You will not want to read this. Nobody does, me included. But creating it has been an interesting experiment. I have been scouring this blog for sentences, one from each blog post. In chronological order, starting in 2012. I had permitted myself to re-order sentences, but I have rarely used that option. The fountain pen…
Tag: Writing
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape
Found Poetry found me. I started this website as a science blog, but then I saw poetry in mundane texts – just as you see faces in things. I created poems from spam comments, from search terms, from physics textbooks, from book spines, from error messages, from Facebooks ads, from any text anywhere in the…
Secure Poetry: “I have been quite confident”
A poem from snippets of two postings on cybersecurity. Trying to carve words out of jargon. Details on the creative process at the bottom of the post. I have been quite confident I have been inspired In this simple way to find both options take note of an extra stealth factor I hardly ever…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.
Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
The Stages of Blogging – an Empirical Study
… with sample size 1. Last year, at the 4-years anniversary, I presented a quantitative analysis – in line with the editorial policy I had silently established: My blogging had turned from quasi-philosophical ramblings on science, work, and life to no-nonsense number crunching. But the comment threads on my recent posts exhibit my subconsciousness spilling…
Spam Poetry: “Cris-Crossing the Universe”
I have tried my hands at different kinds of experimental internet poetry, and all of the poems turned out to have a dystopic touch or tantalizing hints to some fundamental philosophical truth. Perhaps this says something about 1) The Internet or 2) about my subconsciousness. Since I have reduced blogging frequency, the number of spam…
Random Things I Have Learned from My Web Development Project
It’s nearly done (previous episode here). I have copied all the content from my personal websites, painstakingly disentangling snippets of different ‘posts’ that were physically contained in the same ‘web page’, re-assigning existing images to them, adding tags, consolidating information that was stored in different places. Raking the Virtual Zen Garden – again. (Voice from…
Interrupting Regularly Scheduled Programming …
(… for programming.) Playing with websites has been a hobby of mine since nearly two decades. What has intrigued me was the combination of different tasks, appealing to different moods – or modes: Designing the user interface and organizing content. Writing the actual content, and toggling between creative and research mode. Developing the backend: database…
About 14,5 Random Thoughts on Blogging and Social Media
I have been blogging on WordPress.com since nearly three years, and I noted the following: Blogs have a half life. Many decay after 2 years. Blogs I had followed had been deleted, or bloggers had suddenly stopped publishing without notice. There are tons of single-post-blogs. A user-friendly editor motivates people to get started. But blogging does…
On Resisting the Bait
I don’t mean click-bait. I mean write-bait. That article that wants you to launch your 2.000 words rhetoric missile, and click the red button: Publish. I am pondering about one of the most successful genres clicked and shared on social media: a blend of popular psychology, life hacking, and business wisdom, perhaps enriched by trusted…
The More Content You Have Created
… the more time you need for curating. My first ever attempt at tweeting an aphorism. But it is true for me, and it defines the way I use online spaces. As a contributor of online content, I am operating in different modes: Creator, with emphasis on creating something original – including unintended re-invention of…
The Destiny of the Universe
… not what the title implies but Spam Poetry, harvested from about 530 spam comments on this blog. I keep to my usually dystopian-postmodern genre. Imagine somebody with a British accent reading it, and mentally insert black and white images inspired by Philip K. Dick‘s short stories. Don’t expect to understand it, it is like…
Blog Cleanup – Raking the Virtual Zen Garden Again
I am proud owner of a full season of Monk on DVD, and as a child nobody ever had to tell me to tidy up my room. I indulged not only in cleaning my Lego(*) world with a fine paint brush but I rather re-organized all my belongings in Feng-Shui-meets-OCD-style quite often. (*) Lego is…
The Web As I Want to Remember It
This title might be due to unknowingly plagiarizing dejavu.org – The web as we remember it. I haven’t visited dejavu.org in years, but I did now as I felt I need to wax nostalgic. This might be due to my recent tinkering with my websites‘ layouts. As a child I crafted 200-faced paper polyhedra whose…
Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere – Again!
This post might baffle readers that come here for: science / physics / book reviews / corporate world dark satire / search term poetry / navel-gazing / self-destruction … and the other genres I have forgotten. However, I’d argue that this post covers all of those – in a subtle way. My blog has a…
My Reading List
This blog has been inspired by books more often than not. When I crafted my first personal website many years ago, a database of my favorite books was one of the first things I added and changed frequently. For better or for worse – I organize my thoughts and my websites in relation to books…
Poetry from the Virtual Scrapyard Anniversary: I Subconsciously Think about This Element
Today is an anniversary: The first Search Term Poem has seen the light of day one year ago on my Facebook timeline – this was my debut as a search term poet on WordPress on 12-12-12. I have created tons of artifacts from the virtual scrapyard since then. Spammers had enough time to hone their skills since…
Breaking News on Search Term Poetry (Good, Bad, Ugly)
This is a break from quantum physics – you deserve it! Based on your questions – no un-follows so far fortunately – I will follow-up with attempting again to pick the right metaphors for 1026 dimensional spaces and tons of enormous vectors. But there is more (enigmatic) to this universe than quantum field theory – such…
On Science Communication
In a parallel universe I might work as a science communicator. Having completed my PhD in applied physics I wrote a bunch of job applications, one of them being a bit eccentric: I applied at the Austrian national public service broadcaster. (According to Wikipedia Austria was the last country in continental Europe after Albania to…
Unplug Myself: First Update
It has been three and a half weeks since I have unplugged myself from social media and suspended blogging temporarily. I was rather active on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter before since I had Connected Myself to the Collective last November. Now my Klout score is dwindling again. This is my first update from the void,…
What Is Normal? (My Way of Announcing Blogging Time-Out)
I remember the best Out-of-Office note I have ever received – musing on not being able to get back to me as quick as normally, and culminating in the philosophical question: But – what is normal? Probably this is one of the hidden, leading questions that have driven this blog ever since I started it…
What? A Spooky Spam Poem of Danger, Fear, Hope.
It is time to purge the spam queue again! Spam commenters are still gloomy and plagued with existential questions and answers. I am very proud of the simple and powerful title. What? was a complete spam comment. I even clicked the associated link as it felt so genuine. What? there is no danger If you…
Theory and Practice of Trying to Combine Physics with Anything
You have told me, you miss my physics posts. I have missed them, too, and I give it a try. But I cannot help turning this into a cross-over again, smashing together half-digested psychology, physics, IT networking, and badly hidden autobiographical anecdotes. In 2005 I did research on the incorporation of physics-style thinking and mathematical…
Decoding Myself: Searching for Hidden Clues in My Blog Posts’ Titles
I am inventing a new experimental genre: Header Poetry. I tag this post with Spam Poetry and Search Term Poetry as – theoretically – my headers could show up as search terms or skillfully drafted spam comments. As an innovator in poetry based on recycled material I need to do this – in order to…
Existential Spam Poem: The Soul of This Bag
I follow the call to arms by fellow spam poet Michelle(*)(**). Every time she blogs about spam poetry, I have a spam poem in my drafts folder – so I think I need to release the current one now. This time I defined the following goals: there should be a topic and a narrative, and…
Kicking off the ILFB Award: Intelligent Life-Forms in the Blogosphere
As announced in one of my recent off-the-wall posts I have been pondering about founding an award of my own. I am on a mission this week – now I need to get it done! My goals are as follows: Create rules that are self-consistent, loophole-free, but nonetheless rather simple to describe and to follow….
Remarks Written by Brain-Dead Visitors
Dear reader, enclosed you find my latest spam poem. Each line is verbatim from a spam comment (including typos). The meme pool had comprised about 400 spam comments collected in the past three weeks. This time I forced myself to compile the poem extremely fast, scrolling through these comments in Data-from-Star-Trek-style and letting my subconsciousness…
Missing Policies for the Mad Tea Party and What to Learn from The Jabberwocky
I am trying to re-gain control over the blog award nomination process, or I pretend to do so. postmoderndonkey had called it a Mad Tea Party of a nomination process – and right he was. You may accuse me of making this blog the strange attractor of a self-referential loop of weird referrals to itself…
Impolite and Humiliating Spam and Why We Really Need Tags for Spam Comments More than Time Machines
It has been a while since my last spam poem that was really compliant with the rules. My most recent attempt at Spam Poetry bent the rules. (But it is true – I am usually changing the rules as I go.) Recently I have learned from fellow blogger and spam poet Michelle that there is…
On Writing or: What Do I Need to Smoke to Understand Your Websites?
This is a verbatim quote. (“This” refers to the second part of the title. The first one is a lame reference to Stephen King, of course). It is a question asked by a former colleague some years ago who had been exposed to my proto-blog websites for the first time. These websites are subject to…
elkemental Force 