I had the—cursed? Let's go with cursed—realization that briefly taking off my headphones to say hello to someone (usually just a co-worker in passing) is the modern equivalent of doffing one's hat. Like people on the internet say as a meme. I doff my cap to you, good sir or madam. People used to really do that. But now I just grab my headphones and pull them away for a second. Or if it escalates from polite greeting to brief chat, I put them around my neck. To show how much I value you, rather than revealing to you the most secret of my head hair, I will make an exception and let your words enter my knowledge canal. I think it makes more sense as a sign of respect, but... Look, this is a little embarrassing, but I've never really understood hats.
I understand them in terms of practicality. A hat with a wide brim can keep the sun out of your eyes. A thick hat can keep your head warm in the winter. I get all that. I don't understand hats as a social convention.
Hats used to be the thing. Look at any photo of a group of people outdoors for like the first 100 years after photography existed, everyone is wearing a hat. There were complicated rules and customs around hats, when and where you can wear them, where you hang them, which hats are appropriate to wear at which occasions. Hatters would give themselves chronic mercury poisoning to make popular styles of hats. This was a well-known phenomenon, and was in fact documented in a famous 19th century novel (which later went on to inspire The Matrix, the defining literary work of our current century in spite [or perhaps because?] of a conspicuous absence of hats) but it seems like society accepted their malady as the regrettable but necessary cost of having hats. What were we gonna do, not wear certain types of hats?
I'm glad the hat craze has died down, but some elements of it have carried over to the present day. I wasn't allowed to wear hats in school, but occasionally we were allowed a Hat Day as a special treat; but to me, wearing a hat to school seemed just as silly as not being allowed to wear a hat to school. I don't understand why rules mandating or forbidding hats exist at all, except for hard hats on construction sites, and ladies with big elaborate hats in 1940s movie theaters. It seems like it should be left entirely up to individual taste.
Anyway, I'm the only person I see wearing big over-the-ear headphones in public, and my extreme charisma and effortless good looks make me a preternatural trend-setter, so I expect doffing them will become the next big thing in polite gestures by, oh, let's say 2031.
I always thought it was sketchy that the show had a team based on monkeys and also a location called Shrine of the Silver Monkey. There was no barracuda moat or iguana grotto. I think a fair game show should strive to eliminate even the appearance of favoritism.
And that's a week of journal entries in the can! I'm proud of my stick-to-itiveness, but I gotta say, I'm out of practice and the quality of my writing has really gone downhill. Writing on a phone will never feel natural or good to me, and I deeply resent this being my only window to the world for the majority of my life, and I see so many typos and grammatical errors and subject-verb disagreement and overly long clunky sentences that it's almost too daunting to look at when I get home; rewriting it to make it good would require more time and energy than I have left at the end of the day. I suppose I could cut the task in half, spend one day writing and the next day editing, but writing is more fun than editing even in ideal circumstances, and on a phone, 1000x moreso. Editing on a phone sucks way more than writing on a phone. Keyboard and mouse editing feels effortless in comparison: moving the cursor with laser precision like God intended, ctrl-X and ctrl-Ving bits of text around with reckless abandon, etc. Doing all that on a phone feels like folding origami with boxing gloves on. And if I want to mark up any hypertext, perhaps with some computer language designed for that purpose? Well, let's just say less than sign b greater than sign I MISS BEARBLOG less than sign forward slash b greater than sign.
Nah, dreamwidth is cool, there are a lot of things I enjoy about it (see 15 icons for an example. —ed.) But it is kinda funny how confident I was that I could effortlessly go back to a platform where I have to use HTML instead of markdown. I've been marking up hypertext since I was knee-high to a doodle bug, I thought, it'll be a piece of cake! Forgetting that, hey dummy, most of your writing in this blog has been on a device where getting to the </> characters requires eight sub-menus, two days' travel by carriage and a writ of free passage from the king. But I'm not ready to switch back just yet. Let's see how this plays out.
As far as editing is concerned, I'm going to try not worrying about it too much. This is for fun, and if I spend too much time and energy worrying about the not-fun part, I'm likely to burn myself out and not write at all, which would be a shame. Hopefully with practice my off-the-cuff writing will improve, and I already think it's acceptable. And in this era of plagiarism robots, "acceptable" is a higher bar for writing on the internet than it used to be 😬
Anyway, I'm taking the weekend off, so see you in a couple days. If you're reading via one of the feeds, reminder that you can leave feedback on any entry by clicking the link and logging in via openID, or leave a totally anonymous comment! IP tracking turned off. Questions and comments will be addressed on Monday.
If you like what I'm doing over here, I have a ko-fi and a Patreon. Drop a buck or two in the hat if you'd like to vote with your dollar for more of this stuff
I understand them in terms of practicality. A hat with a wide brim can keep the sun out of your eyes. A thick hat can keep your head warm in the winter. I get all that. I don't understand hats as a social convention.
Hats used to be the thing. Look at any photo of a group of people outdoors for like the first 100 years after photography existed, everyone is wearing a hat. There were complicated rules and customs around hats, when and where you can wear them, where you hang them, which hats are appropriate to wear at which occasions. Hatters would give themselves chronic mercury poisoning to make popular styles of hats. This was a well-known phenomenon, and was in fact documented in a famous 19th century novel (which later went on to inspire The Matrix, the defining literary work of our current century in spite [or perhaps because?] of a conspicuous absence of hats) but it seems like society accepted their malady as the regrettable but necessary cost of having hats. What were we gonna do, not wear certain types of hats?
I'm glad the hat craze has died down, but some elements of it have carried over to the present day. I wasn't allowed to wear hats in school, but occasionally we were allowed a Hat Day as a special treat; but to me, wearing a hat to school seemed just as silly as not being allowed to wear a hat to school. I don't understand why rules mandating or forbidding hats exist at all, except for hard hats on construction sites, and ladies with big elaborate hats in 1940s movie theaters. It seems like it should be left entirely up to individual taste.
Anyway, I'm the only person I see wearing big over-the-ear headphones in public, and my extreme charisma and effortless good looks make me a preternatural trend-setter, so I expect doffing them will become the next big thing in polite gestures by, oh, let's say 2031.
Legends of the Hidden Temple
I always thought it was sketchy that the show had a team based on monkeys and also a location called Shrine of the Silver Monkey. There was no barracuda moat or iguana grotto. I think a fair game show should strive to eliminate even the appearance of favoritism.
Have a good weekend
And that's a week of journal entries in the can! I'm proud of my stick-to-itiveness, but I gotta say, I'm out of practice and the quality of my writing has really gone downhill. Writing on a phone will never feel natural or good to me, and I deeply resent this being my only window to the world for the majority of my life, and I see so many typos and grammatical errors and subject-verb disagreement and overly long clunky sentences that it's almost too daunting to look at when I get home; rewriting it to make it good would require more time and energy than I have left at the end of the day. I suppose I could cut the task in half, spend one day writing and the next day editing, but writing is more fun than editing even in ideal circumstances, and on a phone, 1000x moreso. Editing on a phone sucks way more than writing on a phone. Keyboard and mouse editing feels effortless in comparison: moving the cursor with laser precision like God intended, ctrl-X and ctrl-Ving bits of text around with reckless abandon, etc. Doing all that on a phone feels like folding origami with boxing gloves on. And if I want to mark up any hypertext, perhaps with some computer language designed for that purpose? Well, let's just say less than sign b greater than sign I MISS BEARBLOG less than sign forward slash b greater than sign.
Nah, dreamwidth is cool, there are a lot of things I enjoy about it (see 15 icons for an example. —ed.) But it is kinda funny how confident I was that I could effortlessly go back to a platform where I have to use HTML instead of markdown. I've been marking up hypertext since I was knee-high to a doodle bug, I thought, it'll be a piece of cake! Forgetting that, hey dummy, most of your writing in this blog has been on a device where getting to the </> characters requires eight sub-menus, two days' travel by carriage and a writ of free passage from the king. But I'm not ready to switch back just yet. Let's see how this plays out.
As far as editing is concerned, I'm going to try not worrying about it too much. This is for fun, and if I spend too much time and energy worrying about the not-fun part, I'm likely to burn myself out and not write at all, which would be a shame. Hopefully with practice my off-the-cuff writing will improve, and I already think it's acceptable. And in this era of plagiarism robots, "acceptable" is a higher bar for writing on the internet than it used to be 😬
Anyway, I'm taking the weekend off, so see you in a couple days. If you're reading via one of the feeds, reminder that you can leave feedback on any entry by clicking the link and logging in via openID, or leave a totally anonymous comment! IP tracking turned off. Questions and comments will be addressed on Monday.
If you like what I'm doing over here, I have a ko-fi and a Patreon. Drop a buck or two in the hat if you'd like to vote with your dollar for more of this stuff
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