jvnk:
BeeLine Reader
This extension really does seem to help with reading long pieces of text on a laptop or mobile device screen; apparently I read 27% faster with it! It’s a pretty interesting, yet simple, concept. Give it a try, might help ya.
this could have made research projects so much easier. I could never get through online articles.
do you realize how much more i would be inclined to read and study a textbook if they were printed like this?
holy shit I would actually be able to read again
Do you have any idea how helpful this is for dyslexia? OMG I can follow this text! The words and lines are not blurring together! I can READ!
How do I make this go everywhere! Is there a way to make it even higher contrast for people with reading issues?
I think this might actually double my reading speed if the contrasts were higher and didn’t fade to black, or if they had a “automatically use a grey background instead of a blinding and confusing white one that should be against ADA.”
GAH.
RANTING BECAUSE HAPPY
Read this whole fucking thing.
no personality
and yet just by deigning to pay it’s still better than like 90% of arts jobs listings
EDIT: I CAN”T BELIEVE THIS WAS MY 20,000TH POST. I FUCKED UP. I BLEW IT.
This … appears to be a real person who actually talks like this
His books really exist
._.
I AM THE LAST CHAMPION OF TRUTH AND BEAUTY
ANNOUNCEMENT - I am for the time being, putting the blog on indefinite hiatus. It’s a twice failed experiment now, and I apologize for that. I haven’t yet figured out how to disentangle what is analysis of art or culture and what is fingerling or ranting. I think the difference is vanishing, and I am tentatively going to say that is a good thing. Or has the potential to be very good and monumentously powerful. May I’ll try again later, maybe I won’t. Maybe we have reached the point in online discourse where disentangling self from content is no longer wanted. I don’t know. But for now, everything is going on my main blog, which is HERE. you are welcome to follow.
This blog is in storage and will not be deleted.
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Languages animate objects by giving them names, making them noticeable when we might not otherwise be aware of them. Tuvan has a word iy (pronounced like the letter e), which indicates the short side of a hill.
I had never noticed that hills had a short side. But once I learned the word, I began to study the contours of hills, trying to identify the iy. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and shorter than the others.
If you are riding a horse, carrying firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept. You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more energy to ascend, and an iy descent is more treacherous as well. Once you know about the iy, you see it in every hill and identify it automatically, directing your horse, sheep, or footsteps accordingly.
This is a perfect example of how language adapts to local environment, by packaging knowledge into ecologically relevant bits. Once you know that there is an iy, you don’t really have to be told to notice it or avoid it. You just do. The language has taught you useful information in a covert fashion, without explicit instruction.
Life Before (and After) Page Numbers
Print media evolved into its present forms.
In, say, 1469, there were no page numbers. This obvious and now necessary part of the book’s user interface simply did not exist.
The earliest extant example of sequential numbering in a book (this time of ‘leaves’ rather than pages, per se) is the document you see at the top of this page, Sermo in festo praesentationis beatissimae Mariae virginis, which was printed in Cologne in 1470. The practice didn’t become standard, the wonderful I Love Typography tells us, for another half century.
The page number is particularly interesting, I think, because it is a pointer, a kind of metadata that breaks apart a work into constituent parts. The existence of page numbers creates a set of miniature sub-publications to which someone can refer.
Read more. [Image: Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf]
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
If you are wondering how this happens, it is because academic jargon echolalic, and phrases become stock phrases, hat computer programs can replicate things that sound enough like the real near nonsense articles that take hours to decipher. Because understanding all the jargon and insider phrasing is supposed to be a sign of aptitude and experience in the field, no one on these journals dares voice the idea that these technobabble articles are actually nonsense for fear of being seen as just not knowledgeable enough to “get” all the complicated insular language. As a result every just kind of glances at these things, sees the words that look right, and nods it along.
Non-peer reviewed journals are of course more susceptible, but because of the culture of jargon and drivel and fear of sounding not in the know enough, even supposedly peer reviewed journals fall pray to these revealing hoaxes.
At least they were removed before some professor assigned them to their students to analyze for class.
protip if a nerd dude tries to give you a pop quiz about the fandom on your shirt/bag/cosplay by asking you to answer a banal and obscure trivia question to prove you’re a Real Gamer, turn the question back on him. ask him about the thematic implications that bit of trivia has on the actual story. ask him about the character development and motivations of the minor characters he’s making you list. ask him if he thinks the major in-universe event he’s testing you on was successful in carrying forward the underlying tone and intent of the work itself. ask him about fucking literary devices. you know that one super tough and intimidating lit teacher everyone encounters at least once in their lifetime? become that teacher. make him sweat.