If you design a letterhead, make sure it has more than just your logo in it. Include contact information for your organization.

Similarly, if you design a logo, make sure it reads in both color *and* black and white. Not all printing devices do color.

CHNM Finds: Hannah Szenes

I’d never heard of this woman, but her story sounds like it could be interesting:

Hannah Szenes, “was a Hungarian Jew, one of 37 Jews living in Palestine, now Israel, who were trained by the British army to parachute into Yugoslavia during the Second World War in order to help save the Jews of Hungary, who were about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz.[1]

Szenes was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but she refused to reveal details of her mission, and was eventually tried and executed by firing squad.[1] She is regarded as a national heroine in Israel, where several streets and a kibbutz are named after her and her poetry is widely known.”

And, yes, where my head’s at right now, my first thought was, “Gee, I wonder if you could make a Doctor Who episode linking into her story?” Hoorah, me, for falling into another fandom. Oy. It’ll wear off.

CHNM Finds: Independence Rock

I like the idea of walking across stone carved with names and messages left behind by the long-dead.  It’s an eerie image, bittersweet, somehow–the futility of man, all of that.

So, that makes Independence Rock, where settlers traveling West left graffiti as they passed, my CHNM find for the day.

I’d like to keep the image of walking on the names and voices of the dead for my work.  Maybe for some written piece later.

CHNM Finds: Jell-O?

Been a long time since I posted. Being graduated has kind of flubbed up any sense of order/productivity in my life—still trying to recover either. BUT.

Here’s another goofy find from my National History Education Clearinghouse data-digging:

A Jell-O museum.

You know, seriously, why isn’t there a Lovecraft museum up in Rhode Island or something? That’s a gap that needs to be filled. Hell, if Jell-O can get a museum, Cthulhu should get one…

More on RP: Power-Posing

Text-based roleplaying (which is pretty much all online roleplaying, even in graphical virtual worlds, because the emote structures aren’t robust enough to handle interactions beyond social basics and PvP, much) takes a particular kind of grace and courtesy. You take your turn, writing what your character does — make your “pose,” it’s called — and then wait for others to respond. The grace comes in making sure your pose invites a response from the other player (and his/her character) but does *not* impose action on the other character in any way.

That is, you can say, “Negaduck whips out a shotgun and tries to shoot Hannibal Lecter.” (Or even, perhaps, “takes a shot at” or “shoots at Hannibal Lecter).

You cannot say, “Negaduck shoots Hannibal Lecter right between the eyes. Hannibal staggers backwards and sinks to the ground.”

The first example invites a response from player-and-character, and gives the player a chance to choose what the character does and have fun with it. You put your cards down, and wait for s/he to play his hand.

The second example totally disregards the other player and assumes control of his/her character. You put your cards down, steal his/her cards, and play them however’s best for you.

That there’s what’s called power-posing, and it pretty much marks you as a) an overly-enthusiastic newbie or b) a griefer ass, who’s interested in playing other *players* and grandstanding, not in the cooperative dynamic of good roleplaying.

Internet etiquette is an odd thing — really, no action has been taken beyond the writing out of a fictional scene between fictional characters. But, in the context of the game and the social interactions it proceeds by, it’s funny how offensive power-posers seem. It’s like the kid on the playground who always says he’s won or is winning, even when everyone else knows he isn’t. He’s playing by a set of rules totally different from those of the game everyone else is trying to play, but loudly insists that he’s playing the same game.

Contaminant?

- The artificial lake down by my house (Sumner Lake) is chock full of dead fish. I went walking by the lake this morning, and saw one dead fish lying on the sidewalk. “Hm,” I said, and kept on walking. Dead fish, kinda neat. Then I gave the algae along the lake’s side a harder look, and noticed that all of the clear spots in the algae weren’t clear — they were little floating dead fish that had bobbed up through the slime. Walked about a ten foot stretch, counted 40 or so dead fish. Is not a nice lake at all, but that’s not the norm. And now there are guys out there collecting all the bodies with nets and buckets. Really wondering what’s up. ‘Specially considering my dog nabbed a fish corpse earlier and ate it. Stupid dogs.

CHNM Finds – Condoman!

So, I’m still working for the Center for History and New Media (CHNM, for you insider-type folks), plugging away at the slow process of, um, cataloguing the American history content of the entire Web. Apparently. It’s a big job, but I guess someone has to do it…? Maybe?

Anyway, on some days, I come across nothing interesting in my searching. And on some days, I stumble onto good stuff. Fun, interesting, unusual, thorough, well-designed — stuff that stands out.

A few days ago, I came across this:

Oh, Condoman, you have made my day.

In any case, good old Condoman here (is he promoting condoms or condos?) comes from Visual Culture and Health Posters, a U.S. Library of Medicine online collection which consists of a bunch of U.S. and world health posters used to inform the public about health issues. I spent some time poking around the four sections (Infectious Disease, Environmental Health, Anti-Smoking Campaigns, and HIV/AIDS) and found them all quite interesting — there’s nothing like propaganda, of any sort, to give you an idea of the style and concerns of a particular time and place. “Infectious Disease” was particularly interesting, as it contains posters warning against prostitutes as a vector of venereal diseases — and if there’s not a very healthy vein of misogyny running through those, well…must just be my oh-so-rampant feminism coloring my vision, eh? I did not know that STDs could spread by sultry eye contact alone.

Pandora

- Pandora works *much* better if you never thumb any songs up. Use artists for the seeds, and then only thumb songs down. So far, this makes for a much more varied song mix, and prevents those loops where you only get a handful of songs repeated over and over — loops that seem to come from over-specification. Somehow, I always thought thumbing things up would *broaden* the mix — i.e., give whatever does the analysis and selection a broader range of works to choose from — but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The more you fine-tune the channel with thumbs up, the more it seems to narrow in on just those few approved songs. I’m guessing I approached the service with *human* relational assumptions — that is, the more nodes in my net, the more nodes I can *connect* to that net, an exponential kinda thing — while the program approaches it with machine specification assumptions — perhaps it’s looking at all the songs I input and then only playing the songs that match those songs most closely — so the more songs I thumb-up, the more it can narrow down my preferences, until it only plays the few songs that seem to have *all* of the characteristics I’ve shown interest in. Which isn’t going to be many songs.

Programs *think* a lot differently than people. Have to remember that.

More Fruit!

- Always choose apples that have their stems.  When an apple’s stem’s removed, it lets mold and all kinds of other brown and fungi-like stuff move on down into the apple and start eating it away from the core out.  And is quite gross to eat most of an apple and then end up with a mouth full of spongy stuff when you get down to the center.

Scraps from a Rough Draft

- Cut from a rough draft of an essay on Christopher Nolan‘s Memento:

For a cat, for instance, the past exists but it does not cling to it; the future exists but it does not plan for it. One moment may lead to another, but the cat lives in the present, loosely anchored in a past that tells it what is safe and what is familiar and a future that it predicts only through a rough sense of routine. The cat requires no elaborate system with which to position itself within time and to exert control over time, but the human being does.