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What is oturn?

oturn tin drop#8212;click to see enlarged view

In Germany (maybe also elsewhere) people buy tin cast sets containing various shapes (bells, hearts, etc). On new year's eve, these are molten in a spoon held over a candle and cast into cold water. The package contains a leaflet providing explanations of the resulting shapes, which are supposed to foretell the caster's coming year. Drops that accidentally fall onto a flat surface sometimes form nice shapes. This drop on new year's eve looked like an 'O' and hinted at a spiral, so I thought it a fitting shape for an oturn logo.

The rescue of old blog content

In 2004 I had to rescue content from my old blogs genug.weblogs.com and genug.manilasites.com that were being abruptly dicontinued by the provider, the venerable Dave Winer.

I had realised by that time that I was not a good blogger: for that, you need to want to communicate, you need a few clever snippets or hints a day to keep up the flow. For me, a static site would do. The name 'genug' felt a bit worn out, so I needed another domain name that I thought I could live with for a while.

The name oturn

An oturn is similar to a u-turn, just going full circle. Look at it as a bad thing or a funny thing; in any case, you can't force exits.

oturn content in a nutshell

oturn contains my personal output since about 1997, mainly texts probing things and texts sketching things. There are also some series of composite photographs: Strassenszenen, Hafentreppe, Fancy, and Tate. And a pixel drawing, a curse that took me over a year to complete: the rug (the slave).

oturn also hosts texts by John Lindsay that weren't online anywhere. I am fond of them, so he let me put them up here.

And, of course, there is a growing repository of rug analyses. Looking at the search stats, most people come here for the rugs, for a review of a book about psychedelic art (mainly for the images), and for John's information systems book.

When my dad died recently, I scanned in his book Gespaltener Christlicher Glaube and put it up as well. I never read the book properly while he is was still alive but I did when I cleaned up the OCR output of the scans. I think he would like the idea that now, people can actually find him and connect to his thought.

Last update: 15 June 2010 | Impressum—Imprint