things in common [meta]

Who's on my updated read | play list at the right? People and groups whose work and/or activities overlap a nexus that I find of great interest because I think new genres are emerging there. The hover text for each link sometimes explains why I particularly find the work(s) valuable.

In most cases I did not ask for permission to link; I asked only when I wasn't sure which address to use. So people (and groups) may not find out they are on this list for some time (for example, until I write more specifically about them, giving me a reason to get back in touch) or in fact ever. And in terms of links here, for now please only send the URL to others who might think it's fun.

[Ultra skippable TMI: for over thirty years I have been, underneath my bubbly exterior, in a cranky mood. As my scattered bio paragraphs almost always tell you, since 1979 I have worked professionally with interactive online text and audio (keywords: documentation, help, hypertext, usability, HCI, IA, UX, &c); meanwhile my own site's miscellaneous iceberg-y content lurked underwater and un-documented. Even the pieces I did for my 2005 degree had navigation almost completely hidden. As a final example of crankiness, since 2004 this blog has avoided using any of the standard TypePad category tags, to avoid being seen in the Pythonian sense. Fortunately this obfuscatory mood seems to be coming to a long overdue end. When I next do something stompin' it will be not only accessible but more link-swap-happy than an adult services site.]

Once I had gathered these links I was surprised to see how many led to people who as "unacknowledged legislators of the world"[1] (except that in our present distress the species is beginning to realise how important they might be) work with some aspect of poetry, that is to say, with words chosen with precision, for their particular powers. [Hmm; alliteration is hard!] I mentioned that in the previous post, which also calls out some texts that are not 100% poetry but that struck me as I collected the links.

This is an optional bonus posting with read | play list metadata (current as of July 2010).

What the read | play list is not

• Not "all" of my favourite writers (in any genre or format) or musicians or artists or programmers: so many of those are missing that if I added them, the list would be unmanageble
• Not "best friends"; there are friends on the list but most of my best friends are not listed
• Not "favourite blogs" or "news sources I read regularly"
• Nothing selected only on the basis of political viewpoint
• No major publishers
• Few journals
• Not in alphabetical order by LAST name, which makes me focus on first names [here on the internet where we can all be on a first name basis, at least until our social data processing neurons burn out]
• None of my exes are here, and neither is anyone I am actively stalking that way: it's manipulative, to put people on a weblist as a pre-dating ploy involving artificially induced reciprocity [I have a separate dating identity and if you haven't met her already you won't ever need to]
• Unusually for me, here you will find nothing watered down from the pure elixirs of Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil [I do dilute their ideas, garnish, and serve, but not here, except that Simone gets two namechecks in the hover text and she is someone I would have wanted to date; I bet I could have got her to eat; oooh, transgressing my own rules ("they're really more like guidelines") already, but it feels possible because she is gone]

Fun ways to slice and dice

• Closeness: As of today, four of the people mentioned in the list are married to each other; that is to say, there are two sets of couples on the list. There are also many collaborators here, listed singly or in their groups.
• Apartness: On the other hand, I am mixing some of my different worlds, so that it is unlikely that many people on the list are aware of the work of all of the others. There are a few mavens (using the term as popularised by Gladwell) on the list who might know everyone. But if you're deep into your own work and you discover you are on this list and some of the other names on the list baffle you, you will not be alone. (And you don't have to go look at all the others' work now; I've linked to you because I greatly admire something you are doing and it's more than fine with me if you just keep doing it.)
• Aliveness: Dana is the only person here who I know has passed away; at last report Phil Agre was contentedly alive, just "off the grid." Many here are struggling with things that threaten their lives; sometimes they discuss those, in the context of their work and otherwise, and sometimes they don't. And of course projects and collectives also struggle for life.
• Sedentary Scavenger Hunt: (The full story of the sedentary scavenger hunts would be a separate posting.) It'd be fun to have a contest in which I asked you to add up the number of people (in the list + hovertext) who are working with video, divide by the number of people who speak at least one Scandinavian language (tricks: last names alone won't be sufficient here; is Finno-Ugric Scandinavian or not), and multiply by the number of people who are involved in some way with World of Warcraft (which is, because of character names, hard to correctly discern). And the person who got closest to the correct number (I'm sure we'd have arguments that would best be addressed by a temporary arbitration panel with an odd number on it and no 'fourth official') would get the prize: his or her own custom video shot inside WoW with pop-culturally-Scandinavian elements dragged in...maybe a World Tree (structure)...
• Back to the slicing and dicing, we obviously have ... people who speak Scandinavian and Finno-Ugric languages here, whose presence can be traced to my affection for the DAC conference series founded by Espen Aarseth as well as people I met there, who were not all northerners, but many of them are ...
• ... and people involved in some way with World of Warcraft ... and
• People who can speak Romance languages really well: Susana, Marion & Gonzalo [and possibly others that I don't know about]
• People who have their initials as a URL: Celia [+"andfriends"]
• People who have their first name as a URL: Trygve, Sooz, Rob [+half his surname w/ double meaning], Noah [+ initials], Nick [+ initials], [mondo+] Marion, Jill [+txt], Bassey [+world] (URL recently stolen but still hers in my mind and for that matter the Google cache) & Baratunde
• People who have their last name as a URL: Zeldman, Klastrup, Gibbs & Bricklin
• People who have their full name as a URL: Stephanie, Scott, Nalo, Mary, Justine, Joel, Jeremy, DJ Spooky, Derrick & Deena [imo future generations are not going to think this stuff is fun because we'll have taken so many of the URLs that they'll use something far different, but I'm enjoying the moment(s)]
• People who have renamed themselves: Sooz, DJ Spooky & ][mez][
• People who maintain extremely useful archives: TBTF (Keith), Scott, Phil, Jeffrey (A List Apart), Gonzalo (Ludology), Ellen (presents), DavidW (JOHO old and new), david jhave (glia.ca, coming soon on USB, seeking a hosting home that would welcome the surges of traffic that terrified its previous home) & most of the journals listed [and all the independent artists who spend time and effort updating so that we can continue to enjoy their work despite time, changing platforms, and entropy generally]
• People or collectives who have created their own new brands: The Unknown, Tasty Bits from the Technology Front, Take Action Games, Spineless Books, Sooz, Word Circuits, Powerful Robot Games, xdesign, Gibbs Universal Industries, View Askew, A List Apart, AvantGame, Ludology.org, Ludica, ICE Lab/Studio, UnBlinking, Glide, Game Studies, furtherfield, lfs.nl, ebr, the seven legged spider, DJ Spooky, dichtung-digital, JOHO, Next Exit, Citizen Tools, CyberText Yearbook, Basseyworld, _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ & ][mez][ [a non exclusive list as I'm sure I've missed some]
• People with a connection to Australia: William (see the Sydney Biennale videos), Justine, Jill, Jason, Deena, DavidT & ][mez][
• The more meta notes I record, the more risk of being misleading or wrong, so I will pause here...

Of course one possible big plan is to explain the nature of the nexus that I mentioned in more detail than just "new genres are emerging there", as soon as I figure out how to articulate it. But for now, I am happy simply to have captured these links at this moment in time. (As you may or may not know, some of my own projects have to do with selection and how the future and the past regard each other, in particular what they "get wrong". And your tiny scavenger puzzle now is to find the...never mind! We'll do it later.)

As I noted in the previous posting, if you find errors, please let me know and I will correct them as soon as possible. Thank you in advance for reading | playing!

[1] One husband of the foundational proto-TwilightSagaVerse author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was also allegedly a writer; this sonorous phrase is popularly attributed to him. Most sources indicate that his first and middle initials were "P.B.", referring thus to an avant-garde vegetarian protein paste that became more widely popular in subsequent centuries. A small minority of scholars argue that because contemporary postings were often recorded in hand-written script, "PB" is more likely to have been a misreading of the initials "H.P.", which flowered like golden staph over school enrollment lists and tie-in merchandise during this era.

[2] The preceding footnote was inspired by questions raised by JRRHP Tolkien in his essay "The Monsters and the Critics" (1936), without by any means wishing to blame him for the way I am using them: I call blessings upon Ursula K. H. P. LeGuin for recommending this essay to me, and I now recommend it to you.