Sunday, December 26, 2021

Somehow, some part of their attention is directed toward the possibility that their application environment isn't "ideal." They have this notion there's some perfect writing environment that will make them more productive or better writers by eliminating this thing called "distraction." There's some anxiety about the tool they're using.

Dave's right. I've gone through many iterations around "distraction-free" writing myself. In my case, though, I don't do it because I feel the writing environment is holding me back. I do it because it can be fun to twiddle with tools. Same with cameras. My cameras have been better than my ability for years, but I still keep trying new cameras because I love cameras.

Oh, and about distraction-free writing in Tinderbox, I wrote Tinderbox as a Minimalist Writing Environment in 2013. (Unfortunately, all of the site's images from 2012 were lost during one of many platform migrations.)

This week started out with the intention of building a Rails app, but ended with the creation of an entirely new Tinderbox Daybook and blogging system. You're soaking in it. I'm still considering moving the whole enterprise to baty.blog and just living with that for a while. However, I still wonder about returning it to rudimentarylathe.org or maybe even replacing the photography domain copingmechanism.com. And who knows, I may end with all of this back in Emacs in a month. But Tinderbox is still super fun and powerful and let's try it!

Tinderbox does this cool thing in outlines where the icon changes based on the age and size of each note. I'm working on mimicking that feature on the Archives page here. I'm a little lost when it comes to the new "functions" features in Tinderbox 9.1 so I fell back to adding some Action code as an Edict. Like this...

if ($TextLength>500) {
    	$NoteIcon="long.png";
}
if ($TextLength>50 & $TextLength<=500) {
    	$NoteIcon ="medium.png";
}
if ($TextLength<50) {
	$NoteIcon ="small.png";
}
if ($Image) {$NoteIcon = "cam.png"};

Now, we all realize that our jump-off point is agreeing to rally the troops for next quarter so we can circle back to the perfect ROI for the inevitable year-end come-to-Jesus moment. That’s evident from our low-hanging fruit research and the blue-sky white papers presented by the team in marketing, right? NO, YOU’RE WRONG ON THAT, STEVE. STEVE. STEVE. HEAR ME OUT. YOU’RE WRONG. JUST HEAR ME OUT, STEVE.

I sometimes attend an event and take deliberate photos with a serious camera. Later, I see shots other people casually snapped with their iPhones or whatever and posted them (with no editing) directly to social media. They're often much better than mine. Am I just wasting my time?

This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.