"... in Dick’s novels, again and again, the veil of a unitary reality is ripped off, in favor of the revelation that we live in an existential abyss—one that is also an existential plurality. However painful the transition may feel, the true nightmare isn’t this abyss of infinite possibility but the attempted imposition upon it of a single viewpoint."
very informative essay with good inline demonstrations
a wonderful, thoughtful, and down-to-earth statement on LLM use in educational contexts. "I’m a super straight-laced Mormon and, like, never ever swear or curse, but in this case, the word [bullshit] has a formal philosophical meaning... so it doesn’t count :)" lmao.
"So maybe writing about art is, as Krauss wrote of the grid, a way of covering the space between what we can know (the scientific) and what we can only feel (the spiritual). There’s probably no way to make these things join up seamlessly, so we place a lattice of words on top to cover the messy bits or the blank spots."
"Working with or against writing systems and what other poets and artists have done with them, we learn something vital about language as it relates to identity that isn’t taught in critical ethnic studies classes or by community elders or culture workers. Or in an MFA poetry workshop, for that matter. And what poets know about language and identity that people whose institutional job or mission it is to know about language and identity do not know is in the poet’s work, in the poems. "
field report of the tools in the hands of working writers
as much as I recognize Whedon's shortcomings, I really didn't connect with this specific criticism—seems to be arguing that particular "realist" techniques ("show don't tell") should be valued over their alternatives... e.g. I don't agree that stories are (or should be) "about letting the audience disappear into a world you created."
"Icons are not primitive or rudimentary attempts to duplicate the physical world; they are nuanced and complex attempts to embody the spiritual world."
"[a] dictionary and graphical data for over 9000 of the most common simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Among other things, this data includes stroke-order vector graphics for all these characters." (via gábor ugray's !!con 2020 talk)
"Face lets you edit both the text and the font it is rendered in. In text mode you can type and edit text normally. Press escape to enter font mode, where you can select a character to edit. Any changes to a character are visible immediately."
down the rabbit hole of fantasy/sf authors using wordstar
detailed explanation of an unbelievably bad-ass build, fuck