The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lisa Spangenberg:

PublicRadioVet @ 39 you say:
Which is why I think we need to bring back chivalry. And not the kind that cloisters women and forbids them from participation as full partners in society.

I mean the kind that basically says the following:

Males don't become Real Men without Service becoming the focal point of their identity.

That's both inherently sexist, and reveals a complete lack of understanding about chivalry. You're not talking about chivalry, which was a warrior and horseman ethos, and not, at all, about women, except as prizes, and chattel. The "service towards women" meant convincing them to say yes to one man versus yes to another.

What you're talking about is courtly love, which essentially treats women as sexual objects with the right to say yes, but not the right to say no. If you actually look at it, it's about women as sexual chattel, woman as thing. I certainly don't want a spouse to "serve" me; that's an inherent contradiction of the whole idea of "equal partner" you ostensibly support.

Nor do I think that men who think I'm capable of taking care of myself without being, err, serviced, is in any way not "Real Men."

The ms. is not illuminated like Kells, though there are some illuminated initials. Even though it's roughly 175-200 years early the Cathach of St. Colum, another psalter, is a better comparison. I've linked to some images of it (it's also a partial psalter) in my own post.

The ink was based on oak galls, and it not only penetrates the vellum, it leaves chemical traces even if it's scraped off; you need a black light to see them, or sometimes, multi-spectrum imaging, to get them back. The real danger is exposure to light; that does cause the ink to fade.

I've posted about the bog psalter here.

Adam:

Get a copy of Richard Lanham's Revising Prose.

Much much better than Strunk and White, and not for freshman, but for people who write.

Shlgh is an existential crisis, just waiting to spill over and, as Patrick once said, "get stupid all over" us.

This is someone with an inability to perceive reality folks; don't prod.

Strunk and White was aimed squarely at the Freshman comp and sophmore survey class taught by English departments all over the U. S.

It's still aimed there now, though the lastest editions are not, exactly, the work of Strunk or White.

Strunk and White, or Zinsser, or Williams' Style, -- all are books that direct their attention to writing the undergraduate academic essay.

That's it; that's what they're for, that's their real market. Just because your undergraduate English professor uses it to help you get a clue doesn't mean that the book will apply to any other phase of your life as a writer.

There are much much better books on prose revision, on rhetorical analysis, and on style.

Though if you can get your students to, like, you know, read, maybe even follow some of the guidelines in any of these books, (even the stupid guidelines) their writing will improve.

I'm not in a position to critique anyone's spelling, but sloppy syntax is a by product of sloppy thought. When I read my own prose, I cringe at how much of it is drivel, and best cut to the betterment of the rest.

The only way I know to teach prose revision to someone else is the method employed by Patrick, that is, to actually engage in public acts of revision.

I'm gathering various ways to donate to Absolute Write and the Water Cooler forums here Please feel free to pass the URL, link to it, or steal the html.

If you're going to be a fiction writer, Stephanie, you need to:

• Master the art of a coherent narrative; no part should contradict another, all should be internally coherent.
• 
  
• Even in "secondary worlds," or network operations, the principles of physics, the basic truths that govern existence, receipts, credit card invoices, email,—all of these must be taken into account when constructing your narrative.
• 
  
• Characters, like customers, are not responsible for your poor business decisions. Don't blame them for your incompetence.
• 
  
• Your characters too must be believable; remember that one of the signs of an unreliable narrator is one whose story contradicts (internal consistency again) or who is repeatedly shown to be out of alignment with reality or the stories told by the unreliable character's own supporting characters.

Initially, the error claimed that the site had been "suspended"; the "excess bandwidth" message was up later, presumably after a some sort of reptilian thought-process.

Honestly, just doing cross-checks between the stories of the "partners" is a dyslogistic nightmare.

The funny thing about Writer's Weekly is that they've had similar run-ins with Barbara Bauer themselves.

Wherein she invoiced the Writer's Weekly owner for 1 billion dollars.

From the way that JC's posted, I'd suspect that he feels like he's been badly taken advantage of by a bunch of scammers - rather the way most of the AW audience feel about Bauer, in fact - and Bauer's complaints came as confirmation that he was dealing with a bunch of scammers who were out to screw him over.

Three things to note; both "partners" of the hosting company, where partner should be interpreted as a subsitute for spouse, were active members of the Absolute Write forum.

Secondly: It's not hard to find a great deal of verification about Babara's tactics, which really are more aptly described as "scam" then the actions of an agent (since agents a: don't charge, b: sell books to actual consumer publishers, c: make money for their clients and from their clients).

Thirdly, anyone who caves to a phone call from an overtly emotional caller without a follow-up in the form of a cease-and-desist letter on actual papere, or at least a simulcrum of such . . . well, that's inept if not down right stupid.

The usual thing that hosts do when they find someone is soaking up bandwidth is to charge them more money.

ISPs usually warn the customer in advance that the threshhold is nigh. And you'll note that the ISP's bizarre screed points out that they repeatedly chose not to alert the site that bandwidth was creeping up.

Generally they issue a formal warning, and ask for more money. Money that I feel sure Jenna would have come up with, somehow. She's pretty reasonable.

They can even put a throttle on the port; even I know how to do that, and I'm a Medievalist, not a network engineer.

In any case, ISPs don't hold on to the user's files. Especially when it would take fifteen minutes, tops, to image the 2 gig, verify the image, and burn it to a DVD.

Yeah, I timed it.

It takes me about eighteen minutes to pull a drive and seal the enclosure. I'm not coordinated, so I'd expect better time from someone professional.

Real ISPs don't keep indicating that they will provide access to the data, and then not provide access. The former ISP has done this.

The former ISP has no excuse for keeping the data--data which would allow Absolute Write to actually generate income from the members and content, given the presence of ads and the donations of members. For crying out loud, they could copy the data and still "keep" it.

So now, we're trying to reconstitute the database, but more importantly, to retain the community, and the whole thing will involved lawyers. Lawyers, who, for all their virtues, are expensive, and take a lot longer to do anything than it would take to just copy the damn drive.

Thanks TNH; You should know I watch ML like a hawk, especially now.

I've been in contact. I'm passing all such offers of help along, up the food chain.

The offers and support are really appreciated. I take a great deal of joy in the fact that the "neutral" net, the Internet as it should be, is fighting back against the other, newer form of the Internet, the one where the DMCA as a poorly conceived but dangerous law, particularly in terms of its use by scam agents and less than comptetent ISPs.

I'm fine doing triage/go between for offers of help; The Important People are just . . . well, gobsmacked and swamped with email and legal stuff and work.

I'll retain your email, and forward copies to Someone What Knows Somthing.

Lisa

If you're on Windows there are utilities for doing a bulk download of blogger and LJ posts for backup purposes. I have yet to see something similar for Mac--though one of the Windows utilities is actually a Perl script so it might not be much of an issue to use Xcode to make it a Mac application.

If you use Blogger and post to your domain, you should regularly archive the various files; being lazy, I just create a zip archive and burn it to cd then email myself at gmail.

MovableType actually has detailed instructions for making a proper backup of the underlying data, so Everything is restored.

I do that, and email myself and burn a cd.

Greg, and OG, thanks for the vBulletin modders heads up and passing on the request.

We've had some super offers from ML folk, willing to help. I'm passing them on.

It occurs to me that the volunteers in question work as a group; there are at least two separate tasks, one the parsing and cleaning, and then the filling of the database, but that's not a decision for me to make.

Thanks again.

Zen

Those are reasonable questions, but AW was largely a labor of love, and it grew very very quickly from a pet project with volunteer labor to something ginormous with some high end technical requirements. It was very much a labor of love; most people didn't even realize there was a database, or that it could be backed up, never mind individual posts.

These are naive users, not professisonals, not support people.

Posting is a not trivial thing, for a lot of people. They're not sure, really, where the posts, "are" or "go" and a backup wouldn't occur to them.

The database is a couple of gigs.

I'm collecting all the offers to help, and forwarding to People With Authority.

We really do appreciate this folks.

Google won't help directly; I've already tried asking as a Google consultant.

What AW Water Cooler (the forum) will need in order to deal with all the thousands of cached files is a programmer with parsing skills in a scripting language -- my first thought is Perl, but Ruby or PHP might work -- to This person needs to write several scripts. First a script that:

A. Removes the Google signature text
Chunks the information into separate "records," one for each post, and then each record into the data for the "fields" and puts this into a new delimited file. This would need to match the vBulletin schema, since vBulletin is the forum software
B. Second, a script that goes through the parsed delimited file and inserts the various chunks into the MySQL table, where the data goes.

Assuming I'm not insane, and that this is even viable, and that Jenna decides to go this route.

So if you've got skills like that, please post in this thread, or email me and I'll make sure someone with power authority and wits gets the note.

I should add that this is pro bono, but I suspect would make a nice c.v. entry and I'd be willing to do what I could to make your career flourish.

Jenna has posted an update asking for donations.

In addition to legal fees, there are likely to be other expenses related to hosting and efforts to restore the many important forum threads, especially those documentating writing and literary scams, from Google caches.

If you go to the link above, there's a PayPal button that goes to Absolute Write and Jenna and a U.S. Mail address for checks etc.

Thanks to TNH, PNH, and the Making Light regulars for hosting Absolute Write refugees.

Comment statistics for Lisa Spangenberg on the Making Light blog

Total: 47 comments. View all these comments on a single page.