Category: Ramblings

File Format Hell

I’ve had a long journey with text file formats.

First there was… uh… whatever MS works saves files as. That was back in the Windows 3.1 era. That sucked. Then we went to Word… MS Word, and MS Word would not open MS Works files. Go figure. So there was the lovely time of opening files, ripping text from 50 pages of bad binary translation and putting them in Word.

Ok, so after Word I found Wordperfect. No, not that crappy blue screen one either, I found the joy, the wonder, the amazement of Wordperfect 8. To this day, it brings a tear to my eyes. Wordperfect opens Word, great! Absolutely nothing opens Wordperfect except, Wordperfect. Not so great.

Then later I got a copy of Lotus Smart Suite. LWP files baby. Used that for a while, mainly because of Approach. Office 2000 came out, tried that (yet again MS changes Word file formats. Meanwhile WPD files can be opened by any version of Wordperfect after 6…)

Then on to WordPerfect 9. oh, how I miss thee.

There was even some StarOffice in there, and OO.o version, uh… something. (did they do an 0.9 release? Maybe it was just 1.0.. )

Ok, then I go to a Mac.

So after much crying and pouting and general sleepless nights I get MS Office. Thank the Gods that MS Office for the Mac opens MS Office for Windows files. (Yes I was worried, don’t you remember Word 6 -> Word 95 issues? But they are the same… NO THEY ARE NOT!)

But.

Yup, what the hell do I do with SWF, LWP, WPD, WKS (i think) various Quattro Pro and 1-2-3 files (we don’t even think about databases, we learned that lesson from Access 2000)??

Well, again, there was crying and screaming.

Out comes NeoOffice (OpenOffice.org for the Mac). With it comes along ODT. Sounds great, sounds wonderful, sounds like another file format… And I realized that for 99% of my stuff i don’t need all that crap. (it is really just crap) What I need has been in front of me the whole time.

RTF

So that is my new fixation, moving everything to RTF.

Now now, you wait, Mr ODT, I ain’t saying nothing bad about you. In a way you are the next hope, possibly the next RTF. As an open standard there is hope that ODT will find itself on any platform out there. That would rock. Then you could get all the crap in there too. (and spreadsheets would be nice, I like spreadsheets.)

But for now, RTF (and even maybe TXT as back-ups) will do just fine. The goal is the future. A future where I don’t have to find a PC to install Lotus on to get a file that I swore I had backed up somewhere else in WPD format which Neo opens now, but I didn’t so NOW I gotta find a find one.

And do you know how hard it is to find a PC in a Mac house? Sheesh.

Letter to a writer

Constance,

There is something I have been thinking about, and wanted to share with you. In class we talked about your piece, “Good hair, bad hair – thank you Toni Morrison!”. Its not so much the piece that I have thought much about, although it was very well written, and has entered my thoughts at times. Instead, it was a phrase you used when you were talking about it: “Intended Audience.”

I work at a bookstore, and I get questions that you wouldn’t even be able to make up. There was one day, a woman came up to me and asked where we kept the black authors. I didn’t understand the question, so I asked was there a book in particular she was looking for. She replied she was looking for Jerome Dickey. So I took her to fiction, to the D’s. Thanking me, she then re-asked her original question, do you have a section of black authors? Still a little confused, I replied that we had an African – American cultural studies section, but that authors were only separated by the content of the book.

My naivety aside, the question still sits in my head. If (“when” , say “when”) I get published, I don’t think I would like to be separated out but my colour, origin, shoe size, whatever.Shouldn’t my work be above such things? Words are not linked to skin colour, why should sentences, or paragraphs be?

Which goes back to another thing we talked about in class, “What does it mean to be a Black Writer”, and I was asked if I thought of myself as a white writer. The answer I gave was awkward, and long. But this too I have thought about.

When someone creates art, there is a part of them in that work. Sometimes it can be obvious, like a Dali, or Hemingway. Other times you have too look deeper, but it is there. So, if there is a part of me in everything I make, all of my art, from poetry to web graphics, what part of me am I showing?

But a discussion of race and writing is not where I am headed. This is not to be a letter from a white boy to a black girl, but a letter from a writer to a writer. Nothing more.

These two points, the lady in the bookstore, and the discussion of being a black writer lead directly back to that phrase you used. “Intended Audience.”

What part of me, that is in my work, would exclude someone from that group? Is there something about me that inherently creates an “intended audience”?

To me, intended audience says if I am not in that group, this piece will not mean anything to me. When I read your essay, I didn’t feel to be outside of some secret group. Quite the contrary, I felt as if I were being brought into a group, learning something about someone else I would have otherwise never known.

“Intended Audience” didn’t apply to the words in that essay. But it came up in discussion.

Take this piece, for example. It can be argued that you are the only one who this letter is intended for; that you are the “intended audience.” Does that mean that no one else could read it and gain something from it?

I guess what I am saying, is don’t sell yourself short with phrases like “intended audience”, and don’t hide a damn good essay behind them either. Your words speak for themselves, don’t limit them. Don’t limit yourself, plenty others will do it for you, putting qualifiers on you; black writer, woman writer, young writer, American writer, DC writer, blah blah blah. Let them worry about that. You worry about art, your art, because that is what an artist does. Adjectives are just semantics.

And phrases like “intended audience” sound too much like justification. Something the nothing I have read of yours needs.

-jacob

Reply to “All Christains are Serial Killers”

This is a response to this blog post:

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/scrowder/2009/05/26/lonewolf-diaries-all-christians-are-serial-killers/#idc-ctools

I call shenanigans.

Let’s start from the beginning. First let’s look at the TWO examples given by the author: Carrie and South Park. I don’t really see either as being representative of either 1. society or 2. Hollywood. In fact, South Park is an outcast that isn’t exactly among the Hollywood elite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Religious_affiliation

Take the statistics. If 75% of the United States is Christian, then what is the religion of most of the characters in most of the movies out there? I’ll take a wild shot in the dark and say that it is around, say, 75%.

Think of it this way, there you are watching the latest romantic comedy where up and coming young New Yorker is juggling a budding career and a new girlfriend at the same time. They have their trials, but in the end, they live happily ever after. If neither one ever comes out and states their religion, why would you think they weren’t Christians? And what is more Christian than finding the one you love? What is more Christian than “happily ever after”?

Just as there are millions of normal people who go to work, go to the bar, go to the gym, go to wherever it is they go to, every single day who don’t outwardly display their religion, there are these characters in movies. How can you spot them? By how you should be spotting them in the real world: by what they do.

The first instance is a great one: Carrie. Carrie’s mother isn’t just any Christian. She isn’t even a conservative Christian. She is a wacko. A fucking nutcase. She is a whack job who is as far from sanity as you can get and still function in society. She expresses that insanity through religion. Why? Well, ask Stephen King.

But allow me to make conjectures. Carrie is a horror story. For horror to work, the reader/audience has to identify with story, with the characters. By grasping onto something like Christianity (75% of America), King brings home something that a lot of his potential readers are completely aware of. And then he twists it. He perverts it. He turns something that should be safe into something that is not.

That is to tell a story, not to destroy Christians.

Ok, let’s go to comedy. Take Dogma as a good example. This movie is directly aimed at what Christianity tells us. It puts the faith and the church right in the cross hairs and really doesn’t hold back. It is hilarious. (I think, at least)

Now imagine the same type of movie: just as blasphemous, just as scandalous, just as badly humored and whatnot, but this movie is aimed at Hindus. Would you get it? Would you think it is funny? What do you know about Hinduism?

Christianity is such a deeply rooted part of our history as America. Most of our predecessors came from Europe. Most of them were Christians (some escaping repression from? Other Christians! See we don’t even like ourselves). That history from Rome forward changed Europe, guided Europe and carries over the Atlantic to here today.

How would you write a period piece about the Elizabethan era without touching on the oppressive control the church had on normal life? Would you gloss over the past to appease the present?

Hollywood doesn’t have an anti-Christian agenda. (maybe some people in Hollywood do) Hollywood has only one agenda. It is a good old American idea: money. It has got to sell, or they won’t do it. The dollar wins every time. So here is the thing, if Christians don’t like what is being put out, why don’t they stop going to see it?

If 75% of America is Christian, then is safe to say that most of Hollywood characters are either acted, written or directed from a Christian perspective.

Look at the real world. Are all Christians saints? Hell no. We rob from each other, we beat each other, rape, murder, get into road rage, we swindle old people out of their life savings, we do a lot of horrible, horrible things to each other.

Well, you may think, those people aren’t really Christians. I’d be inclined to agree with you, but the requirements for Christianity aren’t that high: Believe in Christ.

Christians come in all types, all shapes, from Christmas Eve Christians to every Sunday Christians. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents. We are open minded, we are closed minded. We are tolerant. We are bigots and racists. We are sports fans and we are pacifists. We are war heroes and we are poets. We are people. And as people we are not defined by a singularity of ourselves.