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On literacy, technology, calligraphy
Jul. 15th, 2010 10:51 pmNew A&S online magazine out of the Kingdom of Lochac. http://www.sca.org.au/cockatrice/
I will have to go back and attempt to peruse it at my leisure once I have gotten done the things I need to get done this weekend, because the quick look I gave it was quite promising, once I got the massive PDF to open.
However, I don't know what to make of so many busy, dark pages topped off with print. I guess no one on the editorial board stopped to think beyond, "This is going to look cool!"
There are two reasons Wodeford Hall is almost exclusively black print on white pages and extremely basic formatting. (1) I am not a web designer, but I do know you (2) can 't use information you can't read.
I use a program called Frontpage 2003. Go ahead. Laugh. I'll wait.
Done now? Oh, good. For any of my readers who are wondering why the tech-savvy ones are pointing and laughing, Frontpage is a WYSIWYG program, which stands for "What You See Is What You Get." Well, mostly. If you can fumble your way through a word processing document, you can probably design a page with this thing and you don't need to know HTML to do it. Mostly. FP2000 (which is what I had on my old Compaq) used to hiccup on me enough times that I found I sometimes had to look at the HTML code view and see where the formatting went wonky, but it was a means to put my stuff Out There (TM) that mostly worked. FP 2003 (I picked up a used copy for cheap and installed it on this laptop when I bought it) has not had the format glitches that 2000 had, so I'm happy enough with it.
My site is barely a step above plain text with pictures because there are actually still some people out there (my Dear Father among them) , with rudimentary computer know-how and old machines they have no need or desire to trade in for New Shiny Blinky Things! (TM). This was borne out earlier today when someone posted to SCA-West with questions on how to put content up on the New Shiny Blinky Wiki Thingy when one doesn't know where to begin.
My eyes were a lot younger when I started Wodeford Hall back on Geocities. At some point, I want to go back and reformat some of the older pages so font style and size are more consistent.
I started reading Uncovering Heian Japan this week on my lunch hours. I never took literary criticism classes in college, I was majoring in history. This bad boy makes me stagger back from my lunch with brain overload. I can't read the literature in question in the language it was written in. I am a prisoner of translations. Dr. Lamarre discusses the visual effect of the calligraphy and how it plays a part in the poetry of the period. If you have a character that can be taken apart to form two separate characters it's as much a visual play as a play upon the words itself. And yes, I'm describing it badly because I'm still digesting what I read this afternoon. Lamarre's book also picks at the established view which ties into modern Japanese beliefs about their national culture springing from roots in the Heian period, when in fact, China and Japan as we know them now did not even exist. Edges and boundaries of "Chineseness" and "Japaneseness" in the language, culture, and politics are what this book hopes to explore.
My waka aren't waka. I can't write waka because I can't write in modern Japanese, much less classical Japanese or classical Chinese.
Blah blah blah blah blah...
I will have to go back and attempt to peruse it at my leisure once I have gotten done the things I need to get done this weekend, because the quick look I gave it was quite promising, once I got the massive PDF to open.
However, I don't know what to make of so many busy, dark pages topped off with print. I guess no one on the editorial board stopped to think beyond, "This is going to look cool!"
There are two reasons Wodeford Hall is almost exclusively black print on white pages and extremely basic formatting. (1) I am not a web designer, but I do know you (2) can 't use information you can't read.
I use a program called Frontpage 2003. Go ahead. Laugh. I'll wait.
Done now? Oh, good. For any of my readers who are wondering why the tech-savvy ones are pointing and laughing, Frontpage is a WYSIWYG program, which stands for "What You See Is What You Get." Well, mostly. If you can fumble your way through a word processing document, you can probably design a page with this thing and you don't need to know HTML to do it. Mostly. FP2000 (which is what I had on my old Compaq) used to hiccup on me enough times that I found I sometimes had to look at the HTML code view and see where the formatting went wonky, but it was a means to put my stuff Out There (TM) that mostly worked. FP 2003 (I picked up a used copy for cheap and installed it on this laptop when I bought it) has not had the format glitches that 2000 had, so I'm happy enough with it.
My site is barely a step above plain text with pictures because there are actually still some people out there (my Dear Father among them) , with rudimentary computer know-how and old machines they have no need or desire to trade in for New Shiny Blinky Things! (TM). This was borne out earlier today when someone posted to SCA-West with questions on how to put content up on the New Shiny Blinky Wiki Thingy when one doesn't know where to begin.
My eyes were a lot younger when I started Wodeford Hall back on Geocities. At some point, I want to go back and reformat some of the older pages so font style and size are more consistent.
I started reading Uncovering Heian Japan this week on my lunch hours. I never took literary criticism classes in college, I was majoring in history. This bad boy makes me stagger back from my lunch with brain overload. I can't read the literature in question in the language it was written in. I am a prisoner of translations. Dr. Lamarre discusses the visual effect of the calligraphy and how it plays a part in the poetry of the period. If you have a character that can be taken apart to form two separate characters it's as much a visual play as a play upon the words itself. And yes, I'm describing it badly because I'm still digesting what I read this afternoon. Lamarre's book also picks at the established view which ties into modern Japanese beliefs about their national culture springing from roots in the Heian period, when in fact, China and Japan as we know them now did not even exist. Edges and boundaries of "Chineseness" and "Japaneseness" in the language, culture, and politics are what this book hopes to explore.
My waka aren't waka. I can't write waka because I can't write in modern Japanese, much less classical Japanese or classical Chinese.
Blah blah blah blah blah...
