in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Monthly archives }
Moving over the next few days. I’ve lived along the same bus route more or less continually for nine years, and I’m a critter of habit, so this will be interesting! Destination Ypsilanti, a short walk east of Depot Town — trading in current cafe haunts for a new set. I’ll be planning a day or two a week to spend in Ann Arbor, and those of you I’m working with can help me figure out what those days should be. The masthead here will change once we’re wired at the new place.
Links and commentary relevant to recent popular searches.
Various search terms inventoried here. My only response here. Enjoy standing in line with a bunch of twelve year olds on Friday night.
Yeah, isn’t it cool that the street address isn’t anywhere on their website? Try 1525 S. Fletcher, Chelsea, MI — the entrance for the farm is actually one driveway south of the map pin here, it’s the wider drive with a cozy little curve coming off Fletcher Street.
‘Page trails’ are a dopey name for dynamic breadcrumb navigation. Handily, there’s a page trail extension for your Oddmuse wiki. I used it, but didn’t like the markup it generated (just a string of links with punctuation inserted via CSS, hence sloppy for text/mobile browsers) — although that’s an easy fix to the extension.
A trip to the library is in order, probably the science fiction stacks. But first, pick a decade. If 198x, you are looking for some nicely aged William Gibson sprawl books. If 197x, you are looking for the Joanna Russ short story “When It Changed.” If other, start assembling your Harry Potter costume now and go get in line at midnight.
Community Farm of Ann Arbor distribution:
— and some cute flowers.
The farm was totally deserted when I showed up a couple hours earlier than usual, just me and a little whining farm cat. I was probably only there for fifteen minutes total, but it was exactly the nice pause I needed in my day: time to not stare into an LCD, to be outside, smells of dirt and dust and fresh hay and rosemary.
Also brought home leftovers from microcoworking ¬art ¬fair Donut Day, where we enjoyed donuts ⦾ and coffee ♨.
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
Important to remember in this Facebook Moment. del.icio.us/tag/freedom0.
Here are three quick rambly sketches of Facebook applications I want — and yes, I’m working on Facebook stuff, but these are applications I want to use, not make.
(1) A flyer tool for group / event promotion. Ideal workflow: point it to a group, get a full-page lo-fi flyer suitable for printing and posting at the cafe or bulletin board. This flyer wouldn’t need to contain much more than a giant Facebook F, the group’s name and picture, some community_indicators — such as number of members, unattributed snippets from wall postings or discussion boards, etc. — and a cheesy “you’re invited!” message. Lots of interesting groups for cafes, venues, and locations, and a flyer is a cheap way to link Facebook to meatspace.
(2) A pageoftext.com style micro wiki application. Individuals and groups already have a strong set of communication tools: posting walls, discussion boards, messaging, and so forth. But for certain kinds of conversations, a wiki scratchpad would be awesome. The generic use case is a way to dodge the Facebook group officer control tower stuff: only officers can make certain kinds of changes to the group, but it’s a hassle — and a risk(?) — to make everybody an officer.
(3) Hunt the Wumpus. With a tileset like this, and anybody who shows up on your profile gets to take a turn (so that the Wumpus never goes unfed).
(Disclaimers: I’ve read all of the books except the stupid werewolf one, and I’m not the world’s biggest fan, but I do live with her. I am not participating in the prediction market.)
Inkling prediction market: Will Harry Potter be alive at the end of the last book of the series? At this writing, it’s trading at $83.81 — that is, an 84% chance that the Boy Who Lived will, you know, live. Here’s a one-week graph (a new Inkling feature):
Do watch this market for any changes in the next few days, although it’s been trading above $70 since May. I’ll go on record with my personal end of Harry Potter prediction here. Basically the little fucker is going to Live and propagate and everybody will exist happily ever after. No SWAT teams, no sniping of hippogriffs, no invisible thestrals biting through night-vision goggles and bullet-proof jackets for a taste of flesh. No squibs with megaphones versus hucksters, shamans, preachers with polycarbonate riot shields. No rocket summer over Hogwarts or Weasley Bros. magicked jellybean radiation-sickness cure or Fortean eruption of giants walking the earth, serpents and great whales swimming beneath it, nocturnal lights flying over it. The whole Dark Lord Trying to Destroy All That is Kind and Good and Cute situation will be neatly resolved, perhaps with a little bloodshed of certain useless tertiary characters (my pick is Ginny, the redhead being stereotypical Dark Lord fodder in this genre), but entirely without patriot redneck muggle hordes slobbering forth about Harry or Neville or Tom or whomever being the antichrist or the Superman or what have you, because the stupid wizard world takes care of its own — because the real world and the hermetically sealed, dysfunctional, useless wizard world never intersect in any meaningful way — because the series never had integrity enough to break through all that (unlike, say, the “His Dark Materials” ‘kids’ series) — because, ultimately, nothing really is at stake in Harry Potter books, besides the generic novelistic concerns of: will our heroes grow up and propagate the species, and in what specific configurations. In light of all this, I should have started a prediction market long ago to track whether or not the last Harry Potter book will end in the most bankrupt of whimpers: with the actual depiction of, in some horrible flash-forward, Harry’s kids. I’d price that market super low, but it is a dreaded possibility, given the prognosis above. Our Living Boy has a Luke Skywalker early retirement in his future, and the way that gets expressed in this cosmology is that (sit down, grab a tissue, you’ll need it) he gets to sire the family he never had! Even better: we also get to see the various supporting characters in Hogwarts faculty positions — proving that those who can’t, teach.
In summary, the Boy Who Lived will live. Mega bullish on the Harry Potter will be alive at the end of the last book of the series market. He shouldn’t be, if there was any justice he wouldn’t be. But he will, and that market will cash out for you at a cool $100.00.
Locally, you can get your copy of this book at the Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor (at the cold, bloodless heart of Art Fair) or The Rocket in Ypsilanti. You can also check it out from the Ann Arbor District Library: “517 holds on first copy returned of 1 copy — 160 copies ordered.” The H. Potter funeral/wedding services will be held this Friday.
Shadow Art Fair — Saturday 2007-07-14 — Corner Brewery — hasten — do not hesitate — go — go
