Supercard Revisited

This just goes to show that you never know the impact of what you put online or when it might be relevant to someone again. Recently, I was contacted for help with Supercard export, thanks to a blog post I wrote nearly five years ago, back in September 2020.

At the time, I was exporting all of my data from Supercard to “comma separated value” (csv) files, so I could open those in a spreadsheet and then transfer them to a database table in OpenOffice. (I’ve since moved to LibreOffice, but they use the same formats and are essentially different flavors of the same program.) I wrote about the process because I was doing it and writing about it helped me think through what I needed to do, but I didn’t really think that anyone would be able to use it. How many people were using Supercard the way I did, and how many of those would want to move to a different platform?

Four and a half years later, I got an email out of the blue from Miki, a translator who was doing just that. They had started in Hypercard just like I did and migrated to Supercard when Hypercard was discontinued. They had what seems like a huge database of terms related to their translations. I was impressed with the way they described their Supercard stack and what they had been able to build. There was just one problem. Like me, they were working on moving to LiveCode and had hired a consultant to make the transition, but they were having issues exporting their massive amount of data in a usable form.

Miki had found my post, where I had included a screenshot of a snippet of code from my export script. They thought it looked promising, but wondered if I could elaborate. Of course, the reason I left Supercard behind was because of an OS upgrade that made it no longer work on my Mac. So I couldn’t open my projects, and hadn’t saved the full code of my export button to a text file, since I wouldn’t need it once I was done with it. I decided to send the project to Miki, and they were able to open it, share it with their consultant, and after a few email exchanges where I explained what I remembered of my strategy (after seeing the script they were able to send back to me), the consultant wrote a very simple and elegant script to export the data.

I trust they also have a strategy for bringing that data into LiveCode. As I explained to them, part of why my script was complicated was that I was trying to set up spreadsheets that would then work as tables in the relational database. I went from Supercard that acted a little like a database to one that had to actually be organized like one.

That wasn’t hard, but it did mean extracting data a few different ways. For each Place I had submitted my work, I had recorded titles, dates, and responses. For each Title I submitted, I had recorded places, dates, and responses. From that, I had to extract the data to create a table of Submissions. Each submission record would then contain the title, the place, the date, and the status (in/out/accepted/returned). I also had separate stacks for Publishers and Contests, and I wanted to combine those into one table of all Places no matter what type of place they were. I also exported a separate file with the inforation about each Place, but without the information about submissions. And I epxorted a separate file with information about each title that didn’t include the submissions.

There were a number of other things I wanted to change as I made the move from Supercard to a database, and all of that made the export a bit more complicated because I was building out three forms: Submissions, Places, and Titles. I had put all of these actions into one script so that when I flipped the switch, I could get all the data from all of my stacks all at once, creating a snapshop of all my submissions at a single moment in time.

But the main thing that Miki needed help with was how to write data from Supercard to a text file and how to organize that text file in a way that would work for their import. My original script helped with figuring out the Supertalk scripting language for this kind of operation, and I hope my explanation of what I did in the script and why I did it helped them decide what would work for their needs.

I am happy if I helped another translator and glad to be reminded of my old Supercard scripting days. Who knows, maybe it will come in handy again some day. So I don’t lose track of it, I saved the script as a pdf file so I could link to it from this post.

Eggless Pancakes

Awhile back, I experimented with making eggless pancakes one morning when I started my usual Saturday routine and then realized we had no eggs. Rather than doing the classic move of walking next door to borrow an egg from the neighbors (who does that these days?), I decided to see what would happen if I left out the egg. They turned out fine.

Considering the high price of eggs these days and the fact that I was cooking for myself this morning (and one egg in pancakes for one person leads to very eggy pancakes — good, but eggy), I decided to try leaving out the egg again, and I could hardly tell the difference.

What follows is a variation on my Cavalier Pancakes. If you’ve read my recipes, you’ll know I’m not a big fan of measuring, so what follows is an estimate of what I did. You could also take your favorite pancake recipe, omit the egg, and add a little more baking soda, flour, and buttermilk until you feel you have the volume and the consistecy you want. Maybe make the batter just a little thicker than usual to help it hold together.

For one person, I started with a slightly heaping 1/4 cup of white flour and a slightly heaping 1/4 cup of wheat flour. (Normally, I’d use a level 1/4 cup or even a little less per person). Add 1/4 tsp or less of salt, 1/2 tsp or so of baking soda, and approximately one half tablespoon of sugar. Stir with a wire whisk until well combined.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, add 1/2 to 1 tablespoon of oil (probably closer to 1/2 but you may want a little more oil than your recipe calls for to replace some of the liquid and consistency of the egg yolk). Then add vanilla and buttermilk. For one person, I used 3/4 C of buttermilk plus a dolop more.

Keep your batter a little on the thick side if you want the pancakes to be fluffier, rather than runny. This is true when you use an egg, too, but err on the side of thicker if you don’t have an egg. If your batter is a little too runny, the pancakes will still taste fine, they will just be thinner and spread out more on the pan. How much buttermilk to use might depend on how thick and creamy your buttermilk is today. I like buttermilk that’s been in the refrigerator for a few weeks and has thickened up a bit. And different brands have different consistencies. If you don’t have buttermilk, the best substitute is a mixture of yoghurt and a little milk. Keep it thick and creamy.

Then cook on a skillet as you would any pancake. People probably won’t even notice the difference.

So why put an egg in your pancakes? They are meant to add a little rise and also to help bind the batter as the pancake cooks, which I’m sure they do. But in a pinch or if the price of eggs has you down, pancakes are one thing that you can make without the egg and it won’t make a huge difference.

I’ve done the same with cornbread, actually, and that turned out really well, too. The secret is using the right amount of good, creamy buttermilk to get the consistency where you want it.

I’ve seen recipes for eggless baking that substitute apple sauce for the egg, and I have nothing against that except that I usually don’t have applesauce just lying around. I’m sure that would be good, too, but you can take your usual pancake recipe and adapt it by omitting the egg and adjusting the other ingredients a little to get the consistency you want. The results should turn out fine, and if you don’t quite like the way it worked this time, adjust a litte more or less next time until you find the way you like it.

Watch My Events Page

With a new book coming out in May, it’s time once again to brush off my Events page. I hope to be adding lots of events in the coming months,, but for now, I updated it with two exciting new appearances:

February 1, I’ll be in Long Beach, Mississippi, at Homegrown: A Writers’ Exchange, talking about Barrier Island Suite on a Walter Anderson panel.

April 1, I’ll be in Oxford, Mississippi, at the launch of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.

Keep your eyes on my Events page for more updates soon!

In Memoriam: Leone Dunkelberg

I’ve been away for the past month or so, working remotely as much as possible and taking care of my mother who, at 97, was in her final days. My brother and I were fortunate enough to be able to stay with her and care for her with the help of the team from St. Croix Hospice as her body shut down. She passed away on January 17, 2025, and her funeral was January 24. At the funeral, I was charged with giving her eulogy, while my brother, his dauther, and my son performed a song she had requested: Kermit and Zoë sang and Aidan played violin. My wife, Kim, and my niece, Elizabeth, read two of her favorite Psalms. Mom had selected several hymns and pieces from the traditional Lutheran liturgy. What follows is the text of the eulogy I wrote for her.

Leone Kathryn Dunkelberg — or Mom, Aunt Leone, Grandma, or Grandma Leone to her great grandkids — lived to be 97 years and seven months old. She was much loved by her family and was the glue that held us all together and brought us together in Osage by creating a warm and loving space in the little house that she and my dad, Albert Gibbs Dunkelberg built seventy years ago, in 1954. It was there that she raised her family, and there that she wanted to spend her final days, and we are so blessed that we were able to spend those final days with her with the whole family gathering again for the holidays.

If there is one quality that characterizes my Mom, I would say it is “caring.” Of course, she cared for and took care of her family, but I am also thinking of her profession as a nurse. Mom graduated high school in 1945 and entered nurse’s training at Iowa Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines as a member of the last class of the United States Cadet Nurse program while World War II was still going on. She graduated in 1948 and began her career at the Veteran’s Hospital in Des Moines, where she would meet my dad as a patient, in the hospital for appendicitis. She also served with the Red Cross at Iowa Lutheran Hospital in the summer of 1952 during the polio epidemic, and I want to remember just how brave and selfless that was, since in 1952 the Salk vaccine had not yet been invented so exposure to polio patients came with very real risks. We can liken her work to those brave doctors and nurses who more recently were on the front lines at the height of the COVID pandemic. Mom certainly knew the risks, since my dad had recovered from polio and would walk with crutches for the rest of his life until he was in a wheelchair, and she would have known of many others who were nowhere near as lucky.

Mom continued to work as a nurse either full time or part time, working at the Mitchell County Hospital for 34 years after they moved to Osage. Even after she retired, she continued to care for friends and neighbors when they were sick, checking in on them, and helping them to navigate their treatment. I was impressed that even late into her life, when my sister had cancer or someone else she knew was on medication, she would always look it up in her medical manual, so she could be familiar any side effects and the expected benefits of each drug. Even in her final days, she was very conscientious about her own medications.

Yet there was more to being a nurse for Mom than just the medical side. She was there to take care of the whole person, and not just the physical. In talking to many of her friends in recent days, I have learned how she was there for them in difficult times, whether those were due to health issues or other trials they were going through. Mom would listen and offer advice when that was what someone wanted or needed, and she would also make sure to stay in touch and to maintain those relationships even when she was no longer able to leave her house.

This side of her goes back at least to when I was a little boy, and undoubtedly before then as well. Mom always had fruit in her yard and garden, and she was an excellent pie baker—who passed her skills down to her kids and now to her grandkids—and she often baked homemade cherry, apple, or rhubarb pies in the summer. When she did, she always made some extra crust and baked a few small pies to give out to our neighbors. She called these her “widow” pies, and she would send me or my brother to visit Mrs. Marshall, Mrs. Delaney, or Mrs. Viscosil with a widow pie as an offering. I realize now that she was doing more than giving a sweet treat to a neighbor. She also wanted us to be the ones to bring it and to spend some time with each woman when we did. We often got candy or a cookie in return, so we didn’t mind, but Mom was also training us to care for others the way she did.

Yet Mom also had an adventurous spirit. It’s hard to believe, since she was only five foot four, but she lettered in basketball in her senior year at Thornburg High School. I’m sure that entering nurses training was also quite an adventure for an Iowa farm girl. I also think of the trips she and my dad took before us kids were born, and the family vacations we took every summer, usually to visit a grandparent in California or another who lived in Florida. We got to see a lot of the country that way, and I suspect my mom did a lot of the planning for those trips, with the help of my dad and AAA. They also allowed us to host foreign exchange students when Kermit and I were in high school, and so we developed life-long friendships with George Ulrich from Denmark and Jon Morten Mangersnes from Norway. They even allowed Kermit and I to go on exchange ourselves, though I’m sure that was an even harder decision to come to. Long before that, our family had hosted Rotary exchange students from the University of Iowa at our house for Thanksgiving: one from Iran, one from India, and one from Germany, opening our cultural horizons. And after my father passed, my mother would travel to Europe when my family was there for a semester, and she would take many bus tours, mostly with groups from the bank and even go on cruises to the Mediterranean Sea, to Alaska, and to Panama, going through the Panama Canal as my dad had in his Navy days.

Mom was always open to new experiences, and she became very accepting of other people’s views and ways of life. She read widely, and was an active supporter of the arts, especially the high school and community theatre and musical productions. She also was a great supporter of our neighbor Mary Ann Marreel’s art, my brother’s acting, and my poetry. She was part of the Bread n’ More Dinner Club, who often had internationally themed meals or explored other unfamiliar culinary traditions. She was an excellent cook, and a gardener with a green thumb.

Finally, I would say that Mom loved life, yet she was also very accepting of death. She said she was ready to die, and she often told me that you never know what day you will die, that it could come at any time for her. She had a deep faith, so she was not afraid of dying, and yet in her final days, it was clear that she also wanted to enjoy each day as much as she was able. There were times when we thought she was very close to the end, yet she would wake up, ask for toast and coffee, or ask to go sit in her recliner in the living room, and even if she slept most of the day, these little things made her happy. She also took advantage of those moments of clarity and energy to give me and my brother a lesson or two, or to have one last heart to heart talk with other family members and friends. Mom lived a long life, and she lived each day well. She was humble and gracious and wise. She was always there for others, and she also took care of herself. She had an amazingly strong will to live and to stay alive long enough to be with us all again, and she did it. She said in her directives that she wanted her funeral to be a celebration of life, and she has done everything she could to make that possible. Even in death, she is taking care of us all. It is impossible to imagine a better end to a life well lived.

Postscript: of course, after the fact, there are a number of things I realized that I left out. How could you include all the memories. One was that for her 80th birthday, Mom decided she wanted to take a ride in a hot air baloon. We had all gathered in Albuquerque, and she, my sister, my niece, and I all got up very early to drive into the valley where we met the balloon. It was in the shape of a green alien, and for years, she would drink her New Year’s toast out of a champaign flute with an alien head that they gave her after that ride.

There are many more memories, like looking for birds or telling her about any sightings we had (on our drive back to Mississippi this time, we saw three bald eagles that we didn’t get to tell her about) or canning cherry or rhubarb jam every summer when we visited—I hope to do that at least one more time when we close up the house. I’m sure many more memories will come to me at unexpected moments over the next weeks and months. Mom had a good, long life, and I was fortunate enough to have her in my life as long as I did. She will live on in our memories.

Re-Release of River Hill: A Ghost Story

There is method to my madness… (I promise).

Back in 2019, I released a story one tweet at a time (on Twitter, obviously), but now that Twitter has become X, things don’t work as they used to, and I’ve moved most of my posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. (The links take you to the start of the story on each platform.) Since I’m teaching a class in digital writing this semester, it seemed like a good time to test out these newer platforms for writing fiction, so I have been reposting “River Hill: A Ghost Story, Part I” on all three platforms, one post or one “toot” at a time. You can see my original post about it here with a link out to the story on X, which is mostly complete. The following links will take you to the start of the story on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, take your pick or try all three.

I say there is method to my madness because I decided to stretch the posting out over four days, and to do that, I looked for the beats in my story so I could find good places to start and stop each day. The hope, of course, is to get a few people interested with individual posts and lead them to the main story. On Bluesky and Mastodon, I can do this by including some additional hashtags on individual posts or toots (on Mastodon). I’ve used #writingcommunity, #fiction or #fictionsky, and #shortstory so far, and may try #amwriting and other hashtags today. I may see what’s trending for writers and try to jump on board.

Threads will only allow one hashtag per post, so I am using #rvrhl for all posts, just so you can pull all the story posts together with that hashtag. I’m also replying to create a thread, so that brings the whole story together on all three platforms. If you click on any post to view it, the ones in the thread before it will be above and any posted later will be or show up below. I might not need the #rvrhl hashtag now that they all collect posts into a thread like this, but I am thinking of expanding the story later with some tangentially related content, and I might do that on these platforms. If I do, then the #rvrhl hashtag will tie those other stories in with the original Part 1.

What I can do in Threads is to add a location to certain posts, so I’m thinking of doing that today instead of using a hashtag to provide a point of entry for people to find the story. The goal is to let people discover the story in different ways and to start it at different points, then go back and read from the beginning to the end or at least as far as I’ve written when they find the story.

I’m interested in how social media can be used as a kind of serialization, and how it allows readers to encounter a text in different ways and at different times. How does our understaning of a text differ depending on how and when we find it? I am also interested in linking different forms of online writing using this story.

Part 2 is already written as a Google Map project, though I might add more locations to the map that would allow me to develop parts of the story. Or I might link back out to Bluesky, Mastodon, and/or Threads to continue the story that way. One link already takes you to a website with Part 3, where you can read the story by following different paths, and there are expandable sections of the story that could branch out from that site as well. Part 4 of the story was written as a game in PlayFic format. So far, it is still unpublished online, though I’ve shared it with my students in the past, and it is playable. I’m hoping to make it more public this semester, too, so watch for a way to discover your own ghost story as a text-based game.

So far, I’ve decided to limit my re-issue of “River Hill: A Ghost Story, Part 1” to the three most Twitter-like social media. This post is a way to bring my blog back into the story as a meta-story about the creation of the story. I’m also active on Sustack and have an account on Medium. Maybe I’ll decide to write some of the story on one of those platforms as well, to re-create it as a series of “Notes” on Substack or to write it in a more linear format as a series for my email newsletter. We’ll see.

It’s exciting to have two classes doing this kind of work, one at the undergraduate level and one at the graduate level. This gives me the impetus, and maybe some time, to develop parts of the story that I have been thinking about. I’m glad to take the time to migrate the story to these three platforms, which also gives me a way to test how they each work for this kind of writing.

Four Poems Newly Online

Not too long ago, I discovered that four of my poems are now available online. I have a Google alert set up for my name, and though it usually doesn’t show me much that’s interesting or that i don’t already know about, occasionally, it proves valuable. That’s how I discovered that the University of Alabama Birmingham has made their back issues of Birmingham Poetry Review available online through their Digital Commons. This includes two poems of mine from 2004 and two from 2023. I’ve added these to my online poetry page. I’ve also added a few more recent online publications.

But I thought I’d post about it on my blog as well, especially since, you can search on “Birmingham Poetry Review” at the UAB Public Commons, and you can access any issue back to 1998 so far. This is an excellent resource for a huge amount of great poetry. Until now, BPR was print only. This makes it more accessible to many more people.

Why I’m Switching from InDesign to Affinity Publisher

The short answer to this question could be that Adobe is raising the price of Creative Suite, but I have been considering this move for quite awhile, even before Adobe announced its price increase.

I’ve never been happy with Adobe’s subscription pricing model. Granted, it’s a good deal if you use all that Creative Suite has to offer, but who can really use it all? I primarily use InDesign and Photoshop, with a little bit of Illustrator. I mostly publish two little magazines and do publicity for my university department using Adobe. For a long time, they were the only thing powerful enough to do what I needed, but now Affinity has come out with a very strong competition, and they charge a single fee for a license. Yes, I may need to pay to upgrade in the future, but I won’t pay every year, and Affinity’s one-time price is much less that an annual subscription for Creative Suite.

I finally broke down and bought it this summer, when they had a half-price sale on the educational price. It was affordable enough that I could justify paying for it so I could really test it out (more than I could do when I had a one-week free trial). And I could recommend it to my students because they can get what they need for one low price. I needed to own it if I was going to ask them to use it, since I knew there would be some issues to work out.

But I’ve been very happy with using Affinity Publisher and Affinity Photo so far. (I haven’t dug into Affinity Design much yet because, as I said, I don’t really use Illustrator very much, but I’m glad that I can use if it I need to create vector graphics.)

I’ve learned the most about Affinity Publisher, and though it is a little wonky (so is InDesign, but I’m familiar with its wonkiness), I’ve found it to be pretty intuitive. I have to get used to some things that are different, but some of those things are actually better for my purposes. I just learned about how to format a table of contents and have Affinity Publisher generate it. That works very well, and though I still end up ‘fixing’ a few things in the output for the TOC, I don’t have to edit it as much as I did in InDesign.

Page numbers and styles also operate a little differently than they do in InDesign, but they are close enough, and as I learn more about how to use them, I’m starting to forget how I did things in InDesign and am happy with Affinity. I have learned about a few bugs in Publisher, but there is a good user support forum for Affinity products that has been very helpful.

One thing that has made my transition easier is that importing files into Affinity has been fairly simple. For InDesign files, you do need to export the file in IDML format. Once I do that, I can then import it into Publisher and most things are carried over, including my page setup, margins, master pages, and my paragraph and character styles. And importing Photoshop and Illustrator files are even easier, since you can just open them in Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer. This means all I really need to do is to save my InDesign files as IDML formatted files before I cancel my Creative Suite subscription. That will be easy enough to do, and from tehre, I can create new documents in Publisher.

New Poems in Salvation South

I’m thrilled to see two new poems appear in Salvation South. If you’re not familiar with this weekly online journal, I highly encourage you to read the most recent issue, and not just because they took my poems. In this issue, John T. Edge interviews Wright Thompson about his new book The Barn, which explores the murder of Emmett Till. There is also nature writing from Lenny Wells and an interview with musician Caleb Caudle conducted by Chuck Reece.

My humble contribution are two poems from my “Intergalactic Traveler” series. The first was inspired by stories I’ve heard from people who’ve visited Buc-ee’s. If you haven’t driven through the South, then you may not know what I’m talking about, but just ask anyone who has, and you will likely hear similar stories. I have been amazed by the reverence and fervor people show for this institution, even friends who I would not expect to wax enthusiastic about a truck stop.

My second poem was written in response to the shooting at Uvalde, though sadly, there have been many other incidents that it could be about.

This series of poems arose out of an exercise I gave myself in 2019 to write from an alien perspective, to write in a different voice, and to take on issues that I might feel less comfortable writing in my own voice. Interestingly, after some years of writing in this series (now totaling more than twenty poems), I’ve also written about some of these issues in first person from my own perspective as well. Writing in this voice also was likely instrumental in some of my poems based in myth.

I thought I was done with my intergalactic traveler, when I saw a call from Salvation South and felt the need for a Southern-inspired poem, which led me to the one about Buc-ee’s. Who knows, maybe I’m not quite done yet…

I’m very grateful to Salvation South for making this mental leap with me and allowing these poems to grace their virtual pages. I hope you’ll enjoy them, and I hope you’ll become an avid reader of Salvation South. The editors there are creating an amazing space for challenging conversations.

How to Choose a Headshot

A week or so ago, I started down the path of choosing a headshot for my next book of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong. After taking tons of pictures using my Nikon and the self-timer, I narrowed them down to four that I thought were decent, and then decided to get some more opinions. So I hopped on Substack and set up a poll with a post about needing a new picture, not wanting the poet glam shot, and instead wanting to look like a normal person on my book’s cover.

The nice thing was that quite a few people took the poll and others commented on my cross-posts on other social media platform. I even got some more subscribers to my free Substack, which I’m planning to use mostly to get out news about the book and book events. And even nicer, the voting clearly favored the picture that I was leaning towards, too. But the comments, which got into some issues of exposure and balance, did make me ultimately decide to try again. So I added a new post and another poll with four new pictures, plust the option to stay with the first choice.

Of course, my publisher will undoubtedly have the final say, and that choice may depend as much on other design choices for the cover as it does on the photo itself. I had seen authors give readers choices about cover design or author photos in the past, though, and this seemed like a good way to drive some engagement and get people excited. No matter what happens with my photo, even if my publisher ultimately tells me I just need to get a professional photographer involved, letting people in on the process and on the decision can’t hurt, and it’s actually fun. So I highly recommend having a poll or asking for comments about your headshot the next time you need one.

If you’re not on my Substack already, please go there and help me choose the best photo!

Possumtown Book Fest

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be taking part in the Possumtown Book Fest, August 24. Friendly City Books is organizing this event at the Columbus Arts Council, and Emily Liner asked me to be part of a panel on Walter Inglis Anderson. I’ll be talking about him and my book of poems, Barrier Island Suite.

Thanks to this invitation, I’ve updated my Events page for the first time in awhile, adding the panel to my calendar and posting a few more details above in the description area. That page is about to get more activity as I gear up for the launch (next spring) of Tree Fall with Birdsong. I’m glad to see it still works the same way it used to. That’s been one place I’ve kept track of readings and other appearances related to my writing.