Manifesto about 'personal' websites
Written by one of my internet heroes ten years ago, the advice is still just as solid today:
Put your head down and don’t listen to anything anyone says about it…It just has to make your world a better place. It has to fill some need in your life. It has to make you happy.
“ There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
It’s done, despite many touch-and-go moments where I wasn’t sure if the deadline (Auckland Zine Fest tomorrow) was positive or negative. I am resisting the urge to redo a couple of pages as per usual. Edit, edit edit, editeditedit time is OVER.
It’s 28 pages of text and images. This is a completely different look & feel to any of the previous editions of vortex so I will be interested to see what historical readers think… and of course, what everyone thinks of the writing!
Got to go and suss out copying costs today - they’ve dramatically increased since 2003 - and will then be able to say what you can order it for if you so please. Regulars, check your mailboxes in a week or so!
Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard - Lapham’s Quarterly
Transcript of a lecture given by Kurt Vonnegut about visualising storytelling using Caretesian graphs.
Inception visualised
Echoing several others, I am going to need to watch this again.
Also: <3 Ellen Page.
Letters to punctuation
Emdashes recently asked readers to contribute letters to their favorite punctuation marks; I think this one takes the cake:
TO: The Period
FROM: Western Union
Regret that telegrams never used a period STOP Official standards required replacing period with word stop STOP This was true for entire history of the telegram despite efforts to stop stop STOP Powers that be made sure that efforts to stop stop stopped STOP Happy to report that in 2006 use of telegram came to a stop stopping use of stop STOP Repeat there will be no more telegrams period STOP
Western Union
Seems meta in a way that I can completely get behind. No one has addressed the exclamation point yet which I may have to rectify!
“ One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
