Essays

In reverse chronological order:

G6J. Microformats, opposed to explicit ActivityStreams verb/object types
Some rough notes proposing GNU social changes, particularly the use of microformats to extend GNU social / OStatus server functionality without actually modifyng the server.

F7N. There Are No Orphan Works
Comment to the United States Copyright Office regarding its Notice of Inquiry on Copyright Protection for Certain Visual Works.

ECG. A Few Words on Ello
A very kind soul sent me a flattering invite to join Ello [...]. I wanted to respond by saying thanks, but no, and why don't you come join us on GNU social instead? Of course, I can't write anything that simply, so it turned into a whole thing.

E3T. RUDIGRAPH: A Simple Orthography for Fun and Insight
RUDIGRAPH IS A SET OF ELECTIVE CONSTRAINTS WHICH STEER CONSCIENTIOUS WRITERS TOWARDS NEW COMPOSITIONAL PATHS

E17. The Typewriter, The TV
In computing, the "standard" 80-character x 25-line text console is a long-held convention that has roots in two 20th-century technologies that predate the digital computer: the typewriter, and the television.

E13. On Home Pages
That's what the in-the-know people were saying. "You gotta get on the web, man. You gotta make a homepage."

D9R. Athwart The Touchy-Feelies
Your interfaces are no more intuitive than any other, as long as they operate on abstracted models of interaction that have no real-world analogs.

D81. Incorrect Speaking is Often Not
The reason spellings need to be unambiguous and standardized, and the reason that technical and academic discourse is predominantly written discourse, is because spoken language is fundamentally ambiguous and unstandardizable.

D29. Rich Text, Poor Text
Bold, italic, subscript, superscript, underlines, strike-throughs -- I don't find any of these presentational attributes of text any more frivolous than quotation marks and exclamation points. I mean, really, if the goal was to be starkly minimalistic about it, we could write prose for electronic transmission with letters, spaces and line-breaks, and throw-out all the explicit markup. We don't call it "markup" when it's been around for more than fifty years, we call it punctuation instead, but it's the same thing.

CCS. Sixty-four Puny Bits
Imagine a grid, eight squares across and eight squares high. [...] Now imagine you have a whole bunch of Post-It® notes that have been pre-printed with that eight-by-eight grid, and you've been assigned the simple task of using a marker to fill-in the squares of the grid, a different combination of squares on each note, in every unique combination of filled and unfilled squares that exists...

CCR. All Those Painted Men of The North
You wouldn't know by looking, but the words Cruithne and Prydain are, in fact, cognates.

[Elder writing from past blogs shall be integrated here piecemeal —L.]

Dilhang

Prose of the pickled tongue.

D66. Zorton Mastik Bestu-Bestu's Deep-Watt Syperbalstik Pey

ACC. Practus Dissectus Ignos, and Fragments

724. The Wilmington Men