A Gigabyte of RAM Should Do the Trick

I am forever fascinated by the craft of writing. I always have been. Even merely looking at photos of old typewriters is inspiring to me. I read that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a Hermes portable typewriter. In his words, it's "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field." By contrast, I heard an interview with Robert Ludlum where he explained that he used to type out his books, but resorted to writing on legal pads to hand off to a typist because he didn't want anything between him and his work. 

Here's a fun fact about typography. Once upon a time, it was customary to follow each period with two spaces. The reason for this has to do with typewriters not always striking the ribbon properly, potentially making a comma look like a full stop. The extra space is supposed to signal to the reader that the mark they've just read is in fact a period and not a comma. Nowadays, with the state of word processing being what it is, this is unnecessary. Now we've adopted this behavior in texting where ending a sentence with a period is seen as cold and unfeeling. Meanwhile, leaving the sentence hanging, so to speak, is taken as warm and inviting, encouraging the conversation to continue. 

As for my weapon of choice, I'm using a Logitech G413 Carbon mechanical keyboard hooked up to an Intel-based Mac mini with a mere 8 gigabytes of RAM. I don't know remember how big the hard drive is, maybe 256 gigabytes, but the most data intensive thing I even do on the Mac is SketchUp, and I haven't opened that program more than a half-dozen times since my job finally agreed to reimburse me for using it out of pocket all these years. I think the largest file I've ever created in SketchUp was about 20 megabytes, and that was because it used a custom texture I painted in Procreate on my iPad. Speaking of my iPad, keyboards are the primary reason I don't ever want a laptop again. I utterly despise their keyboards. They just don't feel right and they hurt my fingers after a while. It doesn't help that many are also exceedingly fragile, a problem I seem to recall Apple having with one of its MacBooks. I have a portable, bluetooth keyboard for my iPad I sometimes take with me when I go out. It has a kind of low-profile version of a mechanical switch. It marries the solid, tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard while also keeping a low profile in terms of its ergonomics. It's still no match for my G413, but it does well enough on its own. I have considered upgrading to something a little closer to my G413 in a portable package, but that may end up having to wait. Besides, I've written at length about it in a previous entry, so I'll try not repeating myself here. 

Really, I simply felt like typing something today. I wrote up a long Wordpress article a few days earlier, but there was a fair bit of copy and pasting there. For as long as it ended up being, I was able to write it up fairly quickly, since most of the counterpoints I was offering to the diatribe it was dissecting were old hat. It was practically instinctual, like when your predictive text is making all the right suggestions because its well-worn territory for your earlier discourses. 

It does give me quite a charge when I get into a good groove and can almost space out a little while I'm writing. The only issue is I tend to make a lot of mistakes. Auto-correct catches most of them, but it always makes me feel a little guilty when I lean on it too much. Once upon a time, unless you shelled out for some especially fancy typewriter, your options were limited in the backspace department. Your speed suffered, but your accuracy went up, and vice versa. Makes me wish there was still a good typing game out there I could drop into and hone my craft with. That one typing game I was eyeing some time ago has been delisted from the App Store, and Facebook games aren't exactly a thing anymore. I mean, they exist, but it's a very different landscape than when I played Bejeweled or something like that. It's more cluttered and overall has less variety than it appears. It's over-saturated and spread too thin is what's wrong with it. Searching for "typing" returns zero results. It's a shame, really.

Maybe it's all this internet discourse that's reduced our need for typing games. Now, we have keyboard warriors training themselves via online spats over various socio-political discussions and hot takes gone awry. I'm sure the rising of mobile platforms hasn't helped things much, either. More people interact using their smartphones than laptops or especially desktops, where that's more the realm of online gaming, MMO's and shooters and such. 

My Mac isn't exactly a gaming machine, but that's not why I got it. I needed something for SketchUp and Inkscape. It's more than adequate for that, though I'm wondering more recently if it's worth getting an upgraded Mac mini or simply going in whole hog on a new iPad. I wouldn't be able to bring my G413 with me, but I'd still have plenty of options for keyboards. The fact is I don't use Inkscape that much here as Affinity Designer is a very good vector drawing program. As for SketchUp, like I said, I don't use it very much at this point for my artwork. Of course, I'm making it sound like this is all going to be a decision I have to make soon. My Mac is holding up beautifully and my keyboard is great. I may get a new monitor, such as an ultra wide so I can have reference images off to the side while I work in Affinity Designer. 

Ideally, my monitor would be some kind of split-level affair, a normal-sized monitor up top for most conventional tasks, and a small, narrow, lower-res one just below it, about where I'd be looking at a sheet of paper in a typewriter. There are some "cyber deck" projects out there that are close to what I'm looking for, but I don't have the patience for such a project. I feel I would get too absorbed in the process and lose sight of the end goal. It would be the Ferrari Cameron's dad wipes down with a cloth diaper in his glass house. 

My keyboard at work is wearing down, certain letters completely worn away revealing the colored backlight. It certainly doesn't get used to anywhere near the extent as this one, but it isn't exactly a high end model anyway. There isn't any noticeable wear on the G413, not even a fuzzy edge on any of the letters. I think it's due to how the keycaps are made. Logitech recently got more back in stock, according to an e-mail alert I got some time ago. Maybe it's time to buy that backup I mentioned in a previous entry. 

My roommate is upset that she doesn't know what to get me for Christmas. My answer is always nothing, which flusters her. Maybe I'll move that one keyboard I added to my wishlist up a few tiers and start dropping some hints her way. 

If you made it this far, thank you for joining me on this little typing session/stream of consciousness. 

Logophobia

Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said that cutting the PBS subsidy from the federal budget was an act akin to deleting text files on a 500GB hard drive.
I just dug out an old 128MB flash drive I bought about ten years ago, and even with a few photos on it, barely 30MB has been used. The myriad of text files on it are probably not even a full megabyte.
I've been using DeviantART's Sta.sh Writer for the novella I'm working on, and it had been great up until just today, when I learned how utterly impractical it is. I remember writing something on an old Blackberry, a really terrible freeverse poem about nature vs. nurture, and having to open a new memo because more than a few hundred words threw its program into a tizzy. Before that, when I was writing  something on my old Mac in Simpletext, I had to split the story up into different files because the program couldn't handle a text file bigger than 12KB. I'm sure that's fine for an essay for middle school or even high school, but it seems monstrously unfair to anyone who wants to write anything longer. Yes, I can use another program, but why this aversion to large text files? Are people that afraid of novels?
Anyway, in completing a chapter just today, Sta.sh began showing me a bizarre and downright terrifying error message:

Someone else has edited this draft. 

Sta.sh is supposed to work like Google Drive in that the only people who can see your work are people with the URL for that particular file. There is always the possibility that someone could guess the URL possibly by typing random characters, the chances are astronomical to the point that a state lottery looks like a coin flip. As such, seeing this message stare back at me was horrifying; it meant someone was hacking my account. Worse yet, the view figures for the page reflected someone besides myself having seen the page once that day. I quickly went to my DeviantART profile and logged out of all other sessions, then logging out of the current one, just to be safe. Luckily, no other sessions that I didn't recognize showed up. I know that sometimes I get logged out of DeviantART and that my viewing figures will reflect this, so Sta.sh was no different. That said, I wasn't logged out, and nothing indicating a lapse revealed itself.
I put the error message in a search and found out, quite luckily, that this was not uncommon, with instances going back to the earliest months of the year. Apparently, if word of mouth is to be believed, Sta.sh Writer is not very fond of files reaching an excess of 64KB in size. This was a relief to hear, and it even matched my own data. When I'd finish writing something in Sta.sh, I'd copy and paste the text into another word program (namely Evernote and LibreOffice) for safekeeping. This is the only time I can see how big a file is, and sure enough it's been reaching the 64 mark. All this really means is that I have to move operations directly into one of the other word program, which isn't all that big of a problem, but there is a worry. It's one of those quirky little idiosyncratic behaviors that we're all prone to in some way, shape, or form.
When you work with a typewriter, even a more modern one with an LCD screen showing your first few sentences before committing them to paper (a buffer, of sorts), you have to think ahead, because you can't really go back. There's white-out and even some correct keys on certain models, but these feel like cheating, and often make weird noises or smell terribly, and just generally make your printed work look ragged and unrefined. You find yourself really mulling over every sentence before you put anything down. It's much the same for ink and paper; that's why essay questions on exams are often so taxing. Word processors fix a number of these problems, but have a few of their own added to the mix, if a little more intangible and hard to relate to in describing. You get used to how a word program works, the way it's laid out, the way the auto-save works, how the spell check picks up on certain quirks in your writing, and having to shift from one to the other can be very jarring, even affecting the way you write. Moving from a typewriter to a word processor means you can afford a few mistakes, but that can breed bad habits as well as hurting the quality of your sentences now that you're no longer turning each over in your head before putting fingers to keys.
I don't have much experience with LibreOffice, and I didn't get much use out of OpenOffice's writer, so a lot of its finer and innermost workings elude me. The biggest one is auto-save, something I've gotten far too spoiled by in recent years. I can remember writing a story on my old Mac IIsi, many years ago when I was still getting the hang of typing. I got into a real groove with what I was writing, staring down at the keys while frantically tapping away at them like Schroeder at his piano, only to look up and see that nothing I'd written made it to the screen. The program had frozen, and I was too busy looking down to see it. I was completely devastated, almost to tears. I knew right away that even if I could resume working right away (which I couldn't because I had to force quit the program and wait for it to boot up again), I'd never write exactly what I'd written before. Maybe that would have been for the best, giving me a chance to think about what I'd written a little more, but it was still a huge setback. Even now, I get nervous over similar problems with more modern programs, even ones with good auto-save, and find myself prone to small panic attacks when I get an error message telling me the sync operation has failed (even if it'll work perfectly well the next time it tries).
Maybe I just worry too much, but this is one of those things about working with text that haunts me when I write, more so than file formats and typesetting or anything like that. It's just so disconcerting that for all our technology, typewriters still hold so much superiority on account of their physicality and tangibility.