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I have not been updating much recently. This seems odd to me, as I used to post as often as half a dozen times a day.

It might be tempting to blame this on Pokemon, which I have recently started playing again and the playing of which has been interfering with my ability to hold conversations with people. But that would only apply to the past couple of days at most and I am talking about something of months.

(I started with Yellow, by the way, and so far have a little team in Vista counting of course a pikachu [Chikapu], rattata [Ratsy], pidgey [Perchy] and two nidorans, male and female [Nirodan and Nita, respectively].)

For the past several weeks I have been undertaking an industry placement for TAFE two days a week, which means working in a somewhat looking Catholic high school library. It has been interesting and fun. I got to do actual cataloging for a catalogue. Well, copy-cataloguing. Also designed and put up a display on this year's Olympics, shelving, cleaning shelves, some circulation (mostly the checking out of laptops to students, who seldom borrow books when I am looking) and end-processing. Also recently making sure signage is in the right place and designing new signs for the shelves.

This necessitated much colour-matching yesterday, to get the new signs with their number breakdown to match the colours of the existing signs pointing to the first hundred divisions. The other people there seemed to think this was a sort of brilliant idea so yay. Currently that is in an intermediate state of being cut to size before getting laminated, after I spent much of yesterday calculating the right font size to use to get the desired spacing, and other such sign-related activities.

The point of saying all this is that I have been doing work-type things for nearly the first time in my life and although for a while it was leaving me tired unto sleep once I got home (now less so to the point of being able to be productive ish in my own time again) and it has been interesting and varied and even in some cases fun. So far I have managed not to succumb to the occasional bouts of anxiety which have me wanting to whimper in a corner until it goes away and I have managed to do socialising a bit.

So. Library work. I can do this. I have also been finding that, if this is what library work is, it is not interesting enough for me to want to do indefinitely. Fortunately it is something I can do and not hate and even enjoy in parts, so I am not looking to abandon it even for the next several years barring some unexpected opportunity, and may well continue with it for a very long time. However, I will definitely be considering what else I might do that could provide me with more intellectual satisfaction.

Astronomy is something I have been wanting more and more to get back to. Doing so would mean really working on my mathematical skills, which I keep not doing. Still not sure how to do so, though I am sure it involves cutting down on the amount I feel obligated to do online and especially the things I do to shut off my brain and thought. Even if I do, I am doubtful I would want to pursue a career in research. It seems laden with a lot of distasteful scrabbling for funds and tenure and a whole lot of pressures not really related to learning about the universe.

Writing is something else. Despite my occasional mutterings about the end of my writing, I do not intend to give it up. I am less focused these days on the idea of publication, and even if I am published it is unlikely I would be so successful and prolific that I would be able to write full-time. It might however provide a diversion from work which would satisfy me. I might find, too, this 'satisfaction' thing in other aspects of my life which I do not expect.

Satisfy, that is a curious sort of word to use. I do not imagine myself ever being satisfied in life, experiencing contentment without ambition. But I might apply that word to the pursuit of things, to engagement with what I am doing, to the journey itself even if no destination can quite compare.

While writing this I have been thinking about my recent decline in posting. There have been ideas.

One is that I am currently in three romantic relationships and quite possibly this has the effect of socially saturating me. There are people (not limited to those I am in relationships with, though nearly so) who are willing to talk to me on a near-daily basis in interesting ways. I do not have much desire to seek out social contact outside what I already have - the main reason at present is the inconvenience of the hours, which leave me often awake with no one about.

Another is that posting is a habit and a mindset, and one I have fallen out of. More than once over the past few weeks I have begun writing a post only to lose heart soon after. I was a bit depressed in the first half of the year and this may have had an effect.

The last one in this little list is that I have been doing such things as going to classes and this industry placement, and I find such activities exhausting beyond their content. Often the first day after these (Tuonday and Sriday currently) I spend decompressing, not doing much at all beyond recovery. So this is going to cut into what I actually do in my free time, although it seems to be improving.

And that seems to be all for now.

I've been thinking increasingly often of what's next for the site. While there's nothing technically wrong with deninet's current incarnation, the underlying purpose is in serious need of refinement.

Deninet 1.0 through 3.0 were geared  toward content delivary of first Denizen Soft's, and then Denizen Entertainment's projects. Due to various circumstances -- life, work, my own ineptitude -- none of those projects have yet come to fruition. Toward the end of deninet 3.0, it became obvious that we needed a proper framework to help us create, manage, and publish our projects. 

Deninet 4.0 was the birth of "The Internet Idea Database", a web application geared toward communal development and tracking of ideas. I spent a great deal of time on Gazelle, the software powering the Idea Database. I still love the concept of communal idea development including our sales tagline of "Invent, Share, Expand".

Gazelle wasn't the most complicated software project I've attempted (InterLock still holds that title), although it had plenty of problems of its own. In Gazelle, Ideas (big 'I') were a fundamental unit of content. Ideas were made of Versions, and contained the actual content of the idea itself. Versions were submitted to the community; authors and others contibuted Thoughts to extend or refine the Idea. Those who liked a particular thought could vote on the thought. When the author is satisfied, they considered the submitted Thoughts and published a new Version. Authors weren't required to change their Idea based on community suggestions, they retained complete control of the Idea's development. Ideas could be grouped at a higher level via Channels, which often reflected a sense of a whole project. 

On paper, the concept looks wonderful. Individuals and organizations can post and track ideas throughout the entire development lifecycle. Once we had a working version of Gazelle, the Idea Database became a useful tool for my own projects. There were, unfortunately, a huge number of problems with the system. There was very little security within the framework. All Ideas were left wide open to the entire site. This reflected my high-minded idealism at the time,  today I just shake my head my nievate. Gazelle itself was a nightmare to extend. Each new content type required new code. Everything was library and no engine -- there was no dynamic way to organize content display. 

The biggest mistake I had made with it, unfortunately, was I began to think of the Idea Database as a generalized content manager. News and blog posts co-mingled with Ideas proper resulting in confusion. In retrospect, I probably did it to reduce the amount of content types within the framework as well as gain the functionality Ideas provided.

Six months after the "completion" of Gazelle, I dumped the entire project. I hated to do so after investing nearly two years of my evenings developing the thing, but I felt it was really the best choice. I had come to the realization that I'd never be able to keep up Gazelle while attempting to work on Paper Girl. There were fundamental problems with the design, and I didn't have the knowledge, expertise, let alone time to write them myself. After investigating my options -- as well as rewriting the framework entirely -- I selected the open-source content manager Drupal to power the next version of deninet.

Deninet 5.0r was the first version of the site to run the new content manager. The site also completely lost it's Creative Cooperative bent and became my own personal domain. My failure to perfect the Idea Database and attract interested people to the concept led me to this decision. Interestingly, once the whole "Were a real company, honest!" charade was dropped, the site began to swell with content. Instead of being project or idea centric, I uploaded my artwork, some writing, and began writing posting blog entries to the main page. I could, of course, publish more complex creative works from the site if and when I ever came to that juncture.

Then a curious thing happened a few months ago. I was no longer the only active person on the site. This both caused me excitement and concern. First of all, deninet 5.1 was designed to be a single user site. While I kept multiple users in mind, there were critical places where it began to break down. The image gallery, for example, isn't set up for multiple users. Even though blog posts are nicely separated, the "river of news" main page is not terribly effective. 

Even more curious was the fact that I was no longer the only person wishing for a Creative Cooperative. Indeed, there seems to be a strong desire to refine the site and reclaim the purpose I had thrown away with deninet 4.0. Although the desire was there, I haven't really been in the position to research our options.

Looking back at the history of the site, certainly have gained a sense of what was good, and what was a mistake. Right now, I'm looking at the Idea Database topology I described above with scheming eye. Yes, it was a mistake to shoehorn all content management into the concept. It may have also been a mistake for me to write the management system myself. As one person, I can only write so much. Developing a new CMS from the ground up simply takes too much time. Gazelle's internal lack of generalization also complicated things unnecessarily. Switching to Drupal, however, saved me huge amounts of development time and added many new features.

What if, I began asking myself this afternoon, I used Drupal to power the Idea Database? We would certainly gain a powerful backend with a preexisting development community. We would only be responsible for what fulfills our goals as an organization. Are Ideas as laid out in the topology, I thought, enough to fulfill the ends of a "creative cooperative"? This is a trickier question. While I believe that the Idea Database topology will be part of our end goals, I very much down it will be enough to fill the project management role required to bring make ideas manifest. There's a lot I have yet to investigate.

I very much doubt that deninet will jump from 5.2 to 6.0 directly. There's a lot of new technology and refinements required in order to get to that point. The present site needs to be updated to the latest version of Drupal and key features made available to all users. There are several more minor releases in our future before we get that far. I for one am very much excited to see how the site will evolve.

Being the product of a species without Broca's
Brain or similar neurolinguistic centers, Spoken
Cat has a much simpler syntactic structure than
human languages, with a simplified grammar. Spoken
Cat is holophrasic, in that a single utterance can
convey an entire spoken sentence in human-derived
languages (particularly those of the Indo-European
family). In addition, the radically different
mouth morphology of cats means that vocalizations
have a different quality, and it can be difficult
for an untrained listener to differentiate
specific morphemes or even phonemes from the
apparent noise.
In part, this is because cats lack the consonantal
range found in even the most liquid of human
languages, and have correspondingly much greater
capacity to make vowel sounds.

Standard
orthographic methods entirely fail for
transliterating Spoken Cat into purely English
letters; in addition to the unclear distinction
between vowel types (one that clears up
substantially if using International Phonetic
Alphabet; but even this sophistication is geared
toward possible human articulation), Spoken
Cat makes considerable use of pitch (as in Chinese
languages), real-world context (as in most
languages with ostensibly "simple" grammar), idiom
(as in any tongue with a restricted vocabulary)
and syllable stress to convey additional layers of
meaning.
To further complicate matters for the would-be
interpreter, Spoken Cat has a very narrow
etymological range. Being less sentient on the
whole than humans (see Sarasti et al for
some reasons why this is not a terrible
disadvantage), domestic felines have fewer overt
reasons to refer to individuals. Feline social
relationships are not as simple as often
stereotyped, and indeed a great deal of
individuality governs every possible interaction
of pair or gestalt; however, as most of this can
be conveyed adequately without language, there was
never any need to develop a vocabulary for it.

Thus, the etymological roots of every word in
Spoken Cat are recent and obvious, for they derive
from the most pressing things in every cat's
existence: mother, interesting things, hunting and killing, and the self. Being terribly fastidious and
instinctively attentive to matters of etiquette,
any overt reference to food or the elimination
thereof is considered so gauche as to be utterly
taboo. Similar rules hold for sexual conduct, the
only exceptions being in the ritual dialect used
by female cats experiencing oestrus (and otherwise
ignored; it is considered the height of
boorishness to even speak of it).

For a mostly-
nonsentient species, this removes several rich
sources of expression that human languages rely
upon heavily for their most basic expressions of
emotion, and any metaphors associated with them.
What is left?
It can in fact be shown that most feline words
derive etymologically from "Mom!". Indeed, the
basic morpheme is often entirely unaltered in
sentences with quite different meanings (for
instance, the word written that way in clumsy
English letters could mean things as distinct as
"I want some of what you have there" to "I am
quite annoyed with the way you have picked me up
and will surely flay the hide from your arms if
you do not extricate me from my predicament,
forthwith", depending of course upon tone, vocal
stress, context and numerous other factors.

Grammar of Spoken Cat

As mentioned previously, Spoken Cat is holophrastic; however, the degree to which it expresses this attribute makes any comparable human language seem quite disunited in structure. The rule, basically unalterable, is that one vocal utterance equates to one whole thought, whether it be as simple as "I am sleepy" or as complex as "I do not quite wish to admit that I enjoy your affection, but nonetheless subtly indicate my approval so that you are moved to continue." Exceptions to this rule are not readily forthcoming; while the author admits to having no fluency in Spoken Cat herself, she does have considerable experience living with native, monolingual speakers. There is no need whatsoever for attention to word order, articles, positional modifiers, tense, case, inflection or grammatical gender of any sort.

Orthography
 

A consistent orthographic system for Spoken Cat does not exist; in addition, numerous challenges await any putative creator of same. The presence distinct voice structures in the upper, lower and middle throat defies easy human placement into the "glottal" category; likewise, the presence of nasal vowels and unique trills and plosives, as well as the corresponding lack of labial or alvaeolar articulation, make easy transcription more or less impossible. There are at least eighteen distinct vocal tones of consistent manner, though this number is disputed by some, and the position of the tongue and any throat articulation points in a word further alters the resulting vocalization. To that end, the following dictionary will attempt to transcribe cat utterances according to literal meaning, followed by a translation into their loose semantic equivalent in English.

Vocabulary

"Mom!" = "Hello!"

"Mom. Mom. Mom." = "Please give me some [of that thing you have, an oblique and childlike reference to food]."

"Moooom..." = "Please stop what you are doing."

"Mooom!" = "I am extraordinary pleased at the way you are scritching my ears."

"...mom?...mom..." = "Oh, what a surprise to be petted by you while I was sound asleep. I suppose I do not really mind."

"Moooom!" = "Put me down this instant or suffer the consequences."

"Mooooom...! Mooooom...!" = "How can you be so cruel as to shut me out of the room you are in? I will surely whither if you do not admit me passage this instant."

"Mooom...?" = "What are you doing? I wish to see."

"Mom. Mom. Mom!" = "Give me that toy you are dangling just out of reach. It is imperative you allow me to bite it at once."

"Mom?" = "Is anybody there?" / "I will now converse with you because you seem to be speaking a strange, unfeline language at me and I wish to be polite.

"Oooh." = "I see something that can surely be caught and tortured for several hours prior to killing it solely for my amusement."

Some thoughts by Kelly McCullough on one's priorities as a reader versus those as a writer.

 In summary, she lists seven categories (plot, prose, description, dialogue, character, world, and wit) and then ranks them according to her tastes as a consumer of fiction, then as an author of same. Her third list, that of a professional, was most interesting to me: I know that professional fiction writers have to make concessions for the sake of business, but beyond that her ranks in this group are based on common sense as well (i.e., your craftsmanship has to be decent, unless you're Dan Brown). 

 Not being a professional myself, I can't comment on the final grouping (though I suspect that studying it would help me in my own writing); however, here are my priority lists as a reader, and as a writer:

 Reading:

1. World
2. Prose
3. Dialogue
4. Character
5. Story/plot
6. Wit
7. Description

 Writing:

1. Character
2. World
3. Prose
4. Plot
5. Dialogue
6. Wit
7. Description

 As a consumer of fiction, I find that the setting alone can often redeem a story for me. I'm also very responsive to strong prose, regardless of individual style -- in fact, I seem to react better to very quirky, purple or disjointedly distinctive voices author voice (which also goes a long way toward explaining my taste in roleplaying games, and why independent titles like Polaris or Lacuna tickle me so). Especially if the author has a mythic bent, the prose and world can become intertwined (which also explains my love of Pratchett and Tom Holt).

 As an author, I need a strong sense of my setting (extremely detailed) or I feel lost; however, even that is fairly useless without a solid character. The top four items on that list describe the ones I struggle with most; once I have them fairly solidly, the dialogue, wit and description flow from there. I've noticed that I'm actually fairly lousy at technical descriptions, which is probably somewhat damning for a frequent writer of hard-SF; however, I can synthesize better description by working it into prose. Whether reading or writing, my imagination supplies the visual details, and I seem to extract those cues from the writing itself rather than literal descriptive paragraphs (which may be why some novels I should logically enjoy, given my tastes, fall flat because they're so hard to visualize). Plot is still a weak point for me: without a solid sense of who, where and how to word it, I seem to find it hard to confidently outline what happened...in this regard, I'm still firmly a novice. I wonder if there are any workshops I could attend.

I feel I owe everyone an apology for my insensitive (if honest) query in my last post. I obviously wasn't as ponderous as I usually expect of me, and instead let my frustration and lack of ability to act influence my writing.

Several commentors made excellent point both on, and off the comment threads. One pointed out quiet insightfully that even thought we live with the mistakes of previous generations, we also tend to make our own mistakes of similar gravity. It's easy when one is frustrated to point fingers at everyone else and scream, "Stop fucking things up for me!" This neglects the mess people often make for themselves. Furthermore, the same commentor points out that the available data at the time didn't properly communicate the implications of problems like larger families or burning fossil fuels. 

Perhaps for the first time in civilized history, humanity is dealing with a complex system on a scale we are only beginning to grasp. Chaos theory, memetic evolution, emergence found in weather patterns, alteration of the climate -- all systems we can only begin to simulate with only the most powerful systems on the planet. Most people have a difficult enough time trying to figure out a personal budget let alone fathom what the beat of a butterfly's wings are capable of producing. Maslow's triangle of needs limiting our scope.

Back when I believed in things such as fate, I often wondered what I could do to help prevent the coming downfall of humanity. I'm not terribly skilled in mathematics, or biology, or chemistry. I tried each, of course, as I'm have a love of knowledge. It was, however, only with computers I felt I had skill or any sort of future. From a practical standpoint, the information technology industry is terribly wasteful. Entire landfills compose of old and broken cell phones. Toxic chemicals are used to produce LCDs and etch silicon substrate. Operating systems and hardware are designed around the concept of a constant, cheap power supply, and are no where nearly optimized for power-savings. How can I help? The simple fact is that I'm having enough trouble getting my life in order to say nothing of reducing my carbon footprint.

I'm no better than all the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.

I tend to view myself as a fixer, a cerebral sort of mechanic with a mind full of learning, culture, and cheesy movies. With that world-view, it's difficult for me to sit idling back when things are obviously broken. It's not just that I want to fix it, it's that I'm compelled to fix it. When I'm unable to fix something, it's terribly frustrating to me. Lately, I've been hearing more and more about how seeming everything is breaking. A prominent biologist claims we're on the cusp of a 6th great extinction event. The oceanic dead zones are expanding. Crops fail and energy prices skyrocket. It's not difficult to look at each as a piece of a larger complex system on the edge of collapse. And I can't fix it. 

Hell, I can't even warn people about it by writing or so much as win a political argument. I'm rubbish at both. If I wasn't struggling to support my own Pyramid of Needs, I'd have more time sit and contemplate and research. Perhaps then I could construct a convincing argument. Or maybe not.

When chatting about this on IM with a friend, she conveyed something telling. "We're in a struggle with stupid people," she typed. A century ago, people thought that nature was infinite and boundless. If we clear-cut the forests, it wouldn't matter as there are more forests. Cue the Amazon Rain Forest. How much of that are we still losing today as others support their Pyramid of Needs? "The problem is, there are more stupid people, and they don't want to listen." The culture of this nation (and increasingly other nations) honor and hail the stupid, and denigrate the intelligent. Anti-intellectualism runs rampant world-wide. After all, no one wants to be thought of stupid, nor does any one want to listen to prognostications of doom.

This incident is tangential to a key personal observation, but it's time for me to continue my Atlas and the Pyramid routine.