Hi Ya’ll!
Well another week has slipped through my fingers. But not entirely fruitlessly. I have polished off part 2 of Alice Under Discipline, though I am
not sure if satisfactorily so as yet; I am
not sue how happy I am with certain aspects of it. The problem has been that in my mind’s eye I
have moved on since part 1 and in addition to working on a serious sciencey
book about protein conformation disorders I have a plethora of incomplete
fragments of something which amongst
other things revolves around a character who, along with her cronies,
delights in watching (sort of stalking), picking out and then causing untold
problems for certain young attractive ‘nippys’ who wait on her and her friends
at afternoon tea at various Lyons corner houses or tearooms (the tale seems to
have set itself in the early 1960s).
This they contrive to do by picking fault
in their service, both by conniving as a group or at other times as individuals,
complaining to the manageress or supervisor with the aim of watching the
sweet recent-school-leaver of their
choice being berated in front of them, with the sure and certain knowledge that
the next time she serves one of them, the resulting flustering will likely
result in yet another opportunity to nit-pick and trouble-make for their
blameless young target. Working
together, by visiting the restaurant at different times as individuals and
pairs and contriving to be served by their target, they are able to make it appear
that the poor red-faced, flustered young thing is quite incapable. It is a game with them:
They even go so far as to set up a certain
pleasantly plump, well-developed young girl with one of their number’s nephew,
merely so he can take her out in her lunch break (a persuasive young chap, and
a chip off his aunt’s block) thus enabling one of them to later pass comment
over the smell of alcohol on the nippy’s breath (he’s surreptitiously slipped a
shot or two of gin in the shandy she’s risked imbibing). In this manner, as it begins to take more and more to satisfy the group’s yearning to witness the public humiliation of others, several girls are brought close to getting the sack (and brought to public tears). But with one girl in particular they are indeed successful in getting her dismissed – and without references and little chance of re-employment… That is, unless one of the group were to step forward of course… And needless to say the central character - and instigator of all this - has a 'thing' about ''nippies' and their uniforms, and discipline, not to mention holding strong views on the benefits of corporal punishment!
The pics here (certainly the uppermost one ) are from 1925 -ish, but I understand that some variant of the uniform survived in to the early 1960s.
I have been doing a whole lot more on the
new website, by the way. It now has an
all-black background (since I took my life in my hands and dug down into the
HTML / CSS code), albeit with a grey bit at the bottom of the page; coz I
haven’t worked out how to get rid of that yet.
It has a long way to go though; I am mostly uploading content from my
collection of stuff at the moment and so there are still no words of
explanation nor much in the way of text contributions generally. In terms of site navigation: in addition to the nesting pull-down menus or
tabs at the top of the pages I am also building in a system of pictorial links
as I go along… Give it a try and
see! And let me know! There is a pretty sad-looking link near the top of the right hand sidebar, which I'll sort out in time.
Yeah, Yeah I know; the text colour i've used here sucks. But I'm pressed for time and I'll fix it later.. And hopefuly add a pic or two!
And now I've fixed it - no more garish lime green (Thurs 14th)
And now I've fixed it - no more garish lime green (Thurs 14th)
Have you tried the footer wrap to get rid of that grey part at the bottom? Besides that it is looking good so far.
ReplyDeleteHow do you expect us to read the "Spanking mags reader's letters"? They can't be enlarged and there's no possibility to save them either in order to enlarge them as pictures?
ReplyDeleteLikewise the pictures in the section "Old Academy Wear Catalogue ~ late 1990s" are quite small even when clicked on. Are these the largest versions of these pictures you have? I could have sworn I have seen these pictures at larger sizes.
ReplyDeleteHi Orage and Madmonkey, and anybody else who might be following this discourse! Thanks for the input! These are not problems that were immediately apparent at this end, probably because I have a pair of large screens here.
ReplyDeleteThe Academy Wear Catalogue photos are the largest I have. But I’ll have a bash at resizing them and then posting them back up... Keep watching this space. Likewise, I am still trying to address the footer wrapper problem. Removing other unwanted features from the website template and turning the background black involved removing links to external off-page imagery in addition to changing the background colour by changing the CSS hex code to #FFFFFF. However, at present I have been unable to achieve the same thing with the footer – and I have no idea why not! It’s really irritating, but not the end of the world.
The spanking magazine reader’s letters are usually not full letters in any case (in most instances) but are those parts that inspired me at the time – the salient points so to speak. Where a letter does continue over two or more pages (and bear in mind I have quite a lot still to upload) I shall endeavour to make obvious which follows on from what. I think I have grasped the best way to do that now.
The letters pics do enlarge when you click on them – just as with the blog – but the problem seems to be that they do not enlarge enough to be read on an average screen. Actually the problem is two-fold, because I have just been experimenting and have uncovered the fact that if one downloads on of the letters and then magnifies it in a photo viewer package or whatever, a measure of pixilation occurs to the image; although rendered readable, it then looks horrid.
Now, the original scans are all hi-res so my conclusion is that the website software wizard is automatically adjusting the resolution to 72 dpi, this being a commonly used resolution for website publication and fine for most pics (but not pics depicting text one wants to share with others!). The originals I can blow up absolutely huge on the screens here without any sign of pixilation, incidentally.
As the case with the Academy Wear Catalogue photos (see above) I am going to attempt to resize the originals first and then reload them to see if that helps.
I’ll report back here a little later.
Right! To all concerned:
ReplyDeleteI have just updated the spanking mag reader's letters page on the new website.
Where possible I have resized the scanned image to compensate for the website’s presumed automatic reduction in resolution, although not all images would resize correctly using the software I have here (I don't know why!.
I have also placed an explanatory note at the top of the page suggesting the interested reader use their browser's zoom function in order to enlarge if necessary – experimentally I found it possible to zoom in significantly without pixilation taking place using MS Explorer and Mozzila Firefox.
Ah, thank you, I've now been able to read those letters!
ReplyDelete