I self-describe as a "mad artist." I engage in what others may describe as the impossible. Logic and sense are discarded when they do not serve my goal.
I'm ace and aro.
I am agender, but I'm lazy and not particularly compelled to work hard at gender when it means so little to me. I present as male out of convenience.
Avatar by @DrSagan -- It's a cat with a beard in the colors of candied yams.
| Beard | No sexuality, just beard. |
| Age | Gen-X (old, parent) |
| Never lewd | May drop f-bomb |
| Pronouns | he, they |
@ghost Unless you're trying to teach someone else, internalized knowledge that you feel but can't describe is totally good enough.
Theory is an optional bonus that is sometimes helpful. It has never been a requirement.
If what you're doing is working, keep it up.
I wish there was an alternative to pdmenu in Debian. Honestly, though, the value of pdmenu had dropped since the move away from Debian Menus to that stupid standardized menu structure.
I've sort of wanted to roll my own Linux distribution for a while. The problem is that I also do NOT want to roll my own Linux distribution.
If I were to roll my own, though... I'd probably have to go with my "White Label OS" idea where I make it easy to adopt a custom theme for the entire OS...
Standard packages with generic functional names and generic icons.
At one point in my past, I used "francine" to let me have a login screen that featured an ASCII-art version of my face. I want to make that -- and more -- available to everybody.
You are a brand, so you may as well use a branded OS.
It may be a hot take, but...
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is proof that Windows gave up and Linux won.
It was the only way for Windows to survive.
There was a weight-loss reality TV show called "The Biggest Loser.'
At one point they were asked, "The show has gone on for years. Why don't you do a special showing how people are doing now?"
Their answer was, "Every single one of them has gained the weight back."
They say smilodons (saber-tooth cats) needed the big teeth to kill because they had very weak jaw muscles and couldn't just bite animals to break their necks like other felines.
The thing is, humans also have very weak jaw muscles. Weak jaw muscles allow the skull to fuse at a later time which allows for a larger brain.
The smilodon could have been the most intelligent felines on the planet. It is possible that they could have even been smarter than humans at the time.
But smilodons weren't social creatures. They could have been smarter and stronger than individual humans, but they still perished to tribes of humans. Ultimately, they lived alone and so they died alone.
@ghost As a European, the act structure being referenced by English writers should be more-or-less what you would hear about in your native language.
There's been a lot of talk and debate about act structure. The original reference point for the discussion, though, is the Greek 3 act play.
This means if you're used to a story structure derived from Greek 3 act plays, you should be fine.
This is how you can know what feels write without understanding the words being used to describe things. It would feel right regardless of the language you used.
When it comes to reading and #writing, I love to read #fantasy novels, but I hate, hate, hate epic fantasy novels.
The notion that all high fantasy novels are also "epic fantasy" is saying that Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is the same subgenre of fantasy as J.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings or what's-his-name's Game of Thrones. It's absurd and nonsensical.
Epic fantasy is also -- by definition -- richly world-built. The kind of stuff people spend most of their time behind the scenes fiddling with which delays the release of their books.
My current favorites are translations of Japanese light-fiction. "Isekai" just means "other world" so all isekai novels are also high fantasy.
The thing is, though, light fiction is typically released serially and -- more than that -- it frequently feels like the author is playing fast-and-loose with their world-building. It's a style of writing that can only be done when you don't overthink it.
On a fundamental level, it is the opposite of epic fantasy. They're NOT the same.
Something to remember when buying technology: All that 3G-only wireless technology is now permanently offline. Even if you could find a device that could bridge your local network with 3G data, the 3G band partially overlaps the new 5G band so you'd be breaking new devices in your area.
This isn't an issue with corded devices. Is there a weird, ancient cord with an unusual connector? It may take some hard work to replace, sometimes it may take expensive, custom work to replace, but ancient cables stretching across your room won't harm any of your fancy new stuff.
You can always keep using old corded devices.
The way I see is pretty simple: Practice.
It's like someone on a piano. Two people may be able to easily play the same tune well at 90 BPM, but if only one of them ever tries it at 240 BPM, only one of them will get good at it at 240 BPM.
If you want to write quickly, you can't practice by writing slowly. You have to practice by writing quickly.
These days I write a lot more song lyrics than poems, but they're basically the same.
I use https://muse.dillfrog.com/ in one tab, and any old place I can put words in another tab or window.
Eventually they all gets turned in to reStructuredText and put on my website. Or, I guess in most cases, I'm generating the reStruturedText and the lyrics are just unadorned plain-text.
I've used scripts to compile books of song lyrics, but only so I could pick a binder's worth bring to a song circle.
I've thought about publishing a chapbook with some of the lyrics. Ebooks with poetry seem like such a pain to produce, though.
Mostly, it is organizing them in to logical chapbooks that sounds like a pain. They need focused chapbooks, not just "I made this in <this> month."
With my particular process, the only thing that's more of a pain is transcribing the lyrics. My specialty is improvised lyrical acapella, so I basically pants the poem and melody at the same time with my mouth.