deninet Staff

I have not been updating much recently. This seems odd to me, as I used to post as often as half a dozen times a day.

It might be tempting to blame this on Pokemon, which I have recently started playing again and the playing of which has been interfering with my ability to hold conversations with people. But that would only apply to the past couple of days at most and I am talking about something of months.

(I started with Yellow, by the way, and so far have a little team in Vista counting of course a pikachu [Chikapu], rattata [Ratsy], pidgey [Perchy] and two nidorans, male and female [Nirodan and Nita, respectively].)

For the past several weeks I have been undertaking an industry placement for TAFE two days a week, which means working in a somewhat looking Catholic high school library. It has been interesting and fun. I got to do actual cataloging for a catalogue. Well, copy-cataloguing. Also designed and put up a display on this year's Olympics, shelving, cleaning shelves, some circulation (mostly the checking out of laptops to students, who seldom borrow books when I am looking) and end-processing. Also recently making sure signage is in the right place and designing new signs for the shelves.

This necessitated much colour-matching yesterday, to get the new signs with their number breakdown to match the colours of the existing signs pointing to the first hundred divisions. The other people there seemed to think this was a sort of brilliant idea so yay. Currently that is in an intermediate state of being cut to size before getting laminated, after I spent much of yesterday calculating the right font size to use to get the desired spacing, and other such sign-related activities.

The point of saying all this is that I have been doing work-type things for nearly the first time in my life and although for a while it was leaving me tired unto sleep once I got home (now less so to the point of being able to be productive ish in my own time again) and it has been interesting and varied and even in some cases fun. So far I have managed not to succumb to the occasional bouts of anxiety which have me wanting to whimper in a corner until it goes away and I have managed to do socialising a bit.

So. Library work. I can do this. I have also been finding that, if this is what library work is, it is not interesting enough for me to want to do indefinitely. Fortunately it is something I can do and not hate and even enjoy in parts, so I am not looking to abandon it even for the next several years barring some unexpected opportunity, and may well continue with it for a very long time. However, I will definitely be considering what else I might do that could provide me with more intellectual satisfaction.

Astronomy is something I have been wanting more and more to get back to. Doing so would mean really working on my mathematical skills, which I keep not doing. Still not sure how to do so, though I am sure it involves cutting down on the amount I feel obligated to do online and especially the things I do to shut off my brain and thought. Even if I do, I am doubtful I would want to pursue a career in research. It seems laden with a lot of distasteful scrabbling for funds and tenure and a whole lot of pressures not really related to learning about the universe.

Writing is something else. Despite my occasional mutterings about the end of my writing, I do not intend to give it up. I am less focused these days on the idea of publication, and even if I am published it is unlikely I would be so successful and prolific that I would be able to write full-time. It might however provide a diversion from work which would satisfy me. I might find, too, this 'satisfaction' thing in other aspects of my life which I do not expect.

Satisfy, that is a curious sort of word to use. I do not imagine myself ever being satisfied in life, experiencing contentment without ambition. But I might apply that word to the pursuit of things, to engagement with what I am doing, to the journey itself even if no destination can quite compare.

While writing this I have been thinking about my recent decline in posting. There have been ideas.

One is that I am currently in three romantic relationships and quite possibly this has the effect of socially saturating me. There are people (not limited to those I am in relationships with, though nearly so) who are willing to talk to me on a near-daily basis in interesting ways. I do not have much desire to seek out social contact outside what I already have - the main reason at present is the inconvenience of the hours, which leave me often awake with no one about.

Another is that posting is a habit and a mindset, and one I have fallen out of. More than once over the past few weeks I have begun writing a post only to lose heart soon after. I was a bit depressed in the first half of the year and this may have had an effect.

The last one in this little list is that I have been doing such things as going to classes and this industry placement, and I find such activities exhausting beyond their content. Often the first day after these (Tuonday and Sriday currently) I spend decompressing, not doing much at all beyond recovery. So this is going to cut into what I actually do in my free time, although it seems to be improving.

And that seems to be all for now.

I've been thinking increasingly often of what's next for the site. While there's nothing technically wrong with deninet's current incarnation, the underlying purpose is in serious need of refinement.

Deninet 1.0 through 3.0 were geared  toward content delivary of first Denizen Soft's, and then Denizen Entertainment's projects. Due to various circumstances -- life, work, my own ineptitude -- none of those projects have yet come to fruition. Toward the end of deninet 3.0, it became obvious that we needed a proper framework to help us create, manage, and publish our projects. 

Deninet 4.0 was the birth of "The Internet Idea Database", a web application geared toward communal development and tracking of ideas. I spent a great deal of time on Gazelle, the software powering the Idea Database. I still love the concept of communal idea development including our sales tagline of "Invent, Share, Expand".

Gazelle wasn't the most complicated software project I've attempted (InterLock still holds that title), although it had plenty of problems of its own. In Gazelle, Ideas (big 'I') were a fundamental unit of content. Ideas were made of Versions, and contained the actual content of the idea itself. Versions were submitted to the community; authors and others contibuted Thoughts to extend or refine the Idea. Those who liked a particular thought could vote on the thought. When the author is satisfied, they considered the submitted Thoughts and published a new Version. Authors weren't required to change their Idea based on community suggestions, they retained complete control of the Idea's development. Ideas could be grouped at a higher level via Channels, which often reflected a sense of a whole project. 

On paper, the concept looks wonderful. Individuals and organizations can post and track ideas throughout the entire development lifecycle. Once we had a working version of Gazelle, the Idea Database became a useful tool for my own projects. There were, unfortunately, a huge number of problems with the system. There was very little security within the framework. All Ideas were left wide open to the entire site. This reflected my high-minded idealism at the time,  today I just shake my head my nievate. Gazelle itself was a nightmare to extend. Each new content type required new code. Everything was library and no engine -- there was no dynamic way to organize content display. 

The biggest mistake I had made with it, unfortunately, was I began to think of the Idea Database as a generalized content manager. News and blog posts co-mingled with Ideas proper resulting in confusion. In retrospect, I probably did it to reduce the amount of content types within the framework as well as gain the functionality Ideas provided.

Six months after the "completion" of Gazelle, I dumped the entire project. I hated to do so after investing nearly two years of my evenings developing the thing, but I felt it was really the best choice. I had come to the realization that I'd never be able to keep up Gazelle while attempting to work on Paper Girl. There were fundamental problems with the design, and I didn't have the knowledge, expertise, let alone time to write them myself. After investigating my options -- as well as rewriting the framework entirely -- I selected the open-source content manager Drupal to power the next version of deninet.

Deninet 5.0r was the first version of the site to run the new content manager. The site also completely lost it's Creative Cooperative bent and became my own personal domain. My failure to perfect the Idea Database and attract interested people to the concept led me to this decision. Interestingly, once the whole "Were a real company, honest!" charade was dropped, the site began to swell with content. Instead of being project or idea centric, I uploaded my artwork, some writing, and began writing posting blog entries to the main page. I could, of course, publish more complex creative works from the site if and when I ever came to that juncture.

Then a curious thing happened a few months ago. I was no longer the only active person on the site. This both caused me excitement and concern. First of all, deninet 5.1 was designed to be a single user site. While I kept multiple users in mind, there were critical places where it began to break down. The image gallery, for example, isn't set up for multiple users. Even though blog posts are nicely separated, the "river of news" main page is not terribly effective. 

Even more curious was the fact that I was no longer the only person wishing for a Creative Cooperative. Indeed, there seems to be a strong desire to refine the site and reclaim the purpose I had thrown away with deninet 4.0. Although the desire was there, I haven't really been in the position to research our options.

Looking back at the history of the site, certainly have gained a sense of what was good, and what was a mistake. Right now, I'm looking at the Idea Database topology I described above with scheming eye. Yes, it was a mistake to shoehorn all content management into the concept. It may have also been a mistake for me to write the management system myself. As one person, I can only write so much. Developing a new CMS from the ground up simply takes too much time. Gazelle's internal lack of generalization also complicated things unnecessarily. Switching to Drupal, however, saved me huge amounts of development time and added many new features.

What if, I began asking myself this afternoon, I used Drupal to power the Idea Database? We would certainly gain a powerful backend with a preexisting development community. We would only be responsible for what fulfills our goals as an organization. Are Ideas as laid out in the topology, I thought, enough to fulfill the ends of a "creative cooperative"? This is a trickier question. While I believe that the Idea Database topology will be part of our end goals, I very much down it will be enough to fill the project management role required to bring make ideas manifest. There's a lot I have yet to investigate.

I very much doubt that deninet will jump from 5.2 to 6.0 directly. There's a lot of new technology and refinements required in order to get to that point. The present site needs to be updated to the latest version of Drupal and key features made available to all users. There are several more minor releases in our future before we get that far. I for one am very much excited to see how the site will evolve.

The clock on my deskphone blinks a solemn "11:20 AM", reminding me I only have 40 minutes of my lunch hour remaining. Lunch itself was devoured in less that time, while I depleted the contents of my feed-reader and scanned a few websites. The typical course of the day is for me to go back to work at this point, saving any pursuits of my non-working life for off hours when I'm well away from my desk.

It seems, however, that less and less happens while I'm away from my desk. Work has taken over my life, my demanding work-out regimen feasting on the remains. As a result, I barely have the time to relax let alone be creative. It becomes more and more difficult to ignore the creeping thought that I should simply give up creative pursuits. The weary mantra of "There's no time nor energy for anything else" seems a sad stereotype. "Occasionally, I find the time," I begin, squaking some lackluster justification to complete the sutra. Perhaps it's true that I'm simply not at the point in my life where I can sustain anything else.

You'd think that giving up would provide me with comfort. "Give yourself a break," "Take some time off," "It'll come back." My friends do try to help, but taking their advice to heart only seems to make me feel more and more confined. I can't escape the demands of my life, I can't walk through the immaculate gate in my mind that leads to imagined people and realities. I seem forever chained in the present, free only to catch glimpses through the doorway before it's slammed shut once more.

When writing software, I can fly. I can speed through intricate, ever-changing machines in a infinite field of electric blue.
When writing stories, I'm an invisible telepathic. I can listen in on conversations and peer into secret dreams.
When drawing, I don't exist at all. The world consists only of shape, stroke, and motion. Color is solitary expression.

I'm tired of being chained. I'm even more tired of being aware I am chained.

For all my artful descriptions, there doesn't seem to be any easy solutions. There seems even less a simple explanation for my state.  Maybe there aren't any, maybe the only thing to do is shrug off the weight and sound of clanking metal, reach for the doorknob and turn...

For one of my classes I am tasked with the creation of a bibliography, an extensive document serving as a directory of books, serials and web resources pertaining to a particular subject. More complicated than something for which a simple catalogue search would suffice.

The library whose resources I have chosen to create the bibliography for (it has to be for and using the resources of a particular library) is the Seattle Public Library. The subject I have nominated to cite is resources for building writing and artistic skills.

My actual intention behind this is to create a resource index for aDE, material we can use to study and learn from. Currently the area of material I am investigating is very broad and not especially well defined. It would be helpful if people would nominate particular areas of interest for skill development, or resources they have found useful in the past.

People who are not members of aDE are welcome to participate too. They are certainly welcome to make use of the bibliography once it is done.

Just a little sketch, maybe a warmup. 

I learned something about writing last Friday. For the last several weeks (maybe a month) I've been trying to divise a new opening for Paper Girl. To say that this has been no easy task is an understatement. I've gone through several different versions and false positives. I researched the experience of other writers -- all far more experienced than myself -- in crafting the perfect first line:

• The first line is your best advertisement next to the book's cover.
• The first line sets the mood and tone of the book.
• The first line should crystallize the plot but only so much as to make the reader interested.

How the hell, I thought, do I stuff all of that into one sentence? Most of the time the first line just comes to me, and I can build a story, chapter, or blog entry around it. The problem with Paper Girl is that it's far, far bigger and a more ambitious story than any I have attempted thus far. Crystallizing that down to one sentence seemed ludicrous. I tried meditation, interviewing the characters, even brute force, but the only thing I was successful at generating was frustration.

On someone's suggestion, I decided to take some time off from the project. I put it out of my mind, or as much out of my mind as is possible for someone with my personality. It helped somewhat that I was out-state on assignment last week. Being away from home tends to make me value my imagination more and I have less distractions available. After all, only so much fits in a carry-on. I put Paper Girl out of my mind primarily for the reason that I felt overworked and needed a break. After a week, my creativity gave suggestions of a return, but nothing solid.

It was on the first leg of my flight home Friday that inspiration struck. I was in a cramped DC-80 somewhere over Kentucky, making my way to O'Hare International. I was convinced that I wasn't going to make my connection since we were delayed taking off, and then there was a ground hold at Chicago. I sat in my seat and thumbed through my music collection on my BlackBerry.

A few songs in, the thought occurred to me that I hadn't been listening to my playlist of Paper Girl related music. I tend to assemble playlists for my writing projects to serve as both focusing and inspirational tools. Lately, however, this habit has fallen out of use in favor of less purposeful listening. On a whim, I decided to change that. The first song I naturally turned to was "Chop Suey" by System of a Down.

"Chop Suey" has been a strong member of the playlist for years. Since college, I've imagined it as the closing song to the fictitious Paper Girl anime. Always the same selection of images flickers in my mind to that song, a building in flames, a girl falling along a mirrored wall, and an assortment of others. Like many of the songs on my writing playlists, "Chop Suey" has a key lyric that is relevent to the story as a whole or a particular character. In this case, the majority of the song has both been parallel, and shaped the nature of the story.

Somewhere near the end of the song I found myself sitting bolt-upright. I'm sure that if anyone had seen my expression at that moment people might have thought I had just witnessed the fuselage being torn to pieces before my eyes. I didn't even voice if it were the right line or not, I simply knew at the gut level that what had come to me was it.

Lacking a pen and paper, I switched applications on my phone and began typing in what I had just written. It didn't take me long to realize that this wasn't the first line of the story. If I hadn't been so caught up in the moment I might have been disappointed at this point, instead I realized that this was the last line of the opening paragraph.

Drawing from some recently generated ideas, an image suggested from a friend, and two failed introductory paragraphs, I began formulating a new opener. It flowed surprisingly easily at 30,000 feet. A flight attendant passed by in the middle of this and asked, "You're not sending that, right?" She thought I was tapping out a text message or an email; I told her I wasn't and she was gone before I could explain further. Some minutes later, I stared at the completed introduction:

NOVELLA:
It's a lot like watching a television set. Everything you experience
has an off-white sense of distance, and a high frequency buzz barely
low enough to hear. Even touch feels rubbery like the buttons of a
remote control. Except, there's no remote, no channels, no off switch.
You're always watching yourself, a puppet made of flesh.

I hated it. I wanted to break my gaze, unplug the world and be free and floating. But then I met an angel who said she wanted to die.

What I had learned as a writer in that moment was that the first line, the very first line doesn't matter. The first line of the above section is actually quite banal, but it does hold your interest long enough for you to read the first paragraph. What is like watching a television set? you may ask. The line also does set the mood of the story as well as tell you something critical about how the main character perceives the world.

Instead of crystallizing the entire story in the first sentence, I decided to make a grabber. The first sentence keeps the reader interested long enough to finish the paragraph -- or the first few pages if they're particularly attentive. The paragraph alone, however, isn't enough for most readers to finish the book. You need more for that. Instead, the first paragraph serves to build up interest and set mood so as to prepare the reader for the really, really grabbing line in the second paragraph.

This line you can call a "nail", as in, "If I haven't nailed your interest by now, you might as well put the book back on the shelf." It's this line that serves to capture the readers interest, as well as act as a point of reference for the writer.

The majority of the analysis occurred over the next 40 minutes of my flight. I was so excited by this revelation that I wanted to randomly show it to anyone that would listen, asking "Would you read a book that starts with this?" I managed to restrain myself enough to compose an email, and set it for delayed send once I was back on the ground.

Since then I've shown the intro to several different people who's sense of writing I trust. The response has been overall positive and I see little reason to change that. Now the problem is crafting the remainder of the first chapter. I have some dialog already, but it's no where near long enough to make a chapter. Now that the imfamous first line is behind me, hopefully it'll be easier to pen the remaining.

Just a little drawing. I'm surprised I still can turn out half-way decent pieces like this given how little I use my drawing skills any longer.

This image started out as a pencil drawing. While the simplicity can be enjoyable, I spent some time cleaning up the static read during the scanning process. I had forgotten how annoying that is. I also had forgotten to draw the side-strip and pocket cover on Novella's jacket. After reconfiguring my tablet on Linux (I had lost it in a reformat a few weeks ago), I added the missing details digitally. I'm rather surprised how that turned out.

It was late at night and I was rifling through my library. I would take a book from the shelf, and open it to the first page. The book remained open only a moment as I scanned the page before returning it to the self and moving on to the next book. The process did not take long due to the size of my library. The two stout, white painted bookshelves could only hold so many books and manga. I was searching for something.

To be more accurate, I was conducting an analysis. I was looking for archetypes, patterns, and ultimately, guidence. I read only a short selection from each book:

"My name is Kathy H."
"All of this happened, more or less."
"A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories."

...came the first three. The next were personal favorites and rather striking:

"It was a pleasure to burn."
"The sky above port was the color of a television, turned to a dead channel."
"Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah's cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting."

As I'm sure some of you have recognized by now, I'm looking at the first line in each novel. Crafting the first line of a story is a kind of art form. It has to grab the reader, while giving you a hint of what to expect. They have to envoke atmosphere and scene in one fell swoop. And of course, it has to sell the damn book.

This is not to say that a bland opening line means a great novel. My first example came from Never Let Me Go, a surprising and heartbreaking fictional biography set in an all to possible futrue. Of all my examples, it's the plainest and least grabbing. It does, however, offer an odd clue and hint of personality in the fact the narrator's last name is abbreviated. Little details like that can make or break an initial line.

Crafting the perfect first line was foremost on my mind that evening. I had been beating my head against the wall attempting to come up with the first line for Paper Girl. When I set about to write something, be it a journal entry, a blog post, or even a story, I often find myself unable to start without having that first line. It's not exactly fear that's holding me back. The first line is a kind of parent that each following sentence descends. I've often started over or abandoned entire bodies of work due to a bad first line.

Thankfully, I have yet to abandon the few pages of script I have written. Unfortunately I haven't settled on a first line either. Some months ago I thought for sure that I had nailed it. I was so excited by the line I spent my morning throwing together a new comic just to introduce it to others.

At the time, it summed up exactly what I had in mind for the story. It was also provocative, and grabbed my attention straightaway. Unfortunately, I began to rethink this the last few weeks.

The problem is that since I had come up with that line, I've been heavily reworking the main character, Novella. Novella has always come across as a weak character, too pliant to the wishes of other's in the story. For quite a number of outlines she didn't seem to have any concept of free will at all. The other characters of Akisa and Miki seemed far more clear in my mind, and I was able write them with much more focus and easy. Novella, by contrast, came across to one of my friends as "someone afraid of her own shadow."

The last few outlines I have been trying to improve her, especially the current Draft 5 plotline. Even so she seemed missing some critical component that made her more dynamic. Oddly enough, a workout session while watching the anime series Ghost Hound provided some inspiration. Since then, the character has been turned around in such a way that breaks the mold of a Transgender character in a webcomic. In fact, it's questionable if Novella is really Trans at all.

Since then I've been trying to get to know this character in a way I couldn't before. This Novella spoke more clearly, although I felt as if I wasn't getting to her directly. It's an odd thing to explain; directed image techniques and modified meditation doesn't always yeild results that make sense. Earlier this week, however, Novella seemed to overcome any communication difficulties and spoke to me in a way that was rather alarming at first. (Didn't I say directed image techniques were weird?)

All of this, however, didn't seem to deal with the problem I was facing. The line I came up with before didn't actually make sense for chapter I had written. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that line needs to be conserved until later in the story where it will be far more relevant. It was also the wrong character speaking. By all rights, Novella should be the one granted the first line. I've done my best to come up with that line, but nothing seems quite be it:

"I can't remember when it first happened," or "When I was young, I remembered what the world felt like," aren't terrible. Yet they are lacking a quality that makes me stand up and say, "Yes! This is the first line of Paper Girl!" Some have suggested that I move on and write other parts of the story and get back to the initial line later. This is where I run into a problem. Paper Girl will take literally years for me to complete. The story I have in mind is complicated enough to warrent several volumes. Considering I plan to draw this story as a webcomic, I don't want to wait until the script is perfect to begin drawing. On the contrary, I want to keep the script only a bit ahead of the drawing so as to keep me interested. And of course there's my problem of how the first line is the progenitor of all the following.

I hope I come up with something soon, the wait is annoying.

Deninet is currently experiencing periodic outages due to possible hardware problems. I'm beginning to think it's a failing drive, but I won't be able to know for sure until I'm back in Minnesota on Friday. 

I discovered recently that Drupal 5 does not encrypt the password on login. I cconsider this a serious hole in security as a third party could intercept communication and capture the password.

Ideally, we'd enable SSL access to the site so the line is encrypted. This cannot be done right now due to the aging OS on the deninet server. Setting up SSL on Gentoo is a mess. For now, I've installed the CRAM module to at least patch the hole. This module sends a random token to the user. The token is used in combination with the password to generate a MD5 hash using Javascript on the client side. This hash is what's sent over the line -- no plaintext passwords. The server then takes the token and looks up your password and generates another hash. If the two match, you're logged in.

This isn't the greatest security, but it's better than nothing (which is what we had before). MD5 hashes can be broken fairly easily, and the token can be intercepted on send. I hope to keep this module around even after implementing SSL, thereby making it much, much harder to break. 

I'd like to deal with the issue of the aging OS and lack of SSL in one fell swoop. In order to do this, I plan to wipe the deninet server clean and reinstall Ubuntu Server 7.10 on it. User home directories, including the one on which the main site is stored, will be preserved as they are on a different disk. Since I will be out for three weeks starting Sunday, I'd like to take care of this ASAP. 

Please be advised this will create some downtime while I reconfigure the system.