Main krozruch channel

Creative Commons Summit Proposal and Writing Resolution

Main krozruch channel — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 21:47:50 GMT

I apologise for the poor person's rotoscoping effect on this video - I think the Christmas jumper in front of the bare walls brought it out of me a little, but I had also mentioned Richard Linklater in one of the videos I had been editing this past few days when I was ill and so had Waking Life in my mind, and could too easily see the whole scene as something out of a graphic novel so wanted to push the envelope a little. Plus, I have been ill and lying in the settee all day put me in the kind of mood to simply play with all of the effects on Kdenlive.

Here I talk about a story, what would become (is becoming) Holding Patterns, which I would work on for the next couple of months until something would kick me back into developing Issue Zero as a whole.

I talk about a submission I made to talk about Creative Commons zines at the Creative Commons Summit in Portugal - it was to be accepted - and my ambivalence about that which relates to Google funding of the Creative Commons.

This video marks an important point, perhaps, as, though Holding Patterns would inevitably invite mission creep, it did suggest to me something that could be serialised and developed in Marginálie while remaining comprehensible to those who do not understand on a technical level all of the threats it takes as its theme.

I did not realise it at the time, but Holding Patterns had bubbled up from a daemon began with Woodstock telling me to write a "chlebovka", something that could be sold to the masses, like a detective story. Though the story - now the beginnings of a novel - is set in the world of Call Them Soldiers, a world which has been overengineered with autistic perseveration over more than a decade, it shares much in common with thrillers and detective stories and could set the scene for Think Soldier, History is on the Make, and other more involved stories in the series.

Marginálie - January 2019 monthly review

Main krozruch channel — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 23:18:22 GMT

I am aiming to do a video once a month as part of my monthly review process. Doing so might help to pin me down, force my hand in terms of talking about what I have been working on (and thereby, in anticipation of same, to force myself to focus and work through what is most important and what I have committed to). This first is a little longer than I hoped for a number of reasons, but I talk about a few issues and frame the project as a whole. It also helped me, along with one other video which preceded it and which I also edited while ill this last few days, to work on a workflow involving recording a screencast alongside a (silent) video from a digital camera.

This video will be a little different from those I hope might follow in the sense that I discuss what may become the main focus of the next few months, a workshop at the Creative Commons summit in Portugal in May. That will involve a discussion of Creative Commons zines and my publishing a zine I will by then, hopefully, have worked on, perhaps in several versions.

Having set up this context and shown something of the org-mode system I use, I hope the next few videos may be briefer, showing only what I have worked on that month, and what I hope to aim for in the next.

If you engage with me on social media at eupublic.social or perhaps on Keybase where I currently remain, feel free to ask me about any of the tasks you think might be more pressing or to ask how I am getting on with them.

The test website may currently be found at https://morbid-interregnum.cz

Morbid-interregnum_screencast_27th_november_2018

Main krozruch channel — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 15:24:10 GMT

A peek under the hood of Marginálie and its current test site at Morbid-Interregnum. This is a screenshot of what the current Flask app looks like, where I am going, and the kind of help I am looking for.

This may be put together as a zine to be distributed at the Chaos Communication Congress in December or somewhere.

Marginálie development diary - Morbid Interregnum

Main krozruch channel — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 22:38:23 GMT

Having been working on the back-end for Marginálie for some weeks with it
apparently in an interminable state where the front-end is out of
action, I finally bite the bullet and take a couple of steps to putting
it up on a test page. This finds me determined but also unsure of
myself. What do I find myself doing? And is it not the case that this is
some extreme case of autistic perseveration? Worse, since I find ways
to demean myself and the whole project even in the event that it will
work, surely it will never earn me a penny? And so I revisit my doubts,
doubts earned from a lifetime of living on the edge, barely scraping a
living, struggling with depression and various forms of mental illness
and stress. All of this takes so much of my energy before even I begin
to tackle all of the hostility and the present negativity that surrounds
me. And yet I have to prove myself, to myself, and to them, those most
recent doubters, and those others that have come before whose voices I
still hear in my head.

And yet, for all of this imposter's syndrome, I talk about what I have
done so far on the project which I could in this video scarcely yet
believe could look like anything at all, could be a web application, as
if I didn't have it in me, and talk about what it could yet become. But
not only that. I talk about coming across the voice of Henry Rollins. I
talk about what it means for me, and for us all, that journalism is not
what it once was, that we are all now expected to be our own marketing
departments, about how I would like to discuss Orientalism by Edward
Said. I talk, too, about my ambivalence towards computers. In short, I
take a look at Marginálie through a different perspective than I have in
other videos and podcasts, but with it all feeling a little closer than
it has until now. At that most difficult place in a project - being
almost there - I talk about what the newly-chosen title for what is this
test site, 'morbid interregnum' means, and what it means for me, for
the site, and for us.

Call Them Soldiers - a dilemma

Main krozruch channel — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 20:07:31 GMT

A discussion of the difficulties involved in writing a novel / series analysing where we are and where we are going with technology when the issues are understood so little.

I talk about the origins of the project with the viral success of Facebook in the British West Midlands at around 2006-8. This was taking place when I was very socially marginal and rather paranoid. I talk then about the expansion of the story into a sequence involving a frame narrative.

I mention Roger Scruton and the Underground University in Prague as one of the influences of the dissident movement in the series, and talk about some of the other important historical incidents I was drawing upon and the resulting concepts such as deprecation and the "negative space". At time of writing (October, 2018), this is the best place to start to understand the fictional project, Call Them Soldiers.

I talk about the intentionally claustrophobic atmosphere of Manchester in the series, and how this posed a problem in the sense that contemporary world events led me to hope to say something about them. It was this that led me to the narrative frame involving the Choctaw Nation.

My thinking on the narrative frame was triggered, as I explain here, by an episode of The Irish Passport podcast on The Great Hunger.

Currently, Call Them Soldiers is on hold both in terms of the narrative frame, History is on the Make, and book one Think Soldier! Should I discovered there to be a readership (and a market) for it, I will take it on. As I explain in the video, I had began to doubt that, and the theme is heavy enough, and the project ambitious enough, to take on without knowing what will happen with it.