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Watch the memes go two by two
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 9:14 pm on 8/7/2004
Those connections blogs I wished for? Found one. Game designer, epistemologist and all-around shmottguy Charles Cameron has created DoubleQuotes, a weblog of quotations paired with other quotations, lately with commentary. As Cameron puts it, these are “thoughts dropped into the mind-pond, not so much for their own sakes as for their concentric ripples and the interference patterns between them.” So far, they reflect concern with the Middle East, as well as war in general and its curious confluence with games.
It has a couple of problems, first and foremost its un-copy-and-pasteable, un-Googleable, un-scalable, anti-blog-ethic image format. Stop that, Charles. Seriously. I’ll write up some styles for you if it absolutely has to look like that. Secondly, the whole “bead” thing seems a little confusing… until you read this and this (both Cameron’s work). But you should read those anyway.
August 8th, 2004 at 9:07 pm
Hi Misuba!
Tackling your second comment first, I’ve done my best to make the “beads” business make a little more sense, a bit frustrated by the fact that I can only have 500 characters in my header. But that first comment! “un-copy-and-pasteable, un-Googleable, un-scalable, anti-blog-ethic image format”! Devastating, particularly the part that suggests I’m blog-ethically challenged!
To be honest, I think it’s more a matter of my being technically challenged. The reason I’ve made them images is that I want a uniform format for them, so they can function like, say, political cartoons, with a recognizable appearance and regular size – so I’m looking to frame the two quotes, images or whatever (and some of them include or consist entirely of images, remember) in such a way that the contrast between them is brought forcibly to the viewer’s attention. And to tie in graphically with the beadgaming.com opening page graphic…
I’d certainly like people to be able to find them by googling words in their texts, and if I was skilled enough in imagemapping I’d happily include clickable links to URLs where the sources are on the net – but I’m highly untechnical and it already takes me an hour or two to compose each one. And I may be able to do something about “un-Googleable” with ALT tags, and I’d have thought the individual images could be brought across with an html tag too – IMG SRC or even A HREF.
But tell me more about the styles you could write – what are you thinking of?
August 9th, 2004 at 12:34 am
I mean CSS that will set up all the visuals for the beads, keeping layout separate from HTML so that you can create the look by entering a couple of simple tags. I’ll have some extra time at work this week so I’d be happy to work on some techie stuff with you.
August 9th, 2004 at 2:44 pm
Excellent — that’s a very kind offer!