I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
02 Oct 2006
Okay, so normally that term has pretty acceptable/well defined semantics… but what’s a “report[s] of textual transmission” in a fictional work?
I just wanna get a big doubleyew-tee-eff out there about that one. In full: “Dracula‘s reports of textual transmission ground its supernatural story in material reality.” My thoughts exactly. Dracula = the text by Stoker. “reports of textual transmission” = wtf1. There’s possibly a wtf2 in there but that hinges on interpretation of wtf1 so I’m not going to bother declaring it. Meh.
The only idea I have is that the “reports” bit is entirely redundant and it is speaking merely of textual transmission within the narrative itself. But that goes beyond mere bad English (which the sentence already is, IMO) and into the realm of… something much worse. Children are dying from HIV/AIDS in Africa because of this sentence.
This one seems to fly in from the office of a certain MH, whom I am utterly convinced is up there as one of the most turgid and incomprensible (obscure) academics in her entire School, if not the Arts faculty at large. She also takes an Arts II PoMo course which probably explains much of it.
02 Oct 2006
Is there anything English-related that Patricia Parker won’t crop up in? My goodness. Shakespeare, modernism, Victorian literature, post-modernism, Romance, and goodness knows what else… her name just keeps cropping up. Lucky Stanford. I believe the word is “prolific”.
01 Oct 2006
It just occurred to me that, to anyone listening from the other side of a wall whilst I’m using Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, Illustrator etc., it would sound an awful like I’m fragging the crap out of people. Ignoring, for a moment, the inconvenient problems of HF loss through walls (let’s say they’re blind and standing nearby, or the walls are made from paper), and the fact that I’m not that good at Counter-Strike to start with (and consequently after a minute or two of fragging sounds they should anticipate a sigh and then a cessation of clicking that just isn’t forthcoming with most graphics work).
Frag on, you crazy designers.
29 Sep 2006
Struggling to come up with a new product name? Branding firm Igor have a freakin’ brilliant “Naming Guide” available for free in PDF format on their site. It doesn’t magically make me any more creative :( but it’s a brilliant resource. If I bookmarked sites anymore, this would be one of them. Not in a lost-at-the-bottom-of-favorites-folder kinda way, either.
