spcebar

Fun little single serve websites and side projects. Built a little graffiti wall a few years back which runs on my VPS and requires basically no attention.

XML is a good candidate, but actually overkill for the purposes I was looking to achieve. Basically, all I needed was character names are all caps, scene headings have hashes, and stage directions are free text. Put a handful of other niceties like title pages, casts, and page breaks, but never anything so complex it needed additional markup.

# INT. JOE'S BEDROOM, DAY.

JOE

This is my dialogue, yeehaw.

JOE exits, and we know JOE is exiting because this is a stage direction, and we know this is a stage direction because it is free text and doesn't satisfy any other formatting requirement.

Haha, yes, as I was finishing writing the parser, I stumbled upon Fountain and realized my genius idea for a markdown based playwriting format was not so original. Ended up adding some Fountain syntax to my parser and ultimately I built a very functional but not feature complete implementation of Fountain by accident.

I built sharing and (sort of) versioning into the web app. Everything is saved in localStorage and on a MySQL server. You can Save or Save As, and every time you Save As it inserts a new database row and gives you a new, sharable URL.

I wanted an experience where you didn't have to login to use it, but ultimately, having a way to keep track of all those URLs would actually be a pretty decent versioning system--add diff checking between script versions and you end up with something pretty handy.

Fun timing on this plaintext conversation. I built a little browser based plaintext playwriting app this weekend for a little weekend project. Found myself really hating 1. how clunk screenwriting software can be and 2. How unsharable the files are.

With plaintext you can hand the file off to anyone on any device--the caveat being absolutely no one wants to be handed a plaintext script. The software I used ten years ago to write plays is long since deprecated and those files are basically unopenable. Plaintext however remains.

Picked up Mint this summer and it has been a joy to use. The progress they've made in the last three years is astounding and opposed to every other time I've used Linux there have been zero moments of needing to run ten terminal commands from stack overflow to get sound to work.

Exactly. It's less important if customers are turned off by it. It's not signaling for consumers, it's signaling for the market.

Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with. Sometimes this is about societal expectations and pressure to conform to gender ideals, sometimes it is about the physical body you were born into/the primary and secondary sex attributes of that body, and often it's both. Hormone replacement therapy is a way of altering the body's secondary sexual attributes to reduce the dysphoria that is cause from the misalignment of ones sense of self and their body.

Doing HRT carries massive life long side effects, which doctors are required to inform patients about. In some places, it requires months of therapy and a doctor's signoff. While I'm sure there are people who have hormonal imbalances, and some of them have perceived gender dysphoria because of it, I find it very unlikely (or at least extremely uncommon) those people would then start taking hormones, given that you have to be _pretty sure_ you're trans before getting near hormones. It seems very unlikely that in the course of a dip in hormone levels where dysphoria was sudden the course of action would be to transition rather than to seek an endocrinologist for answers. If this were common, I would think detransition rates, which many studies have shown to be very low, would be far higher than they are.

Even with 15 years of gender dysphoria, it took me six months post coming out to feel ready to start the hormone conversation, and an additional three months with the prescription sitting in my cabinet before I was ready to actually start taking it. Like I said, my hormonal level baselines were normal for a male.

Edit, RE your edit:

> "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."

"Mess with my hormones" is a flippant and inaccurate way to describe a very difficult conversation trans people have with their doctors. You don't start hormones for fun and you don't start them because you're high on estrogen or testosterone. Hormones also don't make you "more of a girl." If you are a trans woman, you are a woman, regardless of whether you are on hormones, have had any kind of sex altering surgery, or have socially transitioned. You take hormones to bring your inward sense of identity outward and reduce the pain that comes from your sense of self not aligning with your appearance and the societal demands and expectations of your behavior.

The article is talking about the effects of these chemicals on infants breastfeeding and the effects on newborns.

While these are endocrine disrupting chemicals, people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced. The reason transgender people do hormone replacement therapies is so that they can change their hormonal balance. If these chemicals were making people trans, baseline blood tests, which you need to take when you start HRT, would tell different stories than they tell. N1, mine were normal, and this aligns with what others I know have experienced.

My guess is that there is an appearance of a greater number of gender diverse people today because culturally we've reached a point where we don't feel like we need to die with the secret of being transgender, rather than because there were proportionally that many fewer transgender people before.

What do you feel, as someone who likes VR, were Meta's big pitfalls, and what do you like about VRChat that you feel like Meta missed?

I wrote a blog post about exactly this in 2021 when the US was shutting down their 3G networks. https://benergize.com/2021/07/16/were-shutting-down-our-3g-n...

I had a OnePlus 3T and really didn't want to let it go (particularly because it DOES support VoLTE!) but ultimately got a Pixel 4 and have been using it since.

These are super funny, I hope you continue doing them. Clearly a deep understanding and appreciation of the culture here goes into it.

It's getting very hard. At this point, lyrics are the biggest giveaway. AI generated lyrics are always awful and the delivery feels very stilted.

A fun little functional language where everything is a parameter in a glorious cascade of functions from a parent function. It's called OAF (Oops All Functions).

Tangentially, if you enjoy The Great Gatsby, you might also enjoy All The King's Men, which is a work of fiction that I think similarly richly described a swath of the American experience.

As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.

I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).

I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.

A hobby language called OAF (Oops All Functions). Everything is an argument of a parent function PROGRAM. It's very cursed but it's now fully competent as a general purpose language.

The exciting AI ending. When all the companies selling boondoggles fire their employees, who is left with money to buy the boondoggles?

I believe they are saying that this update will remove the ability to decide if you want to install it and will require developers to register and pay for their applications to be installable at all. It's been several years since I developed for Mac, but they operated a similar way, secretly marking a file as quarantined and saying "XYZ Is Damaged and Can’t Be Opened. You Should Move It To The Trash" if you didn't pay to play. Maybe this has since changed, or maybe I'm just a dummy. Regardless, whether a platform has any business funneling a user into their walled garden is another philosophical argument altogether.

If you're interested in learning morse, there's a great app for Android, "Morse Mania: Learn Morse Code" from which I learned. It's surprisingly easy to pick up the basics but requires a good bit of practice to be able to parse it in real time.

I would imagine not very much? The people buying vinyl are buying as a collectors item or because of its audio qualities. It's very easy to accidentally listen to something that's AI generated, you have to very actively purchase a vinyl. It also costs virtually nothing to get music on Spotify but is relatively expensive to get anything on vinyl.

I should start by saying that I find ads incredibly irritating in any form. That said, Miele and DeLonghi are both more than a hundred year old companies. Maybe they don't need to advertise because they have such solidly establish brand identities, but they do advertise and they have advertised throughout their history as companies. Ads are a way of maintaining brand awareness, introducing new products, and creating demand. Even if you have an incredibly solid product with good word of mouth there is still benefit to advertising it.

Having worked in the world of e-commerce, there are genuinely good companies run by good people making genuinely good products that no one knows about, and one of the ways they try and get people to know about their products is advertising. In one case, this is a product that replaced something already in your home, it's materially better, and it's materially cheaper in the long term. How do you create an ad for that that doesn't sound like a lie?

I nearly gave up on Din Don Dan, but if you're on Android you can use media controls to skip to the end of the song and you'll only have to get a few notes right. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and it's ironic that for many CAPTCHAs, AI is now far more capable than humans at completing them .

It's very weirdly worded. Clearer would be: A type of frog which was once used as pregnancy test escaped and colonoised Wales for 50 years.

Direct link to the CDC page with a list of eligible underlying conditions, (as linked in the article): https://www.cdc.gov/covid/risk-factors/index.html

They describe the ban in the article. Kids put their phone in pouches at the start of school and get them back at the end of the day. They say they're magnetic, I assume that describes some kind of lock or means to prevent use.

Nature is healing. Glad to see this. I was in high school when smart phones really became widespread, and was personally still on a flip phone most of the way through. I think there's something healthy to the boredom the kids describe, which ultimately leads to socialization and introspection. 24/7 social media seems like a very destructive portal to isolation, and having a reprieve from that, if only a few hours a day, seems like a great thing.

At least in the world of web, cursive is a typographic term referring to fonts that aren't sans or sans serif and are typically used for decorative purposes.

The world gets hotter, political control of nations continues to flip back and forth between conservative and progressive ideologies, Koreas don't unify, water shortages intensify, year of the Linux desktop.

It definitely depends on what you're looking for. I'm very happy with extremely low-key, cozy, and quiet. There are trains that have lectures and good meals (the trans Canadian railway!) but not Amtrak as far as I'm aware.

Rail is my favorite way to travel. Going to sleep at night with the country going by is one of the finest feelings imaginable in life, little towns with lights on in empty public squares, just one of my absolute favorite things. And you wake up in endless fields or breathtaking views of canyons and mountains. The people are friendly and you meet new ones at every meal. The sleeper accommodations aren't exactly the Ritz, but they're cozy and comfortable and good for reading or writing or just sitting and looking out the window for hours. Coffee is plentiful and decent, meals are probably microwaved but served on white tablecloths. Cruises give me a feeling of disconnectedness. You're on endless waves, endless sea, in the middle of nowhere. On the train, even going through a desert you feel like you're in the moving center of the world and every stop you could get off and be in a town you'd never heard of that means something to someone. You feel like you're a part of the grand and forgotten history that built the country.