@EyeOnAlaska We have a Aussie shepherd who is very much the same.
I read the whine as "Why are you sitting around doing nothing?"

I just read a post by a professional formatter of manuscripts that aimed to convince authors that they shouldn't tackle the job on their own. It was very good, detailed, and informative, not only identifying the problems but how to solve them.

I have learned all of these tricks over the years (and a few more), and I have the software to pull it all off, so I really should do it myself, but the prospect of making hundreds of pages glyph-perfect seems so mind-numbingly tedious to my AuDHD brain that I will happily hand the job to someone who can hyperfocus on it.

@madgeface I have a detailed plan to swap Windows out for Linux in the near future. I've been neglecting Substack a bit, as they seem to be burying people who don't charge for subscriptions, thus limiting the network effects that had attracted me to the platform.

It is 2am. The time has arrived where my nightly backup starts. I have my machine set to shut down as soon as it completes, to force me to go to bed at a reasonable (for me) hour.

Good night Mastodon, it's been as addictive as usual!

@madgeface I just add the feeds to my email client (Thunderbird). My understanding is that the equivalent from Microsoft supports this as well, and I saw some convoluted way to do it in GMail.

I have Tbird set up with a unified folder of tagged and unread messages, so I just pick them off like I do with newsletters. Less than 20 in all, so it's manageable (and when it isn't, I go to the feed's folder and "mark all as read"... I'm a heretic.)

@madgeface Everything eventually winds up on either my nerd/rant blog or my artist/writer blog anyway, so in defiance of all marketing wisdom I just let people get those through RSS (although often delayed, there has to be some perk for subscribing!)

I use perk loosely.

@madgeface Check out https://getshelflife.com/ His focus is on non-fiction, and mostly business-related stuff, but he has the occasional tip/insight that applies to fiction, and probably to technical books too.

@dandylover1 We agree on that! I have long lamented how we have allowed commercial interests to turn the educational system into factories who produce worker/consumers. Were I in charge, no student could escape basic education without the ability to use logic, recognize and rebut fallacious arguments, and engage in critical thinking. Everything else would be a welcome bonus.

@chad Hey, how about in that UFC thing he wants at the White House, we make it a match between the CEO of Antifa and the CEO of MAGA?

@madgeface @LJ

Dang and I forgot to add "subscribe to my newsletter" there. See, I struggle with even low-level organic growth!

@madgeface I'm not sure I'd use vindicated, but yes, the concept of having sufficient disposable cash to spend on even trying something like that is foreign, and even if I was rolling in excess cash, I don't think I would have tried that tactic. I'm far more interested in finding people who appreciate what I do in an organic way. If that somehow explodes into wild success, I'd rather feel that I'd earned it, rather than purchased it.

@LJ

@dandylover1 Ah, there we have a chasm. I reject the idea that a word should be considered inferior merely by convention. The word either fits or it doesn't. Enfecalmatterification just doesn't cut it.

@dandylover1 I do believe it is highly dependent on the author. I've read early works where the author was clearly getting paid by the word. I've read modern works where authors have demonstrated the extensive scope of their vocabularies sole for the purpose of demonstrating the extensive scope of their vocabularies. And then in both periods I have read works where every single word seems to have been honed to fit into an eloquent whole.

@dandylover1 Language is a living thing that inevitably changes with each generation. We would have trouble understanding someone speaking what was correct and proper English from 200 years ago. Case in point, I welcome the neologism "enshittification" with open arms, for it succinctly encapsulates something that's highly specific to the times. Attempting to stand in the way of change in language is futile, especially with English, which I have characterized as the "Borg of Languages". For me it's not the wisest use of my time to rail against changes that don't openly break the meaning of a word, hence my selectivity.

As for etc., I have recently become fond of using etm. instead, when appropriate (which is surprisingly often).

@LJ Perhaps unsurprisingly, these things work well in cells and "short hops" all you have to do is get word to someone a mile or two down the road who you know will get word to someone else another mile or two down the road. There are some other resilient technologies like walkie talkies and code-words, or spread spectrum radios that should offer dome level of security. Hell we can go back to waving coded flags.

It seems to me like now would be a good time to be building resilient networks for communications. By resilient, I mean no phones and no internet (unless it's a secure community mesh network).

Sure, there are tools like Signal, but only until the fascists turn the internet off. This is a highly effective technique that autocratic governments don't hesitate to put to use. For examples, just take a look at @netblocks.

Everybody should have at least five people they know and trust that they can quickly reach in person to pass messages along to. Find good places to hide those SD cards and use them for larger transfers.

Build the infrastructure of resistance while it's still possible.

@dandylover1 I am afraid the language has changed on us. Cynically, it seems nobody has time for that extra syllable on fewer vs less. I have heard less used as fewer on both BBC and CBC news broadcasts. I take this as the official death knell of what we grew up with. Personally I see it as a relatively small hill to do battle over.

I will still fight the battle over "awesome" to only mean "fantastically good." My stock response is "Do you mean awesome as in putting a man on the moon, or awesome as in dropping a nuclear bomb on civilians without warning?" Fortunately, the popularity of this misuse seems to fading. I preferred "sick" in that context, and by preferred, I mean detested slightly less.

Then there's the use of literally in a figurative context. I have hope that literally can still be rescued from linguistic nullification.

@ChrisJagged Every time it's said, people should start chanting their names.

I have an application for a LLM AI (non-generative). I follow a RSS blog feed that mixes the occasional bit of really useful information with (20%), buy my stuff (60%), and utterly useless posts (subjectively speaking. Think "ate a sandwich, drank a beer, good day, going to bed." end of post.)

I think maybe a LLM filter that just highlights the useful information and trashes the rest might work. But for a start maybe "word_count<250 => chuck it" is a lot less resource intensive, even if there's a few false positives.

@dandylover1 Yep, he's under 40.