yeah, we all like this cute icon.
but getting it to run can be tricky. Then when you pile on PostgreSQL, Maven, Ant, and D-Space 1.8 you may want to run away screaming to jump off the nearest cliff. But don’t jump! It is possible. In this post, you’ll find my notes about how I got D-Space to run on my old Mac laptop. (Of course, you will need the root password so that you can switch back and forth to superuser.) Here are the exact specs of the laptop that we installed on:
Macbook 2.5 GHz Intel Core Duo (4GB ram)
Snow Leapord – OS X 10.6.8
Snow Leapord – OS X 10.6.8
The main documentation is said to be quite comprehensive, but I found it completely mystifying in places, and in the end took some tips from the following sites to get everything running.
Having just finished a riveting gothic fantasy novel about werewolves by Tanith Lee, it occurs to me that moral ambiguity is the core theme of the books I have been reading lately. In Lycanthia, Lee portrays the vagueries of a consumptive city-dweller, a self-involved pianist, who comes into a large country manor in the “old country” by way of an inheritance. His reluctant arrival to take possession of the family manor house, and his petulant mood swings in dealing with the superstitious locals, provide the perfect backdrop for his eventual crisis.
The appearance of large wolf-like dogs, and warnings about a nefarious family, the de Lagenay’s, hiding in the forest, draw the unwitting anti-hero, perhaps fittingly named Christian, into a web of conflicts that quickly begins to resonate with emotional depth. The ambiguity of all the surface facts – are the de Lagenays really werewolves? are the superstitious villagers good or evil? is the doctor saving his life or condemning him to fate worse than death? is the upright piano an instrument of beauty or torture? — serve to heighten the tension as Christian becomes ever-more-tightly entwined with the de Lagenays, whom he variously insults, assaults, loves, worships, honors and betrays.
Apologies for being absent in recent weeks / months. It was a crazy stressful time at work, involving various business trips to faraway places. It’s time for some stress-reduction! And some whimsy!
Ya, hören wir uns Chubby Checker, Der Twist Beginnt
Bob Riddle has posted a selection of PEON and LEER fanzines from the 1950s, edited by his father Charles Lee Riddle. There is some wonderful content, including interesting pieces by Rog Phillips, Jerome Bixby, James Gunn, etc. And also a really trashy piece of fluff by Harlan Ellison…which I’m sure he would consign to the Doomsman category. Thanks, Bob!
Zing! Asteroid 2012 BX34 has just skipped by Earth, coming within 30,000 miles. That’s only 0.17 Lunar Orbit distance. Pretty close shave. Meanwhile, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to play with the NASA three dimensional orbit viewer, which animates our solar system by a selection of speeds and centers. Check out the stately, serene view from Neptune, as the inner planets, like Earth, spin like hyperactive dervishes next to the sun.
It was pleasant to be the first person to check out Widener’s copy of Alan Moore, Storyteller, the new hardcover biography by Gary Spencer Millidge. Before the shiny crisp pages of Moore’s interesting comics have been pawed over and collected layers of fingerprints and crumbs, I was able to turn them and learn some more details about Moore’s life.
Was it interesting to grow up in the Boroughs section of a grimy industrial town? To be thrown out of high school and get blacklisted from ordinary employment? Well, if you end up realizing exactly the sort of bean-counting mechanistic life that others end up with; and you end up transforming an entire art form, as well as transforming oneself into a practicing shaman and a fire-breathing dragon of wisdom, then: yes.
Yes, it is interesting.
This book has some information about Moore, though it sounded very familiar, as if much of it was transcribed from the biographical film, The Mindscape of Alan Moore. If you are interested in a chronological journey through Alan Moore’s career in comics, this is the book for you, as it is peppered with Moore’s early pages as a comics artist, as well as comics that influenced him, and selections from his own classics, such as V for Vendetta and the Watchmen.
For me, it is curious to see that whomsoever approaches him — whether from comics, or from popular religion, or from social commentary — none can resist mentioning that Moore has chosen to worship his own deity: the 2nd Century snake-headed Glycon! Yes, all roads DO lead to Glycon, my friends! And yet, there is an impish aspect to Moore’s selection of this tow-headed “rock and roll” pagan god, which you can see in his eyes. After all, for the shaman that Moore has become, the choice of a god is a declaration of independence from the ligatures that bind people to corrupt, so-called “established,” religions. Though there is a bit of narcissism involved, (like the design of personal shrines in John Brunner’s Jagged Orbit,) Moore sets an important precedent for those of us who refuse to be bound into the chains of meaningless traditions. Evidently, we must all pass through the same seven veils and cross the same ring of fire to find our unique spiritual paths.
Vaya con Glycon, amigos!
Our sun blasted out an amazing breath of dragon’s fire yesterday, the largest solar Coronal Mass Ejection event in seven years! Arriving this morning, the blast of cosmic rays ruffled our hair at the staff meeting, and no doubt set a few embedded devices on the fritz, but fortunately not much else went wrong.
Interesting that these cosmic events — unless they fry us into little crisps of carbon — hardly seem to phase human beings, as we are merrily setting up new spacecraft to ferry hairless apes into orbit. Today, SpaceX release a fun sneak peek at the interior of the Dragon spacecraft. With panoramic zoom controls, you can explore every latch and every alloy nook and cranny!
Not much like the Iron Dragon’s Daughter, but all the same!
On BoingBoing there is a link to this “hypnotic folk dance,” which only one commentator identified correctly as Nadia Nadezhdin’s ensemble Birch founded in 1948. (Thanks, Terry di Paolo!) However, it is worth pointing out that the name of this particular piece, Прялица, means “spinning jenny,” as in spinning of thread for weaving cloth. This should be obvious from the motions of the performers as they sit and twist the braids of the thread, and is reinforced by the threads strung over the stage, and the camera angles taken through the skein of strings. If you watch closely, you will also note that the patterns of the rotating group (when viewed from above) actually resembles different aspects of the spinning wheel, a technology that was much closer to the ordinary Soviet citizen of the 50s (when this dance was most likely performed).
Other internal evidence to date this piece can be seen in the fascinating crowd scenes at the end of the performance. The giant klieg lights have fine molded vents and precision external gears. It’s rather difficult to guess at a date of manufacture, but they clearly look like post WWII, pre 1970s objects. But the image of these technical workers at the controls of great lights is a wonderful tribute to the socialist realism of the original futurists, a pure homage to Rodchenko, if you ask me!
Reading Jennifer Szalai’s article on Dwight MacDonald’s Masscult and Midcult in this week’s Nation, gave me pause to reflect on that seemingly outmoded way of characterizing the tension between high culture (the art of museums and mid-town cinematheques) and the kibble for the rest of us low-lifes, otherwise known as kitsch.
When I first encountered MacDonald’s book (in the mid-70s), there still seemed to be an impermeable wall of broadcast television and “mainstream” publishers between the zines of the samidzat press and the greater public. Although a visit to Silver Scarab Press seemed incredibly important to me, to the outside world it was just Harry O’s basement in Albuquerque, and didn’t mean a damn thing to the churning presses of Random House in New York City. From an objective point of view, midcult certainly seemed to be reigning triumphant! But from my point of view, it was the hard-scrabble avant-garde who were the only worthy contributors to and creators of culture.
The clarity of my position was both reinforced and at the same time shattered when I moved to New York City on 1978, and found myself in a cultural battle zone — Sid Vicious would barely outlive the Sex Pistols, but the night scene was a mind-numbing cacophony of voices: the Plasmatics, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Specials, the Lounge Lizards, John Shirley’s Obsession. As fast as the record labels could buy and co-opt the rebellious new wave, another wave of furious, almost insanely self-destructive performers hurled themselves onto the ramparts. Following them were a new generation of fans, who transmitted streams of punk news through any and all channels. As much as I couldn’t actually stand listening to these punks and their continuous howl of mindless rage, they did validate my own state of war with the brainwashing of the establishment’s media.
Do not be like this. Spraying chemical agents into the faces of harmless people is the act of a sociopath. That way lies madness!
Police Officers: all of you walking the beat in American cities from Galveston to Toledo, from Miami to Portland, I believe that the vast majority of you are working to protect your fellow citizens. But we have reached a moment of crisis in our society. The wealth of our nation has been robbed, the banks looted, the government bought by corporations, and our future sold down the river.
Police of America, you have to ask yourselves, when you are told to violently attack unarmed protesters and to arrest those expressing their constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech: who is it you serve?
Who is in danger and who is being protected? In fact, the majority of Americans have seen their real incomes shrink, or their jobs vanish, or their homes foreclosed, or their children impoverished. It is the majority of Americans, the 99%, who are in danger. Isn’t that obvious?
And yet your orders are coming from the 1%, that is to say the rich and super-rich, who have reaped gigantic profits from the horrible suffering they have created. Their financial schemes, such as hedge funds and bundled real estate securities, are the ROOT CAUSE of the economic crisis we are now facing, and yet they are being protected? Protected from what? They are criminals.
