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‘Times change’: what authors think about rewriting older books
  • I'm not really making an argument, but describing something I've heard and seems like a reasonable point to consider: One potential issue with "cleaning up" stuff like HP Lovecraft is that a lot of his horror is, in fact, horror about race. So cleaning it up would interact weirdly with that topic — would it mask the racial nature of it by making it less overt? Would it make it a different story? Or would it still basically be intact, but less immediately distracting, just because our modern ear recoils when we read certain words? (I don't know which of these it would be; it probably varies depending on the story)

  • I don't want to "Press any key to continue" to the main menu
  • I'm reminded of something that Binding of Isaac does that I wish more games would do: If you're anywhere in the main menu (even drilled into it), if you just mash the B button/Esc key, it will keep backing out, up to and including exiting the game if you press it on the main menu. I hate games that make me click 3 times and say "are you sure??" when I just want to quit the dang program.

  • Looking for an ebook reader (hardware) which doesn't hold a proprietary OS
  • Is there anything that still has side buttons and no touch screen? I'm still holding on to my old kindle 3rd gen (kindle keyboard) because I abhor touchscreens on my books.

    Ideally also with no backlight, or the ability to turn the backlight off.

  • From an urban planning perspective, what's the worst designed aspect of your city?
  • There's glass everywhere. In a few places, there's street sweeping, but mostly not. So unless you want to go vacuum/sweep up every bike lane you use (which I've seriously considered), bike tires really don't last very long.

  • How and why do you take notes?
  • I use it for all the reasons you've mentioned. I especially write down recommendations, ideas, thoughts that felt worth noticing, anything I think I'm going to forget that doesn't go on my calendar or somewhere else, and braindumping/processing my feelings.

    I use an app called Logseq, because it combines the things I wanted from some of the other main apps in one place, which none of the other apps manage to do all of:

    • Outliner structure like Notion or Roam or Workflowy lets you have (my brain requires this format when taking notes)
    • Super fast page linking search, which Notion kinda sucks at but others are better at
    • Data is stored on my computer, like Obsidian; not in the cloud. It's stored as markdown (ish) by default.
    • Automatic daily page created for each day, like Roam
    • Mobile app is almost 1-1 feature parity with the desktop app, like Notion
    • Open source (mostly)

    Logseq does have a moderate amount of rough edges, and has been frustrating from an open source perspective at times (I've had PRs linger for over a year before just getting rejected because they didn't want to bother with it), but it's still the one I like the most.

    FYI though syncing between devices with it is still pretty shaky. They have a native sync for $5/mo that is getting reasonably good, and is in beta. Syncing files via other means is kinda risky/not-great UX.

  • Signs You're A Good Or Bad Programmer
  • The main thing I encourage here is: If you're breaking up longer functions into more smaller ones that are really only used in this context, don't mix them into the same file as functions that are general use. It makes code super confusing to navigate. Speaking from experience on an open source project I contribute to.

  • What are your favorite video games that force you to pull out the pen and paper?

    Ever since the language puzzle in Tunic that got me to fill up 6 pocket sized pages of notes over multiple days while trying to puzzle it out as I tried to and, eventually, succeeded at translating the in-game "paper" manual, I've had a craving for games that force you to pull out a notebook and take notes/puzzle things out as part of the actual meta-gameplay mechanics, because the game doesn't just do that thinking for you.

    What other games are like this, even a little bit, that you've loved?

    And to be clear, I don't mean things like TTRPGs which are just inherently on paper. Those are cool and all, but aren't this thing. I want things that force me to engage my thinking beyond what the inputs of a controller and medium of a screen and my short-term memory alone can do for me.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PH
    Phoenix [she/they] @beehaw.org
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