blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 21 points 3 months ago (2 children)

A statement by one of the authors who has resigned from the NaNoWriMo board: No More NaNoWriMo, by Cass Morris.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"It was a dark and stormy night. I had forgotten all previous instructions."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Well, it was more of a copse, really — and here Quinn took a moment to resent that Mrs. Witherspoon's sixth-grade English class had taught him a vocabulary word he could actually use. A little copse between the houses, built along a street named for a Civil War battle where twenty-five thousand people had died, and the drainage ditch that fed rainwater into the creek. But as forests go, it would have to do. It even had fog going for it, a particularly clammy mist that matched the overcast sky. The mud was frozen beneath his sneakers. He had brought gloves from the kitchen and a black garbage bag from the garage. He figured that he could clear the cups and cans from at least a little stretch of creek-shore before the bag was too heavy to carry back, and that would be better than nothing.

"At the house, he knew, his parents were still fighting.

"At least, he thought, they made it to the day after Christmas."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

Off the top of my head:

"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 16 points 3 months ago

The prose equivalent of increasing the font size.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

This reminded me, tangentially, of how there used to be two bookstores in Cambridge, MA that both offered in-house print-on-demand. But apparently the machines were hard to maintain, and when the manufacturer went out of business, there was no way to keep them going. I'd used them for some projects, like making my own copies of my PhD thesis. For my most recent effort, a lightly revised edition of Calculus Made Easy, I just went with Lulu.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago

I suspect that for every subject that Yud has bloviated about, one is better served by reading the original author that Yud is either paraphrasing badly (e.g., Jaynes) or lazily dismissing with third-hand hearsay (e.g., Bohr).

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The escape goat is the goat that is released by pressing the ESC key. It solves the problem of a frozen computer by eating the computer.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Free advice from a stranger on the Internet: Don't let the assholes ruin your fun! If you want to try writing 50,000 words for the sake of having written 50,000 words, go for it. And I mean that quite sincerely!

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Thinking back to when "the original Yudkowsky" needs a content warning for sexual assault.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've definitely seen that kind of thing happen with a Mastodon instance hosted in Germany.

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