REB #22: “When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste.”

– Laiko Bahrs

Well, I guess I didn’t follow Bahrs’ directions for baking, which are to…er…follow directions.

I was flipping through my copy of my grandma’s cookbook the other day and decided to try to make Chocolate Bittersweets. I think this recipe was actually my great grandmother’s, passed down to my grandmother at some point (and that’s not to say it was an original recipe of hers either, as many of the recipes in the book came from other family members, and a couple were even taken from the sides of boxes). I’ll preface this by saying these things are far from bitter, so the name doesn’t really reflect what they are. I’m also not sure what category they belong in. Cookie? Minicake? Something else entirely? Here they are.

In any case, I noticed that I had all of the ingredients to make the cookie/cake part and most of the ingredients for the icing, but I didn’t have the coconut or cream cheese for the filling. I’m not even sure how that works, by the way: how do you put filling and icing in/on a cookie or cake? Well, the problem was solved when I decided to go ahead and make them with just the icing. But I had to improvise on the icing because I didn’t have chocolate chips to make it. So I used…

And it worked wonderfully.

Does anyone else like to cook or bake? I’m certainly no expert, but I do enjoy it, especially when it’s a recipe from my grandma’s book. What problems do you run into? Do you like to improvise? Because I feel like I do it all the time, sometimes because I don’t like what’s included in the recipe (like the nuts in Chocolate Bittersweets) so I leave that particular item out, other times because I feel like I’d like the recipe better with something else added. In this case, I took a risk using Nutella instead of chocolate chips, because while Nutella is fantastic, it is very different from actual chocolate in terms of taste, and in this case, it is also a completely different consistency (a spread) than chocolate chips (which are hard). Luckily, the chocolate had to be melted anyway, so it worked out. In short: Nutella can be used to make a really great icing, if you’re a Nutella fan. You just have to be okay with a hazelnut taste in your chocolate.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #21: “We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.”

– Robert Wilensky

Okay, it isn’t exactly Shakespeare, but I think I’ve got about everything on my writer’s website that I wanted to have by the due date on Monday. Of course, I will add more in the future, but this is it for now. Here is a link to the temporary location (my free U.B. webspace); I’m going to work on transferring it to my rogermarket.com domain – and, thus, self-hosting my WordPress blog – at some point, but that’s not a priority right now. We’ll see it on class on Monday, briefly, but I wanted to post the link anyway, especially for those reading this who won’t be in class or aren’t students at U.B.

While searching for the quote for this title, I found a few more that I loved. Here they are:

“Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as a conversation at a bar.”
– George Lundberg

“My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into private world of real creeps without having to smell them.”
– Penn Jillet

“Hooked on Internet? Help is just a click away.”
– Author Unknown

“The Internet is the most powerful magnifier of slack ever invented.”
– Author Unknown

“You can’t take something off the Internet – it’s like taking pee out of a pool.”
– Author Unknown

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #17: “In this case, kill Marlon. He gets on my tits.”

– Liam Hammond, a poster on the Aaron’s Story blog

According to Urban Dictionary, the phrase “gets on my tits,” which I’d never heard until today, is (1) a “verb used to signify a singular subject that bothers you” or (2) a “verb to describe someone who pisses you off.” It can also be used in the plural (“get on my tits”). The (singular) example sentence is the following: “Senseless violence really gets on my tits.”

Aside from the fact that user “ejito” of Urban Dictionary is technically wrong – it’s a verb phrase, not a verb, and may even have other names as well – I find his/her definition rather intoxicating. It uses the word “tits” in a way that not only evokes the proper mood, tone, and branding of a website called Urban Dictionary but also reminds me that there is a big world out there, with tons and tons of languages, idioms, and slang words/phrases.

Before today, I never would have thought to say or write something like, “He really gets on my tits” – or, to push the definition to its limits, “Geez, would you get off my tits already?” Maybe that’s because I don’t have any literal tits to get on (unlike Michael Moore, apparently), but it’s also because I didn’t grow up with that particular phrase. One reason I love traveling is that I get to see how people talk in different parts of the U.S. and the world. I suppose, in this case, the Internet rendered traveling unnecessary. I was able to sit in the comfort of my own home, on my bed, and read all about how to get on someone’s tits, and then write about it, properly.

Today, I’m a happy writer.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #16: “With the advent of ebook self-publishing and the democratization of distribution … the power of publishing is shifting away from publishers and into the hands of authors and readers where it belongs.”

– Mark Coker interview

Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of Smashwords

Yesterday, I found this interview with Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of the electronic publishing company Smashwords. In it, he describes the changing nature of the publishing industry, highlighting his role and understandably praising his own brand of electronic self-publishing. Thisis marketing 101 after all: you do an interview to raise awareness for your product/service, so why not “talk it up”?

Anyway, I love technology. Outside of books and real-life people, my computer and TV are my best friends. However, I’m apprehensive about this shift toward electronic reading. I already do a lot of my news reading online because of all the blogs and Twitter accounts that I follow. So will I want to sit on my futon this winter, next to a roaring fireplace, and cuddle up with a good…LCD-type screen? An iPad, for instance?

Hell no!

But while I love the tactile sensation of having a book in my hands, turning its pages, flipping quickly to a favorite passage, etc., I cannot deny the convenience that electronic publishing affords the reader (we’ll leave the writer out of the equation for now). The simple fact of the matter is that I’m running out of space for books. When I moved to Baltimore in August 2009, I brought with me a small, 3-shelf bookcase and well over 300 books; I quickly bought two 5-shelf bookcases to accomodate the books, as well as my collection of DVDs. Then in late August 2010, I moved from Bolton Hill to Downtown, where my room is actually a little smaller anyway, so it wasn’t too distressing that one of my large shelves collapsed before I even tried to move it. I’m down to a 3-shelfer and a 5-shelfer. As such, many of my books are now stored and, yes, inventoried in boxes in the downstairs closet. I hate that; my books want to be out of the closet, with me, but alas, they aren’t.

With an e-reader, I still wouldn’t be able to display my books – they’d still be in the invisible “closet” of my e-reader’s storage mechanism – but at least I would have room for them. I guess that’s the tradeoff. I can have more books with an e-reader, I can have them almost instantly, and I can have them cheaper in most instances. But they aren’t books. They’re texts, yes, but they aren’t books, per se.

So why, as a writer, would/should I consider using a service like Smashwords? For one thing, Smashwords itself is free. They only take a 15% bite out of the writer’s royalties, when he/she makes money, which is a far cry from the 50-75% that most traditional publishers take. From an economical standpoint, the advantage is clear: if you (self-)publish electronically with Smashwords, you stand to make a lot more money for your work. There’s also the fact that you don’t have to wade through a sea of rejection letters from publishers, because you, my friend, are self-publishing. For “free.” That’s unheard of, isn’t it? We’re talking about guaranteed publication, here, with 85% royalties and coverage on most of the e-book stores out there (even Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes & Noble’s e-book store are included; I don’t think Amazon is one of them, though – not yet, anyway).

That sounds like a sweet deal, and I’ll probably seriously consider it for book-length works because at least I can get my name and my writing out there. But at the end of this M.F.A. program, when I publish my book of short stories, I still want to see my awesome book cover design on a tangible, traditional book in a brick-and-mortar store. And I want the prestige that comes with having my book hand-picked for publication.

Is that so much to ask?

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #15: “I’m twelve. But I’ve been twelve for a long time.”

– Eli in Let the Right One In

Having seen the original Swedish movie Let the Right One In (2008) – and knowing that I eventually want to read the 2004 book on which it was based – I was appalled when I realized that there is already an American remake coming out. Today, in fact. It’s called Let Me In.

Having had a little time to calm down a bit, I’m still not sure what I think of this. The original movie was great, and I have little faith that an American remake will do the story justice. Then again, I haven’t read the book, so the only basis for comparison that I’ll have is the Swedish movie. I’m starting to wonder if that’s fair or not.

As a reader/writer, I guess maybe it isn’t fair; maybe I should judge Let Me In on how well it translates the book’s story to video. But as a movie buff/writer, I think it’s completely fair. The American movie scene is saturated with remakes and adaptations, so much so that, whenever a new one comes out, I’m immediately cynical about it.

Why is this? Is it fair? What do others think?

For your viewing pleasure, I’m going to include the trailers for each of the movies now. The first one is the original Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In); the second one is the American Let Me In.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #11: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

– Douglas Adams

Finally, the design of my website!

Although I may be going back to the dark ages of computing by using frames on my website (because, let’s face it, not many websites seem to use frames these days), I think it’s the best possible design choice for me. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but as of right now—considering everything I want on my site, how I want it to act, and so on—frames is the way to go, and I’ll explain why.

First of all, I’ve already started playing with Dreamweaver, and from my experience so far, it is not nearly as easy to use as the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite. There are bugs and inconsistencies that don’t exist in the other applications, but I won’t go into that right now. One good thing about Dreamweaver is that it offers several nice templates to use when starting to build your website (if you can figure out how to use them). I went through a few before I decided to try the three-frame approach.

For those of you who don’t already know, frames is basically a way of embedding more than one web page into a single window. In my case, I would have three frames (i.e., web pages) that would make up any given page of my website. The frame at the top will just be the header; there won’t be a scrollbar, nor will there be any division lines between the header frame and the frame for the main text. It will be fluid. The viewer will only see a difference when he or she scrolls through the text of the main frame (which, obviously, will have a scroll bar, assuming the content is long enough to need one), because the header will always be visible. That’s a boon, actually, because it means the viewer will always be able to click the header to return to the main page, without having to scroll back to the top. This is the equivalent of using freeze panes in Microsoft Excel, if that helps you any.

The bottom frame will contain the menu, the navigation for the site. This will be a simple row of mostly text-based “icons,” created in PhotoShop, that will take the viewer from page to page. The potential hyptertext story, for example, would be one menu choice. The story would appear as its own page, in the main frame of the site. Again, the only scrollbar would be for this middle/main frame, where the content is. So, when the content gets long enough to need a scrollbar, one will appear; otherwise, the interface will be very simple.

This is probably really confusing for people who have never built a website before and/or who don’t know what frames looks like. So, I’ll end this post with a screenshot from a design I’ve been working on. Click on it to make it bigger.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #10: “Navigation is power of a limited sort – it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.”

– Todd Gitlin

Next up, if you haven’t already guessed: the navigation of my website.

As Vinny mentions on his navigation post, simplicity is key. I’ve thought a lot about different navigation methods, and I keep coming back to two time-tested ideas: (1) a horizontal header with a horizontal navigation bar underneath it, right along the top of the page or (2) a horizontal header at the top and a vertical navigation bar on the left. Some web designers choose to put the navigation bar on the right (or they utilize a left and right design). I’m not considering that at this point because I prefer the left side. Perhaps that decision is subconsciously linked to politics; more likely, it’s because I was raised in a country that reads from left to right.

However, as I was brainstorming, I decided to go out on a limb: I want to try putting my navigation bar on the bottom of the site. It’s a risky move, in a way, but it’s also a very familiar paradigm for the average computer user, who has to use a “start” menu or a dock of icons (both of which are at the bottom of the screen, by default) to launch his or her applications. I want my website to be easy to use, and I think that having the navigation bar on the bottom is just as easy as having it on the top—but it’s just different enough to be mildly refreshing and interesting, while still providing that sense of familiarity we’ve been discussing. If I do end up deciding on this design, I’ll want my navigation bar to look similar to a computer dock, so I’ll be creating buttons that remind the user of icons. In fact, I’ve already made a few in PhotoShop. In any case, these buttons will allow the user to move comfortably from page to page.

The biggest departure from this will/would be the hypertext story that I may or may not create (I just need time), because the links to navigate the story would be in the story itself, not on a menu. Seemingly random words would take the reader to a new experience, a new definition, a new page. The choices the reader makes would affect the story’s message, perhaps its actual outcome. Of course, this is all assuming I can come up with the right story concept.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #9: “Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.”

– On Writing by Stephen King

This week, we’re writing about our author/artist websites, which we will be designing and potentially publishing over the course of the next month. First up: the content of my site.

I’ve had a blog for almost a year now, one that I’ve actually managed to update on a fairly regular basis. I’ve tried to start blogs before but have never stuck with them. That said, since I’ve already got a blog started, I would like to try to incorporate it in some way. But that topic is better suited for my forthcoming posts on navigation and design, so I’ll go into more detail in the next two posts.

On this blog, I do have an “about me” page, a résumé page, a favorites page (favorite books, movies, and TV shows), and even a page to post completed/published stories, books, videos, and other projects (which I’ve done nothing with, as of yet). I’m trying to think of the best way to integrate all this information into the new website or if I even want to; I’m not sure just yet. My best bet may be to keep it on the blog and use the website for something else.

In any case, I’ve already started playing with Dreamweaver—and even tried out a couple of designs—but right now, my favorite design uses the controversial frames method, with a header on the top, a menu on the bottom, and the content in the middle (again, more to come on design and navigation in a future post). If that’s confusing, I’ll try to explain: these are all in the same browser window but are in separate “frames” (kind of like picture-in-picture for the Internet).

The content that appears in the middle frame, so far, consists of a page on which I can list my published works, an about me page, and even my entire blog (with the header and menu intact, in their respective frames, which doesn’t look great with the blog design but could be worse). I’m struggling to come up with more content for the middle frame of the home page, though, the one the reader sees first. As I said in a comment on Mike’s blog, I would also like to include a hypertext narrative of some kind (and maybe some other stories that I’ve written), but that will take a lot of time and effort to (1) write and (2) implement correctly; I suppose it’s something that will evolve over time, even if I have to work on it beyond the deadline for class.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #8: “Can you hear me now? Good.”

– Verizon ad campaign

At work today, I ran across an old phone stall (not a booth but a stall) that’s no longer in use, because Verizon and U.B. decided that our campus pay phones were too underutilized and that we couldn’t justify keeping them.

The phone and phone book (but not its cover) were both gone from the stall, and this sight inspired me to write a rough draft of a short short, which came to 183 words. But anyway, this thing, this stall, was just so

MT

That old pay phone stall is unoccupied, these days, just a black rectangular outline that used to say “Verizon” somewhere. The plastic case that previously held a phone book now hangs empty MT. Passersby think maybe it’s all a result of Baltimore theft, but I know the truth. Of economic woes and phone line underuse but mostly technological advancements. The pay phone is extinct and out-styled; the cellular mobile phone cell phone smartphone reigns supreme.

Just last year, though, I saw this dreaded-out guy, tangling long, messy locks around bony, brown fingers and speaking casually and playfully on the phone that’s not there anymore, as if unaware that oral aural conversation was going out of style.

Even then, we were headed toward this, the golden age of Twitter and texting txtng, where people actually know what SMS and MMS mean. And can’t live without them, either one.

The emptiness is upon us the MTness is upon us. Conversations of 160 characters 140 characters. And we’re so stupid; we just keep spilling nonsense.

“Bring us more, make it shorter!”

“Bring us shorter!”

“Shorter”

“Shrtr”

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #7: “I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

– The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter

This kid is nuts, not just because he went from an iPhone on AT&T to a highly unattractive Samsung candy bar on the Cricket network, but also because he gives his phone number out for the world to call/text him. It got so bad that he had to go to an unlimited plan, hence the switch to Cricket.

I suppose, in a way, it’s awesome that we live in a world where this kind of thing is possible. Where we can display our phone numbers for all to see and have a cell phone plan that allows for this without breaking the bank. In the grand scheme of things, $45 a month is a small price to pay for unlimited conversation. In a world where we can communicate via Internet with anyone—from any soil-covered and Internet-equipped corner of Earth—we can also speak directly to them on what is now becoming an old but trusty piece of technology: the phone. Specifically, the cellular/mobile phone.

On the other hand, it takes a lot of guts to put oneself out there like that because…this is a scary world we live in, and ironically, part of the scariness isthe technology itself and what it might mean in the future. Minority Report(which was first the title story in a book of science fiction stories by Phillip K. Dick) is not that far off. Of course, the other scary part is that some people are just plain crazy. Just read anything by Angela Carter, and you may think she was crazy—but really, she was just brilliant—and that was decades ago! Just imagine who’s out there now! On the streets of Baltimore, or Los Angeles, or London. Waiting to pounce on unsuspecting prey. And mug, rob, threaten. Hurt.

Me, I keep my “purse” close and my cell phone even closer. And it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of pepper spray. Where’s the techno pepper spray, Cricket? You’re certainly no Google Voice.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.