atlas(t)

new year's resolutions

this year I resolve to post about:

1. micronations
2. more about transportation
3. racial ishooz as they relate to mapping and taxonomy (oh rich subject!)
4. hybridity and taxonomy and mapping (yeah, you figure out your stance, too!)
5. various taxonomies: in fact, I resolve to marginalize taxonomy as a topic on this blog no more!
6. more book reviews! Send me your books!
7. more flights of fancy a la Pruned (Alexander Trevi, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you look like, will you marry me?) and my own, dear fictional style, which has yet to be determined on this site. Yeah, that didn't make any sense
8. art and artbuses
9. and finally, city tours, by bus, car, and on foots

So basically, anyone who wants to can now bite my intentions.

youtube

okay, I've got the bit in my teeth and I'm gonna gallop for it. Youtube mapping and taxonomy all the way, mofos!

Plus, in case you were wondering, the hits on my blog regarding the map on the woman's ass image have all but disappeared. Just a blip on the radar screen of life. sigh.

writing and other distractions from blogging

so sorry for the disappeary!

I know I keep doing it, but my life is in flux and I cain't get regular (and no, I'm not talking about my bowel movements!) Well, maybe I am talking about bowel movements of a sort, because, you see, I've started a new novel.

I'd been wanting to do National Novel Writing Month, which is in November, for years, but never managed. In fact, I'm not really doing it now, because you have to start on Nov. 1 and register and everything, and I didn't get it together in time. However, I thought, why not just do an Individual Novel Writing Month? Which means: I write a novel in a month, by hacking out (and I do mean "hack") 1500 to 2000 words a day for thirty days (for a total of 50,000 words, which in itself constitutes novel length.)

So as not to shoot myself in the foot, I chose a Young Adult fantasy novel idea to pursue in my crazy month's pursuit of publishy goodness. Being a YA fantasy, it involves a hero's journey, which is manifested in a literal journey across the fantasy landscape. Today is my fourth day writing (I already have ten thousand words and am on Chapter Four), and I'm already getting confused as to where we are, and whether we are traveling east or west ... or what.

So I drew myself a map (above). Yay! My first map! This will not be the definitive map. This is just by way of notetaking so that I can keep track of my landscape. Ain't it cool? No?

In other news, I have several posts coming up (they've been coming up for awhile) whenever I can find the time away from my 2000 words a day:

1. a review of Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson's Torture Taxi
2. a further omnibus posting about the class hierarchy of transit vehicle types
3. a final omnibus posting about how I was attacked on MUNI (yes! again!)

Don't hold your breath, though.

'nother hiatus

i hadn't intended to take a break, but right now I'm very preoccupied with moving back to San Francisco and looking for a job and all of that stuff, so posting will be light (ha!) for the foreseeable future. Forgive.

statcounter recent visitor map

who says that progress is dead? Upon my return from vacashe, I found that my web counter (statcounter.com) had added a google mashup to its services that shows me where my most recent visitors visited from.

Here's an example above, which shows someone from China logging in, and someone from the ocean, on the equator, off the west coast of Africa. WTF? Is that a ship? Do I have sailors on my blog? Looking for tattoos? Isn't that too much of a stereotype?

Other maps show folks from Dubai, Pakistan, Iceland, Uruguay and Sri Lanka checking out the tattoos. And some crazy cool cat from Lesotho actually came to look at the mappiness. Hey there, person from Lesotho! Holla!

The only problem is that statcounter lists recent visitors twenty to a page and the map only maps them page by page. So I can't get them all on one map. Neverthe', it's very cool and very mirrors-into-infinity for me to post a map on my mapping blog of people who visit my mapping blog. Yeah.

(Back to our regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow or shortly thereafter. And I did and saw lots in New York that's blog-appropriate.)

vacation hiatus

hello, lovelies!

I'm now pulling well over 1000 hits a day entirely from the google image search on the word "tattoos". My ass-map image is third in that search. Given how popular tattoos still are, and how arresting that ass-map is, I doubt that number will be going down any time soon. Argh. Do you know how depressing it is to have that many people visiting your site who have absolutely no interest in it whatsoever?

By the way, I'm going on vacation for two weeks. I intend to continue blogging, but who knows what might happen? If things get sparse around here for the next two weeks, you now know why.

Love and kisses.