Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’m feeling uninspired - or rather, drained after a rant on-list about condescension - so I’ll get to that backblog of material now.

First of all, I forgot to mention that it snowed yesterday. In Boston, on October 23rd. The leaves aren’t even properly turned yet and there was snow falling out of the sky in broad daylight. Yet people keep telling me it’s going to be a mild winter.

Second, on the very hot topic of whether the sniper in Washington, D.C. should be referred to as a sniper: yes. I know the real snipers are up in arms because the alleged sniper didn’t use proper military-issue sniping equipment or murder his victims from a sufficiently challenging distance, but you can’t pin this use of the term on the sniper media circus. The dictionary definition of sniping is to shoot at exposed individuals from a usually concealed point of vantage. He shot at people, they didn’t see him - ergo, sniper.

I forgot to mention the forums at NaNoWriMo. They reminded me how much I hate forums. A nice little flat-level forum, say, of the size of the J/C Index message board isn’t bad despite the trolls, but when you get into thousands of posts like at TrekBBS, who has time to follow it all? There are no trolls at NaNoWriMo, but still, a thousand people saying hi, a hundred random topics about novel genre - I can’t face it. I’d rather meet the people in person, though, unfortunately, I’ll be away this weekend so I won’t get to go to the Boston kick-off party.

Liz gave a 1 to 10 scale for ranking fic a while back. There’s a more accurate way to rank fic, though - put it all in order, from Revisionist History to Burning Thistles Amongst Thorns. The story’s score is the percentage of stories that are ranked beneath it. That’s how the SAT’s are scored (or at least, how they were scored before the grade inflation). Of course, a scanner doesn’t have to suffer through the bad fic.

There are simpler ways to do it. One could, for instance, take down the name and summary of every story posted to ASC in the course of a year, or every story in the J/C archive, then ask fans a binary question about the list - say, “Do you remember story X which was about Y?” Then rank the stories by the percentage of readers who remembered them, or remembered them fondly. Anyway, it could be done. People would scream bloody murder if you did it, but it could be done.

The new backblog list is:

• The Jossing of Anya
• Extreme measures in veterinary medicine
• That the things I hate about Buffy are just like the things I hated about XF

As long as I’m here, I’ll add my rant on condescension:

So stop it already.

National Novel Writing Month is coming soon, and I do have a novel in mind. At first I’d decided to write a children’s book, not because I was especially inspired, but because it seemed like the most efficient use of 50,000 words. While it’s the ideal for a month-long spate of novelizing lunacy, fifty thousand words is too much for a novella and too little for a novel, market-wise. In my complete ignorance of children’s lit, I thought it might be an appropriate length for that.

As far as I can tell, a children’s book is a book about children. Yes, it’s shorter than Gone with the Wind and less racy than Anne Rice erotica, but there are adult books that are neither infinite nor smutty. Maybe there are certain factors of tone involved; I think my tone would do. My interest in writing for children is not the smut-free pass, the reduced word count, or even the off-chance of striking it rich with the next Harry Potter phenomenon.

Children’s books are the best-loved books. I may have read better books since the Chronicles of Narnia and Taran Wanderer, but they just haven’t hit me the same way. I think it’s more the childhood than the literature - my attachment to LotR dates to elementary school. Man of La Mancha, the musical, wouldn’t form such a large part of my worldview if I hadn’t grown up on it. So yes, I want to scar youth permanently the way Aldonza’s song did me.

But I won’t be doing it for NaNoWriMo, because another idea came to mind. A certain character has popped up in a couple of my uncompleted novels (the Wrong Novel and the Wrong Prequel, to be precise), and I decided that since he fascinated me so much more than my nice female protagonists, he deserved history - a name and a habitation.

I’ve known for a long time that his name was that of an ex-boyfriend of mine, though I’ve buried it in faux-futuristic versions in the other novels. If I stopped to think about it, I might find some unresolved bitterness in the fact that he’s destined to start a war, end a golden age, and perhaps get a little genocide in on the side. Simple filicide will do for the first 50,000 words of his life, though.

I looked up some text generators along the lines of Lorem Ipsum today. Using something called the Dada Engine, one generates postmodernist journal articles, one writes adolescent poetry, and the third does band names. Another site provides legalese on demand.

A belated article on the Alan Sokal affair led me to the pomo generator above, and on to thoughts of what it means for a text to be sense rather than nonsense. SETI, for example, isn’t really a search for intelligence but a search for that which can be distinguished from random noise.

I thought for a moment of adapting the Dada Engine to fanfic, but in fact even the most mockable fanfic is too linear for the random approach. Just suppose, for a moment, than a computer could generate fanfic. (I once accused Suz Voy of being an artificial fanfic intelligence program.) What would make our live fanfic better than the canned thing? How would we know the difference between bad human-written fanfic and good computer-composed fanfic? I don’t know.

I get the feeling that a good computer program could write soap opera scripts. How far is it from there to fanfic? I’m tempted to write a fanfic-generating program myself, but I waste enough time trying out new styles, and we all waste enough time reading bad fanfic. There’s no need for computers to get into the game.

After Windows ate her Mozilla installation, I convinced Jade to download Netscape 7. It’s just like Mozilla, except more bloated, with more popups. AOL’s not about to leave in the no-popup checkbox when they’re one of the worst popup offenders on the net. Don’t despair, though - ad-blocking can be restored easily with two clicks, thanks to the Unofficial Netscape FAQ.

On the style front, I wrote up something resembling instructions for all the recent blog geekiness. I’m also considering a change to my tan boxy pages, since they look too green on Windows. Green is for Buffy.

What Unusual Scully hair are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Quizilla seems to be 404 on the images, so I haven’t even seen my quiz result yet. I hear it’s wet and curly, which is the normal state of my hair. Thanks to MustangSally, who also got an eerily accurate Scully Hair result.

I couldn’t help myself - I had to convert the technicolor blogger template I found a few entries back to Moveable Type. You can see it by clicking on the Technicolor link, or (soon) by visiting the sample blog.

Be warned, however, that the technicolor blog is somewhat processor-intensive, since the entire page changes color slightly every half-second or so. Also, it tends to leave color behind, so be sure to reload the page if you
switch to or from the Technicolor style.

The Latin text for the sample blog came from Lorem Ipsum’s Lorem Ipsum generator. If you need sample blog text, you can use the MoveableType import file I used to generate the 18 entries of my sample blog: loremipsum.txt. Note that
the entries have old dates and will not show up on the main page of a fresh
blog unless you change the MTEntries tag of that page to include lastn=”7″ or whatever number of entries you desire. I set MT to do the dates in Portuguese for that blog; it was the closest offering to Latin, but is different enough to do the nonsense-Latin theme justice.

I’m making a separate blog for Technicolor because it requires javascript, just like the style switcher, and I had to mesh the two scripts somewhat in my
main blog to get them to work together. I also made my sidebar unusually narrow, because that’s my blog style. In the sample blog, it’s wider and includes
the MT default calendar. Full instructions for using the stylesheet and javascript are included in those files: colorswitcher.css and colorswitcher.js. (As always, right-click and download if you can’t see the raw file in your browser.) You may want to cut out my instructions once you’ve followed them to reduce download time. You must leave Eric Costello’s header, however - those are his terms of use.

I’ve also changed my approach to backwards-browser compatibility again, so the Netscape 4 Khaki stylesheet has been taken down. This time, I put in a persistent stylesheet that looks almost like no style at all (persistent.css, if you’re curious). That way, it lurks underneath all the switchable styles, doing (hopefully) nothing, and for users with backwards browsers, it shows up just like Netscape 1.1. Yes, it’s backwards-compatibility with a vengeance. I was actually trying to fix the download delay problem; I’m not sure yet whether I’ve succeeded.

I almost forgot to mention that I made a second LCARS stylesheet, too. Like the first, it only works with Mozilla, Mozilla-derivatives like Chimera, and possibly Netscape 7.

Diaspora, by Greg Egan, was in several senses too good. Looking at it another way, it was too many good books stuffed into one cover. First, as a novel of the Singularity and whether man will still be man on the other side, the author describes the uploaded mind and culture better in one chapter than many entire novels do. Nor is the problem of immortality taken lightly.

Second, as a sci-fi disaster novel, Diaspora threatens human extinction with distinction, combining branches of physics from the cosmological to the quantum-mechanical to lay waste with impeccable style. Third, as a rare work of math-fiction, it makes technical definitions of Riemann surfaces, topologies, and hypercubes the stuff of novels. Fourth, there are wormholes - credible wormholes.

Fifth, Diaspora covers millenia of time, following what passes for man around the galaxy in a great mission of exploration. Sixth, there are aliens of true alienness, a rare find in a genre partially devoted to the alien. Seventh, there’s a mystery, a hunt for a lost transcendent race. And eighth, and possibly not last, there are other universes.

On the level of fresh ideas, Diaspora is not just a novel, it’s an entire career. In many spots the science, math and alienness were hard going, and could have used more, and more gradual, elaboration - like, say, a novel’s worth. This was a wonderful book, but it would have made a better series.

I’ll get over my current geek phase soon, at least in time for NaNoWriMo, but for now, I’ve tweaked LCARS-1 for better text color and tracked down the source of that eye-bleeding technicolor blog template that was driving Seema and me crazy a while back: eric costello, with another good CSS resource.

In the quest for style I’ve also glanced at the W3 CSS Validator and some sites devoted to blog templates: Blogstyles and its sister site Blogplates. That’s all I could manage and work, too.

LCARS stands for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System, and is the bane, or the Holy Grail, of Trek web design. I’m all for controversial designs based on authentic Trek colors so I’ve made an LCARS style sheet for MoveableType. There’s just one catch: you have to use Mozilla to see it. Netscape 7 would probably also work, but IE is counterindicated.

Usually LCARS sites are nasty table-based graphics-heavy things, but by specifying curved borders in your stylesheets, you can reproduce a Star Trek-style computer console without a single image. Only Mozilla supports curved borders, using the -moz-border-radius tags. I am not responsible for what you see if you click the LCARS-1 link in an unsupported browser.

Besides sprucing up the archives page, I also spent some time blogsurfing for good MT style. I found someone’s old entry on the issue of stylesheets and images - that is, how people who use CSS for web design look down on images. I hadn’t thought about it, but I also have a ingrained prejudice against images, which probably dates back to the days of Netscape 1.1 and plain grey pages with plain black text and plain blue links. It doesn’t help that I still connect with a 56k modem over a bad phone line - images make me run screaming the other way.

I did surf into some nice uses of images in blog design, though, in the rather restricted arena of banners and backgrounds: take a look at a plain banner, a fancy banner, and a banner that’s also a fixed background image.

On a mostly-unrelated Trek note, I saw “Time and Again”, one of the very first episodes of Voyager, recently with Dr. Deb. I annoyed her to no end by exclaiming how cute Janeway and Paris were together. The technobabble was a bit painful, but the episode was relatively good for first season Voyager. I should also confess that I saw Enterprise: Return of the Shower Scene this week while I was waiting for The Twilight Zone to come on. There was absolutely nothing interesting about the episode - but then, similar comments have been made about “Resolutions,” the sleeper that spawned an entire shipper movement.

I think it’s safe to say I will never write Archer/T’Pol.

The style switcher seems to be working fine now, though there’s an odd delay loading the first styled page over slow links in certain browsers. Perhaps it has something to do with browser support for preferred stylesheets. In my fruitless investigation of the issue, I learned that the technical meaning of a preferred stylesheet is one with a LINK rel=”stylesheet” statement that also has a title attribute. If you have rel=”stylesheet” but no title, the stylesheet becomes persistent, which means that style in that file should apply to all the alternates as well. I’m not claiming it works - this is all rumor, hearsay and specifications.

I finally got around to adding switchable style to the search templates. (There’s a search box partway down the menu on the main page, if you want to try it out.) The two search templates can be found in a folder called =search_templates= at the same level as the MoveableType cgi scripts. You have to edit them in a text editor, since they’re not accessible through the MT interface in this version (2.5). You can import a template module into the search templates, but if you run more than one blog through the same MT installation, you might want to look at the manual before trying to use modules.

Some browsers (which is to say, Chimera) didn’t run my styleswitcher’s onload function in TrackBack popups, presumably because there was an onload attribute in the BODY tag of the TrackBack popup to seize the focus. I figured that was less important than supporting Chimera users, so I took it out, but it probably wouldn’t bother most people if it were left in.

I’ve stumbled across some nice MT stylesheets now that I’m on the lookout for them. Tapestry use a stylesheet for the archives, while the main page adds table layout. There’s no reason the main page couldn’t be done with CSS, also. The colors, while somewhat web-unsafe, are lovely.

Moveable Blog is clean, clear, and a great resource for MT users. My first TrackBack experiment will be pinging that blog from my first Moveable Style entry. Look for it over there.