ABOUT THE MOONSPEAKER

In very brief, The Moonspeaker is a journal of writing about four major topics: Feminism, Amazons, Indigenous issues, and languages. 'Journal' in this case means something more like a literary publication that presents a bundle of pieces of different lengths and maybe even in different genres on a regular basis. But an even better way to think of The Moonspeaker might be as a sort of extended portfolio, because it isn't just about the text. It's also about web design and working on an approach to web pages that puts text back in the front and centre, while experimenting with different ways of constructing the text itself.

Admittedly, this is not where The Moonspeaker started out. It was preceded, eons ago in internet time, by probably one of the ugliest personal websites that was ever built, today owned in all its grotesqueness by a free web space provider with predatory terms of usage. The site was ugly first because it was a way for me to learn how to write HTML and build web sites, second because it was designed on a laptop with a three-grey screen. According to the specifications on the box it came in, the laptop had a four-grey screen, but since it was impossible to tell two of the greys apart, three was what it had in effect. And of course, in real life, the 'greys' were purple. Mercifully, even I can't remember what I called that site or how to get to it, if it even still exists. The first glimmerings of The Moonspeaker happened unexpectedly under miserable conditions over ten years ago. At that time, I was working on the tail end of a physics degree, and dealing with a crisis.

I was isolated, exhausted, and depressed. Worse yet, I was doing the 'sensible' thing, working towards an oil patch job, and hadn't written much since high school. A whole range of lousy circumstances of my own came together, plus the suicide of one of my classmates, and I finally found myself forced to reexamine what I was doing. Not that this was a conscious thing at first, it wasn't. But in my initial flounderings, while surfing the internet for who knows what reason, I stumbled into what its denizens fondly call 'the Xenaverse.' It was what got me writing again period, and eventually to working on the core topics of this website, some of them again, others for the first time.

The first version of The Moonspeaker simply provided consistent, easy access to whatever X:WP fanfic or original fiction I was writing at the time, plus my book on Amazons. Mind you, that wasn't my whole motivation at the time. In the back of my mind, it was probably also a back up of all my writing, in response to the theft of my first computer and the discovery that all my back ups were unreadable without it, which meant every piece of writing that hadn't been printed, emailed, or posted somewhere was gone. It hasn't been easy; sometimes updates have been few and very far between, real life being what it is, and the site has almost died for good on at least two occasions, due to encounters with bigotry, personality attacks, and paranoia in on-line communities I expected to be at least neutral, if not positive, groups to be involved with. Even now, being older and a bit wiser (I hope), it boggles my mind how much homophobia, sexism, and racism people are willing to spend their energy and time on in hopes of silencing others. Such efforts strike me as being oddly like my experience of reading Baudrillard. It didn't feel like reading so much as dealing with someone screaming violently at the wall in an empty room.

So you could say that The Moonspeaker, even more than it is a journal or an extended portfolio, is a means by which I refuse to be silent — and a demonstration that I've definitely got better things to do than scream at a wall in an empty room.

UPDATE, 2010-10-31: Thankfully the updates to the Moonspeaker are coming much more regularly these days as I have managed to claw back some writing and webworking time. Among the updates is another change in editing tools for the site. After what has been a painful hiatus, I have been able to return to my favoured program for the purpose, TextWrangler. The 2.1 version of TextWrangler had an alarming bug that led to data loss, likely because that version could run on one MacOS but was written for MacOS. Which means that the older version was still trying to manage resource forks for the Classic environment in the MacOS, and resource forks are pathological in a Unix environment. So, as anybody who has used Apple computers expected, the Classic environment and the resource fork have both been thrown in the bit bucket. In the meantime though, I needed a replacement editor, and TextEditor wasn't going to cut it, so I ended up switching to Emacs.

Emacs seems to be a program that inspires religious fervour; the converted are coverts forever, and tend to be very obnoxious about the other programs non-converts might use. This behaviour is at large in the platform wars too, as the various Apple and Microsoft commercials show. I have been training myself out of such obnoxiousness, since there's no convincing an acolyte, and frankly, if somebody finds Emacs or Windows or whatever the perfect tool for their purposes, that's really up to them. All of which is a roundabout way to get to the point of saying that Emacs is not the tool for me. It's just too clunky, and I far prefer the vertical document drawer implementation in TextWrangler to the horizontal tabbing in Emacs, and the far more transparent approach to setting preferences. And frankly, the Emacs key bindings piss me off and I see no reason to spend days reworking them all into standard MacOS key bindings when I only had to spend about three hours writing two scripts for time stamping The Moonspeaker's pages (it's all about the debugging). No doubt the folks who got to keep working on Unix boxes after 1999 would find this an absurd complaint, and certainly if I had been able to keep working on original Unix boxes myself it wouldn't be my experience. So all told, if you have been working on regular Unix boxes for much of your computing career, Emacs is probably exactly what you want. However, if you weren't so fortunate and are most familiar with MacOS or Windows key bindings (I have to use Windows machines at my workplace, so I speak from direct knowledge), it may not be the tool you want.

UPDATE, 2010-11-10: I've finally sorted out the problems with the RSS feed for the site. As noted in the feed, I had a broken RSS page. This was quite a surprise, but it looks like a combination of standards changes plus Safari's rss reader becoming less forgiving. The discovery that not having 'rss' in the file name made all the difference is flabbergasting, because that didn't used to be the case, but there it is. The next challenge is to update often enough for the RSS feed to be useful, of course!

**** Alexiares