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Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2017 1:48
by eMTe
"When Maciek Trybuszewski was thirty three he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom’s vortex and mystery in the sky’s dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation."

What a marvellous piece of prose and philosophy. A little hacked of course.

Randolph puzzle - who is the author of the above section?

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2017 6:52
by Tormuse
eMTe wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2017 1:48 Randolph puzzle - who is the author of the above section?
I cheated and used Google to look it up. :P It doesn't surprise me that HP Lovecraft would write something like that, considering that he's best known for writing about fictional creatures so horrible, that the mere concept of their existence is enough to drive people insane. It also doesn't surprise me that you would be quoting him, eMTe. :D

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 3:42
by eMTe
Well, the problem with Lovecraft is that if you read more about his life (great biography by ST Joshi - HINT HINT) is that you receive clear knowledge that his prose is a simple result of his rl.

He wasn't a complete recluse, but he was, in common terms, odd. He was oversensitive (many people are), he had bad dreams (many people have; Darkseed, ah), his marriage failed (many people's have), he has inherited huge sums of money (maybe not majority people now, but it's not uncommon in developed countries). Anyway, all these factors combined, he's been sort of doomed.

Now, this knowledge overshadows his prose a bit. Simply because of what he was aware - that knowledge kills amazement. Now, when we know that L's (and not only his) weird visions are born either of his internal and perfectly biological/physical fears or mental disorders or intoxication or wrongly developed social interactions or poorly/wrongly understood language or scientific discoveries - there's nothing to pursue, really. Tabula rasa has become tabula plena. Lovecraft, Wittgenstein are no longer interesting, because their fears, thoughts are now widely if not understood, then at least wildly chased.

Houellebecq is still a mystery, on the contrary. Nobody knows if what he writes or what he thinks is some kind of play that Cortazar played with his readers or if he's really insane or is it marketing strategy by the publishing company. Still, the mystery is the key, we don't know who he is and why he writes what he writes, which proves a bit that "mystery" in common understanding is what drives the people towards other people or objects - they seek understanding, "truths", some kind of "fulfillment" (there was this great Polish poet, Norwid, who came to the conclusion that everything in the human culture is born of the feeling of "lacking something" - could be anything, love, knowledge, just if you lack something you pursue it, when you're fulfilled you're over.

In the internet world, personally, as rl human being, I've learned that I can write and read practically anything, randomly. It's over, I mean internet, it no longer counts.

Unless you believe that Sopranos is Godfather, then you do.

Or it does, who knows.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 4:59
by eMTe
eMTe wrote: Wed May 03, 2017 3:42 Well, the problem with Lovecraft is that if you read more about his life (great biography by ST Joshi - HINT HINT) is that you receive clear knowledge that his prose is a simple result of his rl.

He wasn't a complete recluse, but he was, in common terms, odd. He was oversensitive (many people are), he had bad dreams (many people have; Darkseed, ah), his marriage failed (many people's have), he has inherited huge sums of money (maybe not majority people now, but it's not uncommon in developed countries). Anyway, all these factors combined, he's been sort of doomed.

Now, this knowledge overshadows his prose a bit. Simply because of what he was aware - that knowledge kills amazement. Now, when we know that L's (and not only his) weird visions are born either of his internal and perfectly biological/physical fears or mental disorders or intoxication or wrongly developed social interactions or poorly/wrongly understood language or scientific discoveries - there's nothing to pursue, really. Tabula rasa has become tabula plena. Lovecraft, Wittgenstein are no longer interesting, because their fears, thoughts are now widely if not understood, then at least wildly chased.

Houellebecq is still a mystery, on the contrary. Nobody knows if what he writes or what he thinks is some kind of play that Cortazar played with his readers or if he's really insane or is it marketing strategy by the publishing company. Still, the mystery is the key, we don't know who he is and why he writes what he writes, which proves a bit that "mystery" in common understanding is what drives the people towards other people or objects - they seek understanding, "truths", some kind of "fulfillment" (there was this great Polish poet, Norwid, who came to the conclusion that everything in the human culture is born of the feeling of "lacking something" - could be anything, love, knowledge, just if you lack something you pursue it, when you're fulfilled you're over.

In the internet world, personally, as rl human being, I've learned that I can write and read practically anything, randomly. It's over, I mean internet, it no longer counts.

Unless you believe that Sopranos is Godfather, then you do.

Or it is, who knows.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 17:00
by Ancsur2002
Tormuse wrote: Sat Apr 15, 2017 6:52 so horrible, that the mere concept of their existence is enough to drive people insane
Seems like you're talking about my everyday nightmares... I should write horror movies or something :sigh: wish I could write...

On another note, I'm hungry and have almost no food at home (bad planning). Who has food for me?

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 19:15
by Tormuse
Sorry to hear about the nightmares. :( *Hugs* Well... if you can't write, maybe you can channel it into other creative means? Like music? Or building some kind of monstrosity in Minecraft? :D (or similar building game?)

As for food, I just made some borscht the other day and I daresay that it came out pretty good. :) *Offers a bowl of borscht*

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Fri May 12, 2017 22:47
by Ancsur2002
Aaaww :) Thank you for the hugs and the borscht :)

:nom nom:

And I was also thinking about making music... I just have to save up for a midi keyboard or something like that :) but I already have plans in my head

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Sat May 13, 2017 0:24
by jayenkai
I've been using the KORG Gadget app for music composition, on iPad, since it's 2014 release.
Everything here listed as 2014 onwards was done with it.
I"m quite happy with it!

.. no Midi required!

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 21:25
by eMTe
Red barszcz or white barszcz? 8)

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2017 18:26
by Tormuse
The red kind. I'll be sure to post a picture of it the next time I make some. :) It looks weird, but it's surprisingly tasty! :)

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2017 18:12
by eMTe
Without sour cream I hope. I used to vomit this kind of soup in the kindergarten.

They say you don't remember ugly memories (except when they return in dreams), but vomiting the so-called "Ukrainian barszcz" with sour cream (smetana) added is one of the few memories I have from kindergarten.

Up to this day, if you visit dirty bars, usually in smaller towns, you will eat virtually every soup, except broth maybe, with sour cream added. I never really dug the subject, but from what I've read it's some kind of culinary atavism from pre-war times when people ate as much fat as possible, in case of war or particularly cold winter. Just like the animals. My grandma used to fry everything using lard, for example scrambled eggs.

Lard is tasty, don't misunderstand me, I like to eat fresh bread with big fatty lump of lard. Just, adding fat to everything is kind of.. backwardish. Well, I said it!

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Tue Jun 20, 2017 7:00
by Tormuse
I just realized that I never replied to this and ate the last of the borscht that I made yesterday! :o Oops! I'll have to take a picture of borscht another time, I guess. :)

For the record, I didn't put sour cream in it, even though my grandmother's original recipe called for it. I don't keep cream of any kind in my home, so I put soy milk in instead, which gives it an interesting texture and still tastes quite good and has the added benefit of making it totally vegan for anyone who's into that sort of thing. :) (I'm not actually vegan; I don't think I could ever give up meat... or cheese!) :D

And yeah, I remember when I visited Hungary a few years back that sour cream seemed to be a popular addition to a lot of foods; I think it's an Eastern European thing. :)

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2017 3:08
by eMTe
I created a post of unusual beauty yesterday, starting from dairy milk use by pregnant women and ending on a meaning of life, pursuing topics of evolution (I remember writing something about Scythe killing me for talking about it again), cybersex, Finland, Phil Collins, alcoholism, globalisation, human relationships and other hollistic unimportant issues, but something went wrong with the browser and I lost it.

Well, I said it once, letters unwritten (or better to say, undelivered) are the most important, crucial, whatever.

Now, when I'm playing with my short memory, I think I wanted to ask people who are still active here what are their opinions on the internet evolution. My first contact with internet came sometime around 1999/2000 I believe and it was through my mother (RIP). She told me about this new way of interactions between people and also she established the first email address I have ever used (I still use it occasionally for oddish purposes) - my father has already becoming a recluse at a time and I still believe to this day that females (including mothers) are more prone to innovations and general progress

Anyway, it's very interesting how I moved from a virgin Altavista browser user towards an abusive alcoholic manipulative troll.

There were some other issues I probably pursued, but I can't really remember them now. I'm flying to Crete tomorrow btw, my first stop on a Indiana Jones IV tour. Basically, I have to visit Azores, Iceland, Monaco, Algiers, Crete and Thera (Santorini). NY excluded as the true adventure never really happened there.

Believe me that the trip itself is not as much fascinating as seeing the face of the Cretean who will ask me what I am doing here.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2017 6:35
by Railwaymodeler
Internet evolution is something that interests me. In some ways, visually speaking, it has greatly evolved. I remember the first website I built around 2002. A Geocities site, built with Frontpage (Making FP sites work in Geocities sure was interesting!) and it certainly looked the part of a site from the era. No fancy effects, photos had borders around the edges (It was a site to show my railfan photography), but I suppose "Utilitarian" would be a way to describe it.

Nowadays, with faster internet connections and faster computers, pages don't have to be built to load over slow dialup connections. But I think web developers and software programmers have lost touch with being able to write tight, efficient, compact code. Back when I was more active in the IT field I had done some web development. My personal sites I used to have were sort of testing grounds for new themes and ideas. I actually took pride in writing efficient pages. One of my customers needed a site that would load on slow rural internet connections, I was able to build it. It looked good, and loaded twice as fast as his competitors sites.

Of course, it's the people of the internet that have changed. Go ask any kid nowadays what "Nettiquite" is. They probably do not know. Trolls, bullies, frauds, of course, existed since the beginning, but it seems to be much more common now. I think with sites like Facebook (Dumping my FB account was the best thing I ever did for myself!) people have normalized a certain amount of anonymity online, of course more perceived than actual, but are thus more likely to act obnoxious and rotten than they will in real life. I think this says more about human nature than I would care to acknowledge. That humanity might just be fundamentally screwed up, like Earth is the quarrantine zone for the universe or something.

As I told someone a few days ago "I don't need this drama or BS. I just want to sit here and build and fix trains all day".

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2017 12:38
by jayenkai
I recently rewrote my entire forum from scratch (socoder.net - Took about 2 months!!) and the size of each page did indeed worry me somewhat.

A single page can typically be about 50Kb, which doesn't sound "too much" (realistically a few seconds over a 56k modem)

But that's not all.
There's the .css and associated images, the javascript files, and then the fact that each page includes a mini gallery of the last 10 uploaded images, along with user avatars and things like that on actual forum page content.

But I tried my hardest!!
For what it's worth, the css, upload gallery and avatars tend to be cached, so jumping from page to page is usually just the page itself that gets loaded afresh.

.. But I know I'm in the minority for worrying about this sort of thing. Not all web-devs would give a munky.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 2:42
by Railwaymodeler
I also worry about such things. I am in charge of the websites for the hobby shop, and Bob (Shop owner) specifically wanted to keep the same look for his site that he's had since the late 1990s. Tables with visible borders, a light marble background - with the 10px thick table borders, it does convey the look of an old Roman building. But all this is intentional. Bob and I run an "Old Fashioned" hobby shop, the kind where you can come in, shoot the breeze for a while, have some coffee with us, that sort of thing. The opposite of a "Hurry up and buy something" mentality. So keeping in line with the shop's aims, and the feel of the shop itself, which is close to stepping into a time machine and into a hobby shop of decades ago, we keep the site looking old style too.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:17
by Zyx
Nowadays, with faster internet connections and faster computers, pages don't have to be built to load over slow dialup connections.
Then smartphones and the developing world getting internet on their phones happened. The Google front page is optimized to fit on a lower level to as few TCP/IP packets as possible. The web devs who work for companies that make their money online really do care about this stuff, because the ever-present Google and its search results punish sites that don't load fast on mobile devices.

But the internet has changed. Or, more accurately the user base got much heterogeneous. The old guard were more identical with their world-views and culture. Sure, there were flame wars and much drama but this was mostly about operating systems and text editor preferences, both which still doesn't mean anything to an outsider (who, more and more is the average internet user).

New people brought their cultures and their habits. The old guard became a minuscule minority.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 21:35
by Tormuse
As Zyx says, what's really changed the internet is that it's available to the masses now. There was a time when only the most technically-minded and/or "nerdy" people would use it, but now, smartphones are so cheap to build and acquire that even the poorest people (even homeless people) can get one. Also, marketing from Apple and Android have made it trendy and popular for the general public to own a smartphone and we've gotten to the point that a large portion of the population can't imagine being apart from their phone, not to mention the fact that they're being made a lot more user-friendly than they used to be, so even the least computer-savvy people can use it.

This creates a really, *really* weird mix of people that can be found on the internet. As someone said, it's the greatest experiment in anarchy that humanity has ever devised.

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 23:18
by jayenkai
For a while, I tried to please everyone. But at the end of the day, without a team of artists and designers working with me, that's never going to happen!!
Nowadays, I just do what I do. Occasionally someone latches onto it, and they find my masses of generated content to be somewhat enjoyable.
But those are few and far between.
..
But, I'm ok with that, now.
I'm happy to have the followers that I have, and if they can put up with my horrific art style and badly coded oddities, then that's alright with me!

Re: The little Inn by the wayside

Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2017 22:19
by Dizi
Welcome to my life on a daily basis, the constant fight to make things look pretty and graphical, but trying to keep the code lightweight, the server requests low and the total page size (images, css, js...) as small as possible. All this while trying to keep up with the latest technologies, smart phones, responsive builds, retina screens, latest design trends....and so on. As more people have become switched on to the Internet and are becoming more tech savvy the expectation of all singing all dancing websites that load within a blink of an eye is expected, so its a fun time to be a web designer / developer... or at least it is if you're willing to always be a student or the craft as with how rapidly things move in this industry you're never going to get a head of it.

Jay, you can never please everyone and from what I know of Socoder you have a great community of people and I know they would all appreciate the hard work you put into making them a forum that they can be a part of. And from a design point if it does what it needs to do and people are able to post on it then the design is good as it functions the way that it needs to. Design without functionality now that is when it's bad design.