I have moved…

Hopefully for the last time…

You can find my new home at: blog.aleph85.com

There’s just somehting nice about being able to run your own site.

Moving

You may or may not notice the transition… but I am in the process of transferring my web presence to a new server. That is, no longer on wordpress.com, but on my own hosted server. Ok, so it is a couple of dollars… but at least I will be able to host several of my sites at once… and make all the CSS changes I like.

This pricess will take a while, especially as I am doing it in the few moments of free time I can grab between frantic and long-lasting work sessions… but it will happen. And the result will be a better experience and more content for you all… all 3 of you

Prominent on the new site:

Reviews, book lists, and (new) the beginnings of what I hope to become a book about my experiences as a camp staffer.

Keep watching.

Slower Reading

Well, I have read far fewer books so far this year. On one hand this makes me sad, on the other I have been reading many different books and stories. Rather than reading 2 books a week for class, I am reading short stories and developing lessons for them. I’m also reading a lot of books and articles about teaching, but that type of reading doesn’t tend to lead to full readings.

Then there is the fun reading.

Simply put, I am reading some very long books!

I started reading the Saga of the Seven Suns, by Kevin J. Anderson, last year. That is a heavy bit of reading! It took me 4 months to catch up and read the 5 books that had been published and now, 9 months later, the next two books are available. I have one of them and will probably finish it up over the next few weeks.

Last summer I read a number of books before getting bogged down in Snow Crash. This year I jumped right ahead and got stuck in a long book right away. I picked up a copy of Pandora’s Star before going to Maine and, after laying another sci-fi novel aside somewhere around New Jersey, I dived in. And I kept swimming. And gurgling right along. Now, three months, two audiobooks, and over 900 pages later I have finished! Wow, Peter F. Hamilton is certainly a prolific author. So. Much. Text! If I have time, I will try to post a review of the book in the next few weeks… though it is so long and complex that I don’t know if I will have time.

More posts soon. Been thinking on music and literature a lot recently.

-Otto

Gnomic Machine Translation

Posted on Gibson’s Blog, machine translation gone wrong:

“Muffle Chignon” is a cyberpunk discontinuance authored abreast William Gibson. Vestibule he a cyber amazon elect ”Visigoth” is in a way relating to a twist in consideration of set on foot a cyber Vernunft. Alter ego becomes licentious and gets slapdash upon the foul.

(source)

Need to read more

I need to read more.

Looking at my current rate of reading, there is no way that I am going to surpass, or even match, my count of 48 books from last year. There are several reasons for this: firstly, I am spending a lot of time reading bits and pieces of information in instructional books, rather than enjoying full novels or non-fiction books. Second, I am working my way through a very long book (almost 1,000 pages). Finally, I am working in the offic at camp again. Last year I left the office to teach and, thanks to the more regular schedule, I managed to both read several books and watch most of Andromeda over the course of the summer…

I am almost finished with a small book though… after several chats with friends and family I decided it was about time to read some Ayn Rand. Rather than starting with one of her massive books, I picked up a paperback copy of her short novel Anthem. I have about 10 pages left to go and must say that this is a brilliant book. The final chapters, in which the author “learns” how to speak in the first person are a bit pedagogical, but the story is compelling. It is worth noting that I can see why many critics dislike Rand. I’ll save my full thoughts for a later time, but I can certainly see why femanists and Marxists would critisize her. There are also a few logical inconsistancies that might get a structuralist spinning.

More on that later

Listening

I thought that my listening habits could not get any more infrequent. This spring I aquired something called a “real job” and that has severely infringed on the amount of listening I do. I thought that I might listen a bit more over the summer, but… well… working at camp has taken a lot more time than I expected. Silly me, after six years I should be used to it.

The Echoing Green: Sanctuary

The Echoing Green are banging away on a new album, slowly releasing new tracks to Myspace and occasionally pushing out production videos on their podcast feed.

The latest is Sanctuary and, I must say, it does an excellent job building their “darkwave” sound. Here are the lyrics, as posted on their Myspace.

Take naivete from me and leave me isolated
all at once I feel so free, yet so captivated
you make the endless waves of time -
seem so temporary.
you’re my missionary, emissary… Adversary!

You define the line between human and divine
in this empty place intrinsic grace, so necessary.
See the skies divide.. when hope and fear collide
from this cemetery, offer me this sanctuary.

There is violence when you move
yet I’m stationary
devastate all my design and make it arbitrary
you break my legs yet leave my knees…
my will penetrated.
I’m eviscerated…
consecrated…
Lacerated!

This heart, you break it and make it sacred
these eyes awaken, this breath is taken from you

You define the line between human and divine….

The Echoing Green released their first serious “darkwave” work on The Winter of Our Discontent with Blind and Fall Awake. As a style, I think that darkwave can be best defined as the dark, harsh, even bitter side of New Wave with modern production values. This description applies to both the sound and the lyrics. Now, that is not to say that Echoing Green is going all depressed or hatefull. Indeed not! The style is, rather, to dive into the darkest pits of despair and grab onto the faintest ray of hope, then wrench and tear your way upwards until the darkness is evicerated. The sound is dark, certainly. The lyrics can even feel dark at times. But the point is that, if you actually listen, both the music and the lyrics truly focus on hope.

Which, I believe, is the essential message.

-otto

More on Achpin

All projects other than lesson planning tend to fall far behind these days, but I am still plugging away on my insane idea: The Achpin Society.

We (or at this moment, I) now have a domain registered, and I am working on developing the website. The website is important to this project, in part because I am hacking out the details on how the Society will be organized. You don’t think of it until you actually try to organize it for yourself, but it takes a lot to put your mission into a few clear sentences, determine what benefits you will offer to members, think of how to lure in donors, and decide exactly where the (at the time non existent) money will go. On the money issue, I am currently puzzling out how much of any donations I will put directly towards sending scouts to camp, and how much will go towards a long-term camp improvement project. The good thing is that, for the forseeable future, the Society will not need to pay for anything except sending kids to camp. I am covering the website fees, the cost of any donor incentive will be built into the donation system, and we do not (yet) have any print literature or advertising.

Ok, time to stop thinking for a little while and go see Indy4.

-Otto

Firefly

Just dropped by TWiTLive.TV and came across something new: Firefly. It seems to be an overlayer for your site that lets people click anywhere on the page and type messages to other people who are viewing the site at that moment. The messages pop up, then fade away after a few seconds. Interesting idea…

Boom-chicka-boom

A simple song that I have heard sung at camps up and down the east coast. Interestingly, all camps I have attended (including Girl Scout camps) sing this song in the same rolicking, half-shouted rhythm, but the official Boy Scout Songbook companion CD uses an entirely different (and not very appealing) tune and rhythm.

As this is a call and response, each line is called out to the audience, who are then expected to respond. For this reason I have doubled the lines in the following main verse:

“I said a BOOM chicka boom!
I said a boom chicka boom.
I said a BOOM chicka BOOM!
I said a boom chicka boom.
I said a BOom CHiCKA ROCKa, CHiCKA ROCKa, chicka BOOM!
I said a boom chicka rocka, chicka rocka, chicka boom.
Alright!
Alright.
Okay.
Okay.
Now let’s do it!
Now let’s do it.
(some other) way!
(some other) way.”

The (some other) at the end is a way of passing the song on to another leader and extending it. Common versions at my camp include Kitchen Way, Tower Way, Aquatics Way, Admin Way, and Shooting Sports Way. Each of these are sung by members of the respective department, with slight variations. For example, one (of many) Kitchen Ways starts:

“I said a SPOON chicka spoon!”

And concludes with:

“I said spoon DOin’ DISHes, DOin’ DISHes, DOin’ dishes chiCKA SPOON!”

And of course the Admin Way goes something like this:

“I said a SNOOZE chicka snooze!…
I said a snooze take a NAPa, that a NAPa, TAKE A SNOOZE!”