blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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

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

"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."

"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."

Off the top of my head:

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

The prose equivalent of increasing the font size.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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

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

Yud today:

Read the original Yudkowsky. Please. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

You thought water was great, but have you tried H₂O₂?

last time on Nate Trek

ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a creative muse [...] and for refining my understanding of technical topics that are likely to be well represented in its corpus.

— Nate Silver

before i begin, i want to be clear that what i am about to say is not an endorsement of chattel slavery

— eigenrobot

My mental voice for DM guy is Augustus St. Cloud from Venture Bros.

FYI, Python is named after Monty Python

NO? Really?! Educate me, hackernews!

condescending Wonka.jpg

Wait, we had the option of e-mail notifications?