#WritersCoffeeClub (Sep) 1: Intro: Shameless Self Promotion.
Uncategorized
885
Posts
1
Posters
281
Views
-
Also, they let me plug my laptop in behind the bar so I don't have an artificial time limit. Also also, they have no wifi. I can and do use my phone's access point (I need to do research!), but it keeps me a little bit mindful of not blowing out my data plan, so I'm not so inclined to just goof off on social media. 2/2
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 8: Give an example of a project you’ve had to give up on.
None so far; I'm still on my first writing project.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 8: Give an example of a project you’ve had to give up on.
None so far; I'm still on my first writing project.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 9: Have you ever realised you’d included an unintended shibboleth in your own work?
A lot of writers are currently confronting the fact that way too many people are trying to make "uses em dashes" a shibboleth that indicates something was written with — or entirely by — an AI. To which I say (in the immortal words of Gwen DeMarco): "Well, *fuck that!*" 1/2
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 9: Have you ever realised you’d included an unintended shibboleth in your own work?
A lot of writers are currently confronting the fact that way too many people are trying to make "uses em dashes" a shibboleth that indicates something was written with — or entirely by — an AI. To which I say (in the immortal words of Gwen DeMarco): "Well, *fuck that!*" 1/2
(N.B.: They re-dubbed the line to "Well, screw that" in post-production, but you can clearly see Sigourney Weaver's lips forming a very different word. I guess that one Precision F-Strike would've otherwise pushed _Galaxy Quest_'s rating up higher than they wanted.) 2/2
-
(N.B.: They re-dubbed the line to "Well, screw that" in post-production, but you can clearly see Sigourney Weaver's lips forming a very different word. I guess that one Precision F-Strike would've otherwise pushed _Galaxy Quest_'s rating up higher than they wanted.) 2/2
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 10: Recommend a poet or prosaist local to your city or region.
How can I pass up an opportunity to recommend Ina Coolbrith? Poems like "To San Francisco" and "San Francisco: April 18th, 1906" capture (and display) her love of the City, and also her poetic skill. (Honorable mention to George Sterling, though I rate Coolbrith's skill above his.)
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 10: Recommend a poet or prosaist local to your city or region.
How can I pass up an opportunity to recommend Ina Coolbrith? Poems like "To San Francisco" and "San Francisco: April 18th, 1906" capture (and display) her love of the City, and also her poetic skill. (Honorable mention to George Sterling, though I rate Coolbrith's skill above his.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 11: How does your setting contribute to the conflict in your work?
It's quite possibly the city with the starkest, most jarring levels of wealth inequality in the country. (Or else New York, probably depends just how you measure.) Tech bros and fascists have deliberately made San Francisco a symbol "the sin of empathy" with their crusade against homeless people there.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 11: How does your setting contribute to the conflict in your work?
It's quite possibly the city with the starkest, most jarring levels of wealth inequality in the country. (Or else New York, probably depends just how you measure.) Tech bros and fascists have deliberately made San Francisco a symbol "the sin of empathy" with their crusade against homeless people there.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 12: In what ways does weather or season influence how and what you write?
I write better after dark, but I deliberately put more effort into daytime writing during the summer months to counteract that.
(In related news, I just saw a headline on Gothamist saying "NYC won't see a sunset before 8 p.m. for next 3 months". Just knowing that should help me; it tells me in no uncertain terms that writing in the afternoon, instead of waiting until evening, is now a *must*.)
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 12: In what ways does weather or season influence how and what you write?
I write better after dark, but I deliberately put more effort into daytime writing during the summer months to counteract that.
(In related news, I just saw a headline on Gothamist saying "NYC won't see a sunset before 8 p.m. for next 3 months". Just knowing that should help me; it tells me in no uncertain terms that writing in the afternoon, instead of waiting until evening, is now a *must*.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 13: Does alienation feature in your work? Give an example.
I don't know about "feature", but it's at least somewhat present. At the beginning of the book, Jessie is feeling very alienated from her friends and family. David is also feeling alienated, not from people, but from the world, and he hasn't really noticed it. But it's there, and underlies some of his arc.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 13: Does alienation feature in your work? Give an example.
I don't know about "feature", but it's at least somewhat present. At the beginning of the book, Jessie is feeling very alienated from her friends and family. David is also feeling alienated, not from people, but from the world, and he hasn't really noticed it. But it's there, and underlies some of his arc.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 14: How do you use cyclic structures in your work?
I haven't used any of those yet, and I don't think I'll be able to fit any into the WIP.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 14: How do you use cyclic structures in your work?
I haven't used any of those yet, and I don't think I'll be able to fit any into the WIP.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 15: “The past is a foreign country.” What facets of your work do you hope remain intelligible to future readers?
All of them, really. Come on, I don't want my work to become UNintelligible, right?
But the most critical things are the fight against oligarchs and the value of diversity.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 15: “The past is a foreign country.” What facets of your work do you hope remain intelligible to future readers?
All of them, really. Come on, I don't want my work to become UNintelligible, right?
But the most critical things are the fight against oligarchs and the value of diversity.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 16: International Day of Light/Peace. Tell us about your favorite use of symbolic imagery.
I don't know about "favorite", but I've gotta say, butterflies just _keep_ popping up in my WIP.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 16: International Day of Light/Peace. Tell us about your favorite use of symbolic imagery.
I don't know about "favorite", but I've gotta say, butterflies just _keep_ popping up in my WIP.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 17: How do you ‘write what you know’?
I'm setting my story in (and making a character of) the City where I lived for over 25 years, about which a friend once observed, "You know this city like a Dashiell Hammett character."
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 17: How do you ‘write what you know’?
I'm setting my story in (and making a character of) the City where I lived for over 25 years, about which a friend once observed, "You know this city like a Dashiell Hammett character."
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 18: What do you do to actively avoid writer’s block?
I keep in mind that word count is not the only thing that counts as writing. Fleshing out character backgrounds, figuring out how a particular spell works, or how I'm going to resolve a particular problem, or how two characters met, or whatever... it all counts. 1/2
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 18: What do you do to actively avoid writer’s block?
I keep in mind that word count is not the only thing that counts as writing. Fleshing out character backgrounds, figuring out how a particular spell works, or how I'm going to resolve a particular problem, or how two characters met, or whatever... it all counts. 1/2
It's all part of creating this world and story. So if I just can't manage to bang out some words in the narrative today, I can always pick up one or another of the various background things that need doing. 2/2
-
It's all part of creating this world and story. So if I just can't manage to bang out some words in the narrative today, I can always pick up one or another of the various background things that need doing. 2/2
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 19: Is there a creative habit-building method you swear by?
Honestly, the big thing for me has been putting a 7-day exponential moving average on my hand-rolled progress-graphing tool. Just having line graphs with daily points would mean that taking a day off just looks like a brief downward spike. But the EMA means there's a *seven-day gap* in the line, and it just looks awful, and then it takes 6 or 7 weeks to scroll off the left side... ugh! 1/2
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 19: Is there a creative habit-building method you swear by?
Honestly, the big thing for me has been putting a 7-day exponential moving average on my hand-rolled progress-graphing tool. Just having line graphs with daily points would mean that taking a day off just looks like a brief downward spike. But the EMA means there's a *seven-day gap* in the line, and it just looks awful, and then it takes 6 or 7 weeks to scroll off the left side... ugh! 1/2
That wasn't why I did it; it was just the obvious data-visualization move for dealing with the otherwise-far-too-jaggedy line of raw daily data. But it had this wonderful secondary effect. Seriously, nothing has made me grit my teeth and force myself to do "at least 10 or 15 minutes, just as a bare minimum" when I'm feeling crappy, tired, stupid, or whatever, more than that one small decision. 2/2
-
That wasn't why I did it; it was just the obvious data-visualization move for dealing with the otherwise-far-too-jaggedy line of raw daily data. But it had this wonderful secondary effect. Seriously, nothing has made me grit my teeth and force myself to do "at least 10 or 15 minutes, just as a bare minimum" when I'm feeling crappy, tired, stupid, or whatever, more than that one small decision. 2/2
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 20: Pick two other writers’ works that would pair well with yours.
Fritz Leiber's _Our Lady of Darkness_ and Emma Bull's _The War for the Oaks_.
(Special bonus: Margot Chu wishes I'd picked John M. Ford's _The Last Hot Time_ instead of the Emma Bull.)
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 20: Pick two other writers’ works that would pair well with yours.
Fritz Leiber's _Our Lady of Darkness_ and Emma Bull's _The War for the Oaks_.
(Special bonus: Margot Chu wishes I'd picked John M. Ford's _The Last Hot Time_ instead of the Emma Bull.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 21: Are there facets of your work best understood in the context of when you wrote it?
Oh, very much yes. The whole plot strand about the villain trying to influence the upcoming San Francisco election, to get a mayor, half the Board of Supervisors, and a bunch of ballot propositions that he wants, with the future of the City hinging on it? It's extremely 2024.
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 21: Are there facets of your work best understood in the context of when you wrote it?
Oh, very much yes. The whole plot strand about the villain trying to influence the upcoming San Francisco election, to get a mayor, half the Board of Supervisors, and a bunch of ballot propositions that he wants, with the future of the City hinging on it? It's extremely 2024.
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 22: How do you make a location you’ve never visited feel ‘real’ for the reader?
Details. Especially ones that help them anchor themselves in the place, as if they could pick up and use objects there, or walk around in it.
(And yes, I *do* have some locations I've never visited: my characters' homes! Also one fictional bar-and-grill/restaurant/café that I'm inventing.)
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 22: How do you make a location you’ve never visited feel ‘real’ for the reader?
Details. Especially ones that help them anchor themselves in the place, as if they could pick up and use objects there, or walk around in it.
(And yes, I *do* have some locations I've never visited: my characters' homes! Also one fictional bar-and-grill/restaurant/café that I'm inventing.)
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 23: Do you prefer to write urban or rural settings? Why?
Urban, urban, absolutely urban all the way. Because they're what I know and love and live in (by very deliberate choice).
-
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 23: Do you prefer to write urban or rural settings? Why?
Urban, urban, absolutely urban all the way. Because they're what I know and love and live in (by very deliberate choice).
#WritersCoffeeClub Day 24: What in your writing ‘dates’ you?
Well, the whole WIP is set in 2024. I'll be putting in some details that make it clear that's when it is, so readers won't even need to do any detective work or any arithmetic based on internal references to ages or times.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
-
Oggi le persone chiedono ai propri rappresentanti politici, ai propri leader, la rimozione
Non la fiducia, lo sforzo caparbio, la lotta per migliorare, ma la rimozione
La rimozione dei propri problemi, dalle difficoltà, dai fastidi della vitaÈ questo il vero problema
È questo che vuol dire vivere, in modo del tutto errato e totalmente sbiellato, la vita
Vivere una fantasia dorata e rosa da film
Essere nel paradigma allucinato del consumismo
-
Reverse-Engineering the Intel 8087 Stack Circuitry
Although something that’s taken for granted these days, the ability to perform floating-point operations in hardware was, for the longest time, something reserved for people with big wallets. This began to change around the time that Intel released the 8087 FPU coprocessor in 1980, featuring hardware support for floating-point arithmetic at a blistering 50 KFLOPS. Notably, the 8087 uses a stack-based architecture, a major departure from existing FPUs. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a literal closer look at this stack circuitry to see what it looks like and how it works.
Nearly half of the 8087’s die is taken up by the microcode frontend and bus controller, with a block containing constants like π alongside the FP calculation-processing datapath section taking up much of the rest. Nestled along the side are the eight registers and the stack controller. At 80 bits per FP number, the required registers and related were pretty sizeable for the era, especially when you consider that the roughly 60,000 transistors in the 8087 were paired alongside the 29,000 transistors in the 16-bit 8086.
Each of the 8087’s registers is selected by the decoded instructions via a lot of wiring that can still be fairly easily traced despite the FPU’s die being larger than the CPU it accompanied. As for the unique stack-based register approach, this turned out to be mostly a hindrance, and the reason why the x87 FP instructions in the x86 ISA are still quite maligned today. Yet with careful use, providing a big boost over traditional code, this made it a success by that benchmark, even if MMX, SSE, and others reverted to a stackless design.
-
Finger counting. computus compilation, Lorsch 9th century. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1449, fol. 118v.
#medieval #MedievalArt
-
@anubiarts at the other end:
Proprietary: let's call the web browser some colonial name like Explorer, Safari
FLOSS: the menu entry for the web browser must read Web Browser because otherwise the user will be confused about what it does.
-
@Gina hi Gina, I’m a Canberra based Red Hatter and also on the Linux Australia council (for at least the next month or so).
Happy to help if I can.
-
Sophistry as a Service
-
