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The background graphic is Mont St. Michel.
What the iPad is. My island in the shoals.
I mentioned at the outset that I am being squeezed. Increasing continually but from different directions at different rates. At times it gets ugly. 20+ years of intensive interactions on the Internet have created layers of legacy problems, including conflicts in passwords, email identities, and access to apps I’m still paying for but have restrictions on my access to because of changing ownerships and AI appropriation of all customer service, which is effectively reduced not just to zero but to occasional offensive assaults on my ability to preserve my work and even continue my writing. Where we are right now. A second entirely fallacious charge from Apple services not rendered that caused my bank to shut down the debit card (again), meaning a new endless and risky process of changing billing administration to a new card number.
My iPad is old, running current generation IOS software whose automatic updates I have been trying to hold off because every new point release adds more intrusive AI algorithms into Autocorrect that now result in spurious clandestine supposedly me-specific edits, unwanted Google-added hyperlinks, and a refusal to let me type an unfamiliar proper name without turning it into a more famous one, insistently.
I am literally hostage to this machine. I have a huge iCloud account, but I can’t trust it surviving a hardware change in a couple of vital areas. Last time my device died I lost all the Word files that had been bumped up to the cloud, and there’s no one to tell. Just gone.
The current device has 256GB of disk space, of which 115GB remain, with “miles to go before I sleep.” I have so much stored that it is increasingly difficult to search for things I know are there but not exactly when and where I stored them.
Not complaining, just reporting. I chose the poverty that comes with freedom from being told what to write and who has the final word on text, format, and collateral content like photos, videos, and audio files, of which I have a great many that are only accessible through this machine or someone who knows in detail what is on this machine. More than 50 websites in various stages of work-in-process are products of Google’s blogger app, which is getting pushier all the time. My constant dread is of a decision by Google to charge a fee for every Blogger site, which would stop me dead in my tracks. They’ve already succeeded in pushing me out of my Safari browser into their Chrome browser, which is unreliable and tetchy but the only way I can insert images or videos into my blog sites anymore. I have big projects for which I have gathered abundant content material, but am deterred from pursuing flat out because they are so vulnerable to a casual rollover in bed by the vendor.
I can’t let the machine out of my hands to let strangers work on it. They might introduce some fatal new mistake. I can’t send it anywhere for cloning because there’s no insurance policy that could replace the contents if it got lost in transit.
On and off for a few days, been trying to figure out how I can show you just how big this pile of my indispensable but mysteriously fragmentary stored material is.
I can give you some overview indications. I can also show you a representative but by no means complete slice of materials accessed by a single keyword. And I can show you some of the placeholders at Blogger that are receptacles awaiting content components presently stored as fragments on the iPad. I can do the first two of these here. The third will have to be done in a separate post of its own.
I have an app called Photo Ring. It can show me everything in date order, in a long series of huge increments. It begins by sorting all the image files for many minutes.
That’s 83 thousand image files of all kinds, about half my own work-in-process.
This results in a live animation display that can be used to pull up specific files.
There are 183 of these merrygo-rounds
Here’s a video I made, most of one month of a single year (2022) of the 8-10 years of Image files.
Click on the image to see the Rumble video rotogravure.
In a prior post, I described the unpredictability of knowing what I would be working on the next day during writing of The Boomer Bible. Same phenomenon at work here. The order of files is strictly a matter of their date of origin. The speed of change in my topics of interest and graphic construction can be seen here, baffling in retrospect even to me.
Now for the next step. Seeing what one important keyword can summon up. The search term is “Alice,” who has always been with me as a name/person of interest. She is embedded in all of my work. I’m not going to make any attempt to explain the significance of these files, though I will provide ID of their source context, as necessary. They are presented here in nothing like logical order. They’re here just as they came up in my iPad work. The search generated 149 results. This is nowhere near that many. Extrapolate if you can. [If you need more background, I have added a couple of items of interest Below the Fold. Cheat or wait, I don’t care.]
She was there. And so were the Walrus and the Carpenter.
First grade Day 1. Read the whole thing.
Alice Hate
TBB Preface, at the Razor Café
First glimpsed by Boz Baker at a swanky Tech Tycoon’s Party
Sentenced by St. Nuke to be her “dog” for trespass in Punk City.
Central to the history of Punk City and its coded art.
Murdered the same day as St. Nuke at the dedication of TBB.
One of its signatories in blood and forever
preserved in her tomb on South Street
The Muse of Punk City and Johnny Dodge
Memorialized in the cryptic Vennich Manuscript.
Resurrected in the quantumscape of Shuteye Town 1999,
Sought after at the very center of the Undernet.
One of the keys to the Coming of Age of ST99’s J. Doe, in the Book of
Daniel memoir he will write, if he can find it. ‘Alice’ is the password.
Symbolically present in multiple incarnations inside Shuteye Town
Her charmed name always a signal of more going on, as in the
frontispiece of the Autiobiography of the fictional Dr. Pangloss.
That’s enough for now. The Internet landscape in which Alice and her punks will live on will, as I said, be covered separately, but there are a few closing hints…
________________________
Below the Fold
A couple other associations of Punk City’s Alice:
A serendicitous find when I was the deepest in Punk City
I’d had to read a big chunk of Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur in college, which helped me understand Mark Twain’s skepticism. But the eternal mystery of whether Arthur was real or a composite kept me looking into the (mostly Penguin) historical stabs at an unanswerable question. This book turned out to be a delightful surprise. The author approached the subject via language not archaeology. She believed the truth was buried in the place names she had a PhD in. From her piecing together of mostly semiotic evidence she arrived at a unique version of the Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere triangle. As a fifth century Briton of Scottish descent, Guinevere was a warrior queen alongside the knights of ‘Camlac’ or wherever. Then she got abducted and murdered. She is still vaguely associated with an ancient ruin whose name suggests barbs or thorns, where she was, according to Goodrich, held until her death. But she could not be allowed to die by the Arthurian leadership. She was a prisoner in perpetuity. Thus was the tale of Sleeping Beauty and her confinement inside a wall of thorns begotten, only to be abandoned by the later romantics who covered the oddities of Guinevere’s separation from Arthur in the terms of the new fad called Romantic Love.
Sleeping Beauty
I’d also had to read the Contes de Perrault in French at Mercersburg and deliver what our teacher called “literary translations,” so we’d appreciate the writing. It was stuck in there along with Malory and company, and it was a dark-tinged story, not a Disney cartoon. It also made perfect sense for my Alice character, who had two male intimates in her life too, with no announced choice between them at her death. The idea that Alice Hate was a punk parable of Shroedinger’s Box was perfect. Dead but not. Alive but not, and still somehow the object of desire by Johnny Dodge that kept him going after the massacre in Punk City. The two names of the fairytale roots were also complementary in my view:
Johnny Dodge was the possessor of the box that contained them both, death and dawn. In Pineville, where there was a kind of new incarnation who possessed the same kind of fire as both.
Where another of my favorite old books dipped into the blue waters of Punk City.
Monte Cristo was a necessary inspiration…
This, too, was a book I’d read half in English and half in French. My epic punk symbol named Doctor Dream was a metahuman figure just a step beyond the persona of the resurrected Edmond Dantes who became Monte Cristo. The one thing that still tied the Monte Cristo character to the mortal world was his love for the mysterious consort named Haidée.
In the accounts of Johnny’s Last Chance Garage, she is nicknamed Heidi, raised by her adoptive guardian Johnny, who leaves her behind on his mission to build New Punk City. So she follows him, with no idea where he’s gone. Her story still to be told, though many of its events are sitting in the content files at Images and in Word, on my iPad.
Not leaving you much to go on, am I?
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