Saturday, December 17, 2016

Hierarchical-reveal hypertext design




The new style of hypertext I'm exploring in the post "Button test" below is a partial blogger simulation of my planned Fweet-style Ulysses database I've been calling Uleet.

Since Blogger recently changed their rules for images to require https, I'm looking at going thru all 800 pages to find image substitutes.

I thought I might take the opportunity to try to:

1) streamline the page design

2) tag the note-types in anticipation of Uleet

I hadn't expected to be able to implement conceal-reveal buttons in Blogger, but a lot of that kind of stuff seems do-able if you know how.

The current design goals:

1) when you first load a page, you see almost-uninterrupted Joycean text. Linebreaks are freeform for readability, with subtle annotations-buttons at convenient points. (Delaney's embedded podcasts are also visible at this level.)

[at the moment, only the annotations-buttons after "stairhead" and "crossed" are implemented]

2) clicking an annotations-button opens up a summary-view of all annotations for that passage, one short line for each note, starting with a colored oval with emoji (itself the next level of reveal-button) followed by the note-type in CAPS and a short summary-title. (illustrations are visible at this level) The background colors of the ovals will probably categorise the note-types in some simpler way.

3) Clicking an oval button opens that note. These can include a lot more redundant links since their display is optional.

Serious readers will be expected to open every note, skimmers can ignore all but their primary interest.


Switching formats will be a huge task.  The html is ugly and verbose, and the note-types are messy and arbitrary.


The emoji symbols may or may not prove useful-- at least they're decorative.




Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Button test

telemachus: 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

page-text:




Delaney: [1]

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan
came from the stairhead,


bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled,
was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air.


He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
Introibo ad altare Dei.

Delaney: [2]

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
— Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!


Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.
He faced about and blessed gravely thrice
the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains.



Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus,
he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air,
gurgling in his throat and shaking his head.




Delaney: [3]

Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy,
leaned his arms on the top of the staircase





and looked coldly
at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him,
equine in its length,
and at the light untonsured hair,
grained and hued like pale oak.




Delaney: [4]

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror
and then covered the bowl smartly.
— Back to barracks! he said sternly.





He added in a preacher's tone:
— For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine:
body and soul and blood and ouns.





Slow music, please.
Shut your eyes, gents.
One moment.
A little trouble about those white corpuscles.
Silence, all.





He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call,
then paused awhile in rapt attention,
his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.
Chrysostomos.






Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.
— Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely.
Switch off the current, will you?





>


mysteries: Christine; white corpuscles; Two strong shrill whistles answered... Switch off the current, will you?









telemachus: 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Friday, December 2, 2016

Tana French's Dublin

(her primary settings all seem to relocate real placenames to fictional sites)



In the Woods

There's lots of Irish places called 'Knocknaree' but this one is fictional, location (red paddle) implied by ""She had had a ballet class in Stillorgan, a few miles in towards the center of Dublin

Two local motorways opened in 2005

Poem: "At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux" by Charles Causley

The Likeness







Ryan's room is a stone's throw from the Tower (also Synge's pissed-on door)

Ryan and Maddox walk the famous Strand

their offices are in the Castle (like Martin Cunningham's)

Ballsbridge is where the cavalcade ends up

UCD has moved

Knocknaree would have been about an hour's walk from Deasy's school





Monday, November 7, 2016

Ulysses on Ice

► 

so we should try making them explicit
magnifying them into skaters, dancing...

(also: exiles on ice
already minutely choreographed by joyce in stage directions,
dubliners on ice)

i was thinking first just of a ballet
(and an ice ballet could always be trimmed of its ice
if you just can't take it seriously)

ep1 is revealed mostly as a brother-duet
with buck leading and challenging and stephen quietly following

stephen eventually asking for a brotherly commitment

buck peaks with his entrance
a flurry of grandiose pantomimes of male roles

(stephen will get a glorious extended solo later, in proteus on ice)

different modalities might be conveyed with colored spotlights

buck first mimes a self-serious priest
then he mimes stephen as a fearful, jejune jesuit (holding up his jupes to flee? cf Stephen Hero ch18 "holding their soutanes up as women do with their skirts when they cross a muddy street")
then a series of grandiose flourishes
skating circles around barely-moving stephen
(as buck starts to shave as well)

stephen is fearful, displeased and sleepy because haines had a noisy nightmare
stephen must mime haines and himself, and also mime brave buck
and he at first demands buck choose

snotrag-business
sea-gaze

buck suddenly halts and accuses stephen of killing his mother
buck skates off smugly as stephen secretly writhes
stephen then resumes the duet
buck continues challenging stephen's sanity, then catches himself
reverses direction
praises stephen
complains stephen distrusts him
offers to give haines a ragging
asks what's real problem
dramatic pause
stephen takes tentative lead, buck follows warily
stephen recalls overhearing buck's heartless phrase

(stephen wishes for a brotherbond
where buck would play protector of his heart)

but buck flees
mounts defense
stephen parries
buck departs with nonapology

stephen's sad solo turns nightmarish

buck returns



kitchen cooking and banter
milkwoman slow but sure


later:
bloom's kitchen duet with (skating) cat
like chaplin on rollerskates

bloom timidly stalks oblivious neighbor girl
bloom busily circles reclining molly

later:
hades on ice: foursome with two skating backwards


scylla: competent librarians hector brilliant stephen like birds of prey


Saturday, September 24, 2016

Before Bloomsday 1904

c June 20 Seymour "Going over next week to stew" (p22)


Friday June 17

Thursday June 16


p191 "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Signed: Dedalus. Where did you launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram! Malachi Mulligan, the Ship, lower Abbey street."

p190 "Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy's ducats. How much did I spend? O, a few shillings."

p26 "— Have I heard all? Stephen asked.
— Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.
— Half day, sir. Thursday"

p25 "Where do you begin in this?" SD not current

p11 "— I get paid this morning, Stephen said.
— The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid?"

p46 "After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who."

p4 "He was raving all night about a black panther"


Wednesday June 15

SD's hat in BM's trunk p17

p6 BM at the Ship (w/Haines? w/o SD) "That fellow I was with in the Ship last night" leaves w/florin (p15)

Seymour spooning with Lily on pier (p22)

p190 "I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin."

SD eats w/BM? "Three times a day, after meals" (p19)

someone washes dishes

p12 "I told her to come after eight." also Haines? "That woman"


Tuesday June 14


p209 "— O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured, multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!"

p206 "— I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore."

p191 "— The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to murder you.
— Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature."

someone buys bread, eggs, bacon, honey, sugar


quart of milk "it's seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir." p15


Monday June 13


p48 "The virgin at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday"

quart of milk


Sunday June 12

drowning June 7 "It's nine days today." (p21)

seven days of pints of milk start June 6


Stephen teaches daily


someone rents tower "It is mine, I paid the rent." (p20)


p29 "As on the first day he bargained with me here... Three twelve... The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now." (June 16, June 9, June 2?)

p31 "Mrs McKernan, five weeks' board"

26 March theatre program

p208 "— Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jew jesuit! She gets you a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus."

p184 "Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled. Their Pali book we tried to pawn."

p8 "the first day I went to your house after my mother's death"

p648 Mrs Dedalus buried 26 June 1903

Paris adventure

Friday, August 5, 2016

Thursday, June 16, 2016

A Ulysses census

I'm thinking there's a need for a spreadsheet with one line for each character in Ulysses.

[eg]

fields:
fictional name
real name(s)
aka
appearances

I'm playing with the idea of a single column for 'appearances' that holds a series of codes separated by commas

A-R = which of the 18 episodes they appear in
0-Z = class of appearance
0-9 = uncertainty of appearance-class

eg: A00

classes:

0 = seen and named
1 = seen but not named
2 = named but not seen
3 = alluded to but not seen or named
4? named but hallucinated




Tuesday, April 12, 2016

[Bloomsday recipes]

resources for replicating the meals eaten in Ulysses


rashers/eggs/fry/grease
bread, butter
milk, honey, sugarlumps


Irish Soda Bread: HuffPo, Joyce of Cooking


figrolls (fig newtons?)


bread and butter
tea, sugar, cream ("choice blend, finest quality, family tea")
kidney fried in butter with pepper


Simnel cakes


Banbury cakes


Roast beef and cabbage, corned and cabbage


burgundy
cheese sandwich, fresh clean bread, gorgonzola, pungent yellow mustard

gorgonzola sandwich: Davy Byrnes Pub, ditto


pears, peaches, Gilbey and Co's white invalid port


yellow thick peasoup
chunks of bread


mรฉlanges, scones and butter, cakes


liver gravy
mashed potatoes


steak and kidney pie


Liver Slices Fried with Crust Crumbs & Bacon: The Joyce of Cooking


fried liver: Cassell’s “Dictionary of Cookery” (1870’s)


two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps's soluble cocoa
water plus sugar plus cream plus cocoa





Friday, April 8, 2016

[Joycean poweruser's toolkit]

Here's the reference sources I find myself using over and over for both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. (Take the time to put these prominently on your bookmarks bar, and preset them for your most common ranges):


desktop editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
(much more flexible than concordances or online editions)

Fweet
includes regular expressions, annotations (FW only)

Wiktionary
multilingual, so especially good for FW

Onelook
wildcard search of multiple reference sites

the 1909 Dublin map
for Ulysses

the 1901 census
for Ulysses, lots of subtle uses (eg religion, occupation, street address)

GoogleBooks
chaotic but huge

Hathi books
much crisper but narrower

ngrams
track phrase origins

CopyPaste
special characters, quick and easy

GoogleKeep
for chunks of text you reuse

PowerThesaurus
nice design


also: zamzar.com is easy for all kinds of file format conversions




Monday, March 14, 2016

[3D Dublin dioramas]

this is totally not ready for primetime, but i'm trying to test the limits of a free web-based javascript 3d modelling engine called PlayCanvas for mocking up bloom's neighborhoods.

starting from a 'fork' of this very simple terrain demo, i mostly just upload my customised 'heightmap' to replace the one called 'Heightmap.jpg' in their Terrain entity.

i've been using 2048*2048 greyscale jpegs with tracings of the 1909 dublin map. pure black is the 'zero' height and i use trial and error to judge how gradually the black level should lighten. (weirdly, you need to 'flip horizontal' the map or left and right will be backwards.)

my primary goal is to give an intuitive sense of distances, so i want the building-fronts along each street to be approximately correct relative to the street widths.  i have a huge problem with conical artifacts where i want flat right-angles. (update: jpegs default to color blending that causes some of the cones, but others are jaggies when the buildings aren't positioned along the right angles)

i haven't figured out how to set the 'camera's eyelevel-- usually when i lower it it falls thru the 'terrain' which seems to float slowly up into the lovely cloudy sky like graceful polygonal seagulls. (there's simulated gravity but no ground.)

the terrain claims to be divided into 250 subdivisions, and raising this number may reduce the cone problem, while slowing the rendering. (setting it to 256 causes artifacts though)

the 2048 width seems to result in serious averaging, so 256*256 may be the best compromise.




these early drafts mostly look like snow mazes: (w-a-s-d = forward-left-back-right)

eccles to butcher

sandymount

tower
tower b

tower b uses a 256*256 heightmap which can theoretically be optimised to capture tons more detail-- but it's not obvious how to efficiently attack this






Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Clone me, mirror me, fork me

My plan for this 'blog' is to encourage readers to download Blogger's 8Mb XML 'export' edition, do a single global search-and-replace so the internal links will point to their new mirror domain (like ulyssespages2.blogspot.com instead of ulyssespages.blogspot.com) and then reimport the whole blog to that (free) domain... and also download the ulysses-and-finnegans-wake html zip folder and do the same 'replace' on the ulysses file.

this should result in a personalised index to the whole 700-page mirror

(warning: blogger indexes the pages by date and i realised halfway thru that i could 'forge' the dates so each chapter would get its own month... so the dates are somewhat messy)


new ulysses etext w/.direct links to annotation pages

Thursday, January 28, 2016

[Trams and trains in 1904 Dublin]

Who rides trams and trains in Ulysses? (trains and trams both have tracks, trams have overhead power lines but share the street, trains have onboard engines)

1. Conmee in Wandering Rocks briefly rides a train

2. Artifoni in Wandering Rocks eventually catches a tram

3. Stephen may ride a train between episodes 2 and 3, and also maybe between 1 and 2?

4. Bloom's budget lists only two tramfares, one between episodes 5 and 6, and one between episodes 14 and 15. But he ought also to have ridden a tram between episodes 3 and 4, and between 6 and 7?

There's purposeful confusion at the end of Oxen and beginning of Circe regarding the Westland Row and Amiens train stations.

To and from Sandymount would be a long walk but the tram isn't mentioned?


Donnybrook tram in Two Gallants [bkgd]