I made a Python script the other day for generating short (5-word) alliterative stories. I have 4 text files: first.txt, last.txt, verbs.txt, and nouns.txt. The script reads in the lines from these files and randomly chooses a first name from the first.txt file. It then randomly chooses a last name from the last.txt file that has the same first letter as the first name. It does the same for the verb and the noun text files.

This is a silly project, but I did find myself running it over and over again because the little scenes it generates are interesting to read. Many make no sense at all, but the script sometimes generates scenes that I'd like to know a little more about.

Candee Corren chases the cold.

or

Danniel Delahoussaye defends the disease.

or

Clarrisa Calamia communicates a chicken.

I then decided to write a little flask app so that I could host it on the site. Check it out at markcrable.com/stories

Added a new animated logo to my pages. It is an SVG animated with animate.css. I think animated SVG is pretty nifty.

Quit It

Rainy Day

I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with this website. A lot of the posts here are about making the website itself. I re-do everything every couple of months. I probably have more revisions than posts.

I have re-done the gallery section of the website. Before I used Lightbox to present images. I liked Lightbox because it would automatically scale the images, give navigation to the next or previous images, and give nice titles to the image. I didn't like that it required JavaScript to nicely page through images. I wanted to have a main page with thumbnails for all the images. Then I wanted users to be able to click the thumbnails, get a page with a larger version of the image, have navigation and captions, and be able to jump back to the main gallery page at any time to select another thumbnail. I also didn't want to manually create a bunch of html pages because that would get annoying to update and maintain.

To accomplish this, I made a python script to create the pages. It combines thumbnail images into a main gallery page, and generates individual html pages that present the full images. Captions are inserted from text files. This will allow me to quickly update the gallery page by dropping new images into a folder, updating whatever I want the captions to be, and running the script. In the future I would also like the script to just generate the thumbnails for me as well. Totally doable, just haven't yet gotten into it.

I like the workflow of editing this website. Just put posts or images in folders and then run scripts. I also like that I can have different sections of the website that are generated the same way. So this page of haiku can be as easily added as the main section. Just plug in files, run the script, and upload.

I also took off all Google Analytics scripts. It was interesting seeing information about the people that visited this site, but I felt kind of bad tracking people. Maybe there is some different solution for analytics that I can set up in the future that is a little more open. But for now, if you are reading this, I have absolutely no idea who or where you are. Hello!

I'm just trying to make my website weirder, so don't mind the construction. Also I don't think the RSS feed works right now. Break it till it works!

I'm not a programmer, but have been learning to use Python for a bit now by going through Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. It is a really good book. I decided that I would try to make my own generator for this website. As of now this site should be generated with a Python script.

I've been using static site generators to create this site for a while. Most recently I have been using 11ty. Before that I used Org-Static-Blog. And at the very beginning of this site I used Jekyll very briefly. I like static site generators. I like that everything is created in plain text. All posts live as markdown files in a folder. You then run the program and the whole site is generated. It is an elegant way to create websites.

My generator works in much the same way. All posts are in a "posts" folder. Then it takes two HTML "templates." It takes the list of files, generates directories for them and creates individual post files converted to HTML. Then it inserts links to all posts on the main page as well as the date. It also generates an RSS feed.

You can take a look here. This is possibly incredibly bad code. It is among my first Python projects.

Kind of cruel how the rain forces the earth worms to the surface. They then wander onto parking lots and get smooshed by tires or shoes.

Yellow Magic Orchestra

Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Electric Light Orchestra

In recent years, I have become what I once hated. I have become a loud sneezer.

I've always had an aversion to loud sneezers. The startling jolt of unexpected explosion always left me unsettled. Loud sneezers shatter the crystalline silence and leave us to piece together its shards. Can't they control themselves?

They can't control themselves. I have found out that it isn't intentional at all. Loud sneezing isn't caused by an inability to control one's volume, but by a decreased duration of sneeze onset. If I had any warning that I am about to sneeze, as I once did, I would be able to control the sneeze volume. Sneezes now come too quickly, and I no longer have the ability to process them.

I don't know why this has happened to me, but I'm trying to make peace with it. If you hear a loud sneeze today just know that it is not intentional. Know that even though I and people like me are destroying our society, it is beyond our control.

I'm sorry.

(Skull from pixabay, animated by me.)

Click.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Useful little program.

# This program determines if you are named Mark. If you aren't named Mark,
# the program will walk away. If you are named Mark, you and the program
# can go to the secret clubhouse and eat pizza and play pinball. Also
# people who spell their name "Marc" aren't allowed in the clubhouse.

print('"What is your name? I really hope it is Mark."')
myName = input().lower()

if myName == 'marc':
    print('Oh... You spell your name with a "c." That\'s so... \
cool...? of you. Well I have got a LOT of things to do \
today so I will just be moseying along. Reeeeeal good to \
meet you though."')
    print('The computer program abruptly walks away.')

if myName != 'mark' and myName != 'marc':
    print('"Nice to meet you, ' + myName + '. I wish you were Mark. \
Well I have got a LOT of things to do today so I will just be \
moseying along. Reeeeeal good to meet you though."')
    print('The computer program abruptly walks away.')

if myName == 'mark':
    print('"I\'m really happy to see you, Mark! All I have seen today are \
losers with loser names that aren\'t Mark. Want to go to the secret \
clubhouse for people with the name Mark?"')
    print('Type "yes" or "no"')
    answer1 = input()
    if answer1 == 'yes':
        print('"Yeah cool lets ditch these losers."')
        print('You and your new computer program friend go to the secret \
clubhouse where you play pinball and eat pizza.')
        if answer1 == 'no':
            print('"Thats cool, Mark. I\'ll meet up with you tomorrow and \
we can go then. See you later!"')

Back in January 2019, Reddit user beefy_cabbage posted this image on Reddit's /r/me_irl subreddit.

It was a prediction that the Queen of England would die on January 5th, 2019. Then a lot more Reddit users posted memes about the Queen's death or about how beefy_cabbage would probably be arrested. A lot of commenters argued that the meme implied a threat, while others claimed that it was obviously just a joke. Still others claimed that predictions couldn't possibly be a threat, and that's simply not true. Actually what beefy_cabbage created could definitely imply a threat: a market for the assassination of the Queen of England.

Crypto anarchist Jim Bell has an essay about assassination markets called Assassination Politics. In the essay he outlines a system by which the political landscape can be controlled via political assassination. Using an anonymous currency system and cryptography, an organization can "bet" on when a political figure will die. Whoever "guesses" the correct date gets the money. If there is a significant amount of money for a certain political figure on a certain date, then that may motivate an assassin to take action against that figure. The assassin kills the political figure on the correct date and collects the money.

Death markets take more forms than Bell's version. His idea was informed by "dead pools," where people bet on when someone such as a celebrity will die. These dead pools function more like regular betting pools. Bets are made and if you guess the correct date the celebrity dies, you collect the money. They have existed online in various places for a long time. According to the Wikipedia entry on dead pools, Rotten.com (a now-defunct, rather grody website known for its alarming content, but which also had an amazing section of essays on pop culture, politics, and history called the Rotten Library operated the largest celebrity dead pool in the world. Macabre websites run these dead pools as just a bit of dark "fun." It isn't implied that any entity will act on any of the bets. You would assume that you would need a system like Bell's to make the leap from simple betting to assassination.

Maybe not if there is a motivating factor beyond money. What if there was an assassination market that didn't need money at all? An assassination market that didn't even need the cryptography or the anonymity necessary to power Jim Bell's proposed system? I think an assassination market based on accrued fame could function the same way. Replace actual money with likes, subscribes, karma, or whatever social media currency we are interested in. A lack of anonymity would be preferred to truly collect your fame, and so could be implemented as easily as the simple dead pools that we've seen. Someone posts a meme predicting someone else's death. Another entity kills that person on the correct date and gains all the likes or karma or whatever.

It isn't a new observation that people will do just about anything for likes. Even though people don't do just about anything for likes, and those kind of observations are usually made by disaffected cranks that just want to deflate everyone's fun (not me of course...). The difference in this incident was how closely it resembled assassination politics, which is pretty funny. Beefy_cabbage's meme was a joke, and I think that is pretty obvious because Queen is still alive. But it is close enough to some sort of system for a new kind of assassination market that I think we should take care. Once we meme ourselves into dystopia, I'm not sure it will be as funny. Or maybe it will be even funnier. I can't tell anymore.

Making graphics in an emulated MacPaint on Mini vMac would probably be a good example of the hipster-curmudgeon nexus. Both paradigms would have different motivations for doing so... but you know which one this is.

I thought I was becoming a curmudgeon, but now I don't think that is true.

A few months ago I was talking to a friend of mine about how I thought I was becoming curmudgeonly regarding technology. I have a notion (that many share, I might note) that the early web was better. Since I've been making webpages on Neocities, I think I am of the opinion that much of the current web has no soul. When I shared this with him, he asked me if any of the sites on Neocities were just ironic recreations of Geocities-styled websites, and if the irony bothered me. I affirmed that there were a lot of pages on the site that rely on that sort irony and that no, this did not bother me. He said that if the irony didn't bother me, then I'm not a curmudgeon. I think he is right. I'm no curmudgeon. If anything I'm some form of the dreaded hipster.

The "hipster" is one of the most maligned individuals in our culture, but the constantly shifting definition of the term makes it almost useless. It can be applied to anyone for almost any reason. If five people close their eyes and imagine a hipster, they will probably have five different variations of hipster in their minds. The only thing that their envisioned hipster will have in common is that he is loathsome... and probably has a mustache. I think a redefinition of the term could be good. So here's a more optimistic and useful definition: Hipsters are individuals that employ a mix of sincerity, irony, contrarianism, and sometimes affectation to attain some level of cultural and emotional growth.

Curmudgeons value authenticity, sincerity, and contrarianism, but they never care about growth of any kind. Growth is antithetical to the curmudgeon. And they can never be accused of affectation, because they are absolutely sincere in their weirdness.

At first glance, hipsters can resemble curmudgeons due to some shared values. They both like contrarianism and authenticity. This is reflected in both groups' love of things that are outmoded. A hipster and a curmudgeon could conceivably both only listen to music on cassette tape, but for entirely different reasons that might look the same at first glance (the hipster to engage in contrarianism or irony, the curmudgeon because he thinks all new things are bad and dismisses them). Also, I will not dent that they can both be grating and annoying.

When my friend brought up the idea that if I embrace irony I can't be a curmudgeon, it seemed to fit. I'm not a curmudgeon. I think irony is an important tool to use to engage in culture. Irony bothers the curmudgeon because it undermines his complete authenticity. I think that that hipsters often wish they were curmudgeonly because that checks the box of authenticity. But it does not include the cultural and emotional growth that is also important to the hipster. Hipsters can only play at curmudgeonity because the goals of a hipster and a curmudgeon are different. The hipster wants to grow; the curmudgeon wants to stay the same.

I think this is lucky for the hipster because the curmudgeon is on a much darker path. A path that leads to cultural and emotional ruin: the path of the crank.

Khonnor, or Connor Kirby-Long, is one of my favorite musicians. He released music under a few different names: Grandma, I Cactus, Khonnor, Jimmy Buffer. My favorite album of his, probably because it was the first I heard, is I, Cactus.

It is a short album full of short songs. There are beautiful little melodies that are layered with mysterious creaks and static hisses. Even the most frenetic, glitchy beats are tempered with simple melodies that sometimes sound sad, sometimes dreamy, and sometimes triumphant. The songs never overstay their welcome. He presents an idea and then lets it drift away.

Chartreuse Cactus is my favorite.

The majority of his music was released under the Creative Commons license, and you can find I, Cactus, as well as a lot of his other music at archive.org. You can find out more about Khonnor at Wikipedia or watch this episode of MTV's This is Our Music featuring Khonnor (I recommend it).

I love to look at old scientific diagrams. I think they look so interesting and you can learn a lot.

Eat my hat.

Costs and arm and a leg.

A man of letters.

Textures from Texturefabrik

A couple of items of design from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

I like this poster behind Alec Baldwin's character. It looks bad, exactly like something that would come from the downtown office of this shady company.

I also like that when Baldwin's character delivers his speech, he references the exact content in the poster. Like the guys he's ranting at haven't been looking at that stupid poster every night, each fretting about their commissions and their own crushing circumstances.

And here is the brochure for the Glengarry Highlands. I'm somewhat fascinated by this brochure. The way that Ricky Roma unveils it gives it a magical quality. I think you know that this brochure conveys nothing but empty promises, but it conveys grand empty promises. And it folds out into a poster. Hang it on your wall in your cubicle. Contemplate the beautiful photo. Think about your current circumstances in life. Ruminate over your conversation with Roma and his promises of becoming a self-actualized man.

Graphic design is so often aiding in a swindle. Whether it looks bad or good, you should always look at the motivations behind it.

In summer, or spring, one year to the next
A butterfly's cocoon becomes undone.
Ecclesiastes told in hopeless text
Nothing is new if it's under the sun.

If nothing is new, what's variation?
Larval and pupal and then to the sky.
The butterfly arrived through mutation.
Escaping the keenness of a bird's eye.

But the more you look, the more you are bound
To get the meaning of Solomon's word.
For if the butterfly wasn't around,
Something else would be eaten by the bird.

So nothing changes, and that is the truth:
It's just wings and color, and blood and tooth.

I have re-designed this website. The main change was the reorganization of my image gallery. I decided to use Lightbox for the presentation of the images. Initially I wanted to avoid use of Javascript when designing this website. This is just due to the fact that I browse the web most of the time with Javascript disabled (I enable it on a site-by-site basis). I wasn't happy with the wonky way I had set it up using pure CSS/HTML. It would break almost completely if you happened to zoom in or out, which I shamefully found out when I was showing my site to someone. Lightbox (which does use Javascript) presents images in a completely acceptable way, and I think it fits in quite well with my simple website's design.

The other major change was to the blog portion of my website. I had been using Jekyll, which worked well for my purposes. The problem was editing an existing template to integrate into my website's design (this wouldn't have been a problem if I was more experienced with web design or maybe just smarter). It had become kind of a mess for me and I wasn't happy with it. So I started looking for blog solutions.

I found org-static-blog and it does everything that I want:

• It is a package for Emacs (my favorite computer program).
• It uses org-mode files and familiar org-mode markup for posts.
• You can create an entry using a simple command from Emacs.
• It generates bare html that I can then completely integrate it into my site's design.

I am not an expert on any of this, but I really like finding the solutions to these problems that I invent.

Your attendance is appreciated and absolutely mandatory.

These are things that are in my yard sometimes.

Flowers on a tree.

Sour cherries.

Accidental pumpkin plants.

Hiding Rabbits.

Baby birds.

Cats on leashes.

Very large piles of leaves.

Hummingbirds Quote from Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss

Nu Uh

Pizza Party (photocopy texture from texturefabrik.com)

This Way

Of course you can make the world a prettier place with design. But sometimes you can truly innovate and make the world a better place.

This DIY Post-It Note dispenser is an example of true innovation.

Made a couple of new pages.

Fireworks

Rainy

On the first I used pictures of fireworks that I had taken years ago. I color shifted them in GrafX2 (just because I wanted to mess around with that program). Then I assembled them into animated GIF images in GIMP. I like how the images of fireworks kind of take on the look of small organisms under a microscope. The long exposure time of the photos causes trails of light that resemble little flagellum.

The second I animated using CSS keyframes. The image comes from a book called Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual, which is filled with all sorts of cheesy poses by models. The book was published and 1987 and I found it at a thrift store. I traced the image in Inkscape.

I've had some time to mess around with web and design stuff this week since I've been on vacation.

My wife and I made sushi . . .

and went to the Nelson museum where I saw this exceedingly ripped Hercules.

I don't know what to do with this newfound knowledge of what the male body is supposed to look like...

Back to work on Monday.

I've been trying to get this blog working correctly for a while now. I do not have extensive knowledge of web development, but I have really enjoyed making this website.

I've always liked personal web pages. As a kid I remember making web pages on Geocities and Homestead. There were some great examples of personal web pages on those sites. Even if the pages on those sites looked terrible, they were almost always charming. There was a lot more room for personal expression than there is on any modern social networking platform. What was lacking in polish was made up for in gravity. This gravity came from the process.

If I remember correctly, these sites had built-in graphical editors to make pages so I never had to mess with the HTML. It still felt like such an accomplishment to me. I wish I still had access to those web pages. The Geocities site may be floating around on one of the various Geocities archives that sprang up after the site's closing, but I haven't found them yet. Shortly after that I made a webcomic and hosted it on Keenspace. I remember needing to adjust some HTML manually to get the site to work the way I wanted it to. That one is still there!

After that period, I went many years without making or even thinking about making websites. My interest was rekindled after I read A Vernacular Web and Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War by Olia Lialina. The first article is an inspiring look at the aesthetics and ethos of the early web. In the latter article she says the following:

I don't agree that the web of the 1990's can just be considered as a short period before we got real tools, an exercise in self-publishing before real self-representation. I'd like to believe that 15 years of not making web pages will be classified as a short period in the history of the WWW.

This prompted me to make a site at neocities.org, which was fun. I like the social aspect of the site, where you can view the creations of other people and comment on them. Then I decided to make this site to feature my artwork and function as a personal web page, too. I hand-coded this site (with help from tutorials at w3schools.com. The exception is this blog portion, which was created using Jekyll.

Creating your own website gives you a lot more control over what you are putting into the world. I think that people feel that the content they are putting out there is the most important thing, but that isn't true. The process is always the most important part. Process informs art more than anything else. That is why hand-crafted personal web pages will always feel special.