more of them available. I do think having a good range of pre-made templates to which you then add your own flavor is really nice. 

I want to say the individual character sheet for A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the simplest I've ever seen. rather than attributes + skills, we just get one list of 19 abilities, nice and alphabetical all the way from Agility and Animal Handling to Healing, Languages, and Marksmanship, and on to Warfare and Will. scores for each normally start at 2 and go up from there. most abilities also come with a range of specialties (skill with a certain weapon, or a certain approach, etc.) that can grant you bonus dice on relevant rolls.

your characters' age will also play a major role in some of their other stats. younger characters have fewer points to spend on ability ratings, but more destiny points to start with. destiny points can be spent for bonus qualities, or they can be used in various ways during gameplay to add bonus dice or change the outcome of a scene in particularly dire circumstances. as your character ages, they'll gain more experience but also more flaws.

the system allows for free creative decision making with some things, but also gives you fun tables full of options to roll for with others. the dice may dictate which part of the continent your House is from, how established or respected they are, how much land, population, defense, wealth, and influence they have, and whether or not there's an heir or a maester or an army at your disposal. as your game progresses, you'll make House Fortune rolls fairly often to see how all those stats change over months and years of in-game time. this was some of the most fun we had storytelling the big picture-- coming up with the story of a new resource or alliance that could explain the increase of wealth for our House, or imagining the crimes or plagues that would explain a drastic dip in population added to the pure fun of rolling dice for the quantitative stats. 

on the smaller scene-by-scene scale, gameplay in A Song of Ice and Fire involves combining your ratings and speciality bonuses for each ability, rolling that many d6s, then adding up all the results. it's more math than just recognizing the 5+ dice as successes and ignoring the rest, but it also feels a little more dramatic that way too. even if you roll low numbers, if you're rolling enough dice, it might still add up to a success. difficulty levels range from "automatic," requiring no roll at all, or "easy," requiring at least 1, all the way up to "very hard" at 18 or "heroic," requiring a total of 21 or more.

critical successes are a thing only if your total roll when attacking is double the total of your opponent's defense. fumbles are optional, only if your game table is into the higher stakes of something unexpectedly awful happening when all your dice land on 1. 

there are some special rules and procedures for tournaments (jousting and other non-combat contests), battlefields and warfare (large-scale multi-unit combat) and intrigue (social combat in simple, standard, or complex modes)-- most of that is laid out in a pretty clear way as a reference.

for character advancement, A Song of Ice and Fire is an XP system, though you can also earn coin and status through gameplay. during our game at least, leveling up seemed a very gradual process. there are only three ways to spend XP in the book: it costs 10 to add or improve a specialty, 30 to upgrade an ability rating, and 50 to buy an additional destiny points. it seems somewhat limited (and expensive), but not inappropriately so.

 

approachability

neither of these games sits firmly in a category of those with cozy, simple RPG mechanics. beyond the nice, clean familiarity of the stalwart d6, there are layers of rules and exceptions and variations that make both systems at least a little more daunting for the average player. but with a good GM to guide you through it, the struggle can be minimized a great deal.

the first chapter in A Song of Ice and Fire is a primer on the world of Westeros. the book doesn't assume readers are intimately familiar with the world and in fact rehashes a good amount of the history, the map, and the vibes for us. there's enough here that you could get by without much prior knowledge of the books or show if you had to (though why that would ever be the case is a separate and valid question). 

I found it quite odd that the book uses SIF and SIFRP as its chosen abbreviations, rather than the ASoIaF that I've seen way more often out in the sea of internet discourse about the books. perhaps the 2009 publication of the first RPG edition pre-dated the rise of ASoIaF as the more ubiquitous acronym? or perhaps leaving out the articles and prepositions and conjunctions seemed more official? I have no idea, but so it goes. however odd it seems to me, I suppose it doesn't matter so very much.

the order of things may matter a bit more. the introductory chapters make sense enough-- setting, rules, character creation... but after that we bounce back and forth a bit-- chapters 4 and 5 go over general abilities and specialties, then destiny points and qualities. only then do we get into the chapters on house and lands, with all the procedures and tables for creating our house and determining its history and fortunes. that seems backwards, but I suppose the beautiful affordances of a codex mean we can reference any of its contents in whatever order we like. good crossreferences and wayfinding and beautiful visual hierarchy all make that easy enough, here.

if, despite my general pickiness about the ordering of things, I can forgive the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG book for a bit of wonky ordering, it appears that I (still, these five years later) cannot forgive Shadowrun for similar crimes. 

I hope I'm not belaboring the fact that Shadowrun is pretty intimidating as a book and as a system. the fact that there is so much detailed content pulled from fantasy and sci-fi means that it really ought to be handled and designed as carefully as possible for its readers... and perhaps they did their best? who knows. almost since I first touched this game book I have harbored persistent gripes about the mismatched non-parallel lists here and there and everywhere. on any given page, a trio of stats may be listed out A, B, and C, only to have the same stats or categories printed on a standard character sheet in the opposite order, or scrambled to B, A, C instead. why? for the sake of all the dragon-hoarded treasures in all the universes, why would anyone do this?

adding to that the relatively small text, plenty of jargon, and so many options for customization among various slightly-different categories and subcategories, I'd wager a brand new player would need to fall very deeply and very hard in love with this setting to want to tackle the complexity of learning the system from scratch. or maybe it just takes confidence to bend the system to your own creative will?

preliminary verdicts

Shadowrun, upon my revisiting it this past month, really was a lot cooler than I remembered it. one must appreciate its ambitious scope and uniqueness, if nothing else.

I found A Song of Ice and Fire quite unique as well. I'm less a fangirl of its base media, but I still think it's fair to say this game evokes Martin's novels just as well as The One Ring evoked Tolkien's for me.

my experience levels with both systems are pretty even here. both were fun gameplay experiences, both are interesting, and both are significantly different from some of the more popular or mainstream RPGs I've covered so far.

so... do I let my annoyance at Shadowrun's inconsistencies of arrangement knock it out in this first round?

yes. 

yes, I do. while I recognize my response to these things as (perhaps more than) a little bit nitpicky, those issues have frustrated my practical experience of the game in a real way. and it all could have been avoided with even the merest ounce of designery forethought or technical editing attention. that this version is the 5th edition makes it even less excusable. 

congratulations, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. for what it's worth, I think most poeple would agree with me on this ruling, even if not for the same reasons.

what's next?  

I'll summarize my 8 quarterfinalists and articulate a few final reasons why they win in a recap post next week. after that, dear Jeremiah can help me match them up for a new round. since all the most extensive exploration and research has already been done, future rounds will probably involve much shorter, broad-strokes reviews for comparison purposes. ideally I'll cut 8 down to 4 before Thanksgiving, and from 4 to 2 shortly thereafter, so perhaps we'll crown a first ever TTRPG champion by the end of the semester. fingers crossed. 

and after that? I'm not sure. there are still so many more RPG books. maybe we do a tournament of expansion content, setting books-- like the new Tal'Dorei setting book I have barely looked at, or individual published campaign adventures? I could explore Stillfleet properly. Coyote and Crow surely deserves some attention. or it could be fun to invite a whole roster of judges besides little old me, but that would also involve a bunch more structure and planning and logistics. we'll see when and how anyone has time and energy for that sort of thing.

in the meantime, let me know-- how would you rank these 16 games if you were the tournament judge?

week eight

after blogging almost everyday for seven weeks, summer activities and naps and plans took over and left no time. 

but I have still been writing. journaling... work notes... DnD vignettes... mental rants about politics and society... and yes, various blogpost drafts. 

some of that writing will become conventionally useful in future lesson plans or tenure/promotion paperwork or letters to congress.

some of it will simply exist. 

other things I've been up to since last week:

reorganizing and tidying the china hutch, carefully

-spinning wheel practice, frustratedly

-making cheesecake, indulgently

-watering plants, generously 

-planning a weekend camping trip, hopefully

-taking Hamilton for short walks, lazily

-dealing with our fritzy air-conditioning, longsufferingly

-and, resignedly, failing at Wednesday's wordle. 

I fail at Worldle all the time (despite having won 2nd place in a geography bee once upon a time; someday I really need to sit down and try to master all the countries in Africa), but I don't think I've failed any of the daily Wordle puzzles before this. ever.

I still think the game should have a mechanism for signalling when a letter shows up more than once. but maybe that would make it too easy...

oh well. 

life is about way more than mere success, thankfully. 

Wordle 396 (20 July 2022) X/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜🟨
🟩⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩

editing work and so-called "educational technologies"

it's not the most important volunteer gig in the world, but I am on the official Board of Copy Editors for a scholarly journal in the field of social work.

see? (I still need to have them update my institutional affiliation, I know. soon.)

the article I'm editing now is about perceptions of social work and advocacy organizations in Ireland. it's pretty interesting. part of the fun of this position is getting to dip my brain into current scholarship from another field, from lots of other perspectives. one of the pieces I previously edited was all about volunteerism-- something not unrelated to my own scholarship.

today I've been combing through this forthcoming article's reference list, checking for completeness and formatting. like most social science journals, this one uses APA style, which I'm thankfully pretty familiar with.

my editing process can be a little haphazard for a project like this. but generally it follows these broad strokes:

1. read through the piece once and make notes about persistent issues or anything else that stands out, tidying up a few of the easy things (commas, spelling, other punctuation) along the way

2. check that everything listed in the references is actually cited in the text, and vice versa (this is something I learned from Dr. Hawkins as part of her teaching in Bibliography & Research Methods many years ago)

3. attend to citation formatting (all the periods in the right spots, capitalization as APA dictates, and so on)

4. make sure all the headings and subheadings are styled properly (and I'd usually check tables and figures here too, but this particular article doesn't have any)

5. draft a makeshift style sheet for any judgement calls I get to make about hyphenation or capitalization of terms (these are always really informal sticky-note things, if that)

6. go through again, adding queries for the author where needed, making decisions and changes for the major issues previously noted, watching for consistency and fluency at the word- and sentence-level.

7. spot check one last time for the things on the style sheet, review the queries and comments to make sure they make sense, and then send the whole thing off after appending my initials to the filename.

if it's work for hire, I'll prep an invoice and send that along with my edits. I've done a huge amount of editing for hire this summer, it seems like. dissertation proposals, articles about orthodontics, computer graphics, and GPS, and even several book chapters about analytic software programs. but for this particular job I'm only getting paid in collegial respect and academic clout. it makes a nice line on my CV and boosts my ethos as a person with practical, ongoing experience editing. plus, I enjoy it.

there's about a day or two more of work left on the piece. the references and headings are sorted, so all that's left, roughly, are steps 5 through 7. from this point on, I shouldn't need to keep opening and closing the section on APA style at the Purdue OWL. it's down to the less tedious part of the job now. I could, I know, be a lot more meticulous about how I approach the work and how I track the time I spend on it. for now, this is what works for me.

the tedium of citation-tidying, I'll add, is pretty pleasant tedium. actually one of my favourite things about editing scholarly work like this is replacing all the default hyphens with en-dashes in all the page ranges of the references that have them. APA doesn't strictly care about that detail, but the beautiful differences between hyphens and dashes were irrevocably drilled into me back when I worked with the more comprehensive Chicago style at Texas Tech University Press.

style guides like Chicago and APA and resources like the OWL that grow up around them all count as educational technology, don't they? sure, the term is burdened with connotations of electronics, computers, digital connectivity, and such, but books are technologies too. I'd count these guides' paper-based versions as technologies just as much as I'd count their websites at https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html and https://apastyle.apa.org/.

the Purdue OWL has always been a website, though its offline home, the regular Purdue Writing Lab, predates it by almost twenty years.

educational technologies. any technology that serves a process of education, right? well, one would hope.

about a year and a half ago, the dear Purdue OWL entered into a partnership with a purveyor of so-called educational technologies called Chegg. shortly thereafter, citation generator banners appeared all over every page of the OWL, offering quick and easy auto-citations in MLA or APA style. I reacted with great disappointment and irritation at the time. and so did plenty of other people.

since then, the powers-that-be over at the OWL have toned it down a bit. the citation generation tools are still there, but not on every single page. still, it feels odd. one tool, the OWL, gives students valuable reference information and examples and helps them learn to apply that knowledge in their writing. the other just black-boxes it all away and says, more or less, "trust us, we'll handle it, you don't have to think too hard. or at all."

I guess there are probably times when not having to think too hard about some process or technology is perfectly okay, but in academia? it seems thoroughly wrong. this kind of thing doesn't really serve education. does it?

such over-reliance on technology goes beyond students, too. a related "educational technology" here is plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin and other such tools. these companies give lip service to academic integrity and education, but their true goal is profit. they're invested in manufacturing some kind of vague ethical crisis so they can sell software subscriptions.

using software to catch students "cheating" is not education. it's barely relevant to education by any stretch of the imagination. and if you have to rely on such tools to figure out if your students are cheating on their writing assignments or not, then you haven't given your students or their writing enough of your attention, and you haven't designed very good writing assignments.

what has bugged me most about Turnitin and the like is the fact that it copies piles and piles of student work for its own databases and uses those copies as a core part of its function. and I suppose they think that because their terms of service say this is all perfectly fine to do, it is.

I say not. if students had any real choice in the matter, then maybe. but given the power dynamics of your typical college classroom, they don't. if their professor says upload your work via this tool, then students are more or less forced to do so, whether or not they care about the implications.

copyright is a whole mess in itself, but any logical understanding of intellectual property should acknowledge that students own their creative work, even within the relatively convoluted confines of formal education. for a third-party technology company to copy that work and profit from its application is pretty clearly unfair. unjust. messed up. all because some teachers are so worried about cheating they're willing to outsource part of their job to a for-profit company rather than design more robust assignments and trust their students half an inch.

for further reading:

"A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin."

"Plagiarism Policing and Profit: Great news! Our students produced $1.75 billion in profit! Too bad they won't get any of it."

"Re-Thinking Plagiarism as Unfair Competition."

the warthog of Theseus

our puppy, Hamilton, who is almost one whole year of age, loves to chew on things.

we have so far trained him out of chewing on most of the important non-chewable things like human digits, power cords, furniture. still working on getting him to leave shoes and socks and slippers alone.

the pugs have plenty of toys. bone-shaped toys, duck-shaped toys, warthog shaped toys, and a variety of balls. the stuffed toys are especially beloved, but they also seem the most fragile. they tear, their stuffing leaks, and then Hamilton chews on that. and swallows it if he gets a chance.

so I've repaired the stuffed warthog and the two stuffed ducks a few times now.

this green woven nylon duck has needed it the most-- the original stitching around the neck didn't stand a chance against two playful pugs. my own rough but persistent stitching has held up better, so far... but we'll just have to see how many more times it's actually worth mending before there is no neck left to hold any of the rest together.

the warthog (who is named Moriarty, and who has been Wesley's companion for longer than I've known him) is accumulating his fair share of scars, too. when Hamilton ripped his underarms open the other day, I took the opportunity to remove all the long-dead plastic squeakers from among the warthog's fluffy guts before I patched him back up.

much of Moriarty's body fabric is so torn and threadbare that it barely wants to hold any stitches anymore. rather than force his shredded fur back into some puckery semblance of its original glory, I've taken to grafting in other scraps of fabric to strengthen the repairs. around his eye it's a beige linen of some sort. filling in the spots in his armpits and belly is an old floral-print fabric shower curtain.

this stuffed warthog has lasted a pretty long time. and Hamilton loves him more than any other toy (though I hypothesize that part of this attachment is an "absence makes the heart grow fonder" sort; when the thing needs mending I have to keep it on a shelf out of reach, lest the puppy devour all the stuffing). I imagine he'll be worth stitching up again and again for a long time, even if all the original fur pieces eventually get replaced and replaced again with grafts from my scrapbin of random fabrics.

goodbye, facebookland

this week I deactivated my 15-year-old facebook account.

why?

many reasons. mainly, it's a new year, time for trying new things. facebook's role in my recent life has largely been a passive, bad-habit-esque waste of time, and I'm increasingly convinced that its recent roles in spreading terrible ideologies and misleading nonsense makes it problematic for anyone to continue supporting it at all.

so I want to live a year or so truly without it and see what happens. perhaps I'll have more time to write and blog and exercise and knit and make phone calls.

speaking of more time for blogging, over the past months I have been (as is usual) sifting through a dozen different ideas of what I might blog about, with new ideas poking at my brain every few days, too. there are podcasts to blog about, and the upcoming semester to blog about, and gardening plans to blog about. but when? I can't feasibly blog about everything all at once, sadly.

for now, I guess I'm blogging about facebook.

somewhere in the depths of all my old blog drafts, I've had a collection of notes sitting here, from a talk given by a facebook executive or employee of some sort. it was hosted in the student union at Purdue University, where I sat and took notes in the blogger app on my old phone.

here's me, kicking off my mild resolution to blog here more often in 2019, attempting to reconstitute and expand these old notes and snippets into something intelligible and interesting.

facebook's goal/mission/quest/thing has been, for as long as I've heard them talking about having one, is to connect the world.

is this a noble and valiant thing for facebook to be doing? does it seem like a mission that we should trust facebook with?

well, in any case, the speaker opened by stating facebook's mission. and then he spoke excitedly about new developments like live video, virtual reality, and artificial intelligences. oh and about how many new jobs facebook was creating every day. hurray for tech jobs.

he also, unaviodably, had to address issues of privacy and tracking, and he did touch on the ethics of selling users' data to marketers. I'm reminded now, several facebook privacy and ethics scandals later, of this twitter thread about ethics and technology:

The thing about ethics codes is that, like many other forms of “code,” we code around our current way of working. The industry will never create and adopt and enforce an ethical code that disrupts their present flow of capital.

— Emily G (@EmilyGorcenski) January 8, 2019

Gorcenski writes in her informal critique there that there are no universal codes of ethics. ethics standards are always situated. they're constructed, imperfect, with plenty of ambiguity-- often just enough ambiguity to make companies and other institutions feel halfway okay about carrying out very questionable actions in the world.

from my notes, I see that most of my interest and my strongest reactions to this talk had to do with what the speaker said about facebook-as-governing agent. he shared his experience dealing with the many challenges of managing, filtering, and/or censoring public and semi-public online expression across national borders. he reminded us that facebook has employees and users all over the world. what's legal and appropriate in one country doesn't always match what's legal and appropriate in others. but somehow, facebook's own community standards have to make the whole world happy, to at least some extent.
in negotiating with governments about how to enforce or uphold various local standards, the speaker explained, facebook does as much as they can to push their own values. yes, there are tensions between how a borderless online community wants to function and how more traditional global powers want to run their more traditional, border-bound nations.

facebook, the speaker emphasized, tries to be an agent of empowerment. a platform for making invisible things visible. shining light into dark corners. facilitating new and more transparent conversations. changing the balance of power.

and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a major role in someday establishing some kind of global online government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:

"eeeeek."

does the world want and need to be connected by a central online platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?

I'll end this post with two more brief thoughts (the second of which is more of a gesture towards some other people's thoughts, really).

1. it is worth admitting explicitly that the phone-typed notes I took on this nameless facebook employee's presentation are at least three years old at this point. I wish I had included the fellow's name and title and the date of the talk and all that, but I did not. it is also worth admitting that I have not included every single thing I made notes on. what I have done is shape the more timeless bits into a satisfying order and fit them carefully into real sentences. in any case, I make no pretense that my reconstituted representation of the talk and its mood is fully accurate.

2. one of the many awesome podcasts I've listened to inbetween semesters has been ZigZag's end-of-season offering, "If Capitalism and Socialism Had a Baby." they interview Rufus Pollock, who wrote a book called Open Revolution (which you can read online in PDF form over here). I love the ZigZag podcast, and their whole second season was a carnival of great interrogations and important questions about technology and humans. go listen to it!

must be seen as

I have been wanting to write something about this newsworthy mess that unfolded in Virginia ever since it happened over a month ago. but what to write? and why? and why now?

my thoughts have needed time to percolate. I still don't know if they are done percolating. is there an ideal thought-percolation time? is there a point at which you have thought enough about something? I kind of don't think so. but probably it depends on what your thinking-goals actually happen to be. are we thinking to do something, or solve something, or...? usually I am thinking for the sake of it, and in that case there is never enough. but I usually have to stop at some point, because only so many things can fit into the whole percolation.

more and more thinking about Charlottesville would also need more and more data about Charlottesville. and while I've been able to get some, there is no way to get it all. I wasn't there. what I have to think with are observations and thoughts that other people have written down on twitter and facebook and other internet spots. such places become the avenues by which I find my news and my sense of newsworthiness. there is so much room in the world for so much news these days. so many stories and voice. this twitter-essay is less directly related to the Charlottesville mess, but it's a story and a message I keep thinking about.

to supply my brain with more informed view, I could, I suppose, listen to more newsy podcasts. or watch some more newsy videos. the podcasts I tend to put on while I wash the dishes are more ponderous, less newsiness. although, in the way of timeliness, 99% Invisible did recently re-run this Memory Palace episode about a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I don't know if there are any confederate monuments in Indiana anywhere. there is this place, though, just up the road a bit. though it fits the theme of memorials to dead white guys who participated in the general ruination of many, many non-white guys, I don't think anyone is likely to get all enraged about it. I'm not sure though.

it's difficult to think about the complexities of causality and blame. I wonder quite often, what good does blame do? what use is it to spend so much time investigating the precise sources of evils and ills and wrongs and badness, even if we are able to figure it out? does investigating it all make us think we will have any control over the wrong?

maybe just knowing is control enough, in some way. however complex and impossible, we have to try to make things less bad, if we can, right?

sometimes it's hard to see how. sometimes it's easier. sometimes listening is enough. and sometimes listening isn't even that easy.

I've been listening to a few new podcasts lately. Malcolm Gladwell's pet research-and-thinking-aloud project Revisionist History has been a mix of interesting and meh. this very first of the episodes struck me--it's about art and snobbery, patriarchy and sexism, and the concept of "moral licensing." go listen. learning about moral licensing was worth it despite Gladwell's rambling self-important tone.

moral licensing. a justification for keeping all our old and toxic ways of thinking because we spent a little time poking a hole or two in their edges.

so much to think about. I've also been reading a little from a book called Intersectionality. the chapter on how educational institutions play various roles in perpetuating injustice has been thought-provoking for me, now, as I consider my future as a small piece within larger systems of educational institutions. my favourite part of Intersectionality was a quote from Audre Lorde.

"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependence become unthreatening." (qtd in Collins & Bilge, p. 169)

necessary polarities. necessary and productive difference. no consensus, no flattened-out unity. difference. to see difference differently changes it. is that what Lorde means? that what might be threatening to us if we resist will transform into a beautiful, wonderful thing is we'd just learn to see it that way?

or is it actually that the threat was all in our heads to begin with?

I'm not sure who the we is. hypothetical we. everyone we.

or me and you. maybe. partly.

and then there is the whole paradox of tolerance to grapple with. what belongs in this world we are creating, and what doesn't? what things are okay, and what things are so bad we shouldn't even look at them? think about them?

paused

disappointment paralysis: when all narrativium sloshes from one side of your life to the other and spills away uncontrollably, leaving you to tremble at the center of it and wonder where the story is going. when things aren't making sense, nothing is fitting into a plot quite yet and there aren't any conflicts to address (they've all walked remorselessly out the door on you) and you can't find any of your props (they've all misplaced themselves in distant, locked rooms) and your character list seems suddenly erased (subject to immediate and serious revision for no reason at all).

it's a feeling I can't quite keep in my head to describe. a robotic feeling. a half-turned-off immobility of a sort. a creaking passionlessness attended by drifts of lethargic, unmotivated thoughts. from that place it seems like the story will never un-empty itself back into any useful channel.

have you ever felt like that? like you could almost relate to this guy here?

{ photo by this kind soul on flickr. }

but seeing all these June lilies in all their gorgeous smeary, speckled orange...

even if they aren't my favourite flowers, seeing them everywhere has been sort of awakening.

they didn't show up in any bouquets. they just seem to be in everyone's yards this time of year. nodding and swaying and sprawling because it is June and they are June lilies. and in my noticing of them there is something not exactly, but almost sort of akin to what the flowers at the bottom of this old blogpost had to say.

by itself it isn't much. but it makes the ramshackle haltedness and sticky ground where we are feel more like a pause in the story arc than an utter abandonment of it. flowers and fireflies. still worth smiling about.

twentytwo: not drowning

last Friday I walked up to the house through a small stream of water. it trickled charmingly down our steps, along the edge of the walkway, and down the hill to Ferry Street. having a waterfall in the front yard was kind of neat, aesthetically. not so neat in terms of water conservation though.

on Sunday, after a pair of grumbly young men spent a few hours digging in the rain, our yard looked like this:

some of that giant deep puddle might have been collected from spring showers... but most if it was running water from a mysteriously leaking pipe.

yesterday there was a huge trench across the yard, and the already cracked, crooked walkway had been torn in half.

today, it looks like this:

a hideous, muddy, chewed up mess.

but at least it's all fixed, I think, and the water pressure is back to normal at last.

nine: on purpose

more rain. more puddles. more lightning. different thunder. 

I took these photos yesterday. one of them on purpose, the others unwittingly as I walked with my camera-ipod in hand, an old-ish episode of On Being playing behind all the dripping sluicing splish splash of relentless spring showers.

so they are blurry.

they are even more wildly-angled than my usual random photography.

if you have been here on this walk between this building and that building on Purdue's campus, you might recognize it, despite its blurred and tilted representation here.

or maybe you'll recognize something else. the whirl of a crammed Thursday. the dizzying shift from skin-slicing pre-spring chill to muggy pre-summer heat. or the anxious looking from here to there and up and back and up again, wondering who and what and how you will meet and introduce yourself to the future.

empirical epiphanies

why were we talking about shoe-hats in Postmodernism class the other week? can anyone remember?

I have been blogging perhaps too much about Postmodernism class. this week's meeting was our second very neat paper day. a prospective new grad student was visiting for the last little chunk of class, during which I stood in the window to read my short essay of the day. welcome to Purdue, prospective grad student.

but enough about Postmodernism for now.

Empirical Research, my other grad seminar this semester, is a very different class. it's much less up-my-alley, let's say. its readings are not quite so exciting or inventive as those in Postmodernism--or at least not as amelia-exciting, anyway. so I struggle, and I resist, and I ask no really what's the point? with a far more serious and dejected tone than I usually do.

I woke up the other morning, after a somewhat frustrating Empirical class meeting, with some not-really-new but not-really-familiar ideas congealing in my head. I imagine they had gradually been distilling themselves from all the many, many things Dr. Sullivan is trying to teach us this semester. oh we've been reading research report after research report, designing our own small-scale research studies, and talking endlessly about the strengths and weaknesses of this method, that paradigm, these analytical tools...

it's not fun... but it's important, right? I guess?

the thoughts in my head the other morning congealed around two different (opposite?) ways of wrangling with the overarching research goal of finding things out about the world.

1. look carefully and dedicatedly at as much stuff as you need to until you can figure out what it tells you about itself.

2. think of a specific thing you want to know. figure out what questions or experiments or tests you need to set up and what you need to look at in order to learn that thing.

I am much more happy in the first of these schemes. there seems to be less planning that way. more freedom. less fiddly things that could go all wrong.

but as I pondered both of these approaches, I found myself tripping over one of the threads between them. the matching meta-question underneath the opposite surfaces:

how do you define what exactly will count as the stuff you're looking at and what won't? and why?

my realization that these decisions are at the core of any kind of so-called 'good' research isn't all that huge. but it feels momentous in my little head.

I struggle and I resist the importance of methodology and research design, in part, I think, because I have for so long been taught that there is rarely a perfect or 'right' way of doing anything we do in the humanities. there is no proven solution, no near-flawless button. and so as long as we can justify whatever imperfect choice we make, all is well.

suitable justification, as you may suspect, means different things to different people. and this makes the whole process feel a little bit pretend. a performance, or sorts, meant for pleasing an audience. what we write up in our research report might come down to what sounds good, or what meets expectations, or what makes for decently manageable data.

so many of these questions about how to best explain the best ways of claiming to know anything about any piece of that world seem to go in circles. it's a circle of biases, chasing each others' tails.

but despite all the flaws and the ignorance and holes in every sort of research, we can't just give it up, can we?

we are thankfully too curious.

and please, let us hope my curiosity will get me through this not-quite-my-cup-of-tea research class in a useful manner.

rolling credits

fall 2011, my very first semester of grad school adventuring. I took a Bibliography class and a Publications Management class at Tech, where both instructors assigned Foucault's “What is an Author?”

amusingly, they each sent out very different PDF versions of this Foucault. this semester, spring 2015, in Postmodernism class, I have collected yet another version.

this Michel Foucault guy. he is undeniably prolific, and not just of his own accord either. these are three different English translations. the essay has been collected and recollected in lots of places.

he shows up in snippet-form in a million other people's work. quotations and paraphrases and summaries and re-purposings galore.



look at all that proliferation, uncontrollable and unending. [sidenote: prolific/proliferate. hmmm. those are cool words.]

speaking of unending proliferation... when we read this Foucault (in company with "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes) for Postmodernism this week, I saw these theorists from the seventies prophesying the messiness of internet culture.

Barthes gets prophetic with the assertion that

“In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, 'threaded' (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it.” (5)

this reminded me a bit of our class discussion the other week about memes (in particular, this one, which requires advanced Superbowl XLIX background knowledge to even attempt to make sense of--I still don't know if it's parseable, really) and their funny, short-lived, nonsensical nods at “meaning.” and I thought of Tony’s paper day presentation on Wikipedia. what is Wikipedia if not a floating, threaded, tagged, metadata-ed parade of version upon version upon version of writing, editing, responding, and so on? (this whole Barthes piece also reminded me of Doctor Who, for some reason. I think it was the talk of dimensions and eternally present texts and utterances that are always “here and now.” weird connection, I know. I'm not even any brand of a Whovian.)

Foucault's foreshadowing peeks out here, where he tells us that

“as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint--one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced” (222). 

he doesn't know or say what exactly would replace the standard model of authorship, and neither can we... yet. we are in this very moment. (maybe the 1970s were in it too. I don't know.) one version of my online self, a few weeks back, made a copy of a statement by some unknown writer on Tumblr about this whole idea: "we live in a post-copyright society," the guy says. Tumblr itself seems to be exactly the world Foucault is describing. on Tumblr it doesn't matter who is speaking.

I now interject with a complicatedly relevant and timely example from an (overly popular?) author/vlogger/whoever:


(for the record, I saw only seventeen--actual seventeen, not seventeen hundred--likes when I checked on goodreads the other day. there are eighteen now, and it's been reattributed. that was quick.)

later on in his essay, Foucault admits that he has “unjustifiably” limited his definition of authorship and discourse (216). what about so many other forms of creative work, he asks? what if we're talking about painting or music? what if? what if we're talking about pixels and code?

the (really awesome, I think) postmodern tendency to keep widening and broadening everything, always chopping down boundaries, tearing up labels, smashing traditions, etc. makes me want to ask so many questions. if everything counts as discourse, what then? leading up to this, Foucault also explains that “all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self” (215)... as if the self is a text, also. not only is everything discourse, everything is plural. me included. from there, it’s tempting to imagine a "death of the self" along the same lines as this famous "death of the author." someday we may only have self-functions. hmmm.

in our class forums, colleague Beth made a very cool point about the roles and threats and newnesses of technology in this whole shifting authorship/compositionship situation, citing a fellow named Friedrich Kittler on the topic of typewriters. and then friend John posted a link to this awesomeness, which I found delightfully mindboggling. I have a machine that in theory could do such cool things. perhaps I should learn.

back to technology though. technology + humans = cyborgs. and that reminds me of Neil Harbisson. and it reminds me of David Eagleman's Sum (a pretty blue paperback that I actually own). of death-switches. functions without selves. hmm.

tools and other tools

during my lovely, long winter break, I asked my dad if his magical shop of tools and wood scraps could possibly facilitate the reverse engineering and re-creation of one or two of these eighty-dollar wooden crochet hooks.

he said "eighty whole dollars!? for what?" and we trekked out to the shop to find out what we could do. 

dad's lathe is pretty old and creaking, but it works beautifully. I watched him trim down and carve the first prototype out of a prism of quarter-sawn oak. 

then it was my turn, with a prism of lovely, creamy-looking maple. 

that one didn't turn out as nicely. the handle was alright, if a little rough, but as we experimented with the actual hook, things got weird. you'll excuse me if I didn't take any photos of that unfortunate failure, I hope.

after that, dad and I were on a roll. he pulled out a length of black walnut, next. black walnut from the tree that once grew out front at the house where I spent my childhood. black walnut from that tree in my once-upon-a-time hometown. black walnut that my dad himself cut down and sliced to pieces. 

the sawdust of black walnut has spice in its smell. it's a dark wood, and spinning on the lathe it blurs to a chocolatey chocolate brown. it was my favourite to work with. maybe that's cuz it's so beautiful and maybe that's cuz the wood is soaked in so much nostalgia. or both. 

this is how I carved the handle, using a few of dad's chisels to dig each groove and smooth all the curves. then the sandpaper, with the lathe settings on way-faster. then the hack saw, to crop out the lathe-bitten edges.

the little bulbs near the end are not perfectly spherical or smooth. there is some skewing to them. I think it adds character. 

I whittled most of the hook myself, after dad drilled the center out. he helped with a few other bits too. I am quite proud of our joint efforts. both my expertise on the shape of crochet hooks and his expertise with the wielding of whittling knives were needed here. and I couldn't have done this without all his fancy tools. he possibly could've done well enough without my insisting on testing the thickness of each hook against the cheap aluminum hook we used as model, or on bringing my yarn out to the shop so I could make sure the curve of each beak would function properly--but we worked together. one type of craft meeting another type of craft. one set of hobbyists tools' giving birth to another.

while I worked, trying to finish the black walnut hook before I had to get on a plane back to Indiana, this twitter conversation came to mind. knitting needles are pointier and stabbier than crochet hooks, but the principle stands. "domesticity is funny like that," Liz Abinante says. making yarn into scarves or hats is just as much a hobby as making trees into figurines or walking sticks. 

also funny (and fascinating) is the network of tools and tools-to-be that circle around all these hobbies. a whittling knife is a tool for carving wood into a crochet hook, which is a tool for turning yarn into a hat, which is a tool for keeping one's head warmer when it gets freezing and blustery outside. 

some of these tools all need each other to exist. things and their many supporting characters have a way of crowding together, accumulating.

I wonder now if you could say any of this slightly the other way around. a block of wood is a tool for keeping your whittling knives in use, and a knitted scarf is a tool for keeping your hands busy with knitting needles while you watch films. it's less usual to say things that way... but I don't think it's less true.

and if we continue, my neck and head are tools for wearing scarves and hats. my brain is a tool for reading patterns and imagining yarn as afghan or block of marble as impressive sculpture.

whichever way it is that these tools and tool-like objects work, I now own many more crochet hooks than I actually need. maybe I should give one or two away.

un-rerun

these are my folders full of sketches. (I want to say folderfuls. like handfuls or bucketfuls or something. can we make folderfuls a thing? okay, cool.)

fat, overstuffed, manila folderfuls. I am pretty sure this is most of them. others might be scattered around various other notebooks or piles, but these here constitute the closest thing to a sketch archive that this disorganized amelia girl keeps. the sketches are mainly sorted according to the size and shape of the paper they were drawn on. it would of course make more sense to categorize the things by date or by theme, but I just have this feeling they'd take up too much space that way. they take up enough space already. 

plenty of these things have been digitized at this point. don't ask me which ones. don't ask me when.

there are too many. I have been blogging one every Sunday since 2009.

the digitized versions don't weigh anything... I don't think... (or do they? do stored gigabytes technically have any mass?)

but as I wondered how much the paper-and-ink collection might weigh, I realized that I had the tools with which to answer that wondering.

my little kitchen scale says the whole pile weighs eight pounds and almost twelve ounces. there are entire human newborn babies that don't weigh quite that much. and these are only most of my accumulated sketches. I wonder how many sheets of paper are really in this huge pile. I'm not going to count them though.

there is an almost-memory I keep thinking about, from somewhere in my almost-tween years, when I was a young girl scout. mum and I were visiting neighbors, hawking cookies. I noticed all the similarities in every doorstep conversation, every description of the caramel-nut-cluster Juliettes. I may have even commented, in a clueless, judgey, childlike way, on how silly it seemed for this articulate parent of mine to be so, so tiresomely repetitive.

this memory (half re-upholstered with inaccuracies after all this time, I'm sure) adds to the shame I feel about having eight pounds of sketches to choose from and yet redundantly posting at least a handful of them more than once. as if someone might have missed them the first time. as if I couldn't bear the thought of those particular sketches not being seen by as many eyes as possible. as if the internet is in need of even more multiples of even more images of mediocre quality. none of these as ifs are true. I am not worried about my silly sketches being missed or being lonely. I have no excuse at all for littering my dear blog with duplicates. as yet un-remedied proof of my carelessness is openly available here in exhibits 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B. and there have been more cases; sometimes I do catch them and replace the repeats before too much time goes by. but who knows how many I have yet to notice.

tiresome repetition is all in the eyes and ears of the beholder though, really, which is a thing I recognize much more maturely now than I ever did as a not-quite-tween-year-old. if the doorsteps are new and the neighbors lucky enough to be unspoiled by your cookie-spiel, you probably don't need to worry, no matter how clueless your selectively-perceptive daughter might be.

the internet is not a series of separate doorsteps. this blog makes a very different and less forgiving context than a neighborhood, I think. reposting stuff--even if from bouts of inattentive blogpost scheduling, and even if my distracted, forgetful brain does give the stuff a new title--feels intolerably lazy. I might owe my tiny audience here an apology or two. or my tiny audience may not have noticed, since one random ink sketch per week most likely doesn't count as high-priority web content.

nevertheless: I am disappointed in my distracted, forgetful self. one day I'll automate the sunday scribble posts entirely, and then things like this won't keep happening. 

you can't dog-ear digital pages

just so you know, I am blogging about my summer academic reading over here. my post this week puts a ridiculous music video in conversation with a rather fat historical text from the eighties: Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer.

I say fat because I have experience with the weights and thicknesses of other 450-page books, and fat is an applicable word for them, but I actually read this one in pdf form on a kindle. reading practically weightless digital text isn't very new to me, of course, but the neat little kindle itself is. it has its perks, but some of them are double-edged. the kindle I have isn't only for reading. you can put apps on it. watch videos. skim comics and blogs and any other website. (now part of me wants to say all those activities are their own forms of reading, so how does that change my point? hrmm.) anyway, a little while ago I read a snippet from this Dan Hon fellow on books vs. other media and the self-containment of the former vs. the dependence of the latter. he says,

"in my geeky head, books are their own runtime environment. The bound paper is the interface method. They are self-executing. They have direct-manipulation user interfaces that have been standardised now and are pretty intuitive. [...] You can’t just go to a library and get out a DVD and experience the content on it without also owning or having access to an additional access/interface layer. You can do that with a book."

of course, and he also admits this, you do have to know how to read. it is only because literacy and print publishing have become so standard and efficient and well-oiled that these book technologies work so almost-flawlessly. I could keep thinking out loud here about the infrastructures of all that, but really my reason for bringing in Hon's ramblings here is to say that the one-thing-at-a-time awesomeness of a book contrasts pretty obviously with the complexity and multifaceted shininess of my new kindle. I can take the thing out into the woods and disable its wifi, but even then the kindle won't be one single, self-contained book for me. it has dozens of pdfs on it now, and a feedly RSS app, and a slowly growing collection of half-finished ebooks. all that potential reading material in one slim seven-by-five-inch gadget is spectacularly, dazzlingly, befuddlingly cool and overwhelming.

before I started reading that fat-yet-weightless tome about science and history and such, I began my for-fun summer reading with What's Wrong With Plastic Trees? Artifice and Authenticity in Design by Martin H. Krieger. I found this book using my most favourite book-finding method: wandering library stacks until a title or spine calls out for attention. maybe it was the allusion (intended or not) to that Radiohead song. maybe it was that lovely question mark, or the nice deep green of the cover. once I opened it for a taste-test, the alliterative contradiction of the subtitle latched itself onto my curiosity and I took the thing home.

mostly it got read while I galavanted around Utah last month, sleeping in tents and on various sofas, and gradually beginning to look at all things--even the random spinach plants out by the shed and even the sage brush along the side of the road--as at least partially designed.

I began dog-earing at page 42. luckily, the copy of What's Wrong With Plastic Trees? that I read was a paper-and-ink book, with pages I could gently dog-ear without damaging its inner workings at all.

"Canonical descriptions of the world make sense only in terms of the concrete cases to which they are to apply and the hard cases that resist them. That is why we learn from examples and exemplars rather than from generic principles." 42

some of these bits, now that I look at them, speak to the themes from Leviathan and the Air-Pump, maybe. an experiment can be a way of managing a certain concrete situation of possible learning/knowing. how we shape that case will then shape our perspective, and vice versa... around and around.

this next one fits too:

"When we disagree about values, that disagreement has little to do with arbitrary subjectivity. We disagree because we have different conceptions of a good world, different conceptions of how we might achieve that world, different conceptions of what matters and how much. yet those differences are not simply to be noted; that we disagree sets up the necessity for argument. That we can have such arguments, or that we feel insulted by the claims of others, is a sign of community, and so we speak of a community of architects or scientists or programmers. It is consistent to believe that we share notions of quality and that we disagree in our conceptions of a good world." 58

but Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes disagreed about this, too--about knowledge communities and what their boundaries should be. hmmm.

there is a whole section on Niagara Falls that I think I might have my students read in the fall. Niagara is a grand, imposing, natural phenomenon... or is it? do we consider it (or any other "natural" thing) more as a place, as an event, or as a spectacle? can we experience it in more than one mode? how?

later on there were exciting references to technology, originality, and value. my copyright-obsessed academic self will want to keep coming back to this stuff.

"Reproducibility affects rarity. Technologies, which may involve physical processes or social organization, determine how reproducible an object is, for we may be able to make a copy of the original, or we may transfer to another object the significance attached to the original, or we may create virtual environments that are reproductions that acknowledge their lack of identity. Copying natural environments may be easier than copying artistic objects, because the qualities of replicas and forgeries are not as well characterized in the case of the natural environment. And rarity and reproducibility may be a matter of death and the end of production, whether of a photographer or a place." 69

composed reality... perhaps another idea to bring up for my students:

"If reality is a representation or at least a presentation of the world to ourselves, composition is what makes reality satisfying. We show the world to ourselves, and we might say, is is composed, much as God in Genesis saw, it was good." 105

the shifting, relative values of things that are persons and things that are not persons:

"Almost everything has been objectified as a purchasable or at least valuable commodity, human beings included, in slavery, in death, in injury. In modern economies persons are treated in terms of their purchasable capacities, as labor, and their capacities for consumption, as consumers. Things that are not persons may surely be exchanged for each other. Their relative prices are determined in an economy of supply, demand, and to some extent taboo, which restricts the places where they may be exchanged." 114

taboo and convention and tradition... all these factors that influence what we see as possible, or right, or good. will we ever overcome all those limitations?

"When we manage nature we are not forging or destroying a masterpiece untouched since it was originally fabricated. Untouched nature usually means untouched by white men, just as a pristine masterpiece is what has remained untouched for several generations--but has almost surely been deliberately tampered with or preserved at some time in its history." 121

nothing escapes human meddling, I guess. and if anything did, how would we know about it? we wouldn't. as soon as we noticed, we'd have already meddled.

I don't have a list of quotes from the pages of Leviathan and the Air-Pump. there were so many times I wanted to make notes in the margins or tuck bookmarks between certain sections. even though I can keep that pdf forever, it's much more difficult to go back and reference my reading experience of that book. the Krieger had to go back to the library, but my experience with it even still feels so more easily accessible, simply because I could dog-ear the pages.