blogging

The Blog Garden

Quote | | Paul Greer

“In some ways this would be a return to what I did a few years ago with my Gospel of the Trees site, which arose because what I wanted to say about trees just couldn’t be made to fit into a book, in part because it refused to become a linear narrative or argument and in part because it was so image-dependent and book publishers don’t like the cost of that. But the advantage of a tag over a standalone site is that each post can have other tags as well, which lead down other paths of reflection and information, in a Zettelkasten sort of way.”

— Ayjay

Silos and the Open Web

Aside | | Paul Greer

On Blogs, RSS and Social Media:

The Open Web movement asserts a special role for public, cooperative, and standard World Wide Web communications; it opposes private, exclusive, proprietary Web solutions.

Computer scientist Tantek Çelik gives three aspects of the Open Web:

  1. publish content and applications on the web in open standards
  2. code and implement the web standards depend on
  3. access and use content / code / web-apps / implementations

— Wiki

 

An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared but rather remains sequestered within each system or subsystem, figuratively trapped within a container like grain is trapped within a silo: there may be a lot of it, and it may be stacked quite high and freely available within those limits, but it has no effect outside those limits.

— Wiki

Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to go full-bore blog again, like in the old days. Twitter’s only real use is as a notification system, after all, so you’d just pump out post links to it from your blog. You know, the way people used to, when having a place for your own voice and your own thoughts was a good thing.

When I was in the swing of it, way back when, it was like the world’s most minimalist radio station. A Station Ident post to start the day, a Night Music or Closedown post at the end of the day, littered with whatever strangeness and wonder passed my screen in between.

I miss that long moment when the web seemed full of people doing the same thing, or thinking in public. It happens in the Republic Of Newsletters, now. But it was nice to have all those little radio stations broadcasting in the night.

— Warren Ellis

The above tweeter, RSS pioneer, David Winer has made an RSS feed for journalists. Eliot Landrum has followed suit with an RSS feed for Open Architects.  These are in the form of OPML files that can be read in your RSS reader of choice.

Bloglovin

Link | | Paul Greer

Follow my blog with Bloglovin if you like that sort of thing.

Since the very sad and untimely demise of Google Reader I have been using Feedly to read and sort the large amount of blog and RSS feeds I follow.

But still I missed the hive mind collaborative and interactive nature of Reader, being able to leave comments on posts and see what other people were reading. I am aware thereis a payment level on Feedly that allows one to do something similar,  but I am in the early stages of making my work profitable in some form so such expenditure is out of the question at this stage and by its nature one would be only interacting with a small, exclusive commmunity.

Bloglovin seem to be, at this stage, to have the potential of having a simile sharing platform to Reader. You can follow, comment and collate blog posts into collections of particular subjects which echoes the nature of Flipboard. And it all links to your profile and your own blog. Theref providing a potential for a great network of blogs, people, connections and recommendations to those of a similar mind and compulsions.

I recommend giving it a try and please follow me there to see what I get up to.

On Weblogs in 2017

Quote | | Paul Greer

“I won­der what the Web will be like when we’re a cou­ple more gen­er­a­tions in? I’m pret­ty sure that as long as it re­mains easy to fill a lit­tle bit of the great names­pace with your words and pic­tures, peo­ple will.”

“If you’re read­ing this, you have my thanks. But let’s be hon­est: I can’t know what you like. Every hu­man prod­uct that’s re­al­ly worth read­ing or see­ing or hear­ing is made most­ly to please its hu­man pro­duc­er. Be­cause if you aim to please the world you usu­al­ly mis­s, the target’s just too big and you can on­ly guess where it is.”

– Tim Bray

New Front Page

Link | | Paul Greer

I updated my front page with some GIFs, to jazz it up a bit, but also to simplify and to give people a better first impression of what I am about.

I’m a bit concerned the loading time might be affected by the heavy file size.

Any feed back would be greatly appreciated.

Comments open.

Mission Statement 08/02/2016

Aside | | Paul Greer

Hello.

My name is Paul Greer I work at BDH Design and Direction in Bristol making computer animation for the television and other formats. I live in the West of England. I am married with three children.

In my spare time (distant laughter) I draw, write and play with animation.

I started this blog nearly ten years ago as a mixture of a scrapbook of internet things, a log of my professional work, and an archive of my more personal art and drawings.

My main interests are animation and investigating different ways of telling stories with pictures. I also like to post about music, tech, film, friends, politics and comics.

This is a very exciting time with regards to story telling and the ways those stories are disseminated so I would like to connect with people who have a similar interest in radiant experiments with media, and who might like share what we can offer to that project.

As well as this I would like to use this blog as a research station and personal feedback loop to reinforce and encourage my creative life, hopefully providing a resource and point of encouragement to readers as well.

Here is a gallery of the some of work I have been part of or have been fortunate enough to make myself.

Fortune: “Done is better than perfect”.

Continue reading →

Format shift news for RSS subscribers 

Aside | | Paul Greer

As anyone who follows me on RSS (haha!) will have noticed I have started making more microblog style posts on this feed on a daily basis. I have decided to do this so that some things I post on social media have a home here too. Somewhere between a backup and me having control of my own content. So you can get separate RSS feeds for this site, one to include the long read posts, ones categorised “macro”, and one for short posts titled “micro”. Frequency will on the macro will therefore be, at the very most, 2 or 3 times weekly.

Here they are:

From this site:

Microblog – miniposts, daybook, scrapbook.

Macroblog – News and longer posts,

Both – of the Above

Also:

LinkFeed – Everything I bookmark

Tumblr – (Proto-Scrapbook)

 

Adding a Secondary Microblog in WordPress

| Paul Greer

After a few days off at home I get to overthinking things, like how this website works for me and how it can improve the way I use the internet in general.

Background: Like many I often find myself spooling through web content, looking for I know not what. Now this has in the past actually added much to my life, new friends, unexpected ideas and new ways of doing things coming into my life because I discovered them in such a way.

However there is a balance and I would rather use more of the limited time I have on this good planet to make my own creative progress, still enjoying the benefits of the web, but to do that in a focused, limited and directed way once my affairs are in order.

This means, to me, spending and posting more here, on my internet home. I use and enjoy Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and love posting what I do in those places, but they are other peoples places not mine, and would rather I have those status updates, images, quotes and links posted here as well as there, so I have a record of them should any of those accounts become compromised and also so I have a searchable record of these things.

The Proposal: To create a secondary microblog within this website,  but also with the capability of separating it  in the rss subscription so friends who also follow me on social media won’t get the duplication and only receive macro/longread type posts they may not have already seen elsewhere.

Method: A greater organisation an delineation in posting. I have created two main categories. Firstly MACRO, which encompasses my news blog, and any update pertaining to what I have been up to, art I have made and things happening at BDH. There are 9 subcategories for this and they are:

  • 365 Drawing Project – A 365 daily drawing project begun in good faith, but thwarted by life, death, progress and other forces. I have since scaled it back to “regular” but I still aim to fulfil the 365 target.
  • Animated Journal  – “I had always liked the picture a day format, video diaries etc, and animation is, traditionally a long drawn out, painful process, so this was me trying to find a way to free it up and make it a bit more ephemeral. I should’ve just waited a few years for the smartphones to do it for me, but there you are.”
  • Event Diary – What’s happened. What’s happening. What may be happening in the future.
  • Notebook Pages  – “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
  • Personal Record – Diary, stories, personal updates, journal, histories.
  • Picture Stories – Comics, narrative images, story telling, sequential art.
  • Process Archive – How tos, Maya, CGI, work arounds, Ways of doing.
  • Smooth Criminals – Mastermind Group, heroes, mentors, friends.
  • Work Updates – Mainly things pertaining to my role as Head of CGI at BDH.

The second one is called MICRO, this will be a scrapbook of sorts, a research project, a gathering of links and artifact, juxtaposition of non sequiturs for future consideration, as much for my benefit as anyone elses. Within it there are 7 sub-categories as follows:

  • Note Taking – note taking method, master mind groups, daydreams, ticket stubs, daily pages, day books, sketch pads, tentative drawings, empty cities
  • Radiant Thinking – Creative logic, positive imaginings, brain food, associative machines, dynamic potentials, positive humanism, sexual politics, human rights
  • Story Mapping – Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
  • Picture Literatures – Alternative Comics, Sequential visual narrative, photo stories, cave paintings. Little comics everywhere.
  • Imagined Spaces – Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Unity, virtual realities, 360 Video, computer graphics, rendering, augmented environments.
  • Broken Rhythms –
  • Math – Number theory, abstract science, spacial quantities,
  • Flickery Lights – Unusual animation, things that move, experimental puppetry, stop motion, cinematographs.
  • Photo Ghosts – Real scans, photographic echoes, fictional memories, old fashioned film, compulsive transparencies, ethereal landscapes
  • Status Updates – notepad, blurtings, tweets, thoughts, discarded moments.

In addition to these will be the category of Daybook which is a home for longer form posts involving min and other peoples work, otherwise defying categorisation.

It is clear to me at this stage that many of the things I have posted here so far fall into these categories so I will be retrospectively allocating posts to the above for the help of navigating the archive.