This page has a rather fascinating story of the development of the game Adventure. It was written by Will Crowther (who was at BBN writing the code for some of the first routers on the ARPAnet at the time) and then picked up and embellished by Don Woods. As the story goes, Woods sent a spam mail to crowther@every.computer.on.the.internet to try and find Crowther. Not bad. It worked in those days. (unix geek aside: a “wall” in Unix is short for Write All. Send a message to everyone on the system.)

I don’t know if you’ve played Adventure but if you can get this java applet to load, you can play it in a web browser. It’s pretty authentic, with Courier monospace type and everything. A while ago I wrote about how nuts I was about the game Wizardry. Well, I suppose if I’d been around a computer a little earlier I woulda gone crazy on this game. As it was, Defender and Donkey Kong made it look pretty boring.

Do de dooo. I made my little posterchild app load, write, and parse .ini configuration files today. Now I have state!

I'm shutting off autoplay on that damn Aphex Twin sample. It's driving me nuts.

So far on my programming project, (I'm calling it 'posterchild') I spend most of my time worrying about the codepages and escaping of specialized markup or punctuation characters. Separating content from design - or designing the separation of the separation. This is disappointing. I wish I was designing new ways to structure my content and narratives. To provide interesting context for the reader. To make recycling the garbage I've already written easier for anyone. As I tried to mention last week, this is the fault of the current crop of X related technologies. XML etc force me to process textual information with tools the equivalent of assembly language programming.

Unicode is a pretty dry subject and it's something that software engineers in charge of localization have only been forced to deal with. But I, as a not-so-humble writer, if I want to do something as simple as have curly quotes in my writing, or make sure a tool I was using to compose a piece wasn't inserting characters in my writing that would not display on someone else's computer, have to wallow in the details of Unicode or XSLT syntax.

Do you think this is a common thing for writers to deal with? Hell no. Most of them don't even have the most recent copy of Word. In the old days you had grunts to rework and misinterpret your type and/or handwriting before publishing. Think about what happened to James Joyce: fuckups who can't grok some cutting-edge shit creating entire industries of critical analysis bent on figuring out the real intentions of the writer.

I don't care about internationalization of my writing. Maybe that will matter some day but not now. I'm just doing it for the punctuation and IN-LINE MARKUP. Oh, the place that "standardization" has got us to in regard to in-line markup is one of the best yet! Most XML proponents claim that I, as a writer, (because of some 9 year-old girl that's reading my shit in Braille by the fire in a cabin in the woods), don't really want *bold* text, I want <strong> text. They say that bold is just plain wrong. It has no semantics. What bullshit. They say, "It is the job of the author to indicate the meaning and let the rendering device determine the best way to communicate the meaning of the words." That makes sense on some levels but I just want my texts to be text. If you know how to use it, text is rich enough. I'm a professional after all and I put a lot of time into rearranging words.

They (and I mean the SGML and W3C nerds that spec'd this shit out) build the tools assuming I'm some stupid "knowledge worker" writing a software manual who tries to use Word like it's a typewriter. These standards are reactionary. Because, I admit it, there are a lot of dumb people out there, bastardizing poor little web standards. But have you looked at their web pages? They suck. I can immediately spot your basic weak-ass CSS-driven box-model crap. This is the hand-me-down toolset that the poor artist gets from the business world. Some of it is genuinely soul-sucking and evil. Well, I won't give up just because it's hard. Now that I know how much a computer mangles type and that text files have a codec the same way computer video and audio have codecs, I can't ignore it. Encoding schemes are central tools to a digital artist.

I thought XML was the magic high level text encoding scheme I was waiting for. It does allow a writer to boost the meaning in their words, layering meta information over a narrative, placing hooks into the stream of words that can used later for undiscovered purposes. Its descriptive power is one level higher than HTML, and I don't have to litter my writing with programming calls to a web browser. (What a revolution!!) Everybody seems to be considering it the preferred archival format because it is text-based and human readable. But XML was the asshole that drug Unicode, and XSLT (the most fucked-up code I've seen since my attempts at 16-bit Windows GUI programming in C) in front of my face. I know of no way to work with Unicode except through programming languages. I suppose you could script a text editor to open all your files and then convert the codepages and re-save them as UTF-whatever the hell. But I doubt it would work.

XML has its own encoding problems that are !< Unicode, but the Unicode thing was something that I'd never anticipated. Now I have to escape Unicode strings into browser understandable general entities and I have to escape HTML markup inside of XML markup and I have to escape XML markup inside of XSTL markup and I have to escape XSLT markup inside of Python code. That's all so I can print the apostrophe in the first word of this sentence. There is no intelligence built into the layers. (I should mention that in the present entry, this is not exactly the case: I've decided to do this entry in UTF-8 but only utilizing "lower 128 ASCII" punctuation marks so one level of those escape sequences is reduced. Whew!) In networking these things take care of themselves: Ethernet and IP and Winsock and HTML use trUE layer abstraction. The hard stuff is done by driver programmers who manage the transition between layers. But now I'm that driver programmer.

>>> print 'I’ve had it'.encode("html-utf-8")

I&#226;&#128;&#153;ve had it

In text processing, the distinctions I make go from the categorical difference between this being a rant and a review, the semantic difference of a summary paragraph and a body paragraph, down to the difference between how many bytes of computer memory are allocated to represent the RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. That html-utf-8 codec listed above is obviously doing some bad byte allocation. It should have been I&#8217;ve had it. But what are you going to do? I downloaded it off some ftp server at Xerox PARC and there was NO documentation and this is the only method I've found for escaping Unicode characters into HTML entities that are above ASCII 127.

I guarantee you that nobody is going to do this for me. I don't want to count how many times I've had to remove hard line-breaks from a piece of text because it went through email or some text editor. I don't think most people know that you can do a search and replace on a piece of formatting like an end-of-line in Word but you can. Not to mention the difference between Unix and Windows line breaks.

On a previous attempt at redesigning my website I ran into Cascading Style Sheets and Netscape 4.x and it sent me reeling. I vowed to never go near HTML again and never to trust "rendering devices". Maybe this is why there are no abstraction layers between my rants and memory registers. If I trusted the next level down or up it would be fine but when you've got shit like HTML and Netscape to work with....well, fuck that. I trust Ethernet. The guys who designed that (my man Richard Johnson!) made it so what you put in one end of the pipe came out the other. Wow, how novel.

I’ve had this new Mountain Goats song blowing wind into my wings for the last few days and I haven’t learned or played a song on guitar for a while so today I sat down and did it. But first I played no. 8 “Drain You” and no. 9 “Lounge Act” off _Nevermind_ to get warmed up. (them songs are 2 of my top 5 Nirvana songs but they don’t get much credit so I want to say now that if you haven’t listened to that Butch Viggered wall of screeching bliss in a while, you will find that these two in particular (I got this friend you see..) impart a nice affect to your demeanor)

So after fully rockin I sat down with a sweet new number off _All Hail West Texas_ (recently discussed in the local paper) called “Pink and Blue”. I think it’s the standout on the record. I want everyone to hear it. I put the phone up to my laptop speaker so my friend Rose could be summarily melted by its story of a man and his newborn twins. John does the song in standard MG’s style, on his ten year-old Panasonic RXFT500 boombox with its patented massive wheel grind in the cassette transport mechanism. He makes a lengthy point of its importance to his method and details its resurrection in the liner notes.

The microphone on my laptop is right above the cooling fan which spins up while the hard drive clicks away when I try to record but in the spirit of that old Panasonic, I figured I’d bellow into the slit on top of my Dell and post a rendition of “Pink and Blue”. I wanted everybody to hear John’s version of course, and even though you can probably find it on the internet in about 30 seconds, I didn’t want to just rip and post it here, on my legitimate, honest, website. primco.org: a mulitmedia powerhouse.

So here’s it is “with fan noise included”. I guess you'll have to stop the Aphex Twin sample from playing in order to hear it. Writing that, and suddenly becoming aware of the context into which I'm posting this is more than a little scary.

I have no idea what kind of tree he’s referring to in the first stanza, that’s a guess. And I don’t know what “reception sticks” are either but that’s what I heard.

E  D         A   B            E   D
Wind out of Oklahoma this morning
              A       B        E  D
Smelled like blood an smoke
                   A        B
And the crows discuss their future in the
F#                  A         B        E
branches of their Louisiana ?Lybrook?
     D        A          B
The limbs are strong and heavy and it’s
E      D           A    B    E
Leaves are all aglow
D                  A            B
And the branches brush the upper air
        F#                           A        B
But the roots reach down to were the bad people go

    A                   B                  E
And what will I do with you, pink and blue
F#    A
True gold.
B          E    D  A  B....
Nine days old.

E D               A   B
Nice new clothes on you
        E      D             A          B
And an old cardboard produce box for a cradle
   E       D               A    B
I mash some bananas in a coffee cup
         F#                 A        B
And I fed you there at the kitchen table
E    D               A      B
Crows outside complaining about the
E     D               A  B       E
Finer points of local politics
       D          A          B
Strange wind all full of new smells
F#                 A       B
Rust and fur and reception sticks

And what will I do with you, pink and blue
True gold.
Nine days old.

Background sounds are usually hideous and annoying. If you've got the right shit, you're listening to "4" by Aphex Twin. Right now I'm drunk and I feel strongly enough about this piece of music to break the golden rule and shove http audio down your throat.