A twist on a classic theme.
Your Search is Over
If you were searching for the best name for a fish.
Leon Takes Us
After work I decided to go up the hill to get out of the house a bit, and ended up at Slow Bar. I guess that happens when you’re as tall as I am.
After having a delicious hamburger I came home and wrestled with Markov Garden. Things were going okay until I realized that something’s off with the JSON that I’m getting from the parser, and it’s deserializing into something other than what I want. Here’s how I expressed that in a commit message.
The table that we’re getting turns into something a little off, so I think it’s going to have to involve more explicit hand-massaging.
So. . . that was pretty dorky.
Stories
I had too much hair, it was keeping my up at night.
So I cut some of it off.
Later I got dressed. This is the latest in an ongoing series called “Joaquin looks like either a settler or a skinhead, depending on when he shaved last.”
So vanity, but also change. I’ve really kind of gotten into a rut in terms of my relationship with time, and I’m looking for excuses to kind of jar myself into shape. Aside from Temboo and yard-work I’m so scattered that I’m better off avoiding doing anything, rather than starting it and then forking off onto some other activity (which form Markov Garden inevitably means stupid distraction-oriented internet use.) I need to figure out some way to make myself feel more monastic. If only I had a bell!
Yeah Yeah
I had planned to be so good. Furthermore, I guess I’d sort of hoped to coast along on the momentum that came with the previously-mentioned promotion, but of course I don’t work that way. Instead, it seemed to cause a bit of a rupture and everything got kind of destructured.
Assorted thoughts:
Pinterest is great. Despite initial reservations, I think I’m getting more out of it than any other internet service these days. After my initial reaction to the information flood my impulse was to stop following everyone to whom I was automatically subscribed when I created my account. Luckily I didn’t do this, and instead starting dropping individual boards in which I was clearly not interested. The result is that I avoid being inundated with crap, but I’m still seeing a lot of things that are very cool that I wouldn’t have found left to myself.
In the olden days that doddering old fools like me only barely remember almost all personal web presences included a substantial link section. People would use these to collect lists of pages that they wanted to keep around, and there was a sort of discovery process whereby you would find someone’s homepage and follow their links, learning about various corners of the web as you went. Traditionally-minded bloggers like Warren Ellis still frequently post entries that are lists of links, but in general this process has moved within the silos of social networking sites. Of course, Pinterest is a social networking site too, but it’s very easy to get stuff into it and (and really, this is the most important thing) one doesn’t have to be logged in to view content.
I’ve been really scattered. I’ve always tended to be this way a bit, but it has accelerated lately. I think. I definitely feel like I am less able than usual to determine what I should be doing next, which often means that I waste time doing nothing. It is also the case that my attention span has been really dismal. I’m not positive what that is about.
The most obvious victim of this has been Markov Garden, which is currently pretty dormant. It is very hard for me to decide what to do about that. Part of me would like to really focus on how I can get organized in such a way that a next step is either obvious or discoverable when I find myself wondering what I ought to do. Part of me thinks that the most important thing is to finish what I’ve started and trying to organize myself more effectively ought to wait until after that has happened. If you hadn’t guessed from the previous paragraph, the outcome of this conflict is always that I don’t do anything worthwhile.
Prediction
Instagram released an Android version this morning, and I just got a phone with a self-portrait mode. Let me tell you about the next six months.
/The State of the Garden
Despite not keeping up to date with posts, I have been progressing with Markov Garden. Whilst enjoying my vacation in the ancestral homeland, I worked mostly on the appearance aspect, which I’m not very good at, but I think the results have been alright.
As I have noted elsewhere, I am deeply concerned about the homogenization of the internet, so I have been trying to find a look that isn’t too in keeping with the temper of the times. After sort of wandering around a bit, I decided that I’d try to work on something based on this amazing Luibov Popova textile design.
I love this because it is organic, but that doesn’t prevent it from boldly facing the future. Unfortunately, as I’m not much of an HTML-ologist, I found myself compromising in ways that undermined the value. After a little more exploration (for which I think I’m really getting a lot out of Pinterest, despite its sloppy design principles) I came upon this Jean Arp image.
This is an easier stylistic guide, although I’m still trying to incorporate influences from the Popova. Right now the thing runs the risk of looking a little mod, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get past that. I want something that reflects optimism about progress without having to refer to it explicitly.
Summary
At Hampshire, people who didn’t know me called me Comic Book Boy, because when I showed up there I looked like Death of the Endless. Now things have truly come full circle, and I look like Neil Gaiman.
But light makes a big difference.
Oops, I Forgot
I meant to put this picture of Portland institution Beulahland in the previous post.
I’m pretty sure that I’m well enough for Kung Fu tonight, so maybe that will help me get past this overwhelming sense of ennui. The Sifu just got back from Thailand recently, so maybe we’ll just drill. That would probably the best possible thing for me. Nothing quite like kicking for overwhelming ennui, right?
Markov Garden is a little behind. I’m looking through it to find places where I can get it to tell me about itself. The tables mentioned here are a good start, but they’re still pretty overwhelming, and the HTML documents build to display them are literally 50 times the size of the input texts. That’s not necessarily a deal breaker (the tables won’t be part of the published project), but it does mean that figuring out where I can make things more accessible requires a lot of thinking.
Periodically I need to remind myself that this is something that I’m doing in addition to my job/other life concerns/etc. I have been prone to despairing about the fact that I haven’t published the damn thing already, which is clearly about as counterproductive as a thought can be. Here’s the resolution: I’m going to work on it tonight after class, and then after that I’m going to use the parser as-is, regardless of its state, and work on putting some of it up on EC2. Even if things are still a wreck, shifting gears should keep me facile in a way that will make an eventual breakthrough easier than focusing too hard on one thing.