Typing up the past

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Back in 1989 I began to keep a journal on my computer. It wasn't the first journal or diary I'd kept, by any means - another (handwritten) one was produced alongside it most days, but that was more focused on my spiritual life, and how it was going.

But this 1989 journal was different in the sense that not only was it being written on the computer, I was printing it out as I went. Which was just as well, as the computer I was using, an Amiga 500, didn't keep much information itself; you had to back-up everything onto disks. A tedious process, but essential; a story I wrote, and thought had potential, got lost when it wasn't backed-up. (In every other respect, the Amiga was great.)

The back-up disks survived long after the Amiga had been sold on when we got a new computer, but of course they were no good without the Amiga system. Fortunately, as I said, I'd printed the journal out, regularly, and by the time it came to an end (I went onto a different system on a computer that backed up stuff of its own accord) there were seven volumes of it, the first alone amounting to 120 pages printed out on an old dot-matrix printer, with about 700 words per page.

Feeling some concern at only having one printed copy of the journal, I spent some of my hard-earned cash one day and got the whole thing copied by a local printer I knew through my work. Now I had two copies, but what to do with the second one? Where to store it for safety? I considered a safebox of some sort, but didn't have the finances at that point to keep on paying for the storage. I asked our friendly family lawyer, but that didn't work out either; it wasn't the sort of thing they did. (At least not without payment.) In the end I gave the second copy to my son, so that at least both copies weren't in the same house.

Now, having recently finished the book I've been writing over the last couple of years - The Disenchanted Wizard - I decided it was time to do something I've been intending to do for some time: type up the printed copy of the journal onto my current computer, where it'll automatically be backed-up onto the Cloud. And that's what I've been doing for the last two or three weeks: I'm currently up to page 70 of the first volume, making pretty good progress, and discovering all sorts of stories and events within the family that I'd forgotten about.

There's a lot about writing in there, too. In 1988 I began a writing course by correspondence, and when the journal opened I was coming towards the end of the course and making some progress with the writing: getting articles published, a short story read on the radio, and another short story for kids printed by the School Journal. 

I had a thought a couple of nights ago that I could use the writing sections of the journal in another book, and started some preparatory work towards that. Time will tell whether that eventuates. After all, who needs another book on writing?

Junk mail jobs

I guess there are printing companies that have gone out of business around the country, though with one exception I'm hard-pressed to think of any, but there must be some printing companies out there still doing good business, because day after day my letter-box is full of advertising material, all of it in colour, and some of it quite substantial. 

The printers probably don't in the least bit care that most of the junk mail that arrives in our house goes straight in the recycling bin. My wife glances through some of it, when she can be bothered, but for the most part it comes in one door of the house and goes out the other. I guess advertisers wouldn't feel so happy about this, but if they continue to use such an antiquated and costly system of advertising then I suppose that's their lookout. 

But the printing companies must be rubbing their hands with glee. Not for them any scruples about the fact that all this paper and ink is mostly tossed in the rubbish, or that it's hardly useful for anything else (I've occasionally used it as internal wrapping paper in a parcel). For them it's all income, regular and well-paid. 

Yes, we could put up a sign saying, No Junk Mail, but what would be the point? It wouldn't stop the endless flow of stuff being delivered around the neighbourhood. I suppose there's a certain economic on-flow from it all: the people who deliver the junk mail, for a pittance; the paper and ink suppliers, the marketing teams who put the things together, and of course the printers, as I've already mentioned. Each of these would fall over without junk mail. So you might say the true value of junk mail isn't advertising but keeping people in jobs. 

Getting sidetracked

While I was thinking about the matter of wholesale printing just now, I though how strange it is that while books are increasingly appearing in digital form, junk mail is just increasing, full stop. I guess there's a digital equivalent of junk mail - it appears in borders and columns and banners on our web pages, for starters, and is surprisingly easy to ignore.  But the curious thing I can't quite get my head around is why junk mail on paper should be increasing.  Is it because the long-established form of advertising is at a crisis point, and when crises arrive, the lemmings often start heading off in the wrong direction - like over the cliff.  The equivalent in junk mail terms is that instead of there being less junk mail there's more than ever.

At a tangent, for a moment, it must be pointed out that lemmings are much maligned in terms of being a species that jumps over cliffs.  Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I had the thought that it was a myth that lemmings commit mass suicide, and a bit of quick checking on the Net confirms that, on the whole, it is.  Many lemmings live too far away from the sea, for one thing, to go hiving off committing hari-kari as a group.  Those that do live near water are perfectly capable of surviving in it - they're very good swimmers, apparently.  The reason they swarm to a region that's not their home area, is because food becomes scarce when there's a large increase in the population; the tribe splits and numbers of them go somewhere else to live.  Makes sense.

Seemingly the Walt Disney 'documentary' White Wilderness in which lemmings were seen diving off cliffs, and which may be an important source of much misinformation about lemmings, was faked.  White Wilderness was one of the Disney True-Life Adventure series, which, rather than showing reality, often misdirected viewers by mocking up scenes that had more effect than the real thing would have.  (We see the same thing in reality TV these days.) The trivia section of imdb.com on this film, states: This picture was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. They were imported from Manitoba for use in the film, and were purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwords, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures. 

Now I don't know who wrote this, so it can't necessarily be taken as gospel, but you can find more information about it on the Wikipedia article,where there's some background to the discovery that something underhanded had taken place in the filming.  Further information about it can be found on the Wikipedia article on Lemmings, in which we learn that Disney and co weren't the only ones perpetuating the myth of lemming mass suicide.

This is all a bit of a sidetrack from printing and junk mail, but like so many of my blog posts, one thing leads to another and often the 'another' is a bit more interesting.  How many other nature documentaries are faked in some way?  How often is the urbane voice of David Attenborough telling us something that in fact isn't what we're seeing at all?  (See the paragraph about Attenborough towards the end of this article.)  I watched a nature film not long ago in which the narrator (it wasn't DA, for a change) insisted that some particular thing happened because evolution had decided that it should; and if it isn't evolution doing some mythical decision-making, then it's the species itself deciding that life as it is isn't good for the long haul and somehow making its physical features change. The fact that this isn't science at all but speculation is never mentioned: we all know that Evolution is the answer to everything so just throw it in whenever you want it to be the convenient explanation.

See, I'm getting sidetracked again...onto a hobby horse.

Photo courtesy of Sunday Mercury Net, where there's an interesting and positive article about lemmings.

Art processes again

Not being random again, I meant to mention in the last post that I’d found a site where they describe the giclée process in reasonable detail. There’s certainly a lot of work goes into getting the pictures as near the original as possible, always a difficult task when you’re working with digital cameras and computer printers. But obviously it does work, and its increasing popularity amongst art enthusiasts testifies to this.

Art processes

A couple of weeks or so ago I wrote about the giclée process in which original art work is reproduced to such a high standard that it’s almost identical to the original painting. And I spoke about atelier too, where the artist adds real paint and real brush strokes to a copy. Curiously enough, when I entered the two words into Google just now I came across a painting called Mon Atelier by Lucie Attinger, done in the giclée process.
What reminded me of this is that I was visiting the site I’ve written about before called Coupon Chief, and found that a company called Brushstrokes is producing ‘original’ works in this way, although they don’t actually mention either of the words Giclée or Atelier.
Brushstrokes have a number of specials going at any time - up to 50% off. Quite a deal on an almost original painting. And I like the way their site works: when you roll your mouse over a picture it automatically enlarges. I’ve seen this before on some other art sites, and it’s very effective.
Brushstrokes sells both old masters and original works by artists like Gary Holland, Curt Walters, Charles Pabst, Alexei Adamov and Julia Klimova. (For your first purchase you can get 10% off the price.) Some of this work is a bit too sentimental for my taste, though at least it doesn’t sink to the level of Thomas Kinkade!