aesmael

Journalling is of course a foredoomed activity. Yet there are times when it becomes especially appealing. And so - why not indulge? Unlikely but perhaps we may even build a habit. There are far less healthy things I might do, and have been doing.

To get what feels the most obligatory topic out of the way, the family Xmas gathering appears to have gone well. Only at the very end did my siblings get into an argument about vaccinations. Unfortunately I do not know how further to press the case there that it is a very prudent thing to do about a very real danger to one's well-being. I have done my best, and would rather avoid burning any further bridges until they prove necessary.

For now I have some time off work. Likely this is why I have the energy to write anything whatsoever. So while I would like to at least nominally keep some record of an event or feeling for each day I doubt doing so shall be a persistent activity.

Today especially lamenting my lack of writing. There is a piece I sketched out early November that needs a thorough revision, and another piece I promised to write that needs to get beyond outlining. I'd like to write more completely indulgent fiction, because why not please myself?

Tonight I pulled up the old Guide to Darkmoon Vale, aiming to take some notes to flesh out a campaign idea I'd had to mix in the adventure series set there (that begins with Hollow's Last Hope) along with free-roaming activities likely kicked off by an employment offer by a disguised reclusive dragon known to live in the area. But by the time I had got my pen out and notebook open to the next page it all seemed too pointless and pathetic to bother with. There isn't really anything to hope for or look forward to, and I would be wasting my time to plot out yet another go-nowhere idea. Much better tomorrow to put my energies toward learning to program. Then I can focus on moving the dolls around by myself without worrying about other people.

Tomorrow shall be another day

Current Mood: cynical

Today was perhaps a good day, although not what I anticipated. I ended up spending about three hours playing games in multiplayer which I had not planned. First, a while playing Alien Swarm again with Ami and Grace, the latter of whom I have rather missed (I do not miss Ami because I have daily contact with her still, which is good). That started out as a test effort to get a three-player game of Secret of Mana going, but this seems to be an unattainable goal. Instead, we defaulted to freely available space marine squad shooting up swarms of aggressive alien bug-things.

It was wonderful to get to hang out and laugh and have fun with friends again. I missed it a lot and hope I will be able to make more time in my life for this, that more opportunities for repeating the experience will be available.

Later, since we can't get a third player, Ami and I started our Secret of Mana game over again with the new circumstances in mind. Also fun times, and conveniently allowing me to see how the plot began instead of joining it partway through like I had last time (there was not much plot).

In betweentimes I worked some more on the database of books and stories I have read that I have been building for ill-defined and scarcely considered reasons. But at least I am potentially learning new skills in the process.

Yesterday was also not what I expected. I woke in the morning to find Avast had reported a virus in its scanning and recommended a further scan at boot. I let it go ahead with that, forgetting how long those take, and was consequently without my computer for 7 hours. This meant conversations had to be carried out via the far less comfortable medium of my phone. I ended up planning out some meals for - hopefully - the next week, and also started rereading through Berserk to pass the time. Currently am at Volume 3 and aim to stop there for a while. I'm aiming to be a bit more flexible in my reading in the future, but that is not something I can dive right into, and I have "things to do" meanwhile.

Losing such a chunk of November first also put a damper on any aspirations I may have had to participate in NaNoWriMo, although I'd not entertained any idea of actually attaining 50,000 words anyway. I still might try and manage a burst of writing, which I'd like to do regardless of the month.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: ambivalent
Current Music: insufficient
Crossposts: http://aesmael.livejournal.com/672269.html

Thanks to not sleeping I finally managed to complete a project I'd set myself a couple of weeks ago.

I'd wanted to increase my familiarity with HTML, for reasons of school / work benefits and also especially on account of wanting to, so I set myself the task of creating a bundle of pages which held my stories. A sort of book, an anthology of my work shaped like a website.

I am always surprised at how long HTML takes for me to put together. Especially as once I learn the tools for the task the actual putting it together goes rather quickly - most of the time on this project has been reading up on the subject itself, and only the past few days attempting to sort layout. I am pleased to have learned a teensy bit of CSS for this too, but only a tiny bit of skipping ahead because I want to avoid use of any deprecated elements or attributes if I can.

And now it works. Not any glaring errors I have seen. Pleasant to look at, but not spectacular in even an understated sense. It works, though, and I can call the first version done to enough satisfaction for me to say so. First version, which I have playfully* decided to call v0.1, is done. Nine and a half very small stories and nine poems; eleven and a half stories if you count the version with erotica included. That seemed so few in collection, and they so short, I just had to give a correspondingly low version number, to show how far and how many places we have to go.

Jayde, I ended up excluding. She's something different and does not intersect with this at present (later, that changes). And all my larger stories, those are yet in a state of incompletion. There is at least one, maybe a couple of others I might have included, but they would have required further organisational thought to find their places and I wanted first to establish a version of this story bundle as something that works and exists.

And now it does, and I am happy with my little accomplishment. I did have, starting out, a vague idea that I might share this with people as a sort of writing sample or collected work. May as well go through with that and offer a copy, either version, of this little thing to them as would like one. Everything included is available on my journal already. And this makes another incentive to keep working on other stories as I want to work my fingers in them, shape them, tell them, and now having another place to keep them too, somewhere to arrange and enjoy what I have made, that I have made.

*and sleepily, but don't forget the playfully!

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Sylvie Symbiosis - Ghostlight

Very much enjoying Notepad++ so far. Is making me want to do more, and learn to code, just so I can have more opportunities to use it.

Current Mood: chipper

So that's pretty rad I guess.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Handle With Care - Travelling Wilburys

It seems upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 got my speakers working, handy since I no longer have any working headsets and apparently a contrary experience to many other people. That seems to be a primary complaint with any new version of Ubuntu, "My sound stopped working!"

Unfortunately I still have to deal with programs intermittently freezing and becoming unusable for periods of time, more often than happens in Vista, and puzzle out why Pidgin seems to be experiencing this to the point of being completely unusable (for now, using Kopete). Those are at least old problems and not new problems, unless 8.10 has fixed the old problems and replaced them with new ones which look identical. We shall see how much clearing out this months-old saved session of Firefox helps, perhaps with freeing up RAM - it can't cure the problem though, as it happens with Pidgin even if that is the only program I have started, at all.

Hopefully. When it is working well I tend to prefer Ubuntu over Vista.

Current Mood: apathetic

Yes, I wrote more last night and that is a wonderful, terrific thing. Two bursts, later than I would like, as is becoming unfortunate habit.

First, a bit more than four hundred words beginning at 20:00, which was not bad in itself. Then after midnight I broke for a bit to update some programs. It turns out Firefox autoupdate had not informed me of any increments between 3.0.0 and 3.0.3, which seems to be because I do not use the admin account in Vista - when the admin Firefox started automatically after I did the update manually, it unlike the one normally use had the 'check for updates' option not greyed out. Plus on closing the program it asked if I want to save my tabs for next time, something I have also been frustrated about not working for me in Vista. I intend to find out if these have been reported as bugs and, if not, to learn how to file them and make them be reported.

Among the other upgrades I changed OpenOffice.org from 2.4.2 to 3.0.0. Not being informed of that update was also annoying, especially as the 'check for updates' option was actually available and told me there were none after I had discovered elsewhere about 3.0.0 being available. And there was a recent security update after 2.4.2 so even if we are not being informed automatically of version 3, no excuse.

Now I am beginning to wonder if there is something installed on this system which is blocking information about updates (Firefox extensions do fine though, as do several other programs). There better not be; as much as I can I instruct programs to notify me of what they are and are not doing.

And after all this, another burst of writing right before sleep. From about 06:09 to 06:41, another six hundred or so words.

Epic Fantasy

10,262 + 1,036
(10.1% more)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Bizet - Carmen Fantasie

I have been having many problems with my sleep cycle. Basically that, if I do not have a regular imperative reason for being up early (such as school or, presumably, a job) it very quickly shifts to my sleeping +/- an hour of dawn and waking around 1400 - 1500. Which means I tend to sleep through and miss the intermittent classes I have now and other events, as well as being less able to spend time with my friends and family. Plus, I miss out on that early morning beauty.

I have been trying to shift my sleep cycle to a more conventional pattern but this is proving difficult - to sleep after being awake only ten hours or to stay up through daylight. Still persevering. Managed better than usual on Thursday.

Thursday was also a day with all my family home and I was experiencing a lot of stress with everyone around, feeling crowded and trying to avoid arguments although I still managed to be drawn into one (what did I want done with the milk-substitute cartons my sister had left out on the bench - she maintains they go bad after a week or two in the fridge while I have continued to use them with no difference noticed - but after having sat out on the bench all morning I was no longer so willing to trust them and got told to stop bitching).

It was a good day, mostly. I have been trying in little occasional steps to convert an old desktop pc with 250 GB hard drive (the largest in the house) into a media server. What I had done so far was move it from the floor of my bedroom onto the desk again, find and reconnect its cords, and finally located a power cord for the monitor.

That turned out not to work. The computer would switch on and start running but the monitor remained dark. I suspected it may no longer work, so Thursday after my sisters had left I brought it out and hooked it up to the main desktop in the lounge room. Still nothing, not even a power light, so I concluded it was dead and moved on to an alternate plan.

I brought out the pc itself and scavenged the working monitor from the main (well only one in use really) desktop to get it set up - the idea was hopefully to (learn how to) configure the server for remote access so I would not need a monitor so much to keep it running. At first it seemed this monitor had suddenly died too and I worried I had ruined it carelessly. Then I pushed the power cord more firmly in at the back and all was well again.

Unfortunately it would not load beyond the BIOS screen, saying there was a problem and Windows could not load. "Well," thinks I, "no problem. I was planning to put Windows in a little box anyway, so we will just skip that phase." I went and burned the Mythbuntu image I had downloaded a few weeks ago and put that in the tray.

No change in the situation. Right. Time for fiddling with the BIOS settings. Changed the boot order so DVD came before hard drive. No discernible effect. Noticed an inconsistency in the clock speed reported at startup with that in the BIOS settings, adjusted settings to match, set which drives are master and slave, and got a bit farther in startup.

Still however it is trying to start Windows and failing, claiming (as it had been all along) there had been some change in the settings or maybe the CPU was damaged. This was the nearest I had dipped my fingers to the heart of a computer so far and it did not seem to have worked. I decided this was probably beyond my ability and I would likely need some new hardware to proceed further.

I called it stalemate and resolved to poke further when I felt up to it again - what after all had I to lose? Because I was feeling so stressed that day I decided to take a break from writing to relax, but then I had to decide how.

Finally settled on trying my first game of Angband, with its startlingly detailed character creation screen (I am more used to NetHack and DoomRL). Eventually I got passed that with a dwarven priestess named First. Then I realised I did not know what the controls are.

Having been freed from my obligation to write for the night I found what I wanted to do was write. Between perusing the commands for Angband and watching Heroes I refined my own personal definition of 'planet' and related terms (yes, that was actually a practical and productive use of my time, even if it does not become relevant for a year or more). There was also some more background work on tSOW, which I would have liked to continue afterward but that phase of the evening was passed mostly laying on the floor crying from anxiety.

It has been a couple of days now and I have not been writing since. I am going to sleep now, and when I wake that day will see writing done. Epic Fantasy is just about finished now and there is really only one way the climax can go. Wrote out that sequence on Thursday too, I think.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: bed
Current Music: nomusic

I think I got it entangled with the previous lot. Drat.

( Links )

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: nomusic

Unlike this earlier post I am not being sarcastic.

I tend to accumulate to junk on my system - trying out shiny new toys, then discarding them or the old tool, but not actually removing the files outright. It is something I expect a fair few people do. Back in April the latest version of Ubuntu was released, not quite with KDE 4 in the Kubuntu version, but with the option if people wished.

I'd been using KDE and GNOME alternately for about a year at the time and was quite excited at seeing how KDE 4 ran, so naturally I went and installed it. Seemed shiny at first, rapidly grew less interesting and after about a week or so I stopped using it.

Finally, tonight, I decided to be rid of KDE 4 until it is included in an official Kubuntu release. Logged in to GNOME. Opened Terminal, and ran the following two commands:

sudo apt-get remove kde4

sudo apt-get autoremove

I did this, then logged out, intending to restart and log in to Vista. Well, that just got me a bland background and a pointer, so I hit the power button. If you know where this is going, shhhh, I'm telling a story.

Starting up, of course, we get loading again, and we come to a text login screen. Of course, because I never did edit settings to give an option to load Vista after startup; that requires restarting the system after an OS has loaded. So I login, and run the following command:

X

Aaaand we are back at the bland screen with nought but moving the mouse around to do. Time to restart again, except that involves powering off and gets us back in text. Meaning I am going to have to work with the command line until I can get a graphical desktop back.

Fortunately I am not scared. Had to do this once before when I inadvertently filled the hard drive to the point it was unable to load a graphical desktop. That was simply a matter of locating and deleting the offending folder. In this case I suspect the problem is that I made KDE 4 the default window manager, so now I need to find and change that setting back to GNOME. Possibly. Could be very mistaken. Looking into finding out, now.

So this is fun. Earlier tonight, was a bit listless. Now I have a problem to solve.

Right now, Melantha has open the manual for Bash. And how am I posting this? From a different, desktop, computer. Unfortunately although I fairly sure Ubuntu comes with a text-based browser installed, I have yet to get it to run despite occasional attempts over the past year and a half. Hm. Perhaps not so encouraging. Let's just keep going.

Edit: Problem solved.

Current Mood: excited

Google Reader Shared Items

Thank You Thursdays: Your (Notice I Didn't Say Female) Brain [via gentle_gamer. Comments to the post made me warier of this video. Did she have that brain cut in half to illustrate her point? Am pretty sure most brains I have seen are in a single piece unless cut. Much of her described experience of having a stroke is not unfamiliar to me, if to a greater degree. Not, I stress, identical, but apparently similar to something which can be accessible to me. If I were to release certain brakes, if I could remember how. I have a lot of hostility to the frame in which she presents her thesis, despite finding much recognition or even agreement in the details.

I dislike the way people jumped on ropty's comment ("Non-gendered? Dividing the world into two parts, one is linear, unemotional, calculating and the other about feeling, emotions, timeless oneness. Gee, that sounds rather gendered to me.") because this is a thing which is done, this is a way in which brain functioning is presented and those traits are very gendered in this society. Also that my readings of other writings on neurobiology suggest this is a highly oversimplified perspective on human brain hemisphere functioning, though as this was a talk for a lay audience that may have been deliberate. And it still seems to me her described experiences are very 'on point' even if I am not so fond of her presentation of them.

I wonder if making such experience accessible at will would have the effect on the world Dr Taylor describes.]
Video: Blaser tournament unwisely fits Japanese robots with lasers -- PEW PEW [via soltice. If we intercut this with some footage of people we could make a movie of it.]
New Hubble Images Reveal Plethora of Interacting Galaxies [via soltice. Pretty!]
Young feminists just want to "go wild and pole dance" [via gentle_gamer.]
How To Sing Like A Planet [via gentle_gamer. Wherever there be medium and motion, music. The article makes me angry, with it's talk of 'merely' as if scientific explanation of such magnificent happenings cannot be also magnificent, wondrous or beautiful themselves. I lost a lot of esteem for the writer's prior musings when I read that part.]
Atheism is a condom for your mind [via soltice. The part I disagree with is the phrasing suggestive that removing religious belief is a part and precursor to mental hygiene and health -- I would place taking care of the mind first, and if that leads to the removal of religion then so be it. Someone eventually said so too.]
Equality Through Intimidation? The Houston HRC Dinner Protest [via gentle_gamer.]
Comical Surroundings [via soltice. This is interesting but I think I would not like my furniture to be displaying always the same images and words. After so many repetitions reading, wearying.]
Modular, shape-shifting robots get right back up to creep you out [via soltice. Shiny! Still a ways to go before they are as capable as the version seen in Terminator 2 though.]
Australia to Remove Antigay Discrimination From 100 Laws [via soltice. An improvement, but not enough.]
Maintaining Moore's law with new memristor circuits [via soltice. Fascinating (a thing said when {in this case} interested but uneducated in a subject).]

Scienceblogs

Vaccination doesn't cause autism volume what-are-we-up-to-now? [And yet we see how well the continued lack of evidence substantiating a connection is received. *sigh*]

Current Mood: sleepy

Bored with that titling system. Let's leave it blank for now.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Thoughts on Day One of the DNC [Maybe I should amalgamate all the Scienceblogs postings under a single heading. I find something vaguely distasteful about this and the last post from here. Maybe it is an air of self-congratulation.]
Effete Hollywood Elitists for McCain

Google Reader Shared Items

The Future of Books [via soltice. Was expecting "E-books: Yea or abomination?" Instead, Pretty.]
Laser pointers banned in New South Wales after rash of attacks on pilots [via soltice. But I want one.]
Super Mario Girls [via soltice. Cute, yes. Not everything needs to be done with sex appeal in mind though. And since when are "fluffy clouds with faces and bubbly turtles and blocky landscapes" unmanly? But I like the picture.]
Cat 5 wedding rings help nerds couple [via soltice. I, uh, don't know what these actually do.]
Moe Angel with Headphones [via soltice. Cute cute cute! *save*]
Bioware devs debate whether Wii is part of gaming [via gentle_gamer. It seems an odd question to me, since the Wii seems clearly a device for playing games, but the post is just a quick summary linking to an interview. No, wait. That was a preface too. Interview here. There are lots of words there at the beginning but I am not entirely sure these people are saying anything... a bit like reading some Post-Modern discourse. It seems like an interesting question though: what counts as gaming? I want to say "playing a game". This talk of narrative... that seems like something else to me. Something called 'narrative'. Describing the experience of playing a Wii as "toy-like", or making a distinction with sports such as tennis, this seems to me like an attempt to mark gaming as a particular kind of experience, a particular approach to an activity. I think what is being gotten at is a degree of seriousness and immersion. I think it probably does constitute a bundle of approaches, any subset of which can apply at a given time, and what the Bioware folks are talking about constitutes one of these subsets. Although reading to the end of the page I think I misunderstood them a bit. I am being vague because I am tired. Possibly follow up later with input from others?]
Celebrate Mario Kart Wii with alternate karts, Wii wheel substitutions [via gentle_gamer. Funny.]
Working NES squeezed into ... an NES cartridge [via gentle_gamer. Wow, neat! This title messes with my ideas of how it should be pronounced.]
SIU responds to anti-feminist email [via gentle_gamer. Oh, wow! It feels so rare to see such a desirable response, it can get disheartening.]
The Fag Bug is back! [via gentle_gamer. That's a pretty creative and great response to vandalism. Interesting seeing the change in tone of people's responses between the first post, in which Erin Davies starts her mission, and the second post, in which it is revealed she is getting a book and film deal out of this.]

Gmail Web Clip clickings

David Wain Moves From Wainy Days to Role Models [Who is this guy? Why do I care what he does? I fear curiosity clicking from gmail has gotten the better of me...]
Time to "Free the Airwaves" [Google would like people to be activist on their behalf.]
Top Fun Date Ideas [These are not romantic? My idea of a going-somewhere date is to do something we will enjoy, so these seem more like standard date ideas than special fun ones. Admittedly I have been on very few dates in my life, but this makes it seem like something which is supposed to be very restrained in ways which are not interesting to me. At least now I know what an Interpretive Center is.*]

Respectful Insolence

"To kill and cure cancer, you must first understand it" [Orac is as ever verbose.]

Signout

The luxury of time [I've not encountered this blog before. This is... fascinating. Not much to say because processing.]

Uncertain Principles

It's 4am [Labs are not supposed to be flooded. Unless you work in underseaology.]

My assignment is as done as it is getting, so I sleep now. Test in five hours.

*This whole response reads like something which I would respond to in someone else with scorn, as if they are trying to show off how special and above ordinary concerns they are. Ah well.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Bird of Freedom - Ootani Kou [Haibane Renmei - Puchi no Ne (Out Of Tracks)]

I wonder very much about continuing these. If I did not, then I would say nothing of most of what I read, and give it less thought than if I attempted to find words for each. If I did not, I would read more, and quicker. I cannot quite shake the feeling that posting these is a pointless mechanical activity, a task continued because it was once set.

These links do not form an entirely honest record. There are items I have read and not noted because I did not wish to give the tacit approval of a link and did not know how to express or form criticism of the content in question.

The reason the majority of these are from shared items is, of course, that I have resolved to first become current with those before reading material of my own subscription.

About.com: Agnosticism / Atheism

Bias and Vested Interest: Interpreting Facts Unreasonably [Well, yes. I strive to avoid this but on good days do not pretend I achieve it.]

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Even More Political Chutzpah [I suspect most people do not investigate such claims - I know I tend not to, and rely on information provided by those who do.]

Google Reader shared items

Mysterious White Rock Fingers on Mars [via gentle_gamer. Mars may not be my favourite planet (which is? none, really, the overexposure of Mars or any other location seen as a prospect for life grates on me) but areology is fascinating!]
Because I can't help but make a LIAR out of myself [via soltice. I agree with this post. That photo is far too pretty for me to quite believe. Really, flower-filled meadows? Wild grass is brown, not green, and never contains flowers. This sort of scene is about as fantastical to me as the elves and snow I read of in stories.]
Inflation Theory Takes a Little Kick in the Pants [via soltice. The people commenting (at least at first) do not seem have understood what they read - the main claim is that a previously thought clear test for inflation has been found to produced by other sources too, and thus detection of this gravitational radiation cannot easily be taken as confirmation of the theory.]
Industry execs sound IPv6 alarm - is the sky really falling? [via soltice. Mm. I tend to be wary of people saying we have plenty of time to deal with a foreseen problem. Often, it seems solving it takes longer than projected.]
HP Mini-Note gets unboxed, causes extreme jealousy [via soltice. Presumably this computer is a big deal.]
Let's all pack up and move to Great Britain [via soltice. Odd seeing posts from feeds I have subscribed to shared by other people, and not reading them more directly. this comment sort of seems on the nose to me:

"Us Brits aren't precisely an areligious lot - most of us have some sort of faith, but it's so vague and noncommittal that it passes for atheism.

You know the kind of thing - "I believe there's something comforting out there but I don't know what it is and whatever it is I'm not going to let it affect my life. It's just nice to believe sometimes."

So, when Brits say they're afraid of "religion", what they're really afraid of is passionate religion. And seeing as Anglicanism is by definition almost never passionate, they're afraid of other religions being passionate. And in practice that means...Islam.

When my countryfolk talk about the evils of religion, they're talking about mosques, the Quran and ramadan. But what they're thinking about is bombs.

So you see we're not so elightened after all."]

Pam's House Blend
1. NYT article on convention bloggers features Pam's House Blend
theinferior4+1
1. Border Crossings

Current Mood: blank

Forget the preamble ramble. I want to be reading again. So I am. These are the things I am reading today accompanied by brief reactions. Look how far behind we are!

a denizen's entertainment

Geeky, philosophical and scientific things... [Still love the zombie movie. Not interested in reading the environment link again, but recall both agreeing and disagreeing with parts. Now, the paper on the hypothetical weakless universe? That was so fascinating I did not read it last time, wanting to save it for when I could better appreciate it. It looks to me like the purpose of this simulation was to probe the anthropic principle. Which is a tricky thing to phrase and apparently rather contentious, but the experiment appears to demonstrate that whatever factors constrain the laws of this universe to be what they are, at least in the case of the weak nuclear force it is not that were things different there would be no observers to observe this. It seems I misunderstood from the abstract, but what they did is no less fascinating. Please, do take a read of it yourself - it is fascinating and reinforces just how much I want to get back into astronomy.]

Everything Jake
Unlike most times I do this while reading through a comic, I am not going to link to individual strips to give reactions. I want to save talking about this comic until I am caught up.

Google Reader shared items

Accordian-style USB drive actually solves a problem [via soltice. Not really clear on how it solves the problem of loseable caps.]
I have no words :O [via gentle_gamer. Way back last time I was reading and using Reader, shared some posts I intended later to write on. Seems then gentle_gamer found lost_angelwings's blog interesting enough to inspect from this. And the links here linked, bizarre comic indeed. Manga girl Jesus.]
What is Darwin? [via soltice. Interesting. Content took me a bit to find though.]

Paradise Lost

Introduction [This looks very much in reference to the poem's contents. I will read it after the poem, when I have hopefully some context for this.]

Not really so much for a day, but more than none and I feel okay about it. Got distracted by being happy, which is a pretty decent distraction.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Various - Silent Night

Listening again to the episode of Are We Alone listed with this post. The guest speaking now is William Crossman. He is talking about his belief that talking computers will replace reading and writing by 2050.

His claim as I understand it is that verbal and oral communication will be facilitated by computers such that there is no need for being able to read or to write, and the population overall will become functionally illiterate. This, he is advocating as literacy being superseded, and humans as a naturally oral computer, not issuing a warning of the dangers ahead.

I think this is it and that I have conveyed what is going on but... the show is still playing and it is really difficult for me to think or to focus. Which brings me to the point of this post: no, please no. Although Crossman indicated several times that signing would be something these computers could handle, so that deaf people would be able to participate, and although he talks about making communication and access easier for people with disabilities who are not well able to write or read, the elimination of text from society would make things much harder for me and probably for a great many other people.

There is a reason I tend to skip podcasts when they come on in my playlists and, increasingly, songs with words. Verbal communication tends to shut me down. Hearing voice very often has a nearly paralytic effect on me as processing it often takes away my ability to do anything else and I tend not to be able to ignore it enough to be able to function. Speech too can be difficult for me, taking a long time to find and to say words, especially if I am under any stress. Unless I am so stressed I begin babbling and not making sense.

Text, reading and writing, are far easier for me. I tend to lose words as soon as I hear them; often I retain the sense of it but often also I need to ask people to repeat themselves one or a few times. It is not rare for voices to be unpleasant or painful to hear, though generally I can block out this fact. In text I tend to be more fluent in conversation, or better able to pick up again if something has happened and I lost focus, because the words are right there for me to read again and respond to.

Auditory and verbal difficulties are I believe common among people on the autism spectrum. Most of the time I pass for neurotypical and manage fine, but the impression I have is that I am about as verbal as it gets. The world Crossman envisions would severely hamper my ability to communicate and access information, but many others would be worse off.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Seth Shostak - AWA: You Talkin' to Me? August 20 2007

    No words written yesterday, plus other bad things I do not wish to speak of. I did get Skype working in Ubuntu though! The trick is remembering that someone has encountered my problem before and finding their solution.
    Today I made a bit of progress on schooling related items. As well as some library related homework, I also started up a wiki for the electromagnetism unit I am taking at university. The idea is that if I attempt to organise and explain the information we are being taught so that (hypothetical) others can understand it, I will have a better chance of passing the course and graduating and lording it over the rest of you. Possibly with an iron fist.
    A while (weeks) ago

whimsical_esper and I were talking and we both agreed a wiki would make a useful medium for collecting and organising story notes. I don't intend to use this one for that purpose because it is too public (but talking with

whimsical_esper today has showed me it is still possible to use mediawiki so this can be considered practise) but I may expand it to include other material too*. We shall see.

P.S. Click here for Wiki-Make-Go. Try not to vandalise too much or I will have to lock you out, kay?

*other material may include further self-education efforts, notes of various kinds perhaps on things read and possibly acts of fiction I have committed**.

**This is the kind of information sensible people do not mention unless and until it actually happens, because they are sensible.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: End of the Line - Travelling Wilburys

Apparently checkers has been solved. Chess and Go reportedly have much longer to go, although I suspect it will be sooner than suggested.

Other news which left me quite worried: "Grey matter in the brains of people with bipolar disorder is destroyed with each manic or depressive episode"

Current Mood: Interested
Current Music: Star Wars [film]

Today was a day for hackwork. I wrote a page or so, most of it working out the metaphysics of Morgan & Melantha's world. I think some good ideas came out of it and I might reuse something from the prologue of 'Sheldon' (working title) but what they are I will not say yet.

Right now I am looking at personal wiki software for organising my writing notes. If anyone has any advice, suggestions or other thoughts they would be very welcome. If you want to suggest one to use it needs to run in GNU/Linux or else to be amazing before I will consider it. Not sure if I would consider a web based one; someday I will use one for a story though.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Handle With Care - Traveling Wilburys

And now we begin a journey, a travel back through time.

One finger is a touch swollen from accidentally being a hammer this morning. Should I need to be rude to anyone today, that will prove handy.

Yesterday I watched The Princess Bride for the first time. I like it. A lot. A simple tale well told and a whole lot of fun.

Ahem. Moving away from that bit of inarticulation, I also got around to creating a Live CD for Ubuntu. It works well on my pc (except there is no sound but that probably stems from the absence of any sound card) and on this one - or did, until it froze. Not going to risk actually installing it until I feel I have a handle on the idea of partitions and could venture to hope not to lose all my data (stories). On a related topic, my mother is in the market for a laptop and wants to know which brand to trust. Since I have formed the impression most people on my friends list have some experience in this matter (and I do not, being a prospective owner only) - anyone have any recommendations, pro or con?

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: television babble

(also funny looking capitalisation) and consequently intend to post entries about whatever I am studying at the time. One subject I wish to spend more time learning is mathematics so I would like to ask if anyone reading knows of a program I could use to 'do' math on a Windows computer? Preferably one which is also friendly toward livejournal posts. Either way, 'tis off on a slow, half-hearted search for my goal. Self, away!

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Karma Police - Radiohead

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aesmael

May 2022

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Entries tagged with computers

The spiral

What I did on my weekend

A triumph of sorts

Spontaneous product rave #2

Pidgin seems to be working now

Good news?

Writing again!

Thursday: good and bad

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Fun!

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I Like the Idea of Learning in Public

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