Is it just me, or are we all voting essays vs. reviews vs. photos vs. poetry/lyrics vs. life tonight?
It seems like I’m being asked to rank a poem against a photo, etc.
I’ve been away a while. Didn’t know if things had changed from the old days: poems vs. poems, photos vs. photos, life vs. life

Yes, everything is compared to everything else.  It may turn out that we really do want a magazine filled with mostly short stories and poems, but it’s also conceivable that there should be a lot more essays and news stories.  Here’s the Newsletter you missed about it.

If you have any ideas on how I can get around the growing spam problem (which keeps newsletters from reaching a lot of members), let me know.

I am in complete agreement with Captain Vegetable’s apparent confusion, and in fact, trying to rank a photo against a poem, or a short story against a news story, has now turned me into something akin to a (Captain?) vegetable.  What do carrots SAY when they get burnt out?  How does that compare, on a scale of one to ten, with how they LOOK?  If somebody wrote a poem about burnt out carrots, say, “Woe unto ye, who have overcooked me; may ye be overcooked yourselves; yet shall we survive, for we are Root Vegetables”—how does this compare to “Carrot overcooked by Julie in kitchen, details at nine”????  I don’t know how to rank these.  It seems to me that they are both equally good in their own ways.  The poem is poetic and the news is newsy (I expect more news at nine).  I have absolutely no idea how to rate four radically different art forms against each other and say that one is better.  I guess a really good picture of some fried carrots might win, but at the expense of such an excellent short story (which I would post if only I could figure out how to vote enough)?  Can this be right? 

I fear that things are going to get much more arbitrary around here.  People may vote madly, but I doubt they will know what they are doing.  At least, I don’t.  Sincerely.  If the aim is to get rid of the non-fiction and the art, that’s one thing, but surely throwing the wine glasses, the poodle, the rolled oats and the camera into the kitchen sink is sort of akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

My two cents.
Respectfully,
J (Carrot) Hemingway

PS It says I have submitted 3 things and that I have 13 pieces on my ticket.  Is this right?  Why have I suddenly become so stupid?  Do you actually expect me to do mathematical calculations???  Dave, let’s face it, you’re a geek, which is an honourable thing to be, but not everyone is.  I liked it better before, when I didn’t have to think.

Excellent!  I have been trying to make people think, and so I’m happy that I’ve finally forced you into that position

And also, THANKYOU for expressing the frustration and madness facing every creator of media, and for recognizing that my website is putting this problem into the hands of the people that can really solve it.  I have a strategy you might find useful:

Let’s play pretend.  We’ll pretend that you’ve won the right to present something to all the people you know, all their friends, and all THEIR friends too - so, several boatloads of people.  The thing is, you are allowed to present only one of the submissions at Litmocracy.  This is the problem facing every editor, producer, and director or every book, film, and magazine, although they deal with scenes, ideas, plot turns etc., rather than just submissions to an online lit mag.  But the point of the site is that nobody is qualified to make these decisions.  The BEST (in my opinion, obviously) solution to this problem is for everyone to guess at the answer, and then to combine all those guesses so that, ideally, each of the things that end up getting presented to the audience has been judged as better (to present to them) than each of the things that are left out.

So I have 50 pages.  I know I probably don’t pay you enough for the work you do helping to decide how to fill them, but we do keep collecting members, and that will eventually increase what I can pay you.  Does that sound like an OK deal?

And don’t bother doing the math.  Just vote - there are 40 slots in the list.  Once you’ve got the current 40 in there, you’ll only ever have to add new ones, as they come up - and only those that are good enough not to get knocked off by other new ones.

Dave the Geek.

I (think I) see what you’re saying, but I still don’t know how to effectively compare Kraft Honey Dijon Salad Dressing with a TASCAM four-track recording device.
Why are there still categories listed on the site when we’re comparing cross-category anyway?  Why not just have one big category?

If you visit a category, you *should* only get pieces from that category to rank.  So if someone is only interested in poetry, they can use that to avoid everything else.  Of course, your list will still have the items from other categories in it (if I remember correctly).  If you try it and you get out-of-category items to rank, please let me know as that’s a bug for me to fix.

Then again, maybe you’re right and I should do away with categories.  Hmm…

Dave Scotese - 01 March 2008 02:06 AM

If you visit a category, you *should* only get pieces from that category to rank.  So if someone is only interested in poetry, they can use that to avoid everything else.  Of course, your list will still have the items from other categories in it (if I remember correctly).  If you try it and you get out-of-category items to rank, please let me know as that’s a bug for me to fix.

Then again, maybe you’re right and I should do away with categories.  Hmm…

Well, I just think you’re wrong wrong wrong in every category (if there WERE any categories) (!) but if you’re going to be wrong (if you ask me, although I guess you didn’t) (...Well, you have left open the possibility of posting screams of agony in the forums, so maybe you did…) ...Anyways, my anguished opinion is that you might as well be wrong all the way.  Even if it’s true that it’s only poems that come up on the left-hand side in the Poetry category, it’s also true that if I am to rate them, I have to deal with “my list”, which has photographs and drawings and short stories in it.  So there’s really no point in the illusion of Categories, when there no longer are any.  So I think if you’re going to do away with all that is holy, you might as well do away with the “categories”. 

I do, however, contend that this is a giant step backwards for humankind.  Back in the primordial soup, the mitochondria did not make distinctions between poetry and visual art and short stories.  It has taken us FOREVER to evolve the capacity to make distinctions between one thing and another, thus more efficiently to think about them, and now you, Dave, have set us back.  By about a billion years.  Woe unto us all.  But hey, it’s your site. 

I would just like to make the point that a long, long time ago, someone said, “Well, that’s like comparing apples and oranges”.  Meaning that the comparison in question couldn’t meaningfully or helpfully be made, because the categories were too disparate.  Do you know something that this anonymous person didn’t know?  Has something changed?  Well, there’s not as much of a way of telling as there used to be. 

Seriously, I feel completely incapacitated by this new system.  Instead of two things in the same category to compare, one on each side of a page, there is now one thing on the left and a hodge-podge of stuff on the right, all of it in different areas and all having been written, and read by me, at different times.  It is too much for my tiny brain.  I really don’t have TIME to reread and revisit everything on the right, every time I try to rate something that is on the left, in order to make sure that my rating of the thing on the left is fair and true to my honest intuitions.  Perhaps if I were better-evolved, or more God-like, I could keep it all straight and actually have an opinion.  But I’m not.  I just don’t feel capable of making any kind of decent comparative rating anymore, and I am not (believe it or not) STUPID.  So I dunno.  Blerph!

The only fun I’m having is ranting at you.  And it is fun (It’s always fun here).  I see that I am now allowed to post submissions, so maybe I will post some version of this.  Not that anyone who was not extremely highly evolved would know what to make of it,  in comparison, say, to a picture of a lady who looks like a butterfly. 

Hmph gurgle splurfff!!!!

It’s like trying to decide how to spend your time, eh?  Or your money?  Like if you only have $5 - do you buy food or a blanket?

In one of my college courses, we had to write code to control the behavior of virtual predators - they had to find another predator to eat so that they wouldn’t run out of energy.  The student whose predator won the contest (they set them loose in the computer virtual world) had coded his to operate on “feelings” where it would only attack when it “felt hungry” and would otherwise hide.  So I guess the point is maybe you should just go with your feelings.

I’m glad you voted enough to post.  Keep it up!

Dave.

Yeah well, but why does it have to be food OR a blanket when it used to be possible to have food AND a blanket?  And a book to read, and maybe some paints to play with,  in different categories!??

Anyways if it WERE just a food vs. blanket issue, then it would be simpler to decide than it currently is, between all these different examples from different categories. 

Besides which, if we’re now operating on the basis of (virtual) predator vs. prey, and raw gut animal Feelings, grrr, etc., then I contend, see my previous post, that we’ve taken a giant step backwards. 

I know I’ll never convince you.  But I can try.  Just basing the whole thing on my FEELINGS (and other capacities which have now been screened out).

I hate it when you’re wrong, Dave. 

Cheers.  Still can’t decide what to post.  Can I post a video of Cambodia?

PS.  It’s all about context anyway.  If I were here, freezing in the dark in Canada, I’d definitely go for the blanket.  If Thailand or Cambodia, food.  It’s warm enough there.  I guess one way of putting part of what I’m saying is:  why choose between food and a blanket when we could be choosing between the best blankets and the best foods, and convey and discuss more stuff and information?  Ack!!!

Can I stick this thread up as a contender somehow in some, um, Category?

We are choosing between the best foods and the best blankets.  The reason for asking you to choose between food and blanket is because you ARE in Canada, freezing your butt off, while I’m here in CA, and hungry.  If I didn’t ask you to choose between food and blanket, but between foods and (separately) between blankets, that would give me a list telling me which foods you like best and which blankets.  Then I would choose the foods and you would still be cold.  So I give you the opportunity to say (some) blankets are better than food.

If you eat enough food, your blubber will keep you warm.  It’s just a question of whether you want removable shelter outside of your skin or self-grown shelter beneath your skin.  I was deciding that for you, previously, but it’s time you decide for yourself.

I can’t really type properly because I am laughing so hard.

Dave, coff coff sputter, I’ve gone through a lot of trouble over all this time, attempting to reason with you, and it never comes to any (coff guffaw sputter) good.  If you have been choosing the foods over the blankets all along, you should just have confessed, a long time ago, that you were more interested in food and that you were the one choosing the food.  I don’t see why (gack chortle) ... oh, I can’t go on.  Ok I’ll (snnnrk, turtle) try. 

The system itself was (chortle gurgle schnee) FINE. 

<<Then I would choose the foods and you would still be cold.  So I give you the opportunity to say (some) blankets are better than food.>>

Look, if you’re going to run a regime, all I (durbles, clock) have to say is that not only should it not (giggle) be corrupt, but it should make some har har semblance of sense.  Ho ho ho. 

<<If you eat enough food, your blubber will keep you warm.  It’s just a question of whether you want removable shelter outside of your skin or self-grown shelter beneath your skin.  I was deciding that for you, previously, but it’s time you decide for yourself.>>

Gahhhhh.  I can’t respond to that.  I’d like to, but I can’t figure out what it means, and it’s too funny.  Well, I guess you win.  Turtles.  It’s turtles all the way down (punchline to Buddhist joke). 

Julie

Yay!  I made you laugh.  Yay!!

<<If you eat enough food, your blubber will keep you warm.  It’s just a question of whether you want removable shelter outside of your skin or self-grown shelter beneath your skin.  I was deciding that for you, previously, but it’s time you decide for yourself.>>

Gahhhhh.  I can’t respond to that.

Just give yourself time.  Maybe try to run a website where your goal is to please as many of the members as possible, and you’ll probably have an “Aha” - unless that was what all the laughing was about.  But then that would mean that you have an odd way of rewarding people for giving you epiphanies.

This might help:  Food is like short stories.  Blankets are like Mind Change essays (or maybe News).  I was choosing Short Stories because I thought that’s what people wanted.  Then I realized that I had no reason to think that.  The market for magazines of literary fiction is a tiny portion of the market for magazines.  News magazines take up a much larger portion of it.  But that still isn’t necessarily what people want - it’s what the power structure offers.  At Litmocracy, the power structure is in the hands of the members.

Dave.

Well, you could have fewer categories and still have SOME categories.  When I originally got here, I thought/assumed that something would be voted on and chosen and published, from EACH category, for every issue of Literal Translations.  Of course this would mean (e.g.) that if there was only one submission to “Ask G.W.”, and it was crummy or whatever, you’d still have to publish it.  So I can see a rationale for not following the ahem rules that I originally thought were in place.  Still, now, instead of one category called “Free For All”, and some other categories too, there is essentially only one category:  “Free For All”. 

What about a compromise between what I thought it was going to be and the way it is now?  Four categories:  fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual art?  I don’t see why not.  Although it’s funnier the way you have it now….

...and then one fourth of Literal Translations would come from each of those categories?  I’ve actually been toying with something along those lines.  But rather than using some number of different categories and then arbitrarily determining how much of the magazine should be published from each category, I was thinking of providing a topic, and then the issue would be based on that topic.  This gives us a little more direction in terms of trying to decide what to publish.  The problem with it is that there will undoubtedly be several members who aren’t really interested in that topic, so they will stop participating.

As it is now, the only guidance we have to go on is that we want good stuff to read.  I also considered making Visual Arts a separate set of submissions to be ranked because they are seeking cover art, which is categorically different from content.  I haven’t decided on it yet though.  And don’t forget, I’m kind of lazy.

Dave.