atlas(t)

atlas(t) is on twitter!

yes, it's finally happened. I've joined the internet age and started a twitter feed!

It's an experiment, obviously. I'll probably just be posting links to stuff I find on the internet that I somehow don't have the wherewithal to post about. If it works, the feed might be where I do most of my work. Or not. Who knows.

Ennyway, I make no promisses, and if it doesn't work out, no skin off.

By the way, you can find me at: atlastweet.

And the image above is a twitter map of somebody's social networks. It's an interactive map, so go there and double-click on any of the feeds and that feed will show up in the lower window. Cool, huh?

merry christmas!

i hope you all have a great holiday season, whether you celebrate christmas or not. And Merry Christmas to those who do!

p.s.: this is atlas(t)'s 300th post!

new tag line and next series

just a quick note:

I've changed the blog's tagline from "mapping, taxonomy, and you" to "mapping, landscapes, and you." I haven't done anything with taxonomy in a while, and without intending it, I've really been turning my attention to landscape and urbanism. So this is a stop-gap. I might need to rethink the tagline and even the banner in the near future. Design might be forthcoming, is what I mean to say. We'll see.

Also, I'm working on a series of posts about landscaping TV shows. Coming right up.

That is all.

My Entertainment Blog!

Well, I was all excited about getting into atlas(t) again, and then, boom, I stopped.

Why?

Well, I got a gig writing a daily entertainment blog, and I'm really enjoying it. It's called "EnterBrainment" and is my usual long-winded and heady treatment of various subjects, except this time, I'm dealing with pop trash.

I gotta say, I never realized it, but I was just looking for an excuse to grapple with this matter.

In any case, the blog is a featured A & E blog on a new blogging website called PNN or Personal News Network. The software innovation here is that the blogs can be laid out like newspapers, and the blogger can pursue multiple topic tracks at once. I haven't, frankly, seen anything else like it and, although it has its limitations, it also allows a kind blogging that is more difficult using traditional blogging software.

In any case, for the time being, EnterBrainment is going to be taking up a lot of my blogging energy and I'm afraid atlas(t) will suffer for it. I'm going to try to work this out--maybe I'll work on  atlas(t) on the weekends or something--but in the meantime, please go check out the new blog and let me know what you think.

promises, promises

i'm back, but I'm bad. Tired, fighting off a bug, catching up on work, etc.

What's coming up: I've finished (finally) The Death and Life of Great American Cities and plan on putting a cap on that, blogging-wise.

Also, the Princeton Architectural Press was silly enough to send me some free books (dere beeyootiful!) and I need to do right by them. (I started getting sent a few books over a year ago by folks and never got around to posting about those and I feel extra guilty, so I'm correcting the error. I think ...) They asked me if I wanted the two below and I said yes, and they threw in another one gratuitously, which I reviewed here. (Bet they're regretting that now, huh?)

Right now I'm in the middle of Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and its Future by Fernando Romero/LAR. "LAR" is not a verbal ejaculation, much as I would like to do that to my name ("Claire Light/Arrrhhh!"), but rather the architectural firm he founded. And yes, the book required a design firm as co-author; if they offer you a review copy, say yes, is all I'm sayin'.

This book review will be followed by a couple of posts on the theme of the Mexico/US border and art, which have been waiting for me to get my azz in gear.

Next up will be The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World by Thomas J. Campanella. Very exciting. I haven't been to China since 1993 so I've missed pretty much the whole thing. I'm about due for a visit, and reading this book will be the first step.

After that, dunno. I have some aging ideas about transportation I finally want to get to, but I might get distracted by shiny baubles. Plus, I never keep my blogging promises.

week-long hiatus

yes, atlas(t) is definitely back.

I quit my job at the end of March and have been freelancing ever since, thus the sudden renewed energy and interest in blogging (funny how getting your brain sucked out your ear working 9 to 5 as a database administrator doesn't conduce to inquisitiveness or creativity.) In fact, I'm being paid for blogging now (not this), and might unveil my very own paid blog soon. We'll see.

In any case, I'm going to a convention this week/weekend and will be taking a brief hiatus. And yes, I'm still reading Jane Jacobs at the rate of about one chapter per week. I plan on finishing that damned book on the plane and getting started on the next one, which I may blog about from my hotel room ... or not. We'll see.

Back in a week or two.

views from distances

the internet doesn't have everything.

I'm working on my novel right now and trying to figure out how much detail of someone else's actions a character with 20/20 eyesight could see at the distance of a quarter mile.

So I went online to see if any random genius had posted photographs of what things look like at various distances: 100 feet, 100 yards, a mile, etc.

Couldn't find anything like that.

Does anyone know of such a resource ... or would anyone like to create such a resource? ;) Seems like a good project for a student studying landscape, land use or surveying.

Just a suggestions.

Cross-posted at seelight.

over at galleon trade edition

dear darlings:

for the foreseeable future, atlas(t) will be conducting its affairs over at atlas(t): Galleon Trade Edition.

Please join us there!

atlas(t): the galleon trade edition

yes, darlings and darlingettes! Our precious atlas(t) is all growed up! S/he is now popping out puppies!

If that's too cryptic, what I mean to say is that the long bloglessness is finally over. I'm going to half time at my job in July and will celebrate that fact by going on vacation in the Philippines.

But it's not just any vacation in the Philippines. I will be traveling with a group of fartists involved in the project Galleon Trade, an international artists exchange along the route of the old Spanish galleon trade: Philippines, California, and Mexico. July/August 2007 Bay Area artists will be showing work at three galleries in Manila. In 2008 Filipino and Mexican artists will be showing work at the Luggage Store gallery in San Francisco. And then in 2008/9 Cali and Philippine artists will go to Mexico.

It just sounds like a project, doesn't it? Oh, but, my dears, think of the urbanness, the cityscapes and infrastructures, the books, ideas, histories and arts that will pass before my eyes as I travel along. Think of the atlas(t)iness. Yeah, I thought of it too. And got very excited. So excited, in fact, that I wanted to redesign atlas(t) specifically for this occasion. Such things have been done before.

But then I thought: no, it is wrong. atlas(t) is s/heself and must not be tampered with (much). So instead, atlas(t) had a baby blog, atlas(t): the galleon trade edition, which will be the atlas(t) of choice for the duration.

What does this mean, gentle reader? I'm not sure yet. I do know that, for a while, I will be spending all my time bringing up baby. All my atlas(t)ian insight will be filtered through galleon-shaped frames. But as time moves on, I suspect I'll have things to say and do that are clearly shiplike and things that aren't. And perhaps I'll be sorting posts into atlas(t) proper and atlas(t): galleon days. Who knows?

I hope this new project sounds interesting to you and that you'll transfer your attention over there. Here's the link again.

See ya on the dark side. The shizzle begins after June 30.

blogaversary

it's been a year since I started atlas(t) blog and I haven't regretted it for a second. The only thing I regret is how much I've been neglecting it in the past few months.

But the reasons for the neglect---a new job and an ongoing attempt to do my own fiction writing around the demands of the job---haven't gone away. My personal blog, SeeLight, has suffered as well, though not as much.

I'm definitely going to be posting with less frequency in the future, and with less substance, I'm afraid :P. On the upside, there will be that much less outrage in the blogosphere. And I have some unfinished blogjects to get done so maybe I will focus on those. Or maybe I'll be random. In any case, Happy Birthday, atlas(t)!