Posts by Tom Beard
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Muse: Hooray for Wellywood (Really!), in reply to Conal Tuohy,
ENORMOUS (much bigger than the District Plan actually permits)
Well, that's complicated: there's a lot of difference between a "permitted activity" and that which is anticipated by the District Plan. "Permitted" means that it doesn't need resource consent. If it's not "permitted" it doesn't mean that it isn't allowed: far from it, since there are usually objectives, policies and guidelines to help Council officers make an assessment of such activities. For instance, in Wellington's Central Area there is pretty much no such thing as a "permitted" building: every new building needs consent and must be assessed by planners, urban designers, traffic experts and so forth. It doesn't mean that, in laypeople's terms, buildings are not permitted. It's only when the proposal gets to a stage known as "Non Complying" that there is a strong presumption that it shouldn't be consented: and even then there are cases when such a proposal might still meet the overall intent of the Plan.
In this case, the Airport rules are unique and perhaps a bit odd. To be "permitted", a free-standing sign must be no more than 8 sq m (for masochists, please see rule 11.1.5.1.3 in this document). This makes the Wellywood sign a Discretionary (Restricted) activity, which is another example of the brain-bending oddness of RMA language, since it doesn't mean that the activity is restricted: instead, Council's discretion is restricted to certain aspects, and they're not allowed to look at any other aspects. In most parts of the city, this discretion extends to the visual obtrusiveness of a proposed sign, but not in the Airport Precinct. Instead, under Rule 11.3.4 (same document), Council's discretion is limited to position, dimensions, lighting and traffic safety. What's more, that rule contains a standard that says "the maximum height of any free standing sign must not exceed 9m". This sets an expectation that signs up to 9m high are anticipated by the Plan, which would make it pretty much impossible for a planner to say that the "position and dimension" effects of the 3.5m tall Wellywood sign would have a "more than minor effect" compared to an anticipated much larger sign.
One might argue (and I won't, since my code of conduct makes me nervous) that Objectives such as 10.2.6 (in this chapter) require Council to look at the visual effects of the sign. But that would still be compared to the scale of activity anticipated by the District Plan, and when a standard says that 9m is the maximum height, in the strange world of RMA law it's hard to say (in the absence of discretion over qualitative aspects) that there are any quantifiable negative effects beyond that.
Oh, and there are two aspects that WCC couldn't consider under the District Plan: the content of the sign, and notification.
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Fine and shiny on Chrome, nonexistent on IE7 (I know!) at work. I'll try the special IE version tomorrow.
Just one comment: when I was in Data Viz School*, we were told to avoid red-green colour gradients where possible. Red-green colourblindness is much more common than we usually think, and a blue-yellow scale (while perhaps not quite as pretty) will be visible for more people.
(* aka making it up as we went along, with help from a few books on perceptual psychology)
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to Andre Alessi,
It can't be easy knowing other people are picking up the stories and characters you worked so hard on and morphing them in ways you would never have thought of, so any writer that makes their peace with that process strikes me as being pretty cool doodz.
I've only just made the first steps into writing fiction, and right from the start I considered that the stories and characters wouldn't end with my writing: the ultimate success as a writer would be for his or her creations to have a life outside of the original pages. Of course, someone would have to read it first.
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I wonder what the relationship is between fanfic and the mainstream porn industry's parodies of major films? If nothing else, it shows that people like to take characters and situations from their favourite works and imagine them into more erotic realms. There's perhaps less of that sort of thing in mainstream porn now (ahem, not that I'd know), which is a pity since the titles were often hilarious.
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Up Front: First, Come to Your Conclusion, in reply to 3410,
Of course :-) Mind you, creating Gatsby/Nick slash wouldn't be all that much of a stretch.
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I ask because the closest thing to SF that I've read recently is Ballard, which is pretty much impossible to slash since everyone already fucks everyone else in every possible way. And a few impossible ways.
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Excuse my ignorance of the fanfic world, but: is it primarily limited to SF & Fantasy? Or do people write Gatsby/Nick slash, Murakami fanfic and Oulipo combinatorial erotica with the works of Calvino, Queneau and Perec?
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to alobar,
sorry I didn't realize we were discussing a Māori language text
Though the very fact that they write it "Māori" in an English language text seems to indicate that they consider it appropriate to do so.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to linger,
I'm generally happy to go with the Māori Language Commission on this.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to HORansome,
No idea what these "Maori" people keep writing about, though. It's a common word and I've come to think that it means the writer doesn't know how to spell key words in one of the country's official languages.
Or, to be fair, that they can't find it in the Character Map application or don't know that it's ā in HTML. Or that it gets mangled by your braindead word processor or CMS. It may be much easier in many workplaces than it was when I was at TPK 5 years ago, when even for an organisation with a Māori kaupapa it was a nightmare trying to get consistency.