Last night, I was hanging out with a younger friend of mine (26), and she was talking about her confusion about whether or not she should tell her boyfriend (33) that she loved him. They've been formally dating for about three months, but 'hooking up' for almost two years; the process by which she describes her efforts to get him to acquiesce to this shift in status reminds me of the infinite patience of someone trying to coax a skittish deer to eat from her hand.
Apparently, over [Valentine's Day] weekend, he asked her, "Are we going to do something for Sunday?" This statement means something along the lines of, "I expect you to tell me whether or not you expect me to celebrate this holiday with you; by 'celebrate', I mean, allow myself to be cajoled into participating in a celebration for which I expect you to do all the planning. Furthermore, I refuse to say either the phrase, 'Go on a date' "or 'Valentine's Day' out loud; I expect you to say those words for me, and yet after I let you do all this work for me, I will expect you to feel lucky, and as though the relationship has progressed."
So now they have a date on Valentine's Day, and she's trying to decide whether or not she should tell him she loves him, even though it seems like she's pretty much 95% sure that he won't say it back, and this is going to upset her. But, essentially, she thinks that the only way to eventually get him to a place where he might be comfortable saying it is to say it to him first, unrequited, regardless of the hurt this is going to cause her in the moment. She then told me that they get into a fight/discussion approximately every two weeks about where the relationship is heading, and told me that at the next one, she plans on asking him, "Are you curious about me? Do you ever wonder about what I'm thinking?" She is literally committed to the project of teaching him, word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence, how to be a human being in a relationship. It's like she has to chew his feelings for him, swallow them, and regurgitate them back into his fucking mouth.
The weight of it! The work of it! The fucking exhaustion. All these beautiful, lively, smart, intelligent, sensitive, articulate young women, and these goddamn burdensome (not-so) young men, who never had to learn how to recognize a single one of their own feelings and describe them in words, because they rely on the women around them to do it for them.
This comment is in response to a Laurie Penny article in the New Statesman, "Maybe You Should Just Be Single," an opinion piece on emotional labor. "It's time, as the Americans say, for some real talk," Penny writes, before outlining why she believes it's "usually better for women to be single. Particularly young women." Penny continues:
I’m a gigantic squishy romantic at heart. It’s just that I think compulsory heterosexual monogamy is the least romantic idea since standardised testing, and I don’t see why our best ideals of love and lust and passion and dedication need to be boxed into it.
Penny's article focuses exclusively on regular relationships; not so for the metafilter thread. In "it's just not worth it," CTRL + F for "queer" yields twelve results ("I will go so far as to say that I, a queer transmasculine person...have a long history of dating and pining for real jerks.") CTRL + F for "lesbian" nets one result; "gay," "glb" and "lgb" net zero.
CTRL + F of "poly" reveals five matches, including a link to an article called "Why Being Solo and Poly Has Made Me a Happiness Evangelist." Dating, says the author, is "like playing the lottery. A ticket is only a dollar, but if you play every day, soon you’ve wasted thousands. I think I’m just done wasting my proverbial money when all I get is annoyance and frustration. I’m wasting my time." Nonetheless, she manages to find several relationships that don't require her to have "an anchor" (i.e. a live-in partner).
The polyamorous author offers a vision of the future, unfettered by staid expectation:
What if we didn’t have any assumptions at all? What if, when we went on a first date, we all had to ask the other person what they were looking for and where they’d live if they could live anywhere and whether they want marriage or kids or days full of surfing and golf or knitting and gardening? What if, when we asked someone out, we were actually asking out that person and not shopping for someone to fill a predetermined role we’d imagined for them?
What if!
]]>Blood Ink is currently available on Wattpad, where you can read it for free. Once it's released as an ebook, I'll take it off Wattpad. That could take a while though.
Blood Ink will probably be a free download, since it's not very long and I hope it will serve as a gateway to some of the other "teen horror" titles that are in a similar vein.
In other news––sorry for the radio silence from January to June. The first three months of the year I was very sick, then I was very busy. The deep dream zine is shaping up to be very different from what I planned. It's no longer called "Deep Dreams of Electric Sheep" for example, and it's going to be much more personal in nature.
This blog is for announcements and articles. You can always follow Calhoun Press on Instagram and Twitter if you want a better idea of what's happening from week to week. You can also subscribe to the Calhoun Press mailing list, and you'll be the first to learn about new publications, sales, and mailing-list-only freebies and discounts.
]]>I'm currently writing a book set in 2003. This involves a fair amount of research, not just into recent history, but into the culture of the time. Which means a lot of time spent in the Wayback Machine.
Digital archiving is a difficult project, and writing this book has exposed me to some of these difficulties. Although some of the references in this post are dated, due to the focus/nature of the research I'm doing, the problems are not. I try to bring in contemporary examples to drive the point home.
Isn't the internet forever, though?
Yes and no...the internet is forever in the sense that once you put something on the internet, you have to assume that it's going to stay out there, in some form, for the rest of time. That doesn't mean it actually will be out there, though. You can't control what happens to something once you post it on the internet. Treating the web like your own private hugbox or your own public dropbox is probably not going to work out very well.
There are a lot of pages that have not been archived anywhere. Unless someone saved a copy to their hard drive, or unless you can scare up a Google cache, that old page is as gone as a burnt manuscript. Even if a million people saw the page when it was live.
Who archives the web?
I've already mentioned the Wayback Machine. There many web archiving options online, such as the Australian Government Web Archives. There are also on-demand archivers, such as Archive.is (not to be confused with Archive.org, which runs the Wayback Machine). On-demand archivers don't crawl the web, but they allow you to make copies of webpages that you specify––such as this one.
PageFreezer seems geared towards companies or professionals who want "authenticated, legally admissible, easy to produce digital evidence" from their own websites and social media accounts. It seems geared towards people who want to limit their liability from false complaints (e.g. falsified tweet screenshots), not towards preserving a public archive.
Why is digital archiving so difficult?
One problem is just the sheer enormity of the internet. There are over 4.5 billion webpages online right now. Which ones should be archived? How often? What methods should archivists use to decide which pages are worth archiving consistently? Unless an archiving website gets an enormous grant, archiving all of these pages is not realistic.
Some webpages are difficult to archive due to changing technology. How may webpages still use Realplayer clips? How many use obsolete music or video players? If SoundCloud or Spotify shuts down, many current pages will have dead links, even in the archives. Screenshots can get around some of these problems, preserving the look and feel of the page in a way that more dynamic archives can't capture (see: all the broken image links and weird formatting on Wayback Machine pages, like this one).
Any archival project is also going to run afoul of privacy concerns in some way or another. Look at the short-lived site Frienditto, which could archive private livejournal entries that their writers may not have wanted the public to see. Frienditto was an extreme case, which is probably why it was shut down so quickly. It's one thing to repeat something told in confidence, it's another to proclaim it in front of the entire world, which is what Frienditto did.
However, even a site that only archives publicly accessible pages can run afoul of privacy concerns. If people have the right to be forgotten, doesn't preserving their teenage prose poems (username available) run counter to that right? Does Lord Byron have the right to "burn his manuscripts" if they're stored across several servers in different countries? How can he prove they're his manuscripts, that "xwarriorxpoetx" is really him?
Another problem is that many webpages can go offline with no warning, making it difficult to prioritize what should and should not be archived. Myspace is an extreme example. When Myspace updated their look, they got rid of their user's journals, among other things. You can log in and read/download your own entries, but you can’t read anyone else’s. If you don't have your old email address that you used for Myspace, too bad.
The Myspace update was unexpected––not that they would reboot their look, which was a long time coming, but that they would get rid of so much content without warning.
I'm sure there are people who are not exactly broken up over that. “Oh no, no one can read the prose poems I wrote when I was seventeen”––said (almost) no one ever. But what if the account holder died? What if that journal gave other people some kind of comfort and connection to their lost son, brother, father, etc.? Unless mom/sis/widow made a backup copy herself, which she may not even know how to do, then there’s no way for her to reread those journal entries without a cache. And there is no guarantee that a cache exists, especially if only a handful of people ever visited the page.
So you can go very quickly from a webpage being accessible to the entire world, to essentially vanishing from the entire web, over a very short period of time.
If you visit the Wayback Machine, you may have trouble finding archived Myspace pages. They're not blocked by robots.txt the way Livejournals are, but many Myspace pages and journals are simply not available (unless the journal was fairly popular, e.g. Courtney Love's).
And that is what disturbs me––the ability to erase once-accessible information from the web. Many people assume that the internet is being archived consistently but it isn't. A new robots.txt file could make certain pages or entire websites inaccessible on certain archives. Even pages like this could vanish under the wrong circumstances.
A motivated company or organization can get pages pulled from the archives, even on websites they don't control. Scientology has already pressed the issue, by successfully removing certain critical webpages from the Wayback Machine.
How could archiving the internet be made easier?
On an individual level, preserving your own pages on- and off-line is a good start. It's good to make online and off-line backups of your own website, blog entries, etc. Remember that private companies like Twitter and Wordpress.com own the platform(s) that you're posting on, so multiple back-ups are the name of the game in case of some Myspace-like wipeout.
I've also gotten in the habit of archiving every page I reference in an article or essay, and including this archive in the citations, like so:
Patterson, Ti-Erika. "Do Children Just Take Their Parents' Political Beliefs? It's Not That Simple." The Atlantic, May 1, 2014. Accessed at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/parents-political-beliefs/361462/ on 22 December 2015. Archived at: https://archive.is/feHD4
Browser extensions are another option. The archive.is button is a good examples of this. Clipular too, possibly. Browser extensions like this make it easier to archive some of the less-visited websites, blogs, and forums on the web.
As for some of the larger issues uncovered in this post, I'm afraid I don't have any easy answers, other than to keep discussing these issues. Absent public discussion (and I do mean public discussion, not just media chatter), I can see another Frienditto-like service coming along and sucking all the oxygen out of the debate.
]]>I plan to convert this zine into Kindle and ePUB formats as well. This will make it easier to download and read the zine on e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc. The rest of our zines have been image/art intensive so this hasn't really been practical until now. There will also be PDF versions which I think are easier to read on some phones and tablets.
Feel free to leave any questions or comments in the section below.
Cover photo by Johan Hansson.
]]>Oahu in Black and White is exactly what it says it is: a zine full of black and white images of Oahu, Hawaii's third largest and most populated island. These images showcase everything from the windward-side beaches to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.
This zine isn't available to ship yet, but you can download a copy for $2.99 here.
Onmoku is a music fanzine for nonexistent bands. Each issue features profiles and interviews of the world's best fictional bands, musicians and musical acts. This zine includes:
Onmoku is available as a physical zine and digital download on the Calhoun Press store.
Flying Colors: This zine features illustrations made with the program Flying Colors 2 by Magic Mouse Studios. The images in this zine loosely tell a fairy tale about the trials and tribulations of a knight's defeat of an evil magician.
"Flying Colors" (the zine, not the program) is available as a black-and-white physical copy and as a full-color printable download on the Calhoun Press store.
If this program looks interesting to you, I suggest you buy a copy from the Magic Mouse website. It will still work with older computers, and can work on newer Windows computers with a bit of tweaking. It's a fun program to use, and the images it creates have a very nice "old school" feel that is hard to duplicate with any other program.
]]>Have you ever read an article about a topic you know well, and found that the writer got everything wrong? Not just little things, but basic things, like the decade that Kate Bush released her first album, or the sport that Joe Montana played professionally. And did you then turn to another section and read about something you don't know well, such as foreign policy or the economy or domestic politics, and take that story more or less at face value?
If you have, then you've experienced the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. The term was coined by Michael Crighton in his 2005 essay "Why Speculate?" From the essay:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward––reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Why does this happen? For some possible insight, see this quote from George Orwell's article, "Confessions of a Book Reviewer":
Three of these books deal with subjects of which [the book reviewer] is so ignorant that he will have to read at least fifty pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader...Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases — ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc. etc.’ — will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go.
There's more on this subject, but it's hard to collate; "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" isn't exactly a household term. If you know of any related quotes, stories or experiences from your own life, leave them in the comments below. Here are some tangentially-related cases that I remember:
On a related note, are there any drinking games associated with "howlers" in the news? I have a feeling that anyone playing along would get alcohol poisoning pretty quickly though.
]]>Right now I'm working on a zine about deep dream technology, and how artists can use this technology in mixed media projects, photography, videos, music, collage, and any other artistic medium you can think of. I'd like to get in touch with any artists who use deep dream processing methods in their art.
Anyone who has used deep dream in an artistic project, e.g. a collage, a video, an audio track, or just creating an image with deepdream for their computer wallpaper, is welcome to submit their work. Essays are also welcome (1500 words max). If you want to write a little bit about your experiences, or just submit some images, you can do that via the Calhoun Press contact page or via Instagram or Twitter.
The deadline for submissions is November 26th, 2015 (Thanksgiving).
"Deep Dream of Electric Sheep." From an image by 3268zauber, CC-BY-SA.
"Deep dream" images are made by artificial neural networks (a kind of computer program) that seek out and enhance patterns that they "see" in images.
Google uses artificial neural networks to find and sort images on the web. For example, whenever someone searches "sheep," they will get pictures of sheep, not goats or bushes or corgis or anything else, because of these networks.
Google also uses the surrounding text on a webpage to sort images, but that's not enough. For example, a page on sheep herding might feature pictures of sheep in a field, a border collie, a shepherd, and a picture of the author of the post. Artificial neural networks allow Google to discriminate between a picture of an eggplant and a picture of a human face.
How does the network know what a sheep looks like? Basically, the network is fed thousands of images of sheep and then looks for commonalities between the images. Each layer of the neural network looks for different things; the shallower layers look for patterns of light and shadow, while deeper layers look for shapes and more complex visual structures.
A few engineers at Google discovered that these artificial neural networks could not only recognize images, they could also generate them. If Google gave these networks an image of random noise, and then told the network to look for and amplify the sheep-like patterns in the image, these engineers could see what the network had identified as the defining visual characteristics of sheep. This process would allow the engineers to understand how the neural networks were processing images, and what each layer was "seeing."
The resulting pictures, called "deep dreams" by Google, looked a lot like the visual hallucinations of people on psychedelic drugs. Is that a coincidence, or are artificial neural networks giving us insight into how vision is processed in the human brain? It's too early to say, but computer and cognitive science can now "see what the machine sees." Where it goes from there is beyond my paygrade, but it's always interesting to see what happens next in this field.
There are many different computer programs, mobile apps and websites that can generate deep dream images. Here's a list of the ones I've used.
If you have programming experience, this guide on /r/deepdreams will show you how to create a deep dream engine of your own.
Anyone who's made deep dream images is welcome to submit to the zine. The best way to submit your images is to upload them to imgur (or your own personal website) and then send me a link through the Calhoun Press contact page. If you have an essay or article about deep dreams please get in touch as well. Remember there's a 1500 word maximum for essays and articles.
]]>Order today and you'll get the zine as soon as we have it back from the printers.
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]]>"Xerox art," a.k.a. copy art or xerography, involves using a photocopier to create new artwork. There are several ways to turn a copy into an original:
The history of xerography begins in the late 1960s, when a few artists, including Andy Warhol, used Photostat machines and other copiers to created distorted copies of their own faces, drawings, and photographs. As copiers became more accessible through the 70s and 80s, a number of artists, such as Ginny Lloyd and Ian Burn, began creating their own xerox art, curating art shows that displayed copy art, and founding organizations, such as Louise Neaderland's International Society of Copy Artists, to promote the use of the copy machine as an artistic tool.
The term "xerox art" may also refer to art made on a computer scanner using similar methods as the ones outlined above. This is sometimes called "scanner art," "scanography" or "scanner photography." Scanner art has become more popular as access to computer scanners increases.
Xerox and/or scanner art is created by:
This album cover for The Flying Lizards features artwork by Laurie Rae Chamberlain.
Not everyone considers this art, of course. It doesn't take the same level of skill as painting, life drawing or sculpting. To be honest, I'm a bit inclined to agree with this assessment, although I think that anyone with a good visual sense can create an interesting image with the help of a photocopier. Xerox art can also be used as an element in collages and multimedia projects.
Honestly, sometimes the copy/scan turns out to be interesting, and other times it looks like some horror taken out of Raskolnikov's brain. Double/multiple exposures can be dicey as well; if you're only printing in black and white, you can quickly wind up with a page of just black (wasted!) ink/toner. Creating a compelling copy/scan photograph is not as easy as picking the perfect Instagram filter, but I won't say it's at the same level as painting the Sistine Chapel (I'm not that postmodern!).
A basic scanograph.
Unfortunately, the International Society of Copier Artists disbanded in 2003, but their archives are available at the University of Iowa, and ISCA Quarterly back-issues are available at various university libraries around the US. You can also find xerography/scanography on image-sharing websites like Instagram and Flickr.
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