Wisp 13 is now released.

Here’s my editorial:

Exquisite Corpse

by Éric P. Lemoine

Spontaneity—genuine spontaneity— beyond what appearances might tell us, is not something that comes easily, especially given our usual upbringing which tends to bend or harness it into something productive for society.

The Surrealist movement in the 1920s is remembered among other things for artistic and playful experiments that led to expanding our boundaries and views of reality by practising spontaneity without allowing the thought process to hold the full prominence it usually gets. Automatic writing —and automatic drawing— were in fact techniques that Surrealists developed extensively, before they were used by pioneers of conscious exploration such as Jane Roberts.

One of their games/experiments in particular was known as “cadavre exquis” (exquisite corpse). It required a group of people to collaborate in order to compose something (initially sentences, but by extension, drawing, collage etc.) without having a complete view of what the others had contributed to the creation.

There is something reminiscent of an exquisite cadaver in Wisp, for each contributor brings in a piece without necessarily knowing what the rest of the picture looks like before the final release. For months, at each release of the magazine, it has been a joy and a privilege for the editors to see the final picture of Wisp reveal itself before their eyes, and the common themes of the issue bloom from the intermingled roots of different yet contiguous varieties of plants.

As you may see, the plants have grown a fair deal, and this current issue proudly sports no less than sixty-four pages. Truth be told, it has been a practical exercise in spontaneity to acknowledge that the experiment was no longer bringing as much ease and fun as it has been, given the time it required to keep the quality on a par with previous issues.

We often wish for change, but it always comes as a bitter irony when we realise that we’ve been the very one holding on to a given experience by wanting to prolong it longer than it required.

In many ways —and of course timely synchronicities have come since to reflect it more than once— Wisp has fulfilled the extent of what it could be in this format. It makes each of the past thirteen issues even more precious and dear to us, even if the website will still be available for future developments.

But for now, it’s time for the Will-o’-the-Wisp to take a well deserved break, but not before thanking every reader and contributor of this exquisite adventure, and revealing its current one!

As I was publishing a new version of my website, I noticed that some of the little animations I had previously inserted with the bas_flvplayer plugin had ceased to function. Well, apparently… because on other computers they seemed to still look fine.

I noticed that it had stopped functioning for my browsers with the latest Flash version (10) and after some research, it appeared that Adobe has decided to implement a few security “improvements” on the way things are allowed or not to be loaded by Flash.

The thing is that the plugin calls the files in a “download” mode which changes the headers and streams the files. While I didn’t manage to tweak the crossdomain.xml file appropriately to have it work again, I changed a few lines in the plugin and voilà.

If you happen to have the same problem, you can go for a quick and easy fix to the Admin panel, plugins, and then click “Edit” on the bas_flvplayer line.

I have already added a few mods on the plugin (to add sounds and a more standard compliant insertion of the player) so I can’t tell you the exact line, but if you make a search for the function function bas_flvplayer_get_file($where)

You will find this line

// hu.gTxt('file_download').'/'.$thisfile['id'];

That you can comment out and replace by the following

hu.'files/'.$thisfile['filename'];

Where “files” is your folder’s name (would need to find the textpattern proper call for that). Note that as the flash files now will go through a GET mode, it’s not tracked by textpattern and the download counter won’t increment. (I couldn’t care less, as these files are embedded anyway.)

You have also probably to change the if(!empty($thisfile['id'])) by if(!empty($thisfile['filename']))

And that should be all… Enjoy!

Thanks to the pervasiveness and performances of the Internet, it’s now possible to have very complex programs run from your web browser, programs that were only destined to your desktop before.

It’s usually called “the Cloud” (or cloud computing), and allows the access via the Internet to complex programs. You probably already knew about Google docs and your favourite word processor, or spreadsheet program, but coming from up the cloud, we are talking about different kinds of birds. Graphic programs more like Adobe’s Photoshop, except that here, it’s for free (at least for the basic version), and you don’t have to install anything on your computer.

Check out Aviary; even if you’re not interested in computer graphics, the website concept alone is worth checking out, with each project being represented by a colourful bird, the symbols’ continuity being pushed to having eggs for their coming projects (which look very interesting as well), or a broken egg for “404 not found” errors.

The latest of their release is “Raven”, a vector editor which even if quite simple compared to Adobe Illustrator or its open-source counterpart Inkscape is already quite promising.

One can imagine many more interesting ways of using this kind of program, especially on the line of collaborative work. Up to now, there was the early versions of OpenCanvas which allowed for instance sharing a common canvas and draw pictures at the same time with different individuals, but now there seem to be a wider range of possibles.

I recently found out, through one of the referrers of my website, the Amazon Mechanical Turk website. Never shy of a new experience, I register to see by myself what it’s all about.

The premise is simple. Some jobs cannot be automated by machines (doesn’t sound too bad to me) and are relatively simple to be done by humans —and we’re not talking of playing chess (the origin of the “turk” moniker.)

These simple tasks are given to people to be done for a small fee.

I found some search results relevance annotation, a funny “find this movie’s quote in youtube” that was interesting to review some classics (not so much funny when I spent some time to find the exact time of the “I wish I knew how to quit you” in Brokeback Mountain only to discover the embed link wasn’t here — there is some irony in that quote).

Anyway, long story short, after 2 days of playing with it in my spare time, I’ve got…
$0.19 on my account. Wow.

Now, I know for some countries, 1$ is worth quite a sum, but that made me wonder what could motivate people to work for such a misery.

Of course, you have great free software around there that were developed thanks to the dedication of unpaid workers (the GNU community and so on), but they are doing something that is most likely a passion for them. Now, I have some trouble thinking this could be someone’s passion

I mean, if you want to do something as a pass-time for a better world, there are better outlets. Like, perhaps you don’t know, but there is this project named reCAPTCHA which adds some intelligence into the old age battle against the spam coming in your inbox.
Usually, to distinguish from people and automated spamming bots (robots), you can ask people to solve a little problem: read some twisted barely legible letters, or do some maths, make a dance or whatever… But there, the guys thought that it was an awful waste of intelligence (like dancing alone while you could power a discotheque with your mindless wiggling.) And they devised this sly method of using your intelligence to help digitize books. It’s all explained on their website (the catch is that there is one answer that is known by the system, and the other one is statistically matched from your results and others’).

Later, I found an interesting article on the Amazon MTurk phenomenon (I make $1.45 a week and I love it by Katharine Mieszkowski). Apart from the fact that there are indeed people who do this as a pass-time, instead of watching TV for instance, there was a somewhat disturbing aspect to this.

A guy created a project where he asked to “Turkers” to draw sheep for a $0.20 each. At the end of his experiment, he continued by selling them for a hundred times more on his website, to prove his point —which he legally had the right to do, as you waive your rights in the user agreement you never read

Funny or not so funny story… funny to those who think there won’t ever be people to do the most stupid jobs; not so funny when we see that the machine doesn’t have ghosts in it (consciousness, as in Ghost in the Shell).

It’s funny when it’s about finding movie quotes, but when it’s about being paid to write blogs on self-defense weapons, or catching emails… Where one draws the line?

Perhaps we’ve already been in a Turk machine for too long…

Wisp — volume 2 / front cover

After having published with much satisfaction a few books¹ with Lulu (one of the main actors in the print-on-demand services) this post is listing some of the things that may be useful to know (or to remember after a bit of trial and errors) to design a source file that will produce the perfect PDF file.

Black and white prints

Not much to say here, the quality was correct, and the first PDF I created went without any problem.

Colour prints

A bit more of a headache at first. The PDF produced for the book(s) had intricate layouts, and when produced according to the specifications (full embedding of the fonts, flattening of all transparencies etc.) it failed to RIP properly.

Thanks to the Pitstop Pro trial version, I was able to see what the Lulu contact indicated me, that some of the contents were going off the printable boundaries of the pages.

Then I proceeded to slice all of the stuff that I had allowed to go out of the pages without paying too much attention (in the past, I’ve worked with printers who never had any skirmishes printing files created that way, but I figure this was not the case with Lulu’s printers).

Later, I discovered that this happened when creating the PDF, due to the bleed settings in facing page mode, when you export each page individually, some of the parts bleeding on the next page were not necessarily properly cropped; most of the times they are just copied, and “hidden”.

In fact, I figured out that even though working with the bleeding settings was very convenient (to flip between the final page preview and the working page), it’s a real pain when it comes to exporting the pages produced that way. Why? because when you work in facing pages, the interior bleed (of say the even page) takes into account the page next to it (the odd one) –while you don’t really care, because these parts usually fall in the gutter. So you never can guess how the export will crop your page (esp. if you get vector art or text intersecting those).

So, a few things to make sure it simplifies the creation of your PDF for Lulu:

• don’t use the bleed settings: put the bleed to zero, and for full-bleed, extend the page’s size to the desired dimensions: for instance, for a US letter (8.5“x11”) format, your working file will be 8.75“x11.25″. You can adjust the bleed markers by using the grid and guides.
• When you compose the file, make sure your backgrounds, images, and esp. vectors and texts do not extend outside of the page. If need be, do not rely on the program to crop it for you at the export if you think reducing the box’s boundaries will be enough. Most of the times, even with the cropping option activated, it doesn’t work that nicely on the exported PDF.

But this was not all; after resubmitting a revision of my PDF, it still wouldn’t work. Various reasons were invoked (fonts embedding, too many colors spaces, or ICC profiles) but as far as the preflight was telling me, everything seemed nice and Adobe 5.0 (PDF 1.4) compatible…

So, another reason was invoked; that some areas where more than 600 dpi and cluttered the print job… Okay, I go check and yes, some areas where the transparencies flattener had been over-zealous were a little above 600 dpi. I adjusted the PDF to no avail.

So, finally, I decided to redo the file by exporting most of the complex backgrounds to EPS (without the texts), checking the vectors, and exporting them to TIFF at 300 dpi, and reimporting them in my file.

I took care of getting rid of the transparencies (in InDesign) which are convenient, but wreck havoc on the PDF. Going to plain simple PDF, like in the dark times of good old un-fancy Quark Xpress.

This process finally made the PDF printable, and I figured out that the mysterious “Text won’t RIP” message I kept getting from the printer was probably due to those multiply/drop shadow transparencies/effects in InDesign. Because checking with the preflight the PDF the option “text used as clipping path” gave a few warnings in the initial files for all the texts using the fancy effects. They had disappeared in the simpler version.

To this date, there still seems to be a little issue with the printer’s way of cutting the pages… To be checked.
[Note from 2008/11/17: after a re-order was made, the quality was far better, and the page trimming was what it was supposed to be; I suppose the first shot was just messy as these things can happen]

So, in short, if you plan to make a full-bleed full color print with Lulu, remember that simple designs are the most effective, and if you want to go for something more elaborate, make sure you don’t rely on the PDF exporter to create a nice PDF; you’ll get better (and quicker) results by simplifying it for the program.

The silver lining is that the efforts you’ve made in simplifying the layout will make the PDF export much quicker!

Endnotes:

1 First of these babies, Circle of Eights, a thick (350 pages) book, printed in black and white, without full-bleed. A compilation of collaborative stories which have been running for more than a year.

Other books are Wisp (volume 1 and volume 2) a quarterly compilation of the Wisp ezine printed in full colors, with full bleed.

The book has arrived this morning!

It’s a compilation of the stories we’ve started to write about a year ago (Sept. 12 2007 to be accurate) at 8 hands (Tracy’s, Lee Muir’s, Jib’s and mine). Circle of Eights the title, is a reference at the interlocking circles that brought our interests together, as symbolized by the pseudonym for the author’s name which is made by merging our nicknames.
It is much more than one story actually, and quite difficult to summarize as it’s interactive, non-linear, and spans many interests at once. A bit of a challenge to get the hang of it, but immensely rewarding in fun.

We’ve decided to publish a first volume of these stories as much for our own personal pleasure as it’s also a way to have the content more easily explored. Coincidentally, the 888^th addition to the stories was made on August 8^th 2008, but it’s only one of the many synchronicities that surrounded the creation.

I chose Lulu to print the book, which is a self-publishing service, and the quality is really great, as you can tell on the pictures.

It’s a really large book (350 pages black and white, perfect bound). The exterior (paperback) is all shiny and Tracy’s picture of the cave in Jimena, Spain is looking awesome on the back.

A look inside, with illustrations I created along the stories

If you want to give it a read, there is the stories website, and the link to order Circle of Eights.

Woohoo

(2009–03-12 EDIT: the second volume is out too)

Wisp is released

 Wisp is released

Internet is a fantastic and creative way we got to reflect the intricacies of our creations, and also the ease with which we can manifest.

Think of how easy it is to order the last book or DVD — even if it has a very discreet distribution on some remote part of the world, there is always a means to get it.

Back from a trip in Malaysia in the Cameron highlands (see pic) in 2001 (shortly after September), I was so enthusiastic about the atmosphere, the images I had in my head of that gorgeous part of the Earth, that I wanted to order some of the B.O.H. tea they produce locally. A little googling, et voilà, a few weeks later, I got some mandarin flavoured tea and other delicacies, right in our dead-and-alive hole without much of a trouble.

On the contrary, when we are beginning to get accustomed to so much ease and rapidity, it can be extremely frustrating when things don’t happen as quickly as they could.

Yesterday was a disconcerting day, because when I was setting up this site, there was a time frame were the new addresses were propagating on the worldwide web, and there is no way to control the process or know exactly when it will be right.

At some points, other people could see the new addresses but I couldn’t yet, because it had not yet propagated to my ISP (Internet Service Provider).
But, the fun part was that I could use a proxy (another computer somewhere on the Internet which allows me to “see” through it) that was able to get the new redirection right.

In any case, there is a moment where it’s all about trusting that everything will fall into place, and relax into the process. Just like when Windows asks for a nth reboot after having installed some new updates, just when you’re in a middle of a conversation and it slows down everything to the point of making nothing work at all.
The good thing is that being such a geek, I can move my attention to another computer, and let the Windows one do its stuff in the background without worrying.

And it works. It’s not necessarily quicker, but at least it’s much less annoying…

Back to the Internet metaphor, there is something that struck me with the address relocation episode, and that’s the fact that you don’t always see the same thing as the others depending on where you are on the web.
When I was in China, it was quite funny at times, because I was always wondering whether or not what I was seeing was filtered out (though I could still use proxies, as I explained before, to make that sure).
Back in France, where things are not supposed to be filtered out of political, religious, or such other bias, I tended to forget that, and mainly stopped questioning what I was seeing.

This morning again, everything seemed to be so slow that I wondered where was the “weak link”. After all, it could be anywhere. It could be some technical defect into my own connection, or of my ISP connection, or the host of the website, or even in the worse case, something related to the Internet cables (like it did happen in Asia some time ago).

Apparently, looking at the connectivity stats of my web host, it seemed like it was due to some repetitive attacks from bots on some of there servers which had slowed down everyone hosted on these servers.

Bots are not evil… (they spell with a B like beliefs). They are doing automatic tasks, and very effectively. I link them to how much I am present to myself, and how many automatic reactions I get towards certain beliefs…

How did the web-host solved these attacks? Well, good thing you ask. By rerouting the bots to another server…

Moving your attention again, and let things fall into place…

Lots of our daily tasks are tedious to do, probably a large percentage of them, by anyone’s account… But what if it were just a matter of perspective after all.

Imagine that you have to sort out old files, and tag entries, or copy stuff. Can you imagine anything more boring? It sometimes requires the patience of a monk to do these repetitive tasks, like in the old days of the copyists, before the invention of the movable type printing…

So what worse can it be when it’s the kind of thing which requires a human to do the job. A robot could be programmed, but chances are high that it would always request a human input to adapt its program for new unexpected data coming into its sorting task. People would be amazed at how much of such tedious repetitive tasks are being done everyday, even (especially) in the most “high-profile” jobs.

That’s were being a little playful comes in handy. Every child knows that playing is the antithesis of boredom. Making something boring into a game, sounds a bit too easy?

Let’s have a look at the new “game” [Image Labeler] offered by Google.

The principle is simple and genius: you log in with a nickname, you are paired with someone on the net randomly, and you both start to label pictures during a limited time period. When it matches on a word, the system issues you points (the more specific the word, the more points you get).

And there, we have Google benefit from this, because it makes their own image searching feature more efficient —even more than when it’s merely relying on the words hints on the websites of the owners which can be completely misleading, like “this is not a dog” in front of a cat’s picture, and you might have the cat picture pop out of a ‘dog’ request).

But the “player” benefits too, in many different ways. Like any game, you have untold rules you start to discover, and you get better at the game with every play, and that’s the incentive. For instance, for a non-English speaker player, or a with paired UK/US English speakers you will see that you look for the easiest, common denominator. Most of the time, it’s dominant colours of the picture (unless they are already in the words that you cannot use), it can be any word written in the picture etc.

In any case, if there is one thing that it would remind me of, it is:

If that’s boring, make it into a game!