juliannechat

Poems for Darcy and Bennet --> Dogs

At the end of 2023 we adopted a brother and sister, five years old, about 20 pounds each. Their build and coats and ears and teeth and personalities differ slightly in interesting ways. But they both have small sad (sweet!) beagle faces, and tails that curl at exactly the same angle.

Miss Bennet (Bennet, Lizzy, g'girl etc) has gold fur with some black in it. Mr Darcy (Darcy, Fitzy, g'boy) has black fur with some gold. After an initial period of adjustment they are flourishing.

Here are the first three poems we've written for them, in order of authoring. (Val's is third, and its first and the last lines are the same.) Without further ado.

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With your tiny paws and knees,
you can't catch those those since they climb trees. 
You can't bite those since they have wings,
but we'll do other awesome things!

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[for Darcy]

Don't poop under the lilacs!
You know I hate it there.
Why don't you poop like Bennet,
out in the open air?

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I have two doggies that I love
When in bed I have to shove
Them aside so I can sleep
I have two doggies that I'll keep

I have two doggies I adore
They like to bark beside the door
So they can go outside to play
I have two doggies here to stay

I have two doggies next to me
Upon my lap and on my knee
They are a blessing from above
I have two doggies that I love

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Remembering Lola and Luna --> Dogs

Trigger warning: memorial posting. Much better: a "spot the dog" game with Luna's pictures.

If the pictures don't load, here or there, just refresh.

Lola stayed with us because her human pack members were ill. (I think her private Instagram may have been @lola_the_wonder_dog?) We were Luna's fourth and "forever" home. 

Lola was a Lab/Akita mix, and Luna was Chihuahua/Terrier. Their heads had different shapes, but from the front that wasn't as obvious.

Lola's human pack did the official memorial, but I wrote a rhyme:

 

Lola was the leader of the Avenues pack

Once she arrived, didn't want to give her back

We loved her a lot, and we'll never forget

Lola the wonder dog, the world's greatest pet

 

"World's greatest pet:" likely every "dog person" can say the same. 

Click on this link (PDF) to read my poem_for_Luna. Since I have almost no words, it's short. 

 

Here's a photo from right after Lola arrived. Her mom brought her bed, but she liked the cool tiles. Luna is not sure what to make of it all.

 

Find the dog in this picture --> Dogs

You can click on each picture to see it "full size." [Most of the time, unless "an error occurred." Retrying usually works. Two full size versions are currently sidewise.]

Starting with the easy ones. Here's Luna, the dog you're looking for. 

Indoors | Easy

Indoors | Medium

Indoors | Medium

Outdoors | Easy

 

 

 

 

Outdoors | Almost Easy

Outdoors | Medium

Outdoors | Expert

Outdoor | More Expert (last one!)

questions part 1

It's 2022. Most books I read are set in a world we have already lost.

I'm thinking about this and invite others to do the same.

Because mourning [0] is one of the things I find weirdly helpful. Because avoiding mourning seems to slow the work I want to do, must do.

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Most books I read are set in a world we have already lost [1].

Many books I've read and collected [3] are also dependent (for the book to "work") on the authors & editors not having had the information / perspective that we have now. 

To state this more positively: our current knowledge and understanding cause them to be "not as good" any more, or they can only be read through a haze, with the sound of screaming in my brain.

(Who's we? Me and other [in some cases specifically White] "readers"? [5, 6])

 

 

[0] These rants on Medium are already sadly dated. Still, they're a record of what I was thinking at the time. These are friend links so you don't have to have a subscription.

[1] I was involved in Readercon from the time Margery Meadow told me about it (1990?) through 2003, after which I moved to Australia for awhile. One of the best parts (although there were many good parts) was coming up with panel ideas. One chunk of my brain hosts an ongoing "real year" panel, continuing the series originally sparked by a comment of John Clute's. "You're soaking in one now!"

Panel descriptions were beyond collaborative (although in that era Eric Van polished all the texts, so they had something of a consistent "almost too arch" tone [2]) but I do remember two discussions I'm proud of providing the initial spark for. One was eventually titled "Words as Magic" (in honor of GOH Lisa Tuttle) and the other one was sparked by my reading of a statement by Simone Weil. (My long time study of Weil has given special resonance to my friendship and sort-of-collaboration with Stephanie Strickland.)

Oh yes and who could forget "Weird Reading Strategies" (or some title like that). Tom Jackson was on that one and could likely remind me. His blogs are amazing and I'll link to them from here as soon as I write him to catch up and get the correct links out of his signature block.

[2] Eric's prose style can go to the edge and teeter there. Neurodiverse brains are more common that we once thought but I still cherish his. It helped that we had zero mutual sexual chemistry. Personal theory: "high dopamine people" [Eric told me I was one, based on my conversational style, and I didn't follow up to find out what he actually thought that meant] or at least I tend[ed, until I figured it out] to confuse "brains buzzing together" for actual sexual connection. To add here: links to Eric's work in multiple styles. 

[3] I have one shelf of books - collected in a project extending over decades - that I'm confident is unique in North America. Unique only because WHY would anyone want to collect these together? ... and North America because likely some Widener-style library in the UK has all of them simply by being comprehensive ... but anyway, these books related to the core of my identity for a long time, and they still do, but now I realize they're also problematic [5]. 

Am I just being coy here to no purpose? No, I'm going to write about this project and then perhaps sell it to a colonialist sympathizer [4], or if I can't find same, donate them somewhere. 

[4] And use the proceeds to buy more dark chocolate (sustainably harvested if possible).

[5] I haven't studied literature formally, except for one class with Paul Cantor in the 70s that I got a C in, and enjoyed the heck out of, so I use words in ways trained academics "would never." But if trained people are OK collaborating with me, I will bring something to the potluck. (Example: the Digital Arts & Culture conferences were fun because I could bring some digital!)

[6] Still here? This week I'm reading Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture website (2021 update of 1999 article). H/t to Shiny Flanary for mentioning it on a podcast (links coming). 

Good long read: Sundman nonfiction

I'm a fan of John Sundman's trilogy [1], and have written about one part of it.

But I'm writing today to say, my socks have just been knocked off by nonfiction JS wrote in 2003 in Salon. Still totally relevant, with plenty of useful interviews and links and brain twisting questions.

Friends ask me for good long reads and here's just the thing to distract us during whatever extreme weather you are experiencing. Link titles are mine, since the original titles had that Salon archness that today is not working for me.

Part 1: In which JS gives new meaning to "decoding" the human genome
Part 2: ... and continues to do so, with special focus on eugenics

 

[1] Amazon doesn't show them as a trilogy because John published each of them under a slightly different name (which relates to its plot/theme). Here's his own web site with more info.

Feelings from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop (ELO2021 - 2)

Among Laura Hyunjhee Kim's many roles is that of feelosopher.

As described on her website, "a Living Lab focuses on the body as a feelosophical medium and a somatic laboratory for art-in-the-making." And so her workshop "Feeling without Touching" included remote-friendly versions of her practices, which involve "attending to the everyday with a sense of critical wonderment," by means of "spontaneous and improvisational perspective-shifting experiments."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE ALL DID. (I looked up these words afterwards. In the moment I just experienced her suggested activities to the deepest extent possible.) 

Part of the documentation is an image of all of us dancing. I'm waving my large arms and also (it's probably not possible to discern) using my electronic recliner to fold and unfold at the same time. 

Laura asked us to choose an object. This was mine: an extra-large D20 for tabletop gaming. (With pencil for scale, and a view out my office window.) 

(Due to climate change there is thermal film on that window, and I'm featuring the number 17 because Stephanie Strickland has turned me on to prime numbers. You can see this same ledge in my Palm Sunday posting.) 

Up close, the die has glitter embedded in it ...

... which reminded me of the glitter we had played with in Katie Schaag's workshop the previous day. 

My most surprising encounter with the die was when I closed my eyes and simply felt. The hard edges and corners felt "safe"; they were not going to hurt me. 

And finally, when Laura asked us to drink water (all together), I didn't expect to have a flash of worry about the water molecules and their health and our health and the health of Gaia.

I'm now realizing that on a deep level this connection to water is always with me, and I have to ignore or tune it out for some daily activities, but when Laura asked us to be present, there it was!

THIS NEXT BIT IS OPTIONAL and involves "visions" /warning

In the 90s I "captured" some text from the point of view of the water molecules in my morning wash water. It turns out (I was surprised to "discover") that they were keeping an inventory of all living creatures and reporting back to a vibrating database (in the Sargasso Sea at the time; they might since have moved it). 

"Apparently," back in the day, water molecules pushed atoms and molecules together into chlorophyll and proteins and all manner of shapes, so that the (the water) could flow through these shapes and have varied and interesting embodied experiences. But the human-shaped creatures have been harmful to the biosphere generally, and (I was saddened, but not surprised, to further "discover") now water is conducting a referendum on whether to pull their creations apart.

Here are the sort-of-poems. 

Of course, rather than leave well enough alone, I buried them at the center of a hypertext called Murmur of Water. Depending on how you answer a question at the beginning, the reader is either stuck at MIT with some computers wondering where the humans have gone, or maybe it's not too late but this situation is tense. 

The hypertext was an artistic failure, which I analyzed last year in this infographic.

Thank you, Laura and everyone in the workshop!

 

Here's my self-intro for the conference overall. I hope it'll link to more notes soon.

ELO 2021: session report links, self-intro, & 2 stories from the 90s

The conference team is doing a great job! Wit and wonder abound. Links to my session reports:

• GIF from Katie Schaag's workshop "Queer/Femme Internet Aesthetics"
• Notes from Laura Hyunjhee Kim's workshop "Feeling Without Touching" 

[the following were awesome
and I hope to write about them later this year]

Wednesday Keynote by Lai-Tze Fan:
"Unseen Hands: On the Gendered Design of Virtual Assistants and the Limits of Creative AI"

Thursday Keynote by Archana Prasad (and many collaborators):
"RadBots: AI Augmented Writing towards Radical Video Bots"

Friday Keynote by Olga Goriunova:
"Subject-making and aesthetics of data practices"

Since 1998 these conferences have been respites from my career (LinkedIn) and regular life. This week I am on PTO (=paid time off, vacation) from my day job but my regular life is fraught, so I decided with a heavy heart to witness the tools and art sessions via video "later" (as a treat for myself throughout the summer) and actually attend: 

• One precious workshop each day
• All the keynotes
• Events I'm doing with Deena (WRITEPODs being the one I worked on most fiercely) 

The New Work is usually my favorite part, which means when I meet artists I have just seen their work and am able to react/enthuse. Missing that. 

 

A partial self-intro

This blog subtitle "let's play follow the reader" references my career-long obsession with how people read online. My other obsessions include games and collaboration, summed up by this text from inside the early Frisbee:

Flat flip flies straight. Tilted flip curves. Play catch; invent games!

Those sentences used to be my Twitter intro, but now they're just on Medium. My read | play list (to the right), last updated in 2010, was a mix of people I had worked with and people I wanted to work with as of that date. My own works (some in the list on the left) have suffered from my "create one per platform and move on" approach but I learned something from each one. As part of facilitating the work of inventor/creators, my best skills are editing, facilitating collaboration, and continuous process improvement.    

My first full time job was with an interactive TV startup, then I moved to tech writing and usability, then to working on interface "personality." For awhile I gave conference talks on online help and what I then called "object-oriented documentation." I was a fan of early hypertext (multiple platforms) and wrote erotica in Storyspace. In the 90s I was doing tech writing and usability at a CD-ROM division of Lotus and assigned myself to keep track of the early internet on top of that ... 

Career highlights: the infographic

I met "this community" when Dan Bricklin sent me to ACM-HYPERTEXT (now SIGWEB) in 1998 to demonstrate Trellix. Since I'd been tracking pre-web-HT I knew well how most works invented their own user interfaces. Discovering how each one worked was part of the adventure. But many creators chose to sit with each reader to help them discover their work, so I started sharing basic UX observation techniques (including "sit quietly, on your hands, and watch") and I helped Deena Larsen organize the conference | house | party that was the CyberMountain Colloquium. Now we have page metrics and eye tracking, but low budget "fresh reaction" techniques still work and have informed my work with this year's WRITEPODs; I'm still joyfully collaborating with Deena!

I've also had the honor of working with (and learning a great deal from) Stephanie Strickland. Projects have included a non-standard Tumblr in honor of Dragon Logic and coordinating the work of two programmers for her "code project for print," Ringing the Changes. 

And in order to work with Markku Eskelinen I learned enough Finnish to say, "Puhutko Suomea? En puhu." (Do I speak Finnish? Nope!) But it was Raine Koskimaa who laughed. I was glad to discover that word-magicians as featured in Kalevala are still with us.

Nowadays, as a small part of my current day job, I help two colleagues manage a dozen customer support chatbots. As of April 2021 this link goes to the chatbot for Sage Fixed Assets. Naturally I'm watching all the machine learning content with great interest.

 

Note re embodiment and archiving

A former therapist told me there are three ways to think about one's body: what it can do, what it "looks" like, and how it feels to inhabit it. 

I've always been grateful for what my body can do (dance, row, hike) but have disliked how it looked and "felt". Cross-dressing helped a bit. I have brain chemicals that allowed me to talk easily with strangers (I recently did some coaching on how to talk to strangers at conferences, and here's the flyer) and a big voice, and for much of my career I weighed over 300 pounds. Being loud and large made me feel less specifically gendered.

Now that societal changes are making it easier, I'm using Jules and they/them pronouns, and I chose the nonbinary X on my drivers' license, and Deena used Rose Language to help me engage with the change. Of course I haven't gotten around to rebranding any of my web content, partly because I value the history. My first web site was at the nation's first public ISP, and it's still there! Not forever of course; I'm in the process of archiving and saving just the good stuff.

 

Two old stories (that I think are funny) about presenting Trellix to the eliterature community

At ACM-HYPERTEXT 1998, Doug Engelbart looked at Trellix, and asked tough questions such as, "If you change the name of the link there, does it propagate to the actual node (=lexia)," and fortunately the answer to that was yes. I chatted with him for awhile and got some of the pioneers' history confused ...

The next day I came up to him and said, "I wanted to apologize for something I said yesterday. I think I mistakenly attributed one of your ideas to Ted Nelson." 

And he looked at me completely deadpan and replied, "It kept me up all night." 

 

The other story is from TP21CL 1999, during the era in which large groups of people sat and watched as each presenter came up with their own laptop, connected to a projector, and rebooted. (Pretty soon after that, events started requiring you to give them your slides way in advance. But this was partly a tools/tech conference and most of the tech was new enough to require its own machines.)

Anyway, we were all in a lovely, steeply banked, wood-paneled auditorium at Brown, and I was presenting head-to-head against a hyperbolic text (viewer? or something) tool called The Brain. I'd created a work that showed off the Trellix features that were most useful for eliterature, but I failed to fully connect my laptop to all the pins of the projector so everything onscreen was too orange and white. (Afterwards Jim Rosenberg said kindly, "At least you engaged with the community.") 

Then the guy representing The Brain took the stage, looking Matrixy (The Matrix had just come out), with glossy black hair edgily cut, wearing black jeans and a short sleeved black t-shirt, moving around the stage athletically.   

He said, "I hear you people are into books so I decided to make a Brain using my favorite novel of all time!"

And much of the audience leaned forward a bit.

And he unveiled an interesting-looking web of words onscreen and said proudly, "Atlas Shrugged!"

 

[1] Footnote: Lily Zheng's excellent To Dismantle Anti-Asian Racism, We Must Understand Its Roots.

white tears vs mourning for "real"

One of my demographic identities is North American white Protestant Christian and I'm writing about an issue some members of our community, especially those in older generations, have [1]:

• All genders are trained that "polite" communication is indirect. We don't want any communication to get so "real" (=authentic) that "anyone" (=white) becomes "uncomfortable."
• People who identify as female are seen as responsible for keeping communication flowing "politely." [2]  
• When "things become awkward," we first try to "smooth things over" with distraction, deflection, derailment. 
• If despite our best efforts things do become "real" then some of us think it's "our fault/responsibility" and so ...
• ... we have strong emotions about our failure / frustration and may begin crying.
• This can deflect / derail any authentic discussion because people turn aside from reality to comfort / engage with us. [3]

 

Why does this "work"? From an article on the Solus Jesus blog:

The most easily transmittable emotion in human groups is fear. This is an important survival mechanism for most mammals. A member of the herd, group, community, family is frightened, and that fear is quickly passed to other group members.

 

How can I prevent this "white tears" reaction in myself? Recognizing the pattern is the first step. Second step is staying extra grounded.[4]

Found a good primer on NPR's Code Switch podcast: When the 'White Tears' Just Keep Coming. Bonus: another Code Switch focusing on The Blacksonian.

Having lived in Australia for 7 years I recognize what Ruby Hamad, "an Arab woman working in Australian media," is saying in White Tears, Brown Scars. If you don't have time for an entire book, here's Ruby's Guardian article that the book is based on. Bonus: this from Miss Blank.  

Prayer: may my mourning be for real.

 

 

[1] Robert Coles says the only "plight" we should write about is our own. So this blog tries to stay in its lane.

[2] And remembering birthdays and anniversaries and holidays for people of all other genders. Really too many annoying expectation to list here.

[3] So we achieved our goal - indirectly - 

[4] I wrote about this in my Medium trilogy, Enough, now out of date. (For example, embarrassingly naive about US history of patrolling/policing control over Black people. Karen Trusty did warn me!) Process improvement errday.

Jeremiah 29:7

"But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." - Jeremiah 29:7 (NRSV) 

 

I come from a scholarly-evangelical background where people asked each other, "Which is your favorite OT prophet?" [1] That's a thought-provoking question because so many OT prophecies are still resonant today.

Due to the power of gifted teaching, my favorite prophets are all the ones I studied under Frances I Andersen. [2] And among those, Jeremiah is my guy. His society was in turmoil, some of his country was in ruins, and in the midst of these travails, God had guidance for God's people. The weeping? In my reading, some of the tears in the poetry are God's own, weeping for us. And like me, Jeremiah was verbose. So many reasons! 

This weekend I was reading Jeremiah again. After I reviewed the warnings about false prophets, I turned to read: Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile ... for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

In my translation: "Seek the welfare of this planet and every bit of matter on it," because everything is connected. Now to ponder the implications of this command, and pick a project. Everyone doing something. [3]

 

[1] They also said things like, "That was a great youth sermon; too bad you can't be a minister because you're female." Christians for Biblical Equality helped me a great deal. But back to my favorite prophet!

[2] Even though I didn't finish my MTS, studying at New College Berkeley changed my life. The biggest adventure related to Jacques Ellul (with many thanks to David Gill) and laying out its course catalogue on my Fat Mac was fun too. And Professor Andersen helped me understand my evangelical heritage and claim its power.

[3] https://theworld.com/~jchat/1dec00.html : an eco-rant from 20 years ago. 

Three posts on Medium

These rants are "sort of" a trilogy. I wrote two in November and the final one in May, and I'm still tweaking them. Not promoting; just want them to be in public in case anyone wants to know what I "think" about "things". Totally optional reading for friends, who already know!

Speaking of which, these links are "friend" links, meaning that you can read them even if you've exceeded your free articles for the month.

Enough.

Unflinching.

Moving Forward (beyond hope).

Happy for all comments. (The site goes up and down; I'll be linking to PDF versions in case it stays down.)