Pixel Scroll 6/18/17 ‘Twas Pixel And The Filey Scrolls Did Fifth And Godstalk ‘Neath The Wabes

(1) FILIAL PROS. “For Father’s Day, 9 famous writer dads and their awesome authorial offspring” – the LA Times feature includes a segment on Stephen King, and sons Joe Hill and Owen King.

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Bookwürms.

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(2) BAD MARVEL DADS. Hidden Remote considers “Who is the worst dad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?”

Before we break down who the worst dad is, let’s give an honorable mention and round of applause to the very few awesome fathers and father-figures in the MCU!

  • Uncle Ben — He didn’t only step up and raise Peter to be good and kind, but he also taught us all that “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

And the winner (loser?) as worst dad? It’s a tie!

Guys, this one is a toss up. Ego and Thanos are both so terrible, we’re not sure which is the most wicked. But, personally, I believe Ego is the worst of the worst.

(3) WISCON REPORT. Claire Light at Literary Hub tells what it was like “At the World’s Preeminent Feminist Speculative Fiction Convention”.  

The way this 5-day, 1000-attendee, multigenerational festival plays out is not quite what you might expect from a bunch of futurist nerds. Public bathrooms (separated genders—to be determined by the user—and all-gender bathrooms alike) have bottles of Dr. Bronner’s at each sink, for the chemically sensitive. The convention reserves a quiet place for those with a tendency to become overwhelmed by sensory input, as well as “safer spaces” dedicated to trans/genderqueer people, people of color, and people with disabilities. WisCon’s accessibility policies are a model of thoughtfulness.

…Other events founded at WisCon and becoming convention staples include the Floomp, an annual queer dance party, which started out seven years ago as “The Gender Floomp” to bring a new generation of queer and genderqueer issues to the forefront in a fun and celebratory way. As WisCon has come to increasingly demarginalize queerness, the Floomp has been folded into the traditional social programming of the convention and is now its primary and most popular party.

There’s also the POC dinner, once a table for 11 at a restaurant, and now an annual organizational headache for short story writer and Angry Black Woman blogger Tempest K. Bradford, who has to find a room to fit nearly 10% of the convention’s attendees every year. And last year, a group of Asian attendees got shabu shabu together; as they’ve already repeated the dinner once, it’s already well on its way to becoming a new tradition.

(4) CARRYING A TUNE. Charlie Jane Anders speaks from firsthand experience about “The Wild Magic of Karaoke” at Tor.com.

And yes, if you can’t sing at all, that just means more wild spoken-word stylings. Take a page from the master of songcraft, William Shatner, whose singing ability remains somewhat theoretical but who has recorded the definitive renditions of countless songs at this point.

The point is, karaoke is magic. It’s taking songs that we all know, and turning them into something ephemeral and wonderful and frequently a bit bizarre. Karaoke is a chance for everybody to expose his or her own inner avant-garde pop diva, and let the musical insanity burst out for everyone to see.

When I was teaching Clarion West back in 2014, I had some amazing times with my students, and I like to think we bonded a lot in general—but I really didn’t get to know them, and discover the full range of their personalities, until we went to this weird nautical-themed karaoke bar where half the decorations were mermaids and the other half were signs explaining that the bartender didn’t need to put up with your s—-t. Some of science fiction’s most promising new writers busted out with renditions of Lady Gaga, Madonna, and The Cars that stay with me to this day.

(5) WHAT ATWOOD THINKS. While authors always have opinions about adaptations of their work, they’re not always willing to talk about them publicly – here’s a rare instance: “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: Margaret Atwood on the 5 Biggest Differences Between the Book and the TV Series”.

Her Name Is June

In the novel, the heroine is given the name “Offred” by her captors at the Red Center, where fertile women are retrained to be Handmaids: breeders who are assigned to the ruling families in the hopes of bringing new babies into this fertility-challenged world. That name translates as “Of Fred,” the identity of the man whose home she lives in, and who rapes her on appointed nights every month. We are pointedly never told Offred’s pre-Gilead name. For the show, Miller made the conscious choice to give Offred a distinct identity for the flashbacks to the era before America fell and picked the name June, confirming a long-held fan theory.

Atwood says: “The readers have already decided that’s her name, and who am I to disagree with them? It wasn’t in my mind, but there wasn’t any other name in my mind either. It fits because in the first chapter, the women exchange names and all those names show up again later on except June. So by default that would have to be her name! That’s a pretty good deduction and I’ll go with that. This is June, and she really does have an identity; it’s forbidden, but it’s there. I’ve told fans before, if it works for you, go for it.”

(6) IX GALLERY. “IX Gallery Opens Its Virtual Doors”. Gallery’s inaugural online art show just went live on Thursday. This first show is exhibiting about 120 pieces of art from some of the most recognizable SF&F artists working today. It appears that they have already sold 3 pieces of artwork since Thursday afternoon.

The IX Gallery Inaugural Show runs June 15-August 14.

IX Gallery, a division of IX Arts, is the first online-only gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary imaginative realism. As a natural extension of IX’s reach and solidly established inspiration value, this year-round effort is designed to provide gallery curation and structure in an online-only environment that allows for the widest possible access while reducing the burden on artists for participating.

It is structured like a normal gallery – rotating shows that are a combination of group and solo efforts, rather than a constant online inventory or catalog, and we do not “rep” any of the artists in the show. Everything is handled on a show-by-show basis to allow the artists maximum flexibility in their participation.”

Click for a list of coming Exhibitions. These artists are listed as part of the inaugural show.

Linda Adair, Samuel Araya, Julie Bell, Shaun Berke, Brom, Armand Cabrera, Jeremy Caniglia, Dan Chudzinski, Kinuko Y. Craft, Felipe Echevarria, Bob Eggleton, Craig Elliott, Jody Fallon, Scott Fischer, Teresa N. Fischer, Marc Fishman, Annie Stegg Gerard, Justin Gerard, Donato Giancola, Lars Grant-West, Rebecca Guay, John Harris, Michael C. Hayes, James Herrmann, Richard Hescox, Stephen Hickman, Greg & Tim Hildebrandt, Greg Hildebrandt, Luke Hillestad, Patrick Jones, Rich Klink, J. Anthony Kosar, Jota Leal, Vanessa Lemen, Don Maitz, Gina Matarazzo, Matt Mrowka, Aaron Nagel, Tran Nguyen, Ryan Pancoast, Lucio Parrillo, Colin & Kristine Poole, Colin Poole, Mark Poole, Rob Rey, Tooba Rezaei, Forest Rogers, Laurence Schwinger, Dave Seeley, Hajime Sorayama, Matthew Stewart, Bryan Mark Taylor, Vince Villafranca, Chet Zar, and Dariusz Zawadzki.

(7) ON EXHIBIT IN LONDON. “‘Anime Architecture’: windows on dystopia” is En Liang Khong’s review in Financial Times of Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan , an exhibit at the House of Illustration in London that has lots of illustrations for cyberpunk anime movies, including Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor: The Movie, and other examples of “real-kei”, “where futurity is set in counterpoint with realism.”

Anime Architecture at London’s House of Illustration traces the production design behind these cyberpunk anime — “noir” films reimagined for the future — in which specialist artists pioneered a visual language that drew on the booming Asian megacities of the early 1990s in order to broadcast a vision of future dystopias.

But the future is fleeting, constantly outdated by our own shifting socio-political fears and dreams. Wandering through the rooms of Anime Architecture is a reminder of how quickly visions of the future can become old, spooky and elegiac. And there is poignancy to these images: the artists represented here come from the last generation of Japanese animators who still believed in drawing by hand.

(8) COHEN OBIT. Morton Norton Cohen (1921-2017), an American author and scholar, hdied June 12. He was a Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York. He is best known for extensive studies of children’s author Lewis Carroll including the 1995 biography Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

(9) MEADOWS OBIT. Author Patrick Meadows (1934-2017) died April 22. A graduate of Florida State University with a Degree in English, he had lived in Majorca since 1969. His first published story, “Countercommandment” appeared in Analog in 1965. His other four published stories appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction later in the Sixties, and three of them have been digitized and made available on his website. [Via Gordon Van Gelder.]

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 18, 1983 — Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.

(11) SHY. Wil Wheaton – a star on the outside, is still a shy guy on the inside.

(12) HOL-RY COW! Screenwriter James Gunn told his Facebook followers that “‘Scooby-Doo’ wasn’t supposed to be a kids’ movie”.

Gunn added the film would have looked completely different if he had it his way.

“And yes, the rumors are true — the first cut was rated R by the MPAA, and the female stars’ cleavage was CGI’d away so as not to offend,” he wrote. “But, you know, such is life. I had a lot of fun making this movie, regardless of all that. And I was able to eat, buy a car, and a house because of it.”

(13) READY, AIM. The Traveler from Galactic Journey tweets an ad from 1962.

(14) VISITING THEIR FUTURE. By the way, here is a photo of Professor Elliott and The Traveler from their visit to Wondercon.

(15) BEAUTIFUL MACHINES. “If memory serves me correctly (and it alas doesn’t always),” says Cat Eldridge, “Gibson typed Neuromancer on a typewriter.” Snopes suggests the old technology still has appeal — “Call it a Comeback: Old-School Typewriters Attract New Fans”.

Typewriter enthusiasts gather at an Albuquerque restaurant to experiment with vintage Smith Coronas. Fans in Boston kneel in a city square and type stories about their lives during a pro-immigration demonstration. A documentary on typewriters featuring Tom Hanks and musician John Mayer is set for release this summer.

In the age of smartphones, social media and cyber hacking fears, vintage typewriters that once gathered dust in attics and basements are attracting a new generation of fans across the U.S.

From public “type-ins” at bars to street poets selling personalized, typewritten poems on the spot, typewriters have emerged as popular items with aficionados hunting for them in thrift stores, online auction sites and antique shops. Some buy antique Underwoods to add to a growing collection. Others search for a midcentury Royal Quiet De Luxe — like a model author Ernest Hemingway used — to work on that simmering novel.

(16) ATARI RISES AGAIN. But Rhett Jones at Gizmodo says “Atari’s New Console Sounds Like a Bad Idea”.

“We’re back in the hardware business,” Atari’s CEO Fred Chesnais told VentureBeat in an interview at E3 2017. Beyond that, Chesnais offered no other information aside from saying it will be based on “PC technology” and that it will be revealed at a later date. The teaser video claims that the “Ataribox” is a “brand new Atari product years in the making.”

This is the online ad that triggered Jones’ article.

The ad reminds John King Tarpinian “In the first Bladrunner movie there was an ATARI Fuji logo-shaped building in the city.”

(17) A TOUCH OF HARRY IN THE NIGHT. For those of you near Pasadena, here’s something for you to do September 9 — “Eat See Hear Outdoor Movie: Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone”. Food trucks. Dogs welcome.

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

This is the tale of Harry Potter, an ordinary 11-year-old boy who learns that he is actually a wizard and has been invited to attend the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry is snatched away from his mundane existence by Hagrid, the grounds keeper for Hogwarts, and quickly thrown into a world completely foreign to both him and the viewer. Famous for an incident that happened at his birth, Harry makes friends easily at his new school. He soon finds, however, that the wizarding world is far more dangerous for him than he would have imagined.

(18) BESTSELLING TOY PREDICTED. The generations have run from Chatty Cathy to Prattling Peter: “Sphero’s Adorable Spider-Man Toy Will Make You Forget BB-8”.

Rumored in late March, the app-enabled superhero was officially unveiled this morning with a video that reveals what’s essentially a chatty Amazon Echo (“Alexa!”) with Peter Parker’s attitude and sense of humor.

Featuring emotive LCD eyes, not unlike the mask in Spider-Man: Homecoming, this adorable little wall-crawler (it’s about 9 inches tall) has its own Spider-Sense, enabling it to detect and react to movement. He can tell jokes, relate stories, wake you up and even patrol for “intruders.” More intriguing, perhaps, is that Spider-Man can talk kids through more than 100 storylines, and allow them to make their own plot-altering decisions in a Choose Your Own Adventure fashion. Don’t worry about running out of stories, though, as Sphero plans to add more through the device’s web connection.

(19) MINDGAMERS TRAILER. Here’s your grim future. Or is it present?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Sean R. Kirk, Andrew Porter, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jabberin’ Joe H.]

91 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/18/17 ‘Twas Pixel And The Filey Scrolls Did Fifth And Godstalk ‘Neath The Wabes

  1. @Soon Lee Yep, we’re on the same page. I’ve currently got it under Rogue One because I am hopelessly in love with all of the Star Wars, but above Arrival and Ghostbusters for sure. Still have Deadpool and Stranger Things to watch, though, so rankings might change and I won’t vote in the category at all if I haven’t at least tried everything.

    I wonder if/when we’ll have a steampunk style revival for brutally functional 60s and 70s office aesthetic? I cant wait for the Selectric “artisanal typing experience” kickstarters to take over my Facebook ad space…

  2. I learned to touch-type in 4th grade (so back in the mid-60s) and to 10-key punching data entry cards for my father’s research at the end of high school. When I went off to college, I picked up this cute archaic-looking typewriter at a garage sale. Still had it in grad school, but of course it was a long time since I’d actually used it for anything and the one time I got it out to fill out a form, if found it had gotten damp when the roof leaked and rusted over.

    The vast majority of my typing has been on computers…and a vast amount it’s been indeed. And what I’ve found is the more I’ve typed, the worse my typing gets. Mostly because my brain is processing the muscle signals by whole words but the fingers respond at different rates. So it’s like a computer program where the instructions come in non-ordered packets but then it turns out it actually matters what order they’re executed in. (I had to investigate a glitch caused by that a couple years ago.)

  3. @PJ Evans: Indeed, good secretaries used to wear out Selectrics regularly. My mom had to get her manual typewriter adjusted regularly, what with her ridiculous speed.

    I liked having a word processor with adjustable fonts when everyone else was turning in their papers on Selectrics. Professors had not yet caught onto the trick of changing font size to either make the paper longer or shorter, or the difference that could be had by tweaking the side, top, and bottom margins by amounts too hard to measure. Heh. Plus they liked the justification.

  4. My boss got me a wireless keyboard a few years ago. I made him bring it back; the lag between what I typed and when it showed up on the screen was making me crazy….

    (I have no idea what my typing speed is anymore; it was well north of 60wpm without errors once upon a time, but now both my speed and my error rate are higher because it’s so darn easy to fix typos on a computer. No messing around with bottles of Wite-Out….)

  5. @Arifel

    Possibly not quite to a revival yet but every movement needs a harbinger:

    Qwerkywriter

    I still can’t justify the cost but: WANT! The prices do keep falling though…

  6. Hi everyone. About to collapse into bed…but I am back from the Antipodes!

  7. I still have the typewriter my father wrote his MA thesis on in 1936; it has no ‘1’ key AND is missing other interesting characters to provide keys for western-European accents. (His thesis was on Latin, but he wanted to put in examples from other languages.) I was told to learn touch-typing in 1966 by an English teacher who despaired of my handwriting (the school taught a method that did not work for left-handers.) I sold the last typewriter I used (a “portable” electric) in ~1982, to someone going off to college, having retired it after I started working for a computer company. (Who else remembers nroff?)

    @OGH: cute title on @17, although the original is “A little touch of Harry in the night.” (Last year I could give you that whole speech verbatim, 8+ years after doing it; now it’s rusty.)

  8. (Who else remembers nroff?)

    [hand raised] I did some of the originals for Frisbie’s seminars, in the early 80s, using RT-11 and one of its handy utility programs.

    (Am I the only one who’s noticed that the title of this post seems to be missing a letter? Shouldn’t it be ”pixel and the filey scrolls?”)

  9. @Chip:

    Of course it has a “1” key. It’s right there next to the “K.” 😀

  10. @Cassy B: huh, I’ve used a few wireless keyboards now and never had an issue. The only time I’ve had a problem is when I dropped my laptop and it smashed the dongle to bits, and would always disconnect itself. I’ve now got a Logitech keyboard and mouse set that connect through one dongle. I’ve been extremely tempted to buy an even smaller bluetooth keyboard that would free up even more space in my bag when I’m travelling. There’s a nice one in a store near me for only ~$20 or so.

  11. Cat, sorry you are having such a tough time.

    Paul, welcome back.

    Cassy, I had the same problem when my office switched from DOS based Multimate to windows based WordPerfect. Like all typewriter trained typists, I never looked at what I typed. But early WordPerfect was so far behind that it kept distracting me. The screen would flash three times and a page of text would appear. Kept throwing me off because I couldn’t ignore the flashing screen. And I deeply resented having to take my fingers off the keyboard and use the mouse. Way way slower. That part hasn’t changed. Still learn as many keyboard shortcuts as I can because the mouse is too slow.

    Don’t remember who mentioned it, but I had never heard of a mechanical keyboard. Must obtain one as soon as possible.

  12. I asked for a typewriter at Rice and was shown the shelf of typewriters nobody else wanted. I ended up using one that had clearly been accustomed to typing with a UK emphasis: it had a Pound key, for instance. There was no 1 or 0 (so binary would have been tough), and I had to use youthful ells and mature ohs. Exclamation points were made in the time-honored way, by holding the space bar down and typing a period and an apostrophe—though the work tended to be so unexciting, I never seemed to need this method.

    Mom’s typewriter was a nice little portable Royal that she’d had fitted with enyes, accents, and inverted quarks and bangs for typing Spanish. I’d have gladly swiped it after Mom no longer used language, but it was gone by then, no doubt to some unappreciative junk shop or the trash. (Oh, the things we covet: I asked many times about the Orphan Annie decoder pins she had, but those evaporated.)

  13. P J Evans: (Am I the only one who’s noticed that the title of this post seems to be missing a letter? Shouldn’t it be ”pixel and the filey scrolls?”)

    That would make a great improvement.

    Does this mean yesterday’s appertainment begins very late, or today’s opens very early?

  14. @ Chip Hitchcock (to whom I seem to be directing an unexpected number of responses in this session)

    I still have the typewriter my father wrote his MA thesis on in 1936; it has no ‘1’ key AND is missing other interesting characters to provide keys for western-European accents.

    The stories I heard about why the “Americanist” phonetic transcription system held on so long after IPA became popular involve linguists doing field work with a carefully altered manual typewriter.

  15. @ OGH

    Does this mean yesterday’s appertainment begins very late, or today’s opens very early?

    I noticed that when it posted last night but was too wiped out from the heat to summon up a copyediting brain cell.

  16. I taught myself to type, on a big clunky not-very-portable metal pre-Selectric, as a young teenager, cranking out terrible science fiction and fantasy epics until my fingers ached and throbbed. Since I was already typing at a passable speed I never bothered with a typing class, and I developed my own idiosyncratic way of navigating the keyboard that involves not using my pinkies. It never stopped me from exceeding 100 wpm (or maxing raid dps) (or earning a living doing various things with keyboards). I transitioned to PCs back when the screens only had one color, and I’ve never looked back.

  17. JJ: Gah. I feel like that kid in grade school who keeps raising his hand

    I thought “The Filey Scrolls” was an expression of incredulity, not pointing out a typo. My mistake!

  18. Heather Rose Jones: I noticed that when it posted last night but was too wiped out from the heat to summon up a copyediting brain cell.

    When I get my next brain transplant I’m going to request a side order of those.

  19. Chip Hitchcock on June 19, 2017 at 7:45 pm said:

    (Who else remembers nroff?)

    Remembers it? I still use it (or at least its cousin, groff) for creating manual pages for *nix software. Not in depth, at least not any more–if something requires an in-depth manual, I’ll probably turn to something a little simpler–but I still like to provide at least a basic man page. The folks at Debian still insist on having at least a quick summary in man(1) format. 🙂

  20. @Chip Hitchcock & @Xtifr: Oh lord, runoff, yes, I vaguely remember using it on a Prime mainframe at college.

    @Someone (sorry!): I love tactile feedback for my computer keyboards! My colleagues get used to the sound and I feel a little guilty, but only a little; I type faster and better with good-quality mechanical switches that give tactile feedback. I hate mushy keyboards (i.e., most keyboards!).

    When replacing my home keyboard recently, I was surprised to find the ones with the best tactile feedback and mechanical switches were for power gamers. Heh, well, I’m not a (power or otherwise) computer gamer, but I got one and love it. I’m nervous about replacing the one at work, though; I’m not sure if the power gamer keyboard is louder or softer than the one at work. (We have thin walls, open doors, etc. and I type a lot and fast – hopefully still over 100 WPM).

    ETA: I’m not the only one where I work who’s gotten a good clicky keyboard, but the one I have at work right now, I got when I was in a more isolated office. 🙁

    I used to farm out my typing skills in college to people who wanted their papers typed. And when going through mementos recently, my mom and I ran across an ad I did in high school, it looks like, to type papers for people. (I don’t remember anyone in high school taking me up on it, but I did get some paying customers in college.)

    Yay for that summer my parents sent me to a couple of summer things, one of them a typing class. That’s probably the skill I’ve found most useful in life! 😛

    /TypingNerd

  21. I used Scribe to generate documents at the same job where I sometimes used the Selectric. It was the newest latest greatest thing. The text editor was Emacs, because everything at that job was Emacs (actually a proprietary version therof). I had to reboot my brain going back and forth between work and home, where I had WordStar.

  22. @lurkertype: if only you’d known that Emacs had wordstar-mode. (Nowadays marked as obsolete, but still distributed with the system.) 🙂

  23. @World Weary

    Early WordPerfect didn’t support a mouse. It didn’t even run on Windows. In fact as it moved into a more GUI paradigm (which eventually the DOS version did as well) it lost users (who departed quite noisily).

  24. I use an early (non-mouse) WordPerfect even today, at work. It’s part of the ancient inventory management and quote generating software we use (dates back to approximately 1992). Shift-F7 for print… When instructing younger colleagues how to use it, I have to explain how menus work.

    They’re probably finally trashing the software this year or next. It’s well past time, but I’ll miss it. After 25 years of using it I can make it jump through hoops…

  25. Phonetic typing reminds me that I made a small amount of cash typing audiology papers for a future roommate, leaving spaces and drawing in the special characters with a #2 Rapidograph. After I’d done two or three, I made a fake one analyzing my friend from his papers, which I deemed utterances, and his idiolectic use of a secret language with its own alphabet. He presented it to his professor, of course. I didn’t keep a copy of it because xeroxing was so expensive, and who had twenty or thirty cents to spare?

  26. I was trying to get this working to torment my cow orkers but struggling to get it the dependencies in place on RHEL.

    One of my colleagues down South has a real Model-M which is audible from two or three offices away.

  27. @Rev Bob: the ghost of George Flynn, Boston’s porofraedre extraordinaire, rises up and smites you with a copy of his last academic project: a p-chem textbook for which the idiot designer spec’d a sans-serif font. Sometimes you could tell the difference between 11, 1l(iter) and section II by context, and sometimes not….

  28. @IanP

    I am currently typing this on a genuine Model-M keyboard of 1993 vintage. Probably needs the keycaps pulled and cleaned but other than that it is still providing excellent service. I work from home now so there is no-one to complain about the noise, but I used to take it in to work as I didn’t like the squishy keyboards that came with the machines.

  29. @Xtifr: our proprietary system didn’t do Word Star mode. sigh.

    I miss Word Perfect too. I don’t type many long things now, so Google Docs is good enough for letters, recipes etc. If I have to do an envelope, it’s hand printed. If I absolutely need Word Perfect, I’ve got a functioning XP machine that I was given which Dell built to my friend’s specs — including WordPerfect and NOT MSWord/Office/etc.

    It took Mom a bit to change from “l” to “1” but she liked it once she did. Because of the problem Chip mentioned.

    She had to type my brother’s paper on Czechoslovakia, after which we were instructed to either write about shorter names or type it ourselves. Me, being a smartass, picked Qatar, which has no “u” after the Q. She, being the one we got the smartassness from, said nothing more.

  30. My typing skill makes me think of this possible Pixel Scroll title

    “Tyme Scrollfari, Inc. Scrollfaris tu any Pixel en the Fyle”.

  31. @lurkertype: EMACS was my favorite editor. Some of the key bindings are imprinted on my soul. 😉 I still use a non-menu, non-mouse editor on Windows that uses some basic EMACS key bindings and minimal macro-recording and has no UI, basically. Kinda silly – I only use it for some things. I need to load those mappings into the other editor I use (I’m sure it has an option or plug-in or something).

  32. I still can Emacs when need be. It made my left pinky strong! I learned it in 3 days — well enough to get by with a cheat sheet anyway. (I got the job Thursday night and they told me to report Monday morning. I, uh, may have somewhat exaggerated my knowledge of it during the interview.)

  33. Related to absolutely nothing foregoing…I opened my e-mail inbox after work today and discovered a lovely little story acceptance note. At some point in 2018, there will be a new Alpennia novelette out in the world.

  34. Kendall on June 20, 2017 at 8:43 pm said:
    I got talked into using TECO. It came in handy at work, when I was having to edit some text files where someone had left off a digit on addresses. (They seemed to assume that all of them were going to be 4-digit. In a region where 5-digit addresses are common, this is … unhelpful.They also had an extra space after the number.)

  35. @P J Evans: (reading at Wikipedia) “TECO was a direct ancestor of Emacs, which was originally implemented in TECO macros.” – !!! I did not know EMACS was originally implemented as macros in another editor. That is a bit surreal.

  36. TECO is a programming language – if you get into it far enough. It has looping and conditionals….

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