Something Different
Here I stand at the crossroads
I can see the four winds
The wind of the north, bringing a chill on it's breath
The wind of the east, with the stories of the travelers
The wind of the south, with a warm and pleasant smell
And the wind of the west, with rumors of things to come
The winds from the four corners, they meet here
Speak to each other
They do not speak to me
I am just the wanderer, they think
I have no need for the voices of the winds
Foolish thoughts
I am a wander, yes, but where I go
Light follows
I carry color to people whose worlds are grey
I carry vibrance to the towns that lie in obscurity
I go, and brilliance follows, but the winds do not know
So I stand ignored
I, who called them here
In the end they part ways, with no notice of me
I still stand, at a loss
But I must go still
Carry the stories forth
Just without the ones from the wind
Tags: new_alexandria regularspelling writing
A Wrong Turn, Somewhere...
So, after I created this site, I altered my MSN title to contain information about it. I changed it to "The Anaconda - RegularSpelling.com"
Except replace "RegularSpelling.com" with "NormalSpelling.com"
I'm not quite sure how it happened, nor am I sure why I didn't notice it. It was noticed by a couple others on my list that have come here, but they never told me.
They suck.
Anyway, I made a few changes on here yesterday. First, I added an e-mail address, so you can e-mail me if you want. I'd prefer you comment or say something on the AnacondaSoftware forums, but if you don't want to do either of those, there's another option available. In addition, I changed the number of entries displayed on the front page (which was previously all of them, which made the page really long), and altered the archives from monthly to weekly. That should make it easier to navigate around as more and more entries are created. I like keeping things organized.
In fact, as I type this, I'm working on organizing ideas for Skewed and other works of mine in a mini wiki, running off my flash drive. Found a neat project on Sourceforge called Wiki-In-A-Jar that runs a micro web server in Java, hosting a small wiki. I organize AnacondaSoftware project ideas and information in a much larger MediaWiki wiki, and really like the way wiki's work. Because this one is simple, doesn't require installing anything, and is a snap to set up, I really like this one.
Tags: anecdote internet regularspelling wiki
Recommended Misspelling
Google owns the internet.
But we already knew that. Google has become synonymous with "search". Google has a plethora of tools for getting stuff done. Google Toolbar has built in bookmarks for accessing things anywhere, a built in spell check (which is greatly needed by many people). Personalized Google (excuse me, iGoogle) gives you all sorts of things to make the information you want easy to access. It's even got a utility for managing your files, easy to find them too. And to think they started as just a simple keyword search based engine.
Which they still are, at the core. And its interesting to see some of the hits that come off the site, which are passed when you click on a link for statistic logging software, like AWStats, to log. Which means, every so often you get some interesting, and sometimes perplexing hits from the search results.
Around AnacondaSoftware I get some interesting hits. One more recent hit thats perplexed me is "i think everyone hates me disorder". I mean, what kind of search is that? And, does that really qualify as a disorder? That sounds more like just a low self-esteem problem, and a shallow perception of what other people think of you.
Sometimes it puts together unrelated discussions to form a hit, which isn't necessarily a useful hit, such as a discussion about Skype and a photoshop of Cubia from .hack I did out of boredom linking together in the search term "skype system recovered from serious error". Other times my discussions of news when it first comes out caused a number of hits, like when .hack GU was first announced and pictures of it started to roll out. Other interesting hits I've gotten over the course of the last few years have been related to computers I own, or other things I own which I've talked about either on the main site or on the forum. Among the ones which make less sense how they could link to there, or rather why people would follow results to there, are: "mack jagger and new girlfriend", "rumours spread faster", "how do endospores help humanity", "karp the killing fish grrr", and "tunnel boaring machines gallery".
The DevBlog gets very little search result logs, but a lot of traffic. I've discussed this there with numbers, and I'll post more numbers about that in the future so I won't discuss it here. This blog is rather new, so there's little in the logs that link here, mostly just the terms "regular spelling", and one hit for "name spelling of daniel". All in all, its quite an intriguing thing to see the kinds of links a machine makes in our language.
But for the person who went all the way to page five of the Google search to find this site using the search term "1995 mercury sable gs speedometer problems": Hope you get your problem taken care of, I really like my Sables.
Tags: internet spelling website_design
Listen To What I'm Thinking
Text is plain. Emotions can't be portrayed very well with text alone, especially in just speech text. Forums, email and chats are where these problems particularly play out. I find it odd that offense can be easily taken with such mediums. As emotions cannot be portrayed in such ways, everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, time and time again I see someone getting mad over something said, in jest, when the meaning was read wrong.
That's why smilies were created, and that's their primary use. If you're sad, you put a frowning face. If youre happy, you put a frowning face. If you're a lion, you put a >:3 face. Forums with graphic smilies allow for even more portrayals, as they'll often show things not easy to type in text characters alone. Even then, though, even in situations where sarcasm and jest is expected, they're still needed in large numbers.
There's an older saying on Notebook Forums that goes "a smilie to soften the blow". It was created after the obvious inclusion of smilies to indicate sarcasm didn't become so obvious to some members, so it was tacked on to point it out. Still, its a creed forgotten from time to time, and every now and again people need to be reminded that not everything said on the internet is meant as it sounds.
Tags: internet linguistic
Description and Direction
Most of the time I plan out things in a script format. I have stories told by the characters, with conversations between characters explaining the situation. Anyone reading HEHEHEE The Story on the AnacondaSoftware forums should be quite familiar with this writing style, since that's how the story takes place. The rest of the time, when I write out descriptions of things, I write them in a report format, like a paper. I prefer to plan things out visually, but when I don't have the time to focus on planning visual settings I let my thought process drive characters in conversation to explain situations.
Going back to Skewed from the last entry, this explains the problem I have. I started writing Skewed in 2004, almost 3 years ago now. I write it in chunks, one at a time, in a linear fashion. I don't usually plan things out in a linear fashion, I'll jump back and forth working on different ideas for different times, which is why its such a struggle to consistently update Skewed over the years. And, in addition to writing it out, If you read through the story though you will see me struggling with description. I'll resort to direction, not description, to carry forth the story. Conversations between characters, characters thinking to themselves, characters talking to themselves. There are several points that you'll see my attempt at description failing entirely, a few places with monologues. I'm not too pleased with those parts, because my goal for Skewed is to try and be descriptive. I've built a rather unusual world there, one thats not easy to picture without good description. Yet, when I fail to provide good enough description for what I'm directing, I fail to fulfill my duties as the Author.
When I was in high school, I had an English teacher named Mr. Thompson (don't remember his full name right now, but he's a fairly young English teacher at Skyline High School here in Utah). I had him two different years, for two different classes. He didn't particularly use any set material, because it was hard for him to get his classes to focus on things to learn. instead, one year, he decided to rewrite things from scratch, writing an entire curriculum from various English resources on the internet. Most of this class was on improving writing skills and quality, and was a class I enjoyed very much. The first focus of the class were five sentence writing fragments for increasing sentence complexity, tricks which I had used occasionally in my writing, but not often, and didn't even know they had names to be considered tricks. Altogether, the entire class material was in a very large packet of printed materials, which, due to the size of the thing, he ended up having to charge students who lost it to replace to cover the costs of the paper.
Because of my forgetting things from this packet, my prose writing skills are deteriorating, and which is why I'm not happy with the way parts of Skewed have turned out. I might still have this packet. I thought it had been thrown away long ago, much to my dismay, but if I recall correctly, somewhere within the last few months I found it while reorganizing some things. If i find it, I'll go through some of the things from it here.
Tags: anecdote linguistic skewed ties_to_infinity writing