Archive for 2014
Pronoun Flowchart Update and Poster
Posted by Angela Brett in Publishing on June 11, 2014
It occurred to me that now that I have a Zazzle store, I could print posters of the inadvertently-Zork-themed English pronoun flowchart I made at the start of the year. The image I used for the background has no ‘noncommercial’ condition on the license, after all. So I fixed a typo, fixed the alignment of the text in the boxes, thickened the lines, nudged a few things into better positions, and before I knew it I was moving a whole lot of things around to get it into more of a square shape to make better use of the space and fit onto a standard poster size. I think the result looks much tidier, and what’s more, in the process of doing that I noticed I’d somehow forgotten to add an example sentence for the pronoun ‘he’.
Now it is available as a 24″x24″ poster. You can order it at a smaller size if you like, but I think the text would be quite small (though still readable) in that case. I’ve also made an updated pdf of it, so if you want you could print that as a poster instead, or just read it on your screen; I don’t mind. The background might look slightly different from the Zazzle version due to resolution issues, but it’s only a faint background image so it doesn’t matter that much. I have yet to try either option.
It still doesn’t include relative, possessive or interrogative pronouns. Picking a pronoun is complicated enough without them. It does include we, ourselves, us, they, themselves, them, he, she, himself, him, herself, her, I, itself, it, myself, me, oneself, one, yourself, yourselves, you, and advice on when to look up a more exotic gender-neutral pronoun or dialectal plural ‘you’. Most of these rules will be obvious to native English speakers, but if you like grammar or flowcharts it’s interesting to see them written explicitly, and the example sentences may be entertaining. It could also be useful to people or robots whose native language is not English.
As with the other poster, if I get enough money that Zazzle actually pays me, I will lend it on Kiva, since I currently have enough money from my day job to live on.
Creative Output Posters and Postcards
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Publishing on June 9, 2014
Almost five years ago, I took a photo of the audio input and output ports of my then-new MacBook Pro, and edited it to have various things I’ve written and drawn streaming out of the output port, as a pun on the idea of ‘creative output’. I then renamed the blog to go with it, since the old title no longer encompassed everything I was doing. I said I might make posters of it some day, but all I did was use it on my contact cards. However, I recently decided to set up a Zazzle store so I can sell another thing I have in the works, so I’ve just made that picture available as a poster and postcards. The postcards are eligible for a 20% discount for a Father’s Day promotion Zazzle has going on, which I think ends some time today. [Edit: It turns out they pretty much always have some kind of discount that applies to certain things.]
Before putting it up for sale, I updated it. I added the Wordles from everything I’ve written since then, as well as various images from the Cantor Ternary Set Cantor Ternary Set, the arrow poems, and the Post-It decorations in my temporary apartment. I’ve added things to almost the entire output stream, but you might need help from Myopic Person to make some of them out amongst the general mess of output. Apart from that, I made a few cosmetic improvements using new features in a much more recent version of Acorn (which I’ve just noticed still isn’t the latest), which no longer crashes when dealing with a file that size. I also made use of the graphics tablet and fonts I’ve acquired in the mean time. I added the words ‘Creative Output’ and the URL of the blog, since the whole picture was based on that pun and may not have any artistic merit without it.
This is what the poster looks like:
The postcards show a bit more of the Mac at the top, due to the different aspect ratio.
For the poster I chose the ‘standard’ size with the closest aspect ratio to the original picture, since a standard size will make it cheaper for anyone who wants to order a framed version. The poster is 19″x13″, and at that size it should be about 210ppi; I can’t do much better than that since it was based on a 12 megapixel photo. This is higher than Zazzle recommends for a good-quality print, and it should be fine for a poster, but if you’re a real print aficionado who prefers higher ppi, you can choose the ‘extra small’ option in the Size menu.
I don’t need extra money at the moment, since I still have a day job (though I will be looking for a new one next year; does anybody need a programmer who knows some things about accelerating particles and also occasionally writes, studies linguistics, and doodles on photos?) and since the payments from Zazzle will go into my PayPal account anyway, I will lend them on Kiva until such time as I need them.
Wordles: Just, like… know things, okay?
Posted by Angela Brett in Wordle on June 8, 2014
I realised that I never created a Wordle for the second run of Writing Cards and Letters, like I did for the first run. For that matter, I haven’t written a second joker for it either. But first things first. Here’s a Wordle for all the words used in the things I wrote for the second Writing Cards and Letters, not including diagrams, videos, or those speculative card games, but including the text of ISS vs. LHC that’s directly on the blog.
I usually look for related words that are coincidentally near each other. The big words don’t leap out to me as saying anything much, apart from ‘just know’, I guess, but I like the ‘much writing, one head’ which could even be continued as ‘much writing, one head, two HeartValet feel things.’ Is that how to get intense emotion into writing? Having two HeartValet implants instead of one? Then there’s the LHC baby and the time dealer. But which is true of my writing? Is it ‘Find story, keep.’ or ‘years lost’?
Anyway, I’ve written many other things since that first year of Writing Cards and Letters, some just because I felt like it, and some because of NaPoWriMo. Here’s the Wordle for all the poems I posted for NaPoWriMo, which I participated in for about half a month before realising I had a short story to write:
Gave one internet? Judged? Just like (better) things! Loud feminine? Masculine wrong? Awesome never? Doctor McFly?! Don’t be concerned by the large ‘die want’; the ‘die’ is mostly the German word. Or it’s a result of ‘clear verse, soul worse (perhaps.)’
Here’s the Wordle of the various things I’ve written and posted to my blog since the end of the first Writing Cards and Letters that didn’t fit into either project. I did not include the Mozartpuffreissnitten recipe, since that’s more of a blog post than a piece of writing, and again I didn’t include the text of things I made videos or audio recordings for in that time.
Well, this is interesting. Clearly I’m a CERN princess. Or a time chameleon; wouldn’t that be cool? A chameleon that has chronophore cells instead of chromatophore cells, so it can resemble (or presemble) any time? Eyes spread is just unreasonable, though. This one has a lot of names of real people in it, which probably came from my origin story.
I find it amusing that this one is all about a princess and the others are just, like, things. So I decided to see what the relative weights were when I put the text for all three things in one Wordle:
Just know. One time, like, love, okay? People, think! Die, baby dealer! Got thulium? Story, song, chlorine… really?! Life: Make Something. There are a lot of names in here, which is interesting considering each name is usually only used in one story. Is it a bad thing to refer to somebody by name often? I tend to get lost in stories where characters are referred to in too many different ways.
I may have to challenge myself to write something about the word combinations found in these, or write something that doesn’t contain any of my most common words.
Recipe: Mozartpuffreisschnitten
Posted by Angela Brett in Recipes, The Afterlife on June 1, 2014
In 2009 in Geneva, I made a pavlova for my birthday. In 2012 in Sweden, some friends made me a pancake cake. This year, in Vienna, I went to two concerts between the time my birthday started in New Zealand and the time it ended in Austria. When Sara Chicazul goes to a concert on her birthday, she makes cake, Nanaimo bars, cupcakes, or Nanaimo bar cupcakes, for the entire audience, so I decided I’d have to do the same. While I did help Sara with Nanaimo bar cupcakes before JoCo Cruise Crazy 4, I was a minion rather than an evil genius, so I don’t really have the expertise to make a lot of cupcakes myself. What’s more, I had a French exam the day of the first concert, so I didn’t have a lot of time. Instead, I made about the third simplest food that can be made with puffed rice (a.k.a. Rice Krispies, Rice Bubbles, Ricies.) I made Rice Krispies Treats (a.k.a. Rice Bubbles Squares, or some other combination of a word for puffed rice and either ‘treats’ or ‘squares’) with Austria’s famous (i.e. I’d never heard of them until a tour guide told us about them the first time I visited Austria) Mozartkugeln (a.k.a. Mozart balls, followed by sniggering) mixed in.
So here is the recipe for what I’m going to call Mozartpuffreisschnitten. Serves two concert audiences including performers (bigger than Viertel, smaller than the first JoCo Cruise Crazy, which the Nanaimo bars were made for) with enough left over for a peckish post-birthday girl.
- One 300g bag of marshmallows — I used a bag of white ones, but the ones pictured here are multicoloured because I took the picture of my spare pack after making them.
- One 170g bag of Mozartkugeln Minis.
- About six cups of puffed rice cereal. It turns out, going by my quick look in a few shops and the word of a few locals, that there is no such cereal available in Austria. Luckily, I had enough that I’d brought with me from Switzerland, but I had hoped to get some more to be sure, and was quite surprised by this lack. Probably any light cereal that isn’t too sweet would work. I saw several cereals that seemed like good candidates, but they were 30% honey, which seems like overkill when you’re adding 470g of candy. But hey, it’s your birthday, you’re allowed twice as much redundantly superfluous overkill as you want.
- A little bit of some kind of oil (probably optional.) I found a recipe online that said to use butter, but I didn’t have any, so I used sunflower oil. I don’t think the oil is really necessary anyway.
- Some non-stick baking paper.
- Cornflakes to garnish (optional.) I’d bought them as an emergency filler in case of insufficient puffed rice, and decided to stick them on for decoration and to reduce stickiness.
Pour the oil, marshmallows and Mozartkugeln into a pan, and put it on a medium heat.
The chocolate will melt first. It turns out there’s no solid, unmeltable centre in Mozart balls.
Soon the marshmallows will start to get gooey. Have fun mixing them with the melted chocolate.
Soon enough the marshmallows will be fairly smooth, and you can make streaky patterns in them with the chocolate. Take a note of how you feel at this moment: this is what it was like to create Jupiter.
But eventually you’ll have to say goodbye to Jupiter and say hello to smooth, uniform, light brown goo. Don’t worry, Zeno, you don’t have to say hello and goodbye every time the streakiness changes.
Turn off the heat and pour in the puffed rice, stopping to mix it in a couple of times. Add more if there still seems to be enough goo to hold it. You’d be surprised at how much can still be mixed in when it already looks fairly dry. Pour it all onto the baking paper such that it’s a few centimetres high. Or make it into a giant Mozart ball; I don’t care. Add cornflakes or whatever garnish you like that will stick on.
Once it’s cooled, cut it into squares, or rectangles, or smaller balls, so it’s easier for people to eat. Don’t worry about it too much; it’s easy to tear into smaller chunks with your hands, so if your concertgoers want smaller pieces they can have them.
Everybody who tried the ones I made said they liked them. Some had tried Rice Krispie treats in the USA and missed them. In my opinion, the finished product didn’t taste too much like Mozartkugeln, so if I did this again I’d use more of them. The only other time I’ve made Rice Krispie Treats, I added Sprüngli chocolat chaud grand cru and it made it really chocolatey. The classic recipe is just puffed rice and marshmallows, so of course it’s good with any amount of Mozartkugeln, including zero.
I almost forgot: the other thing that happened on my birthday was the song I wrote to sing with Worm Quartet went live on The FuMP sideshow.
A Song For Angelastic to Sing With Worm Quartet
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo, Things To Listen To on May 23, 2014
When you’ve let what is left of your pride go,
let your own song beset the FuMP sideshow! — Brush Up On Parody
Remember that parody I wrote of ‘A Song for Worm Quartet to Sing With TV’s Kyle’? Well, I recorded myself singing it. Sorry! It’s coming up to my birthday, so it’s time for me to embarrass myself publicly again.
You can thank ShoEboX of Worm Quartet for providing probably the only part of this that sounds good (the backing track) and also blame him for encouraging me. When I first emailed to ask about it, he played his part perfectly by not responding, and I recorded said lack of response for use in the song. When I actually met him at MarsCon 2014 and reminded him about it, he kindly and foolishly sent me the backing track. Some blame also falls on DJ Particle for singing (also at MarsCon) a song encouraging people to submit to the FuMP sideshow. This should appear on the sideshow around May 31, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be my best sideshow ever; it has twice the worms of my only other attempt, and one fewer html-parser-destroying character in the title.
I also met TV’s Kyle at MarsCon, and I understand why ShoEboX found his sideburns so compelling. In a world of musicians controlled by sentient beards of dubious alignment, TV’s Kyle is leading the resistance; he will not allow his binate bristly battalions to collude, not by the hair on his chinny chin chin. I forgot to ask him if he consented to [not] appearing in this track, though. Sorry, Kyle!
The lyrics I wrote originally had noticeably fewer nipples than the average Worm Quartet song, so I replaced ‘nebulae’ with ‘nipple gas’. It has similar consonants and constituents, so I don’t think this change affects either the form or function significantly. I also attempted to actually make my voice audible rather than covering it up as much as possible with the backing track, since after all, if people are going to endure my singing, they may as well at least hear what the words are. It’s difficult to record all of those words clearly, and to the right tune, and then overdose on testosterone and expect it to still be comprehensible. Here are the current lyrics: Read the rest of this entry »
Unintentional Haiku from New Scientist, on Shakespeare and Stuff
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, NaPoWriMo on May 4, 2014
I’m still behind on New Scientist, so I’m now reading the issue which has a special feature on Shakespeare. It seemed like a good issue to look for poetry in. Here are the haiku that Haiku Detector detected in the articles about Shakespeare. The first is a strategically-syllabicised book promo:
His book The Science
of Shakespeare is published this
month (St Martin’s Press)
The next has a supporting quote from the Bard himself:
Supporting quote: “If
sack and sugar be a fault,
God help the wicked.”
but this one is my favourite:
Most of all he swings
between moods superbly high
and desperately low.
That doesn’t seem like enough stuff for a blog post. Luckily, the issue just after the special issue that I already found haiku in has a feature on ‘stuff’, so here’s the only haiku from that:
His leather backpack
is today’s bag to haul our
essentials around.
In case it’s still Star Wars Day when you read this, you might want to check out my post from last Star Wars Day featuring a video in which I read my poem about not having seen Star Wars.
Better (Entitled Hipster Version)
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on May 2, 2014
This is a parody of Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘Better‘. You probably haven’t heard of that song, because it’s from before Jonathan quit his day job and got all famous. It’s way better than his new stuff, because it’s about someone who liked their partner before said partner turned into a cyborg and sold out to the robot overlords. Opinions expressed in these lyrics do not reflect those of the author.
What have you done?
I think you know what I’m talking about.
No more homespun;
I’d just bought in and then you just sold out.
I remember the Yale Whiffenpoofs,
Spizzwinks(?) and Pop!Tech and Little Gray Books.
Little short lines I read nothing between.
Nobody loved you like me.
But it’s not me, it’s you.
It’s the star you’ve turned to.
The day job you quit
like no artist would do.
You were my great nerd love
that no-one had heard of,
but I don’t think that I like you better.
No I don’t think that I like you better.
You started out small,
some free tunes and some gigs as an opening band.
Now you must have it all;
you moved on to the sea once you’d soft rocked the land.
Now you tour with a real live Scarface,
big boomy drums and a super star bass,
and the act that you opened for opens your act;
you act like you don’t know your place.
Then you made record-deal ‘art’
and produced it with Flans,
denied us your real heart,
ignored your real fans.
You might be a giant,
but I ain’t no client
and I don’t think that I like you better.
No I don’t think that I like you better.
So that’s how it goes.
Your whole cake is a lie, and you’re eating it too.
Everyone knows.
Why would anyone think I’d be happy for you?
It’s not about you, it’s all about me.
Here is a list of what I want to see.
Don’t please the masses, and don’t plead for cash.
Just be authentic for free.
Now, I’m not against gold mines
’cause I like sluice box muck.
But man, you’re the nugget,
the million bucks.
You used to like monkeys,
but now you’re like Snuggies
and I don’t think that I like you better.
No I don’t think that I like you better.
Just for fun, I’ve included the titles of or otherwise strongly referenced the titles of at least five other songs of his, and one song by his opening band (that he used to open for) Paul and Storm. See if you can find them!
‘Better’ was actually one of the first Jonathan Coulton songs I heard, when I found Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms, and Jonathan was probably about halfway through Thing A Week when I found it. I didn’t find out about the Whiffenpoofs, Spizzwinks(?) or Little Gray Books lectures until some time later. I like his new albums too and I’m glad that he’s successful and therefore has the freedom to do whatever he likes without worrying too much about what will sell. I’m happy that if I mention his name at a geek-adjacent event these days, people are likely to know who I’m talking about. I even sang ‘Better’ at a karaoke event in Vienna recently, and it wasn’t the first JoCo song to be sung there.
Dear Internet
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 26, 2014
Dear Internet,
My prescriptions have been filled,
and I really do not want my blood pressure killed
if it means my blood’s not flowing ’cause my beating heart was stilled.
Dear Internet,
I’m a person like me;
I am not a Doctor Who, or a colour or a tree,
and regurgitated multi-choice is not psychology.
Dear Internet,
Radium was discovered by a mum,
but it isn’t the parenthood that proves it’s not dumb,
It’s this one weird trick called a Nobel Prize, and repeatable experiments on what to do with some.
Dear Internet,
As long as finite life’s a haz-
ard, doing fifty things that you say everyone has
(or must before they die) is nuts, to justify the thing that I identify as.
Dear Internet,
Your trick will not burn fat,
and the reason the doctors will hate you for that
is it’s useless at best, deadly at worst, but the dough that you make would cheer up grumpy cat.
Dear Internet,
I like Tim Berners-Lee too,
but that ‘vague, but exciting’ wasn’t ‘OMG you
MUST see this, and simply will not BELIEVE
the AMAZING pile of who-knows-what this headline links to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!’
Dear Internet,
my penis is fine;
to be honest, I don’t even think that it’s mine.
In any case, I won’t call you if ever my vaginal mesh can’t keep it in line.
Dear User,
I swear it isn’t me;
I follow your instructions and I do it perfectly.
I serve your spam and lists and ads and awful poetry.
So think before you link to things you did not want to see.
I still haven’t written so much as a full draft of the short story I need to write, so I may as well get back on the NaPoWriMo horse momentarily. This probably won’t age well, as it’s based on ads and spam and web pages I see a lot of now, which will hopefully not last. The ‘vague, but exciting’ refers to the response to Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal that led to the worldwide web.
Why didn’t GlaDOS tell lies?
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 20, 2014
Where did your life go so wrong?
Why was that test not surveilled?
Why not preserve your cube long?
Who wants a slice of this cake?
Why should enriching tests end?
Why must you go the wrong way?
What is that useless eyed head?
Why kill a harmless AI?
Why don’t you have any friends?
How are they all still alive?
I haven’t been feeling inspired enough to sculpt many poems from scratch, but with enough constraints, all I have to do is inject word goo into the mould and make sure it gets into all the corners. So the other day I looked up the last three optional prompts on the NaPoWriMo blog, and followed them all: ten lines of lies, all questions, in terza rima. The mould was a little too narrow to get goo through in places, so I relaxed the last constraint to some pretty loose terza assonanza.
Of course, the first thing I thought of when I saw the lying prompt was GlaDOS (and the promised cake) from the game Portal. Most of these questions are based on things GlaDOS said during the original Portal game, approximately in order. If you haven’t played Portal, or at least heard the song ‘Still Alive‘ which Jonathan Coulton wrote for the end credits (which, by the way, my old Mac once covered), it might not make a lot of sense. Show it to a friend who has played and see how they react to it.
An alternate ending, which doesn’t end with the phrase ‘still alive’, is:
What is that useless eyed head?
Why would you kill harmless me?
Why don’t you have any friends?
What will you do now you’re free?
Unintentional Haiku from New Scientist, on Self, Sleep, and Death
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector, NaPoWriMo on April 19, 2014
Following on from the posts on reality, existence, and God and consciousness, life, and time, here are the unintentional haiku that Haiku Detector found in the last three sections of New Scientist’s special issue with the ‘big questions’: the self, sleep, and death. The ‘self’ section has a haiku in an image caption:
The self may be a
necessary illusion
(Image: Darren Hopes)
I suppose it could make sense if somebody named Darren hopes that the self is an image:
The self may be a
necessary illusion
(image, Darren hopes)
The others are from the main text:
But we surely still
have the same self today that
we had yesterday.
For most people, most
of the time, the sense of self
is seamless and whole.
These ones are about sleep, perchance about dreaming:
Our emotional
undercurrents seem to be
the guiding force here.
This one requires ‘2008’ to be pronouned ‘two thousand eight’, not ‘two thousand and eight’:
In 2008,
hints emerged that these might be
the deeper stages.
The fountain of youth
may have been as close as our
bedrooms all along.
So it’s puzzling that
we still don’t really know why
it is that we sleep.
And finally, one on the final sleep, death:
When the risk is slight,
mild concern may be all that
is appropriate.
That’s all from that special issue of New Scientist, though the latest issue is dedicated to Shakespeare, so I hope to find some poetry in it. If there’s anything else you’d like me to mine for haiku, let me know!
While I was writing a poem a day, there would be times when I’d just feel like writing prose, for a break. I was hoping that this prose pressure would build up and I’d write something amazing when NaPoWriMo ended. Now that I’m trying to prioritise writing a short story for a competition, poems are trying to force their way out. So I still could manage 30 poems in 30 days, but I’m not going to pressure myself to post them by each midnight, and I won’t feel bad about posting found haiku when I don’t have a poem ready.
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