Quick bits:

• I still have no gloves and the weather is getting colder. In my defense, I did go shopping for cycling gloves last winter, but found none that fit my hand size.

• I have tickets for Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe at the Schaubühne in late November. This play, nearly five hours in length, was a recommendation that I could not say no to.

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Shower thoughts:

• Free idea: a book titled The Book of Unwritten Stories, with just blank pages in it.

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Last week, I said that I probably wouldn’t pick up the work on my interpreter book,¹¹¹ I wrote about the interpreter book for the first time in Week­notes 2023 W05: Fridge cleaning.  but I’ve poured all the material I had into a new Scrivener project, which means I might continue with it after all.

Before I can genuinely start writing the book, though, I need to finish the programming language that the book is built around. And frankly, I don’t know how far I want (or need) to go with this. At which point do I say that the language is good enough to start writing the book?

A big open question is whether Ruby is a good choice as an implementation language. It’s quite easy to get started with Ruby, but at some point, it becomes quite clear that writing an interpreter in an already interpreted language is not a great idea.

Perhaps I need to limit the scope: rather than a full-fledged programming language, I could limit myself to an (extensive) external DSL. I am not sure how well that’d sell as a concept, though.

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I published a new short story: The Gap. At 700 words, it might fit more in the flash fiction classification rather than short story, but I’m happy with the outcome regardless.

I drafted it (at my regular Shut Up & Write meetup), did a quick revision on my laptop, and then printed it out for a final edit I planned for the day after. Strangely, after printing it out, I was afraid to even look at the printout, in fear of the writing being horrible on second look, as if either I had been entirely delusional about the quality of my writing, or the writing had somehow transformed itself into something grotesque overnight.

Truly, my primary struggle with fiction writing is psychological at this point.

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Scrivener remains a bit of an acquired taste. I limit myself to writing Markdown in it, because it makes exporting content so much easier. However, Scrivener really isn’t a Markdown editor: it is a rich-text editor in which you can also write Markdown.

In fact, you can combine rich text formatting (like different typefaces, font sizes, and font styles like bold and italic), pure Markdown (like headings, emphasis, or Pandoc-style citation markup), and Scrivener styles. But if you were to combine all three approaches in a single document, you’d end up with an unmaintainable mess.

I think Scrivener would be better with a distinct split between rich-text and markup modes. In rich-text mode, you’d have rich text formatting and Scrivener styles, while in markup mode you’d be able to use pure Markdown and Scrivener styles.

Scrivener styles are great, and I use them extensively in my writing. Those styles translate to pure Markdown on compilation, so I don’t lose anything, and in Scrivener they show up in a visually distinct way. Here is an example of what that looks like (cobbled together from various unrelated bits of writing):

Not having to deal with raw Markdown markup is a benefit in my book: it is distracting visual noise.²²² My own markup language, D★Mark, has the same issue. As I mentioned a while ago, I might from now on be doing all my technical writing in Scrivener rather than with D★Mark.  Highlighting semantically meaningful elements, like in the example above, is, I believe, a more sensible approach.

If only there were a dedicated Markdown mode that disabled all regular formatting options, like typefaces and font sizes and styles. I don’t need any of those, and I fear that I run the risk of using rich text formatting by accident that won’t export/compile properly.

But, you know… there is nothing else quite like Scrivener. Is it not amazing that there is a piece of software that is essentially irreplaceable, filling a niche so well?

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Entertainment:

• I’m about halfway through the Alan Wake novelization.³³³ Rick Burroughs, Alan Wake (New York: Tor, 2013).  It’s not a great piece of writing, but I’m continuing with it.

• Voyage of Time⁴⁴⁴ Voyage of Time, written and directed by Terrence Malick (Sophisticated Films, Broad Green Pictures, IMAX, 2016).  is the word awe condensed into a film.

• I suppose I finished Satisfactory,⁵⁵⁵ Satisfactory (Coffee Stain Studios, 2024), published by Coffee Stain Publishing.  at least from a story point of view. I’ve made a horrific mess, though not nearly on the Let’s Game It Out level. I’d share a screenshot, but I have no means of blurring images on my web site (yet), and I’d rather not, erm, scare anyone.

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Toots and tweets:

• Wil Wheaton is now five years older than Patrick Stewart was in the pilot of Star Trek the next generation.: Whoa!

• Laura Manach on the difference between Art Noveau and Art Deco: Legit.

Links:

• The Atlantic Did Me Dirty (Carrie M. Santo-Thomas): I linked to the article from The Atlantic last week. Here is a response to it, with a clear counter-argument.

• An Enormous Photo of the Moon Zooms in on the Cratered Lunar Topography in Incredible Detail: Amazing!

• How I Fell Out Of Love With Facebook (Tantacrul): I too remember Facebook being a force for good… until it very, very clearly wasn’t.

• The Chappell Roan Paradox (Friendly Space Ninja): The Chappell Roan situation was unfolding in my peripheral vision, and this video puts it all together in a clear way. (I would absolutely not want to live in the spotlight like that.)

• Remake / Submissions (via Kottke): Some of these are amazing!

• Dan Olson at XOXO Festival 2024: Relatable! I often find myself suffering from intensive, creative longing. As if my life purpose is to create. I too have avoided watching good films and television series because I know that I will get envious. There are two kinds of envy (good and motivating, and bad and destructive), but I am not sure what kind of envy I often am feeling.

• Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really) (Twin Perfect): Big spoilers, naturally, but my primary take-away was an insight in the creative process behind it all.

• Morrowind Doesn’t Have Any Rivers (Any Austin): Not me learning about hydrological features from Morrowind video esssays!

• Cabel Sasser at XOXO Festival 2024: A twist!

• Oh baby, we’re talking interest rates (Good Work)

Berlin links:

• Gerichtsentscheidung zu Kiezblock: Die Poller können stehen bleiben (taz, in German): I am so happy that the bollards can remain in place. The diagonal bollard setup (a modal filter) is excellent. (There is also the official press release: „Modalfilter“ in der Tucholskystraße kann zunächst bestehen bleiben, if that’s your thing.)

Tech links:

• The Disappearance of an Internet Domain (Every): I am skeptical, and I think that the .io top-level domain will stick around. But the current .io situation is a good warning: don’t use ccTLDs for your fancy domains if you can avoid it.

• ‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In (404 Media): Matt Mullenweg seems to be losing it.

• Cool 3D Buttons (Sage Fennel): Pretty! I created my own 3D buttons, but not nearly as fancy, back in Week­notes 2023 W02: Exploding head.

• The Static Site Paradox (Loris Cro): I adore the ultra-simple setup for my own static web site, but I cannot recommend it to anyone who’s not well-versed in the technologies that make it work. Opportunity for change?

• LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem (Gary Marcus): No surprise here. This has been self-evident from the start of the LLM hype.