T w e n t y S i d e d

Now here is an interesting social… program… experiment… thingy. What do you even call this sort of thing? Oceangram is a software implementation of the old message-in-a-bottle idea.

You can write messages and chuck them into the ocean where they will find their way to other people, or just sit there until a message washes up on shore. When you get a message, you can choose to throw it away or add your own comments to it and throw it back in. You can’t change what others have written, only append your message to the end of what is already there. At first when I saw you had to wait for a message to arrive I was a little annoyed, but now that I’ve done it a few times I can see it’s actually an important part of the system. I’d probably sit there and “leech” if I could just click and get a message. Since you have to wait for them, I’m more reluctant to throw them away and more tempted to add to it and throw it back in. They seem to come at the rate of one every five minutes or so, although I gather some people get around this by opening the page in several windows at once. I suppose you could keep four or five windows open, which is probably plenty to keep them coming at a steady rate if you’re adding responses.

Here is an example of one I found:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Oceangram”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Too busy to be creative today. Let’s do one of those memes, of which I was making fun yesterday. Let’s see… Don has a good one: A Book Meme.

To keep this interesting, let us append the qualifier “besides the Bible” to all of the following. Otherwise, my list would be rather homogenous.

1. One book that changed your life
   A Wrinkle in Time was the first book I ever loved. I was in fourth grade. As an adult, Screwtape Letters actually had a large effect on me. The book is quite small and simple, but it gave me some very handy tools for thinking about the Christian life in different ways.

2. One book that you've read more than once
   Fellowship of the Ring. I read the other two books only rarely, but I’ve taken in Fellowship many, many times.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island
   Laying aside the fact that I’d mostly likely die within a week if deprived of my medicine: Some sort of survivalist book. For beginners. With pictures. Maybe even some sort of survivalist pop-up book, which contained various tools and devices within its pages.

4. One book that made you laugh
   Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In my youth I read it a couple of dozen times. I’m sort of afraid to revisit it after all this time. Will it still be funny?

5. One book that made you cry
   Never happened. I don’t go in for sad books, I guess.

6. One book that you wish had been written
   “Why Shamus Young is Totally the Greatest Guy Ever, Volume X” But wishing for that book is silly. I’d settle for just a Wiki.

7. One book that you wish had never been written
   I don’t know. Are we trying to alter history or just avoid reading something that sucked? If the former, then I guess Mein Kampf or the various things Marx put to paper could be a good choice, although I’m always wary of messing with the timesteam. Haven’t we learned anything from Star Trek?

   If we just want to blot something from history to avoid reading it, then I nominate Day of the Delphi as an example of something that was published to the detriment of human culture. Utter sophomoric tripe. As proof: How many fiction books have a webpage dedicated to detailing all the ways in which it sucks? (And in fact, the author of that page is unduly kind in my view. There are many additional flaws that he does not bother to enumerate. He read it in order to familiarize himself with the Technothriller genre. That’s like watching Plan 9 From Outer Space as an introduction to sci-fi.) Take the Tom Clancy technothriller formula, hand it to an author who knows nothing about firearms, goverment, or military equipment, replace the main characters with stale b-movie hero archetypes and various Weathermen-style 60’s radical leftovers (as good guys), and then run the whole plot through some sort of John Woo stupidifier. Some books aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed, but Day of the Delphi isn’t worth the cubic volume of air that the book displaces.

8. One book you're currently reading
   (Blush) Fellowship again.

9. One book you've been meaning to read
   The System of the World books. I read the first in the series – Baroque Cycle – but got bogged down because the whole cast was a bunch of miserable cusses. I know there’s gold in the later books, I just need to suck it up and get through the plague, torture, slavery, frighteningly bad medicine, war, gross food, bad hygene, crushing opression, and the general prevailing theme that life in the seventeenth century was horrible, violent, and short.

10. Tag 5 people
    Five? Stinking extroverts. Hmmmm. I can’t “tag” Steven, as he hasn’t upgraded his site from Stone Tablets and Chisel version 1.0. I could tag Don, who I got the meme from in the first place, but that would cause the meme to collapse in on itself and form a singularity. So let’s not do that. Lots of other people I read deal with a subject in particular (such as Anime) so tagging them would be an implicit request for them to break the theme of their site. What happens if I tag someone and they simply don’t feel like answering the questions? Doen’t this seem sort of pushy? Hey! Blog about books because I linked you!

    Anyway, if these questions interest you then by all means: Knock yourself out. But in the interest of fulfilling the request for an arbitrary five tags…

    My wife.
    Let’s also ask Fuzzy.
    And Augury.
    Let’s see if Mark will give up talking about movies long enough to talk about books.
    How about Beware the %Kawaii no wait… that just leads back to Don again.
    Tunes for Tancos? Nope. Don again. Come on, man! You’re hogging the internet. Save some room for the rest of us.

I picked this meme because I thought it would be a good way to bang out a ten-minute post, and I just blew a half hour on it. Whoops. Back to work.

FURTHER REFLECTION: Doesn’t this “tagging” business go counter to the idea of a meme? A meme is supposed to spread on its own, because people find the idea attractive or interesting. The “tag” thing seems to be a way to artificially spread a meme that wouldn’t otherwise cut it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.