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Online Writing
Medleyana, Year Six: The Future of Fates Worse Than Death
I made a key decision when I began Medleyana (six years ago this week!): I gave myself permission to write about whatever I felt like rather than covering a single narrow topic (the blog's motto, "In praise of the eclectic," was thus aptly chosen). I could not have predicted, for example, that a good chunk of my time would be spent covering old movie serials. Related to that freedom, and as an antidote to a phobia of leaving any angle uncovered I had developed in grad school, I accepted, even embraced, that I would not always be comprehensive in my discussion of every topic. Building up over time, each article adding to the big picture, the writer I have become has been revealed (to myself, not just to readers) over the past six years. This is, of course, normal for reviewers, who write about one thing at a time, but it was a new way of thinking for me. In retrospect, it was silly of me to think that I could do it any other way.
This is also the sixth year of writing Fates Worse Than Death, mostly during the summers. I originally started the series as a way of motivating myself to watch a few serials I had on DVD (while, at the same time, providing fodder for my blog). I have since bought many more serials for the specific purpose of writing about them, as well as hunting them down online (not to mention the books I've bought and checked out of the library to bolster my writing). I feel that I've graduated to "aficionado" status, but I wouldn't say I've yet earned the right to call myself an expert. More than 250 serials were produced during the sound era, and I've watched and reviewed about 20% of them at this point.
However, I have watched enough that many patterns and similarities have emerged. Originality (as opposed to novelty) was not the primary aesthetic goal of the serials, so evaluating them individually is often a matter of judging the skill and artistry of filmmakers who were ringing changes on familiar formulas rather than breaking new ground. The question I face is this: should I continue writing about the serials in individual summaries, as most of the articles in Fates Worse Than Death have been, or should I condense and consolidate my coverage, while continuing to watch and research the serials? As I have frequently pointed out, I wouldn't continue to do this if I didn't enjoy it, and while I sometimes have criticism to level at the serials, I hope that my affection and interest in the genre and the era comes through in equal measure. If I am critical, it is because I am a fan who was been moved to think about what I am watching.
I also feel that I have written enough installments of this series to identify the strengths and weaknesses of my approach. There is a great deal of material already available on the production of the serials: the careers of the actors, directors, and crew members; the box office results and later television revival of the serials; and the places and people that often go nameless in the original films but have been identified over the years by eagle-eyed fans. I do not feel that Fates Worse Than Death is primarily about those things, although I touch on them occasionally. Nor does my work quite fit the nostalgic approach taken by many of the first-generation fans who grew up attending Saturday matinee showings of these films; as I have written previously, my own nostalgia is for the films and TV shows made in reaction to this material such as the Indiana Jones movies and The Rocketeer (I couldn't really see the serials uncut until I was an adult anyway). Researching the serials (as well as the comics, pulps, and radio shows of the Golden Age) helps me to understand the influences that went into those works, but the serials are ultimately part of someone else's childhood. On the other hand, I hope that I have more to offer than just snark.
No, I have come to find that my primary interest is in the form itself, in the way the demands of the cliffhanger and the weekly episode shape the story, as well as the way low budgets encouraged economy, from the use of recycled props and sets to the use of in-story flashbacks and that reliable staple, stock footage. One strength of this approach is that I have tried to watch as broad and representative a sample of serials as I could, taking on the serial as its own genre, not just as early film vehicles for my favorite comic-book superheroes or as an embarrassing cousin of the Western, gangster, or science fiction genres.
I also believe that there is room to explore the influences that flowed into and from the serials: the popular crime novels of Edgar Wallace, the fantasies of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the comic strips of Alex Raymond, for example. I've mentioned those names many times, and they keep coming up because of the repetitions of formula I've mentioned; again, I'm not the world's foremost expert on popular culture, but I've learned a great deal from writing this series, and I hope to continue exploring those elements. (Because of the way I write installments of this series, I generally like to go into each serial as a blank slate, only afterward discovering what other materials I need to fill out my review; a more comprehensive approach would necessarily make research a greater priority.)
Similarly, as the 1930s and '40s recede further into the past every year, details from the serials that contemporary audiences took for granted become more obscure. A work that delves into those details, that separates fact from fiction and provides a clearer picture of everyday life in that era, the better to appreciate the flights of fancy, strikes me as overdue (Christopher Miller's book American Cornball, which explains to modern audiences what used to be so funny about castor oil and other jokes that turn up in old cartoons and movies, is a model I have in mind here).
In short, I put it to you, dear reader, especially those of you who have stuck with Fates Worse Than Death this far: what would you like to see going forward? Would you read a longer work, partly an explainer about the serials and the world that produced them, partly a guidebook with selected reviews of individual serials? Or are the reviews themselves compelling enough that you would prefer to keep reading them? Are there specific serials or related subjects you'd like me to write about? I intend to keep watching them, but I don't want the article format to become stale, for myself or for readers. If you've followed this blog or read Fates Worse Than Death (all available here), let me know what you think: comment here, or drop me a line through the Contact page or on Twitter. As always, thanks for reading!
Books, Creative Process, Movies/TV
Fates Worse Than Death, Medleyana, Online Writing, serials
Medleyana, Year Five
The author, hard at work producing fresh #content
I have been thinking about editors lately, and how necessary they are. It is sadly clear that editing isn't the priority that it used to be, and I'm not just talking about writing online; finding an obvious error in a newspaper, magazine, or even in a book, and knowing that it was preventable is one of the sadder and more frustrating experiences that all readers have had at one time or another. Everybody needs an editor: another pair of eyes will frequently notice typographical errors, missing or misused words, and ungainly repetition that I have overlooked (it's so basic, but I still get annoyed when I find I've used the same word twice in a sentence or repeated it too closely in a paragraph). I happen to think I am a pretty good proofreader of my own stuff, but nobody's perfect, and beyond the question of my writing ability, when I'm self-editing I only see what I think I've written, mentally filling in words I've left out or correcting spelling errors without even noticing them. An editor sees what I've actually written and can go from there.
Of course, what I'm describing is really proofreading and doesn't even get into the more active roles many editors take in shaping their writers' work. For a couple of years I wrote concert reviews for the Wichita Eagle. That was instructional, but newspaper editing has its own set of conventions: I learned quickly that I couldn't write four paragraphs of critique and then turn it around with something positive in the last paragraph, because newspapers "cut from the bottom," and that last paragraph was the first to go if space was needed, undercutting my rhetorical strategy and making it seem like I had nothing positive to say. I also found that phrases in parentheses or set off by em dashes were easy to cut, so I learned not to put anything too important in them. As far as grammar or word choice, though, I don't recall many changes being made to my prose. My concert reviews were submitted via e-mail, where they would be posted first online and then usually appear in the print edition a day later (as you may expect, it was the print edition that sometimes made cuts for space).
Needless to say, Medleyana does not have an editor other than myself. With enough lead time, I can let an article rest and come back to it with fresh eyes, seeing clearly what is actually there, but realistically I don't always have the time to let things settle before I hope to post them. Being online, I can always go back and correct mistakes if I find them later, but beyond errors of fact or simple typos, I try to resist the temptation: once you start rewriting, you may never stop. That said, my experience writing and reading lead me to have great respect for the editor's art and skill.
There is another way in which the passage of time helps my writing process: in the realization that I've perpetrated a cliché. Clichés are often the byproduct of hurried writing or the initial stage of the process in which I'll put something, anything down on the page to get started. You would think that a hackneyed phrase would immediately jump out at me, but if it fits into the rhythm of the passages around it, it can be camouflaged, only appearing obvious later, once I've pressed the "Publish" button. Sure, I take out clichés if I catch them during the proofreading/rewriting process, but it's the ones I don't catch that I really remember–and importantly remember to avoid in the future. (Lest I be accused of vagueposting, I already cringe when I see the sentence "What's a girl to do?" in my review of Disenchantment, and that was only two weeks ago. Blecch.)
Weak endings, judgments that later seem too harsh or not harsh enough, and arguments or turns of phrase that come to me perfectly formed the day after I've published are examples of similar phenomena. The realization that I've written something trite or half-baked is a powerful incentive to do better, and a single published example I regret is stronger in that regard than a dozen unpublished aspirations. Still, as I said, I try to avoid editing old posts, because down that road lies madness. I'd rather look forward and try to apply what I've learned from my successes and failures to the next thing I write.
On that note, it's now been five years since I started Medleyana; my focus has changed over time, with fewer personal essays and more reviews (especially my series Fates Worse Than Death, about which I'll have more to say in an upcoming article). Some of what I have written seems excessive to me now, especially in the early blog entries, which were often about subjects I'd been thinking about for some time before writing; the search for fresh material often doesn't leave as much time for exploring things in depth as I might like. However, I know from experience that if I don't keep a schedule, I might never finish anything, because there's always more "research" to be done, always some other nugget of information waiting to be uncovered. (And of course there are months where I don't post anything at all.) It's true that I don't publish as often as I did when I started, but I plan to continue, and I've already re-upped my domain registration, so I guess I'm committed. I have some fun articles planned already, and October is usually a fruitful month for me with plenty of Halloween-related topics to write about, so please continue to check the site (or subscribe)!
To all my readers, whether you've been with me from the beginning or just discovered Medleyana, if you've shared links to my posts, commented on a post, followed me on Twitter, or just read something you enjoyed: thanks.
concert review, editing, editors, journal, Medleyana, Online Writing
Medleyana: Year Four
I've been thinking about Dungeons & Dragons lately: specifically, the period in the mid-1980s when I was most obsessed with the game. (This is a periodic thing for me: I don't play anymore, but once or twice a year I get the itch to relive past glories.) I've been reading some of the adventure modules and other materials from that era, and one thing I remember is how much time I spent as a kid just reading those same books, poring over the pictures and the endless statistics and rules (well, the rules I mostly skimmed) and regretting that I didn't get enough serious playing in. I felt like I was missing out. I've since heard from many D&D fans who in fact never played the game at all, either because they didn't have friends who were interested, or they weren't allowed to play by strict parents, or they just didn't have enough free time.
I am certainly familiar with the daily ritual of examining gaming materials that would never see a round of melee combat, but my situation was a bit different: in those days, the writers at Dragon and Polyhedron (and, I dunno, White Dwarf I guess) put an awful lot of emphasis on the importance of developing your campaign. "Campaign" was the word for the ongoing game over the long haul, and in particular the interconnected skein of events, personalities, and long-term goals that transformed a series of disconnected sessions and small-stakes adventures into a sweeping epic like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Amber. A properly developed campaign was, it was hoped, the stuff of legends, the kind of immersive collaborative storytelling that years later would make players wistful as they recalled together, "Do you remember that night in Shanar, the one with the Halfling assassin?" "Ah, yes, I remember it well." Sighs of contented reminiscence all around. It's no wonder that the word campaign itself was borrowed from military jargon by way of wargaming: were not a group of players bonded together over time and shared experience in a manner akin to veteran soldiers?
Equally important, at least in the pages of Dragon, was your campaign world. It was fine to play in the World of Greyhawk, the default setting of most of the early published adventure modules (replaced later on by The Forgotten Realms and a number of other prefab settings), but it was assumed that you would only be satisfied with that for so long, and that at best such supplements were to serve as a springboard for your own Great Work, the Magnum Opus of any Dungeon Master: your own individual campaign world, one that you created, and sown with seeds for adventure derived from the unique geography, history, and culture(s) that you came up with. It all sounded very compelling, and just as importantly designing your own world from scratch gave you something to do during that time when you weren't playing but you were leafing through the rulebooks anyway.
In middle school, I had a lot to learn about worldbuilding, Dungeon Mastering, and storytelling, but that's not the point of this. No, the main thing I remember about my campaign, set in the world of Ix-Nay, was how it got harder and harder to get all four (and later three) players, including myself, together, until finally we were playing maybe once a year. No wonder Ix-Nay never had the breath of life in it! In roleplaying games, a setting isn't really a world until it has been set in motion and players have been given a chance to explore it. So I felt that I was missing a key experience in any serious gamer's career (and as you can tell, I took this calling very seriously indeed).
But here's the thing: even though my campaign with my custom-made world and handpicked players withered on the vine, in retrospect I played D&D quite a lot. There would be random pick-up games with kids who would come and go, most of these sessions one-shots with characters who were never seen again. There was even a Dungeons & Dragons club at my middle school, held in the art teacher's room. Sometimes I was the DM and sometimes the player. Sometimes you would be playing with people you didn't even particularly like. The game experiences I had ranged from total party kills at the hands of rigorous (to a fault) DMs who had strong ideas about the integrity of the game, to freeform fantasies that included guest stars like Bon Jovi. I have a lot of memories of playing D&D (or the mutated offshoots of it we came up with ourselves). Yet at the time, snob that I was, I didn't think those games "counted" because they weren't part of my campaign. They were, at best, pre-season or exhibition games (to use the parlance of sports with which I was hardly conversant at the time).
It wasn't until much later that I renewed my acquaintance with the Devil's game from the player's side and experienced some truly excellent Dungeon Mastering. I learned that developing a campaign is a two-way street, built upon the contributions of both Dungeon Master and players, and most of it all it requires regular care and feeding with weekly or biweekly sessions (ultimately I just didn't have time for that kind of commitment, but I kept it up for a few years). Perhaps that helped put my youthful gaming in perspective: I could stop beating myself up about my "failed" campaign and embrace the fun and growth I had experienced in the "unofficial" side quests. They really hadn't been so different.
All of which brings me to the changes I've gone through in the last year and how that has been reflected in this blog. This weekend marked four years since I began Medleyana, and as I always do at this time of year it's time to set down a few thoughts about what I've done with it and where it's going. I'll be the first to admit that writing hasn't always been the first thing on my mind this year: my work as a musician and teacher has kept me busy, and even "free time" doesn't always equate to writing time if I really just need to recharge my batteries. (I won't deny that the dreadful state of our politics has gotten me down as well.) I've also noticed that the majority of my blog posts have become reviews: it's much easier to get the words flowing in response to a movie or a book or comic, and it makes it easier to stop when you reach the end of that topic, as opposed to the open-ended ruminations that Medleyana started out as.
At the same time, however, when I look back at the past year, I've actually done a fair amount of writing. Although there were some gaps in posting, I've averaged about two entries a month, and I can be proud of what I've written (revisiting my first year, it strikes me that many posts were filler, born of self-imposed deadlines). Among other things, I also completed the draft of a novel earlier this summer, an undertaking of at least the last four years or so (another one of those "small" projects that grew bigger as I went); it's still in need of complete rewriting before it will be fit for any kind of public consumption, but being able to write THE END on it, even in the state it's in, has been a real relief, and is perhaps one reason I can look at what I've published this year and be okay with it.
Ultimately, just as I learned when playing D&D, there is little difference between what I see as my "real" work and what I produce in the mean time: it's all part of the process, and it takes just as much focus to write a good blog post as it does to complete a novel, the only difference being the length and the relative challenge of sustaining that focus over the long haul: the difference between a one-off adventure and a campaign, if you will.
Dungeons & Dragons, Medleyana, Online Writing
Medleyana: Year Three
Well, another year of blogging has passed, and that means it's time to write a "state of the blog" post again. I can tell this has been a busy year for me, at least based on the gap between posts earlier this spring. As I said then, I've given myself permission to not write unless I have something to say, but I still find the discipline and structure of blogging helpful for making myself finish things. Speaking of finishing, I'm finally nearing the end of a project that has taken a lot of my writing time and is probably the number one reason I haven't posted as frequently in 2016 (more on that as it develops).
I suppose I don't really have much to say in comparison to previous yearly summaries, but as always I want to say "thank you" to those of you who subscribed, commented, and shared links to Medleyana. I appreciate the feedback and fellowship. And in that spirit, I'd like to turn outward and recommend a few other online sources that I rely on and enjoy.
First off, I still follow Philip J. Reed at Noiseless Chatter; like Medleyana, Noiseless Chatter covers a wide range of topics–whatever Philip and his guests feel like discussing–so it's hard to point to a representative sample. Philip recently wrapped up a long, intensive dive into ALF, the television series about an alien puppet who lives with a suburban family and eats cats (seriously, I was never really a fan of the show, but Philip goes into much greater detail). Other articles have provided thoughtful looks at popular culture, the creative process, and heavy topics like mental health and suicide prevention (Philip's response to the death of Robin Williams, and the dialogue that followed, is one of his finest moments, as far as I'm concerned). If you've followed Medleyana for long, you've probably seen me mention Noiseless Chatter before, but if you haven't checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?
I've also recently been taken with New Orleans-based Swampflix, a movie review and discussion site run by fellow Dissolver Brandon Ledet, among others. Swampflix casts a wide net in its reviews and articles, including up-to-date releases and older films going all the way back to the silent era, "from the heights of art cinema to the depths of basic cable schlock." That's a mandate I can get behind, and it's just as much fun to read about films I've seen to get the writers' insights and perspectives as it is to browse their reviews to get recommendations for new things to watch.
Like many sites these days, Swampflix has also spun off into a podcast. I'm not a very regular listener to podcasts–I enjoy them, but it's not quite a habit for me–but I've enjoyed the episodes I've listened to. Another podcast I've found entertaining and informative is We Love to Watch (formerly Listen To Our Podcast), by Aaron Armstrong and Peter Moran (in addition to their website, they're on Stitcher and iTunes). They cover a variety of genre and exploitation movies, as well as a few higher-profile selections that dip into those areas (like Deliverance). They've also sometimes covered the same movies as Swampflix, giving an interesting range of opinions and perspectives (like when they both covered 1981's Possession, a bizarre and unsettling film I also caught up with earlier this summer).
I would be remiss if I failed to include the blog of Rick Kelley, aka Luddite Robot, whose coverage of film is deep and always well-researched, and who doesn't shy away from the political implications of works, even while acknowledging their power (he's right on about the flimsy allegory of Metropolis, but it's still one of my favorite films).
Finally, I also want to recommend fellow Dissolver Zack Clopton's Film Thoughts. Zack is a true "monster kid," a fan of all kinds of horror and genre fare, as well as a collector of monster toys and action figures. He both writes knowledgeably about a wide range of movies (his "Director Report Card" series is a highlight) and reflects on what those movies have meant to him in his life; Zack's affection for the genre shines through in every post.
Thanks again for a great year!
film, Film Thoughts, Luddite Robot, Noiseless Chatter, Online Communities, Online Writing, Swampflix, The Dissolve, We Love To Watch
The Graveyard of Unfinished Articles
The truth is that while I will go to just about any lengths to stay on a schedule, even a self-imposed one, when I allow myself the freedom to only post when I feel like it, it becomes easy to put it off or just not bother, and that's how I've ended up with such a paltry output on Medleyana this spring. This week, after finishing up my Tune in Next Week series covering the Buck Rogers serial over at The Solute, and feeling self-conscious about how long it had been since I posted here, I wrote up a thousand words or so about a topic that had been rattling around my brain for a while.
The article, once I finally got rolling on it, was a speculative endorsement of a live action feature film based on a popular children's property. (No, I won't say what it was; I may yet find something to do with what I wrote.) I thought I made a good case for a live action version of a property that has, as yet, only been seen in a direct-to-video animated format. However, the more I wrote, the more I felt that I couldn't be the only one with that idea. Sure enough, upon searching for information online, I found that a live action film is already in development, although a release date isn't set.
My feelings upon learning this are mixed. On the one hand, I feel vindicated: I'm clearly not the only person who sees the potential in the property, or at least my ability to recognize patterns in the media strategies of large brands is intact. On the other hand, there goes a morning's work that I can't use without serious reframing. (Note to self: do research before writing.)
While the amount of labor involved wasn't huge, the incomplete article joins others stored in my hard drive or notebooks that will likely never see the light of day, made obsolescent for one reason or another. A partial review of Galavant's first season, begun under the assumption that it would be a self-contained story, seemed pointless to complete when it turned out that the story ended on a cliffhanger; the many loose threads would be tied up only in the second (and now final) season. Another article about the wave of detached, ironic "appreciation" of bad pop culture prominent in the 1990s (think Mystery Science Theater 3000) petered out after two paragraphs (its premises overlapped too much with a similar article I had written about listening to "bad" music). Another article on shape-changing "versatile" animals in fantasy fiction remains just a series of notes and references (I suppose that one may still get written some day). All of these drafts fell victim to a fatal lack of accessible information or the realization that I didn't have that much to say about the subject, or simply fell out of date, overtaken by events before I could complete them.
The record for my fiction output is even worse, since I've tried to find outlets elsewhere for it rather than self-publish. I'm not talking about finished but rejected stories–those are annoying enough, but I can show them to anyone that wants to see them–but those "stubs" that started off strong but petered out or were interrupted and never returned to. (I'm hardly alone with the latter problem, exemplified by the "man from Porlock" who interrupted the composition of Coleridge's Kubla Khan.)
George Bernard Shaw famously said, "When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work." This blog, as well as my work at The Solute and other venues, has been part of an ongoing effort in the last several years to finish more projects, even small ones. Certainly there is satisfaction in having a steady stream of small articles instead of being invisible for a year at a time between unveiling larger projects, but there is something to be said for single-minded application as well. Currently, I'm scattered between several projects, and while the time to work is more abundant than it has been for some time, it still takes discipline to manage so many competing interests. That's a matter for discussion at another time, however.
In any case, whether I recast the article I wrote or simply leave it in the drawer, it surely won't be the last thing I write that fizzles out or is allowed to die quietly; sometimes those premature deaths are mercy killings. At least a few of them have the potential to be repurposed, perhaps into an article about leaving projects unfin
creative process, Online Writing
Medleyana: Year Two
A year or two before I began Medleyana, I idly mentioned my interest in starting a blog to a friend. "No one reads blogs anymore," he said. That gave me pause, but eventually, I went ahead and started anyway, and the result is this blog, now two years old, give or take a day.
Within the first six months of blogging, I realized that a lot of my articles started with a reminiscence such as the one above, with the rest of the article enumerating the reasons the other person was wrong. I quickly found that as tempting as that rhetorical device can be, I needed to use it sparingly, lest the entire blog become a giant exercise in "staircase wit," a compendium of the things I should have said, if I'd only had the presence of mind. (Of course, if I argued as vociferously in person as most people do on the internet, I'd have no friends left, online or off-.)
So, as I celebrate Medleyana's second birthday, I don't bring up that friend's offhand comment to prove that he was wrong. In fact, in many ways, he was right: the time in which a blog could amass a large readership just by being out there is long passed. This summer has proven to be something of a reckoning, not just for bloggers but for all kinds of "long form" writers on the internet.
In addition to the abrupt closure of The Dissolve, "free-form" radio station WFMU's Beware of the Blog ceased posting; as of July, both exist online now only as archives of past content. I'll admit I wasn't a regular visitor to WFMU's blog lately, so maybe I'm part of the problem, but when I first discovered it I spent quite a bit of time browsing its posts and downloading files from its collections.
Looking at it now, its mixture of original articles and reposts of unusual tapes and records, comics, and other found oddities are a good example of what the web used to be like as recently as ten years ago. Industrious writers with scanners and mp3-editing software could clean out their closets and share whatever weird stuff they found with the world instantly. It's not just that the early internet was less commercial in nature (although that's certainly part of it–Beware of the Blog was a volunteer-driven affair): it was countercultural, picking up the habits of reclamation and subversion that had driven the alternative press in the '80s and '90s. And it went both ways: like many of the blogs and websites that emerged around the turn of the century, it developed a culture of users (both writers and commenters) that gave it an identity. In the past, I've compared online forums to bars or coffee shops that are always open, and that was especially true of the websites that attracted regulars, "where everybody knows your name."
The passing of this ethos is part of what Vox editor Todd VanDer Werff laments when he calls 2015 "the year the old internet finally died:" now there's so much emphasis on social media and going viral, it's harder to create a website with an identity that is a destination, rather than a source of memes and videos to share. The content is often no less quirky than before, but the context is quite different: instead of being part of an ongoing discussion with a community of writers and commenters (something The Dissolve excelled at), each picture or link is encountered as part of the reader's Facebook or Twitter feed; to the extent that it has any attribution, it's more like a brand than a source to return to (one reason a lot of these meme-mills are radio stations). According to VanDer Werff, writers of longer articles (what used to be the expectation for writers and journalists) are in trouble unless they can also provide the quick hits that generate clicks.
Of course, Medleyana isn't really playing on the same turf as The Dissolve (or the A.V. Club, or Grantland): it's just me, not a staff of writers, and it's a labor of love, not a job. But the landscape has changed for bloggers, as well: the same month that The Dissolve and Beware of the Blog shuttered, Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan wrote about the world he remembered before he was sentenced to six years in an Iranian prison for his writing:
Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested. At that point, and despite the fact the state was blocking access to my blog from inside Iran, I had an audience of around 20,000 people every day. Everybody I linked to would face a sudden and serious jump in traffic: I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted. People used to carefully read my posts and leave lots of relevant comments, and even many of those who strongly disagreed with me still came to read. Other blogs linked to mine to discuss what I was saying. I felt like a king.
Again, I'm not sure I have much in common with Derakhshan; it's hard to read his comments and not feel that he mourns the influence he once wielded as much as the changing structure of the internet. And while he isn't wrong about the changes in the way we exchange ideas online, there are simply more people writing then there were before, making it harder for individual voices to stand out. The friend I mentioned at the beginning of this post didn't say anything about people not writing blogs anymore, after all.
More seriously, Derakhshan goes on to point out how commercialized and homogenized the dialogue is when it's in the hands of corporate social networks like Facebook: "The Stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that's picked for them by complex–and secretive–algorithms." Those algorithms tend to emphasize what users have already shown that they like with their clicks and upvotes, contributing to the echo-chamber quality of such networks. That's a fair concern, and one shared by many observers: that the internet will become more like television, with a fragmented but largely passive audience, faced with an infinitude of choices, but less likely to be challenged by different perspectives.
Ultimately, while my readership is not large, at least not in comparison to the heyday of the form, it has been growing: this summer's Fates Worse Than Death has been a success, at least measured in comments and discussion (some of which have taken place, yes, on Facebook and Twitter). This year I stretched myself more to post on a weekly basis, and I experienced and learned about some fascinating films that I might not have been motivated to explore otherwise. And just personally, I'm pleased that I was able to stay on my self-imposed schedule with some late nights (and a few very late nights!). I'd probably try to keep this series going all year round but for two factors: first, it's too time-consuming, and I would burn out if I tried to keep it up for much longer; second, I have other things I'd like to pursue as well. To those of you who may have found your way here for coverage of serials, I hope you'll check out some of the other topics. And rest assured that I'll still be covering them in one way or the other.
Finally, thanks for visiting, and for reading. If you've taken the time to comment, or contacted me personally, or if you've shared one of my articles, know that I appreciate the feedback. If there's anything I can to do to improve your experience in the coming year, or you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to see covered, or you just want to say hi, please don't hesitate to comment, send me an e-mail through the contact page, or find me on Twitter!
P. S. And keep writing!
Online Communities, Online Writing, The Dissolve, writing
It saddens me to say that The Dissolve, my favorite site on the Internet for the last two years, is closing up shop. The whole thing happened rather suddenly, but has been confirmed by an announcement from Editor Keith Phipps. I'm saddened to lose the insights of Phipps and the other writers for the site, but I'll also miss the lively discourse among the commenters and the general culture of sincerity and encouragement. Despite The Dissolve's official focus on movies, subjects under discussion often ranged widely both in the regular articles and in the comment sections. There are at least four articles on this blog that got their start as comment-section projects (my Lovefests on Addicted to Love and Cowboys & Aliens, my Scarefest on The Visitor, and my tribute to former Dissolve writer Nathan Rabin, Guardian of the Gods). That's not even mentioning The Solute, the site launched as both a tribute to and an extension of its parent site. I'll continue to post over there, and if the current influx of commenters over there is anything to go by, it may well end up being a continuation of the lively forum we had at the Dissolve; I invite you to read wallflower's memorial, which eloquently sums up the feelings of so many of us.
R.I.P. The Dissolve, and good luck to its staff as they move forward.
Medleyana: Year One
Apparently, this is who I am.
Wow, it's been a whole year already! Medleyana became a part of my life so quickly that it's hard to remember a time when I wasn't trying to shape my thoughts into blog posts on a regular basis. In a lot of ways, this has been good for me to undertake, even though it's been a lot of work. I probably should have started blogging a long time ago: there's a big difference between having a thought and putting it in a form for others to read. There is often research involved, and it's surprising how many leaps in logic one can make that only come to light when trying to write an idea down or explain it to somebody else. As someone who often reaches conclusions by intuition or lateral thinking, blogging has kept me honest and forced me to support my opinions in a more rigorous way.
The reality of blogging has also been different from my expectations. I at first conceived of Medleyana as mostly an essay series, one entry building on another until I had gotten all of my thoughts out, presenting an overarching argument made from many angles. I quickly realized that most people, including myself, don't read blogs in that way: the format lends itself to browsing, with the expectation that not all readers will be interested in every subject a writer chooses to explore (especially true for a blog like mine, tackling a variety of subjects), and each entry needs to be able to stand on its own rather than building directly on its predecessor (not that I haven't had some threads running through). In some cases I've responded to current events or arguments, but mostly I don't consider Medleyana to be a "headline news" kind of blog; perhaps that is something to consider expanding into in its second year.
Overall, although some entries didn't quite get where I wanted them to go, I'm pleased with the progress I've made as a writer, and I've proven to myself that I can stay on a schedule (most of the time). I've also found it necessary to branch out in search of new subjects to write about, after exhausting most of the things that had been building up inside, the ideas that drove me to start blogging in the first place.
Fates Worse Than Death, for example, my exploration of movie serials, was a product of happy circumstance: I had a few serials on DVD but was having a hard time committing to watch them. So, like so many bloggers before me, I began a series, thinking that the summer would provide the free time to watch them with the side effect of providing a little content for the blog. How wrong I was! It turns out that watching and writing about a four-hour long movie, even on a biweekly basis, is rather time-consuming! As I often tell my wife, I don't really take on big projects anymore: I just take on projects that I think will be small, and wait for them to expand! It has been an enjoyable process, however, and I've even made some friends in researching and discussing this material (and I still have plenty to look at for next summer!).
The most surprising development of the last year is how quickly I have been able to find other outlets for my writing, including The Solute (for which I will have some pieces upcoming, I promise!) and The Wichita Eagle. I'm also still awaiting publication of The Lost Worlds of Power (now expected at the end of October) and I've got a few other projects in the works. Some of them are larger in scale (so maybe I exaggerated when I said I never take on big projects) and might demand more of my time. My goal is to keep posting at least once a week here, but after proving I could do it for one year I'm going to be more forgiving of myself if I don't, and I've got an ample backlog of material for anyone who gets impatient for more reading.
Finally, if there is one thing I appreciate from readers, it's feedback. I have a general idea of readership through the number of "hits" this site gets each day; I can see what search terms are leading readers here (and frankly, some of you should be ashamed of yourselves). I'm aware of which posts are the most popular (for the record, it's "Instruments of Death" by a long shot), but unless I hear from you, I don't really know what you think. If you're reading this, why not consider commenting and letting me know you're there? If the commenting system is too restrictive or you just prefer to remain private, drop me a line through my Contact page. Criticism is as welcome as praise, as long as it will help me make this a blog that you will want to keep reading.
To all of you, thanks for a great first year.
Online Communities, Online Writing, writing
Am I the only one who goes back to read my old comments on online forums?
I've been active to varying degrees on a few different websites over the years (no, I'm not saying which ones—those things are pseudonymous for a reason!), and most commenting systems have the option to look at all of the comments made by an account at once. A few years ago, I mentioned to a colleague that while commenting online includes being part of a conversation, it is also something like a mirror. It was difficult to explain what I meant by that, but I think I had the review function in mind: going back (sometimes years, in the case of a few websites I've spent way too much time on), I can see a clear picture of who I was, what I was doing, and what my thoughts were.
As I mentioned before, I was once a regular journal-keeper and diarist, recording my thoughts for posterity. Part of the appeal of journaling is the idea that someone in the future might want to read your writing, perhaps because your thought process and opinions would be worth knowing, or at least because your observations are clear enough to give an accurate picture of the world you live in, for history's sake. In that sense it's just a few drafts away from being a memoir, composed one day at a time. There's also the more immediate pleasure of revisiting your own thoughts: very often I'll encounter a detail in my writing that I had completely forgotten, and the written word will cause a flood of memories.
Reading my comments online can be like that, but very often it's less like a diary and more like the conversation books left by Beethoven's visitors late in his life: because of the composer's deafness, visitors had to write their side of the conversation for him to read, leaving a record of only half the discussion. It's one thing to reread a comment that contains a fully-formed opinion and think, "Ah! Yes, that sums it up!" or "I remember that!" It's quite another to look at a comment reading "I agree!" (or, God forbid, "LOL") and not remember what it was in response to, or read a comment that was obviously a real zinger in context, knowing it was part of a very funny comment thread, but falls flat or simply makes no sense in isolation. Online interactions may be saved on servers forever, but not all exchanges were meant to be timeless: sometimes you just had to be there.
Taking part in online conversations has also helped me to sharpen and clarify my opinions: one can hardly write anything on the internet without facing disagreement, so writing (and defending) opinions, and accepting that others will see things differently, is an excellent spine-strengthening exercise. I've seen more than one forum poster claim that taking part in the forum helped them to become a better writer, and to the extent that participating helped them solidify their point of view and express it clearly, I believe it.
Of course, all of this assumes a certain level of civility, not always easy to come by online. I'm not sure the internet has truly lowered the level of discourse, as is sometimes claimed, or if it just allows us to see more of it than we would normally encounter without the flood of information coming to us through Facebook, Twitter, et al. (And of course, even traditional media outlets now expect that their audience will want to talk back, a development that is mostly positive but which is also an open invitation to kooks everywhere.) I avoid the comments sections of news sites like I would avoid bad neighborhoods; I resist the quixotic urge to correct every misinformed thinker I encounter online. In retrospect, there are a few occasions I wish I had spoken up, but mostly I just get worked up and agitated arguing with people I don't even know, and the well of ignorance sometimes seems bottomless: arguing with people could be a full-time job, and for some people it apparently is. I've come to believe that strong moderators are essential for preserving lively discussion without descending into flaming and abuse, especially in the early going; after a forum has been around a while, with a number of regular posters, a tone is established, in general set by the content of the site and the guidelines set by the moderators. To state the obvious, speech online isn't that different from everyday speech: you aren't free to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The website isn't "censoring" anyone: as a private enterprise, it is free to set its own standards of conduct.
I'm not as active in forums as I once was, and for some of the same reasons I don't journal: I don't have the time, and If I'm going to spend time writing I'd rather put the energy into something more permanent. Being able to comment online is like having a bar or coffee shop in your home, open twenty-four hours a day, where you can always get into a conversation (or pick a fight). That's a strong temptation, and for most websites it comes hand in hand with a continuous flow of new content to spark discussion. In that sense it's not that different from the way I used to watch television, but it can feed into the feeling that I need to be entertained every moment, that I can never be alone with my thoughts. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way (witness the productivity programs whose selling point is the ability to lock you out of your email and social media so you can get some work done); it's a battle I keep waging, even if I know I'll be more successful some days than others.
diary, Facebook, forums, journal, Online Communities, Online Writing, Twitter

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


New Delhi, Feb 6 () Jubilant Foodworks, which operates Dominos Pizza and Dunkin Donuts chains in India, today reported a 31.93 per cent decline in standalone net profit at Rs 19.97 crore for the third quarter ended December 31, 2016. The company had posted a net profit of Rs 29.
New Delhi, Aug 8 () Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd (JFL), which operates Domino's Pizza and Dunkin' Donuts chains in India, will invest around Rs 100 crore over the next 12 months to relaunch its pizza offerings in the country.
The tiered delight garnered instant likes from fans online.
New Delhi, Jun 13 () Food services major Jubilant FoodWorks plans to open 130-140 new Domino's Pizza outlets and around 20 new Dunkin' Donuts restaurants in the current fiscal to expand its footprints in the country. "Restaurant expansion continues to a core priority in order to expand reach..
Jubilant FoodWorks Limited which operates Domino's Pizza and Dunkin' Donuts in India recently made its newly developed policy, 'Usage of Antibiotics in Poultry Birds' Health Management' public. The policy focuses on eliminating antibiotic misuse in their chicken supply chain in a phased manner.
Consumers at fast-food chains across the country may not be able to enjoy the full gains of the lower GST rate of 5% that kicked in from Wednesday as many restaurants are raising menu prices, citing the government's decision to withdraw credit for taxes paid on raw material and rent.
Pooja Hegde's vacation pictures from New York are goals!
The queen of geek did not disappoint this new year!
US Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Dunkin' Donuts store here in the Pakistani capital today to a get a "little slice" of the popular American breakfast snack, and was soon trolling on twitter.
The market value of Jubilant Food-Works, which operates Domino's Pizza and Dunkin' Donuts, has fallen 45 per cent since May 25, 2015.
Over 1,100 employees of Domino's Pizza and Dunkin' Donuts joined in a clean-up across various cities after Anant Chaturdashi.
A 24-year-old Indian national has allegedly clubbed to death his wife inside the kitchen of a Dunkin Donuts restaurant in the US where they both were employed.
The owner of an American restaurant chain in Pakistan is offering free meals to any Indian visiting the country on a short-term visa, in a novel reaction to reports that a Pakistani family was refused accommodation by hotels in Mumbai.
Noticing the gaint hoarding of Butibori MIDC, Std VI student Ansh Dhopte of Centre Point School (Bypass) asked why is a bakery situated among factories as the bus entered the zone off Wardha Road on Sunday afternoon. As around 40 Nagpur For Kids (NFK) members started their tour of Ajit Bakery's manufacturing unit a shortwhile later, the children started getting answers to the question raised by Dhopte.


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Singapore Venture & Private Capital Association (SVCA)
See EventsAbout Us
SVCA Annual Chinese New Year Lunch 2023
Feb 1, 2023 11:25 AM - Feb 1, 2023 2:00 PM
Mandarin Oriental, Singapore, Singapore
Advancing Gender Equality In Private Equity & Venture Capital
Feb 21, 2023 2:00 PM - Feb 21, 2023 6:00 PM
IFC Singapore Office, 10 Marina Boulevard Marina Bay Financial...
Masterclass: Excellence in Negotiating Venture Capital & Private Equity Term Sheets
Mar 28, 2023 8:40 AM - Mar 30, 2023 4:45 PM
M Hotel Singapore, 81 Anson Rd Singapore 079908


Maxxter mini-USB 300Mbps Wireless Device: Maxxter is a Dutch company. Their Mini-USB device is a bit larger than "nano" (twice as big). After compiling the GPL driver, installing it, the device was immediately recognized and ready to go. But the driver comes with a byte array for firmware "source".
Informations extracted from a device sold (2018) under the name : "CNYO® 300 Mbps Mini USB 2.0 Interface RTL8192 Wifi dongle Wireless LAN network card adapter XC1289 OFDM CCK 16-QAM 64-QAM DSSS".
Device: usb 0x818b "802.11n NIC"


text:
Posted inAustralia, Beijing, China, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Oceania, Russia, United Kingdom, World
What did the Panama Papers reveal about China?
By Initium Media
On Sunday, several global news organizations published articles about a treasure trove of leaked documents. They originated from a Panama-based law firm named Mossack Fonseca. Dubbed the Panama papers, their weighty pages revealed how the law firm provided offshore services that allowed some of the world's most powerful people to conceal their wealth, dodge taxes and engage in other illegal activities that were tangled in a web of unseemly financial transactions. The documents contained the names of politicians of more than fifty countries. Among them, the presidents of Russia, Argentina and the Ukraine.
The news shocked the world. Based on the information disclosed, the politicians named encompassed current and former top Chinese officials, including president Xi Jinping. However, in contrast to the huge reactions of many global media organizations, Chinese news agencies remained silent.
On Monday, only a few online news agencies had translated what the papers had to say regarding illegal financial transactions of powerful types in nations such as Russia and Iceland. State censorship also blocked any news reporting that had something to do with the Panama Papers.
We have gathered and edited some of the published information on individuals from China:
Li Xiaolin, former Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng's daughter attending World Business Summit on Climate Change. Photo by KELD NAVNTOFT / SCANPIX DENMARK / AFP
Li Xiaolin, daughter of former Premier, Li Peng
From 1987 to 1998, when Li Peng served as the Prime Minister of China, his second child and only daughter Li Xiaolin, and husband Li Zhiyuan, were the owners of a foundation based in Liechtenstein. According to the Panama Papers, the foundation owned a company in the British Virgin Islands named Cofic Investments. In order to make it harder for herself to be connected to Li Peng during background checks, Ms. Li's name on her Hong Kong passport was given as "Xiaolin LIU-LI." In addition to being the Vice president of China Power Investment Corporation, Ms. Li also works for a top consulting firm in China. The scanned copy of her Hong Kong passport was exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which reviewed the papers. One of the directors of Cofic Investments, lawyer Charles-Andre Junod in Geneva, refused to take questions from ICIJ, claiming that the firm was lawful.
BEIJING, CHINA – MARCH 03: Jia Qinglin, Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference delivers a speech at CPPCC's opening session. Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Li Zidan, granddaughter of Jia Qinglin, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee
According to the Panama Papers, Jasmine Li Zidan studied at a boarding school in the US. After graduating from Stanford University, she worked as an assistant to Cai Guoqiang, a Chinese artist based in New York. She later worked at Artsy, an online art retailer. Mossack Fonseca's report indicates that Li Zidan became the owner of a company called Harvest Sun Trading Ltd. in 2010, when she was under the age of 18. This company was registered in 2009 in the British Virgin Islands. She took ownership of the company for $1 from a person named Zhang Yu in 2010. Zhang is the founder of Hengdeli, a luxury watch retailer in China. Li Zidan also is the sole founder of another company. Li's name did not appear in the registration documents, though she is the owner of the two companies. Her grandfather, Jia Qinglin, served from 2002 to 2012 as the No.4 member of the Politburo Standing Committee.
BEIJING, CHINA – MARCH 13: China's Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai attends closing session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Photo by Lintao Zhang /GETTY
Boku Kailai, former Politburo member and secretary of Chongqing, Bo Xilai's wife
The French architect, Patrick Henri Devillers, was the former commercial partner of Boku Kailai, the wife of Bo Xilai. Bo Xilai was the Politburo member and secretary of the city of Chongqing from 2007 to 2012. He was sentenced to life imprisonment (by the Chinese government) for corruption. The documents show that Devillers and Boku Kailai are co-presidents of a company named Adad. The company is registered in Britain. Devillers holds funds on behalf of Boku Kailai in the company. Court documents indicate that this company tapped corrupt money to secretly purchase a luxurious French villa worth 3.2 million dollars. Devillers's testimony was accepted by a Chinese Court in 2013.
Deng Jiagui, the brother-in-law of Chinese leader Xi Jinping
In September 2009, Deng Jiagui, the brother-in-law of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, became the sole president of two companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. According to the Panama Papers, up until November 2012 when Xi became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, both of these companies were inactive.
Thomas Kwok (L), one of the chairmen of development giant Sun Hung Kai Properties arrives at the high court in Hong Kong on May 8, 2014. Photo by Philippe Lopez / AFP
Sun Hung Kai Properties in Hong Kong
In 2012, Sun Hung Kai Properties (SHKP) asked Mossack Fonseca to close a company named Yorkshire Limited owned by Thomas Chan Kui-yuen. The law firm's staff found that Chan was involved in a corruption scheme involving Xu Shiren, former Hong Kong Chief Secretary for Administration, and had been arrested a few weeks earlier. Mossack Fonseca staff were wary whether Chan was the legal owner of the company. They asked SHKP to provide more documentation. SHKP rejected the requests based on the company's inactivity. Mossack Fonseca staff in Hong Kong were concerned that further pressure for obtain records would encourage SHKP to change law firms.
However, Mossack Fonseca's president asserted that the company couldn't be closed without proper documentation. The deadlock continued for three months until SHKP provided the requested papers.
In 2014, Mossack Fonseca found that Chan was the director and beneficial owner of another company in the British Virgin Islands named Moricrown. Moricrown is a subsidiary of Cheung Kong Holdings, the company of Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong's richest man. One of the founders of Moricrown, Thomas Kwok Ping-kwong, a billionaire co-owner of SHKP, had been charged in the bribery scandal alongside Chan.
Mossack Fonseca documents disclosed that the identity of Moricrown's owners needed to be legally be updated. Otherwise, there was a risk of being fined more than 10,000 dollars. Six months later, Chan Kuiyan and Thomas Kwok were sentenced to six and five years of imprisonment respectively. Thomas Kwok's family also owned a company named King Yip Group, which used a company in British Virgin Islands to make billions through commercial cooperation with the Australian government.
Actor Jackie Chan's name also surfaced in the Panama Papers. According to information revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) which probed the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca provided services for at least five to six of Chan's offshore companies. But there's no indication these financial transactions were illegal. Merely having an offshore company doesn't necessary entail illegality.
This article was originally published on Apr. 5, 2016 by The Initium Media, a Hong Kong-based digital media company. Asia Times has translated it with permission with editing for brevity and clarity.
Translated by Tenei Nakahara for Asia Times
Tagged: Arts & Culture, China, Economy, Mossack Fonseca, Panama papers, Politics, Technology


Tarkett, world leader in flooring and sports surfaces, has developed a unique design expertise in the role of flooring within the life of Alzheimer patients. The objective of this initiative is to assist architects and health facilities directors in the design, layout and fitting of living spaces for the patients. Tarkett is a reference in the health sector, equipping about 200 aged care institutions every year in France.
Launched by the design department of Tarkett, the study analyzes with a scientific approach the sensorial and psychological impact of floors on the quality of life of patients. Besides hygiene, safety and other regulatory aspects, the floor patterns and colors provoke emotions that can stimulate or soothe Alzheimer patients, contributing to better manage the effects of the disease. Floors also influence the circadian rhythms, the acoustic comfort and the general atmosphere of the rooms.
To better understand the issues and impact on the environment of Alzheimer patients, this study has relied on the expertise of recognized specialists. For example, note the contributions of Dr. Xavier Cnockaert, chief of Gerontology at Beauvais Hospital, Rudolf Schricker, chairman of the German Association of Architects and Interior Designers (BDIA), and Professor Desmond O'Neill, president of the Irish Gerontological Society.


Posted under Flash, art & architecture sites.
A superb design for a master-planned community just within Orlando, Florida that features a modern neighborhood with a "ridiculous amount of parks". This line-driven web design features a great blend of photography, solid typography, and vintage illustrations that create the framework for exploring this rich interactive environment, while the smart writing and marketing copy which comprises the meat of the site is quite fun to read. The juxtaposition of the various styles is beautiful and creates a welcoming, yet contemporary feel for this site. A really gorgeous job here.


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In Ward 8, Is the 3rd Time A Charm?…
SPRINGFIELD—If at first you don't succeed try, try again. This age-old chestnut may aptly describe the upcoming race for City Council's Ward 8 representative. Crossing swords for the third time in as many cycles, incumbent councilor John Lysak will again face Orlando Ramos in a
Aug 30, 2013 by wmasspi in Springfield
…And the World: We begin today in Syria, where an alleged chemical attack has the United States contemplating its options. Bashar al-Assad denies the use of chemical weapons in the slaughter. Inspectors mean to look over the site of the alleged attack faced sniper fire
Aug 26, 2013 by wmasspi in Uncategorized
Take My Council, Please: When the Opposition is Resi-dense…
SPRINGFIELD—The Springfield City Council opened its meeting on a high note with effusive praise of the tornado-damaged Cathedral High School, but quickly descended into acrimony and a display of dysfunctional government. Councilor Tim Rooke was absent from the meeting. The meeting was technically two. The
…And the World: We begin today in Egypt, where The New York Times has word that a judge has ordered former President Hosni Mubarak released from jail. The Guardian says the release could be as soon as 48 hours away. This comes as the US
Briefings: Overriding Objections of a Veto…
SPRINGFIELD—Determined to revive the city's moribund residency ordinance, a Council committee announced it would ask for a vote Monday to override Mayor Domenic Sarno's veto of an ordinance designed to limit the use of waivers to city employee residency requirements. Other actions will appear on
Analysis: Field to Replace Knapik Presages the Tenor of Campaign…
Day by day the race to replace Michael Knapik in the Agawam-Easthampton-Holyoke-Westfield aligned 2nd Hampden & Hampshire is taking shape. Earlier this week, a few more candidates entered the race while at least one prominent would-be contender bowed out. Rep. Aaron Vega's decision to stay
Aug 17, 2013 by wmasspi in 2nd Hampden Hampshire Senate
Vega Staying Put, Will not Run for Knapik's Seat
BREAKING: This is a developing story. More details when we have them Holyoke State Representative Aaron Vega has announced in a statement that he will not seek the seat of former Senator Michael Knapik. In his statement, Vega cited family & political obligations, including the
Tardy Tuesday Takedown 8/14/13…
A very brief takedown to make up for not markup. …And the World: We begin today in Russia, where the powers that be there fight growing anger of its anti-gay laws, particularly in the context of the Winter Olympics. Meanwhile, The Guardian has a profile
No Markup 8/12/14
No markup today. Our apologies, we will try to post a takedown tomorrow.
From Activist to Candidate, Cruz Crosses Threshold…
SPRINGFIELD—Speaking before a crowded hall at the Cedars on Island Pond Road after delaying the start to his campaign several months, city resident and activist, Ernesto Cruz kicked off his bid Thursday for one of the City Council's five at-large seats. In a speech capped


The BMC Beverage Company Database Print Version is the industry's premier fact-checking and prospecting source book. Includes extras such as government and trade associations, and industry supplier listings, plus a 14,000+ brand index.
2018 Edition - Published March 2018.
1,200+ pages with more than 14,000 brands, 19,500 key executives and 6,500 beverage companies.
** Indicates companies for both the United States and Canada.
Contact Andrew Standardi at 800-332-6222 ext.252 (Outside the U.S.: 740-314-8380 ext. 252) or via email.


After my last post in which I criticized WordPress for not hiring a technical writer to make their documentation simpler and more accessible, two things dawned on me. First, I'm an idiot for not recognizing an opportunity when it presents itself. I should write a comprehensive help file on WordPress and sell it. I'll work on that.
Second, the interplay between simplicity and complexity is what technical writing is all about.
Although simplicity is a noble ideal, and something like "simplify complexity" could be the mission statement of any technical writer, simplicity is in fact a complex undertaking.
Let me explain with an example. If you look at any TechSmith help file, the author tries to make the content as simple and accessible as possible because TechSmith wants users to feel the inherent ease and simplicity of the application. Topics are light, short, easy to navigate. It's quick to see what's there.
This model works fine for the basic user just trying to get up to speed, but it fails the power user. If you look at TechSmith's forums, users have written Support asking hundreds of questions, many of which aren't answered in the help. For example, how do you reduce AVI file size? The treatment in the help is light, but the support forum is heavy.
This is the supposed tradeoff between simplicity and complexity. If you keep it simple, the documentation is accessible and easy to digest, but it may not answer many of your questions. If you try to answer all of the reader's possible questions, the help becomes thick and heavy and the product seems complex.
WordPress is another example. If you know what you're doing, installing WordPress really only takes 5 minutes. However, because there are a dozen different install methods (depending on your web host, the database tools, and your server access), and because various authors have added their how-to's on the installation page, installing WordPress looks complicated.
Sure the WordPress wiki authors could strip out the installation instructions and target them for the most likely user (applying the 80/20 rule), but then the other 20% whose server setup is different from the install instructions would have trouble.
Many people will look at the tradeoff between simplicity and complexity and leave it at that. If you want it simple, you have to dumb down your documentation and leave out all of the exceptions, notes, what-if-scenarios, and other gotchas. If you want to include all of the info every possible user may ask or need, in a variety of situations, you'll end up with a complex looking help application that intimidates users. This is the perceived tradeoff between simplicity and complexity, and it's partly a myth.
This is where the skills of technical writing come in. A good technical writer can add in all the complexity of the system – the notes, tips, cautions, what-if's, remember-this, watch-out-for-this-gotcha, if-you-have-this-platform, for this and that scenario – and so on, without having the help file degenerate into a hairball of complexity. This is what separates trained technical writers from basic IT people who can write coherently.
Almost every best practice of technical writing is aimed at simplifying complexity. The more techniques you employ in your help, the more powerful you become at compressing information into your help file without cluttering it into confusion.
Here are 20 techniques most experienced technical writers implement almost unconsciously.
Approach the application from a task-based mindset rather than a screen-by-screen mindset.
Break up the material into discrete topics that you can manipulate into different outputs.
Use numbered steps in your tasks.
Keep the number of steps relatively short -- no more than 10 steps; otherwise, chunk the steps into subtasks.
Keep sentence structures and paragraphs short and simple.
To facilitate scanning, bold button names and links that you want the user to click.
Include screenshots to identify where things are, especially when it's not obvious.
Use diagrams to illustrate concepts.
Use examples and scenarios to strengthen understanding.
Avoid unfamiliar terms and concepts (jargon, for example). Always define acronyms first.
Add tables of contents with chapters or books that logically organize the content.
Choose a readable font for the medium and make the size legible.
Balance text with graphics to increase the layout appeal.
Include video tutorials directly within help topics to demonstrate confusing processes.
Write in the active tense so that it's clear who is doing what.
Ensure steps are accurate, especially after developers near the end of a release.
Where applicable, use drop-down hotspots to compress multiple topics on the same page.
Single source the material so you can provide both online and printed help to accommodate both learning styles.
Insert cross references or hyperlinks in relevant places for more information.
Be consistent in your methods so the reader can better follow you from topic to topic.
Nothing I've said should be revelatory to any technical writer who's been hacking away at help for a while. But if you give the same list to developers, I bet most of these techniques never cross their minds. Adhering to these principles would be so tedious and painstaking that it maxes out their writing thresholds.
I'm not saying that if TechSmith help authors adhered to all of the above, they could fit the entire contents of their support forums into their online help file without making it look dense and complex. But to some degree, yes. To some degree, adhering to best practices does allow you to get more information to the reader in a cleaner, more organized, more consummable way, as illustrated by the following graphic.


TradCatKnight: Synod Latest: "Dogmatism Coming to an End?"
Bishops at the Vatican's worldwide meeting on family life issues are dividing amongst themselves to form lobbying groups in favor of various positions, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has said.
"I've never been at a church meeting where there aren't groups that get together and lobby for a particular direction - and that's going on, I assure you," the archbishop said at a Vatican press conference Wednesday.
The archbishop was speaking about the Synod of Bishops, an Oct. 4-25 meeting called by Pope Francis that has brought some 270 prelates to Rome to discuss issues of family life.
While Chaput's comments widely confirm what was already known about the meeting, they are notable for the way in which they publicly acknowledge that different bishops are actively pushing different viewpoints and trying to convince others to support their views.
Among the issues known to be at discussion among the prelates is church practice towards Catholics who divorce and remarry without first obtaining annulments from the church.
Anecdotal reports from inside the gathering indicate that the discussions have become quite fierce at times, with some bishops forcefully talking over others or sharply rebutting their arguments.
Brisbane, Australia Archbishop Mark Coleridge said in a blog post Wednesday that the discussions had a certain similarity to popcorn.
Chaput was speaking Wednesday at a briefing alongside Vatican spokesman Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi and two other Synod members: Peruvian Archbishop Salvador José Miguel Piñeiro García Calderón and French Archbishop Laurent Ulrich.
The U.S. archbishop is one of nine American prelates participating in the Synod. He was answering a question about reports that Francis had spoken to the entire Synod gathering Tuesday morning, asking them not to give into a sort of "hermeneutic of conspiracy" that views other bishops' ideas with negative intent.
"We must work in order to be united," said the French archbishop.
The Synod bishops are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in small discussion groups, divided by language preference. They will reconvene on Friday and Saturday into open session.
All the meetings are held behind closed doors, with daily briefings on the deliberations hosted by the Vatican press office.
Chaput spoke several times at Wednesday's briefing about reports that some bishops in the Synod have called for the church to use more open and inclusive language in its teachings on family issues.
The archbishop said one concern expressed in his small group was that inclusionary language should not be unclear regarding church doctrine and should not allow politicians to interpret such language in ways the church does not intend.
Chaput also said the task of evaluating the different Synod documents is made harder for English speakers, because generally they do not speak other languages and many of the Synod documents are in Italian. Sometimes, the archbishop said, the English language translations of the documents are inaccurate.
The archbishop also spoke about the recent World Meeting of Families hosted by the Philadelphia archdiocese, the event that Francis closed with an open-air Mass on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway during his September visit to the United States.
Many families at the world meeting, Chaput said, had a "hunger for reaffirmation" of current church teachings on family life.
"People want it and want to live it and were very, very enthusiastic about it," the archbishop said of the sentiment at the world meeting towards church teaching.
In response to an NCR question about reports that some Synod bishops had suggested the church use more inclusionary language towards gay people, Chaput said that was not "a dominant part of the conversation" in the first days of the Synod.
The Vatican announced the leaders of the 13 different small discussion groups being used at the Synod.
There are four English-language groups, led respectively by moderators: Australian Cardinal George Pell, British Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Irish Archbishop Eamon Martin, and Canadian Cardinal Thomas Collins.
The four English groups also have relators, or secretaries. Those, in the same respective order, are: U.S. Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, Irish Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Coleridge, and Chaput.
"Some times we bishops can indulge in a kind of churchspeak, which may seem wondrous to us but which communicates little or nothing to most people," wrote the Australian.
"We will have failed if all we can come up with is a final document full of churchspeak which the Synod fathers may admire but which most of the world find incomprehensible," he wrote.
It will be easier for a camel to cross through a dense jungle than any of these anti bishops and cardinals to return to the Path of Glory.
The false messiah appears to be doing a great job in preparing his arrival. He might just show his face at the conclusion of the sinod.
It reminds me of a professor that I had-- she said that the most beautiful thing would be for us to not be able to tell whether someone was male or female--- that this would be the most liberating and loving thing. Yuck. I'll double up on prayers for conversions!!!
Today there's no difference between a Freemason and a modernist (false) bishop. This is satanic's work inside the Church.
Ye i also think in the same way that the church teachings are getting directed in a different way.We must consider it and thing about the progress of the religion not in a bias way but in a positive and healthy manner.
I am quite impressed by this topic and it really tells a very correct story band facts about the Christianity.After reading the whole article it strikes so much.


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Does Trump's indifference to the rule of law reach the 'crisis' level?
With his emergency declaration, Donald Trump appears to have shown -- again -- his indifference to the rule of law. Is it a "constitutional crisis"?
TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump leaves after speaking during the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in the...
Feb. 15, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC / Updated Feb. 15, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC
For those whose principal concern is preventing government shutdowns, Donald Trump's emergency declaration probably doesn't look like bad news. As of a couple of months ago, the president's position was that Congress had to approve funding for his border wall -- and if lawmakers balked, he'd end federal operations until his demands were met.
The emergency declaration, to an unsettling degree, is acting as a pressure valve. Trump gets to pursue his absurd goal; the governments gets to function; and the whole mess will eventually be resolved in the courts.
But for those whose principal concern is the rule of law, avoiding another shutdown comes at a high price. James Hohmann had a good piece along these lines this morning.
"White House lawyers have told Trump he could reprogram money without calling an emergency," Fred Barbash, Ellen Nakashima and Josh Dawsey report. "But Trump … has been determined to declare an emergency, partially for fear of looking weak."This is just the latest, and possibly starkest, illustration of Trump's disdain for the rule of law, as well as the premium he places on political expediency over constitutional norms and legal guardrails.
In the abstract, there's nothing wrong with a president starting with a specific goal and working backwards to determine how best to get there. The trouble arises when someone tells the president, "That may not be legal," and the person legally required to protect and defend the Constitution replies, "I don't care."
William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor, told the New York Times, "This is a real institutional threat to the separation of powers to use emergency powers to enable the president to bypass Congress to build a wall on his own initiative that our elected representatives have chosen not to fund."
Banks added, "It sets a precedent that a president can, without regard to an actual existence of an emergency, use this tool to evade the normal democratic process and fund projects on his own."
There's a school of thought, which I'm generally sympathetic toward, which says there are two kinds of constitutional crises. The first arises when officials turn to the law for answers, but the law is silent. When Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, for example, and he physically couldn't fulfill his duties, officials looked to the Constitution. The 25th Amendment didn't yet exist, so the result was a sort of crisis: the law offered no guidance on how the government was supposed to function.
The second is when the Constitution establishes a legal framework, but those in positions of authority chose to operate outside those boundaries.
Does Trump's gambit, asserting powers he's not supposed to have, in pursuit of a project the people and their elected lawmakers do not want, fall into that latter category? There are scholars who can speak to this with more authority than I can, but this Vox piece struck me as notable:
The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the ultimate power to appropriate money. The president legally has the power to declare emergencies and respond, but can he do that in a situation where Congress has explicitly declined to fund the president's wall?According to Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on national security law, the answer is that he can't -- and Trump's attempt to do so constitutes a "constitutional crisis."Goitein is the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan but liberal-leaning legal nonprofit. Her research focuses on balancing national security and constitutional rights, which makes her pretty well-positioned to evaluate the president's claim. In a series of tweets, she made the case that declaring an emergency on the border constitutes a power grab that directly threatens the constitutional order.
Last night, I spent a little time poking through my archives, looking up instances in which I wrote about Donald Trump being at odds with the rule of law. It was exhausting, not just viscerally, but also practically, because these stories have been ridiculously common.
Indeed, I found a quote from Sally Yates, who served as acting attorney general before Trump fired her in 2017 for giving the White House good advice, who described one of the president's efforts last year as "nothing short of an all-out assault on the rule of law."
The depressing part is, you don't know which Trump effort Yates was referring to, and if I hadn't read the report, I wouldn't either. There have been so many all-out assaults on the rule of law since Trump's inauguration that it starts to look like one long crisis.
That said, today's gambit seems qualitatively different. Civics 101 offers clear definitions of what the co-equal branches of government do, and Trump's declaration seems designed to shuffle the deck in ways that undermine the institutions themselves.
I don't honestly believe that this president wants to tear down the rule of law, because that would suggest he's invested energy into answering the underlying question. That seems wholly implausible. It's Trump's indifference to the rule of law that's the problem.
He doesn't see constitutional frameworks as his enemy because he doesn't see them at all. Today's crisis, alas, was probably inevitable.


FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- The South Florida Sun Sentinel was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for public service on Monday for its impactful coverage of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
The prize, the most respected in journalism, recognized the newspaper's 10-month effort to reveal how 17 people could be murdered in a school considered one of the safest in Florida.
In dozens of stories, the Sun Sentinel exposed failures by the school district, law enforcement and social services that enabled the teenage gunman to enter the school on Valentine's Day 2018 and slaughter staff and students with a semi-automatic rifle.
The Sun Sentinel's coverage sparked significant changes in law enforcement and school safety and led to legislation to hold schools more accountable for crimes that occur on their campuses.
The Pulitzer judges cited the Sun Sentinel's stories for "exposing failings by school and law enforcement officials before and after the deadly shooting rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School."
Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in 14 categories of journalism, and the award for public service, recognized with a gold medal, is considered the most prestigious. The Sun Sentinel also was named a finalist for the Pulitzer in breaking news for what the board called "exhaustive and lucid" coverage that "brought compassion and clarity to a horrific tragedy."
This is the second time the Sun Sentinel has won the Pulitzer for public service reporting. In 2013, the Pulitzer board awarded the Sun Sentinel its gold medal for an investigation of off-duty police officers endangering the lives of citizens by speeding. The series of stories, titled "Above the Law: Speeding Cops," led police departments across South Florida to discipline scores of officers and institute new ways of tracking police activity.
-- Laid bare how the Broward County school district failed to deal with a violent, mentally disturbed student who became a mass murderer.
-- Exposed a culture of leniency that enabled the future shooter to get away with criminal behavior in school.


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Gators roll to eight-straight wins in first half of series against Otters
Mason Bissada|April 13, 2019
Photo courtesy of SF State Athletics/Christine Jacobson
SF State won its first of two doubleheaders against Cal State Monterey Bay on Friday, April 12, winning their first game 4-3 and their second 7-1.
Utility junior Michelle Castro was key to both victories, notching a two-run RBI in the first game to give the Gators an early lead. She then followed it up with going 2-4, with two RBI in the second game.
"I was just looking for the balls and looking for the holes," Castro said after the game. "People usually pinch me in towards leftfield. I was just thinking 'right side' today."
The first game of the doubleheader went down to the wire, as the score was locked at 3-3 through seven innings.
The Gators took advantage of Otters' starting pitcher Hayley Fein's high 135 pitch count and loaded the bases in the bottom of the 8th before freshman infielder Lehua DeLeon brought in the game-winning RBI single.
SF State dominated in the second game, thanks in large part to senior pitcher Karla Soto, who pitched a complete game in addition to her three-inning save in the first game, allowing just one run.
"I was just keeping it low, Soto said. "I was hitting my locations; I think I missed one location and that's the run that came in. I think I was just really hitting my corners today."
"Karla pitched a great game," head coach Alicia Reid said. "To come in and relieve at the end of that first game and then come in and pitch a full seven is not easy. She just beared down, dug deep. At the end of the game, she was getting a little bit behind, but she had trust in our defense to make the plays and get the outs."
The pair of wins bring the Gators to a record of 28-15, their eighth straight.
SF State will look to continue their dominance and tie the program record with two more wins in their second doubleheader against the Otters on Saturday, April 13 at noon in San Francisco.
SF State Athletics
SFSU softball
SF State boasts campus diversity, continually fails people of color
SF State athletics returns to normalcy this season
As the institutional memory of Gators football fades away, former players keep its memory alive
SF State men's basketball come up short against nationally ranked San Bernardino
Lackluster promotion leads to low attendance for SF State arts
SF State volleyball player Chloe Henning excels on the court and in the classroom
SF State women's soccer team earns a gritty 1-0 victory over rival Cal State East Bay


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U.S. Hispanics Consider Restaurant Dining a Family Affair
Chicago, November 9, 2011 — The family orientation of U.S. Hispanics extends to restaurant dining, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company. Slightly over 40 percent of restaurant visits by Hispanics include children compared to 30 percent of non-Hispanic visits, based on the latest findings from NPD's CREST® Hispanic foodservice market research.
Hispanics represent 16 percent of the U.S. population based on the 2010 U.S. Census, and according to NPD's CREST Hispanic, which continually tracks U.S. Hispanics use of restaurants; they made 5.8 billion restaurant visits in the first six months of 2011. When making those visits Hispanics seldom go to restaurants in parties of two. They are either alone or in a group that often includes children. Forty-five percent of Hispanic restaurant visits are a group of three or more compared to 32 percent for non-Hispanics.
NPD reports that language is an important factor in how U.S. Hispanic families use restaurants. Spanish language is an aspect of home life for 88 percent of the Hispanic population, 52 percent of Hispanics are bi-lingual speaking Spanish and English equally at home, slightly more than a quarter are Spanish-language dominant, and 21 percent are English dominant. Spanish-language dominant Hispanics are the most likely to include children in their foodservice visits.
"Hispanic restaurant consumers tell us that they would visit restaurants more if they make children feel welcome. Language also matters in reaching this market," says Michele Schmal, vice president, product management for NPD's foodservice unit. "Restaurant operators and food manufacturers would do well to focus marketing to Hispanics around the family and children."
About The NPD Group, Inc.
The NPD Group is the leading provider of reliable and comprehensive consumer and retail information for a wide range of industries. Today, more than 1,800 manufacturers, retailers, and service companies rely on NPD to help them drive critical business decisions at the global, national, and local market levels. NPD helps our clients to identify new business opportunities and guide product development, marketing, sales, merchandising, and other functions. Information is available for the following industry sectors: automotive, beauty, entertainment, fashion, food, home and office, sports, technology, toys, video games, and wireless. For more information,
contact us, visit
http://www.npd.com/, or follow us Twitter at
https://twitter.com/npdgroup.