AAAARGH!!!

You know, I vanish for a few measely months, and someone goes and vandalizes all my FrontPages!! Bitch! I wouldn't mind so much if they hit the UGP entry for "Surviving the Game," say, but the some of those front pages had carefully borrowed (or something) and jury-rigged dtml that I won't be able to easily reconstruct (since the history doesn't seem to go deep enough to just restore), unless I can find some of my old backups of the site. (Though how to get into the .zexp files is something I don't especially need to think about right now.

Meanwhile, I'm going to set up a temporary wiki at http://unlikelyglossary.objectis.net/hiatus that I'll use as a temporary staging ground fo rmy semi-public thoughts. As to blogging, I think I'm going to have to at least temporarily scrap the idea of using Zwiki as a blogging platform--not because it can't be done or because my Zwiki-blog is currently deformed by linkspam (grrrrr), but rather because I simply havent' the time. I need a high level of automation, and the debate in my head is between rehabilitating my old livejournal (which, despite the many, many shortcomings of livejournal, is my longest-running blog and the only one that anyone ever actually read) or else going with blogger and using the post-by-email feature almost exclusively. I may actually do both, as I'm playing with the idea of divorcing my personal musings from my academic and professional ones--not to mention some even less realistic ideas.

Comments welcome (kukkurovaca@gmail.com)...

Refugee Site!

Since The old site is coping a jism, to borrow a horrible, horrible phrase, I've moved here to this plone site. Please get yourself a username, even if you're only a casual reader, since many of plone's features are based on people logging in first, and I'm not yet good enough at plone to solve that problem.

The projects currently functional here are:

• The Unlikely Glossary Project
• My blog
• My Mulamdhyamakakarika translation project . Please feel free to browse both, and to edit the former.

Quick tip: if you want your new pages to show up in the "Recent Items" box, you have to "Publish" them by clicking in the "State:" box in the corner.

What is the Unlikely Glossary Project?

I don't recall who said it, but I'm pretty sure that this is all a direct result of my taking literally someone's suggestion that I should come equipped with a glossary so that people know what the hell I'm talking about. This isn't just a question of me being cryptic, obscure, marginal, or silly, though I am, of course, all those things. It's a matter of divergent [[Cultural Literacy]]--we no longer have a common literary and intellectual culture such that one can simply drop references into a conversation and expect them to make sense. Culture can no longer be assumed; it must be made an explicit object of knowledge, something packaged for distribution and acquisition.

What I want is a sort of index to my total cultural literacy; that is, everything anyone would need in order to understand all the nonsense I spew. By extension, I'd also like it to extend to all the nonsense that my friends and acquaintences (I'd say "enemies," but I don't really have any, at the moment.)

Of course, this has a quixoticism rating of "monstrous."

Currently there are in theory hundreds of entries in the glossary; I have not yet begun to attempt to define most of them; I'm more at the categorizing and cross-referencing stage, and not very far into that, to be honest. Also, and fairly obviously, the entries are over at OldSite:glossary.html, and are not yet here, so much. Yet. Give me a minute. Or start creating entries yourself; that's good, too.

The virtue of the Wiki format is that it allows for communal editing. In other words, you get to the dick with the glossary, too! Theoretically, of course, if you don't know who I am, you won't bother to abuse this, as you doubtless couldn't care less. This probably goes for those of you who do know me, as well.

—Nick

Plone resources:

• Plone website
• Zope community
• CMF website

There are mailing lists and recipe websites available to provide assistance to you and your new-found Content Management System. Online chat is also a nice way of getting advice and help.