Coffee. Hot and keep it coming.
Daily writing = this is necessary
February 21, 2024
This is the prompt that never ends…
February 13, 2024
“I’ll take ‘Barely Surviving’ for $100, Alec.”
From C64 to Mac Plus – All Hail the ’80s PC Geeks!
February 1, 2024
My father got a Commodore 64 (“C64”) in the early ’80s and I learned how to type on it. Not sure exactly when, but at some point in probably 1986 or 1987 I had saved up enough to get one of my own.
Green monitor. No color. The only computer wherein the disc drive would argue with the CPU (bc the disc drive also had a CPU of sorts). 5 1/4″ floppies. Constantly switching discs in and out to load programs.
I created music (a maximum of four different sounds at a time). Learned BASIC and “machine language” and created very simple programs by copying endless pages of code from a magazine my father subscribed to (he also joined Commodore Users Group, or CUG, and got software to teach us how to type, how to write prose, and how to create family newsletters, all of which led me to eventually run my college newspaper in the early ’90s).
I played endless hours of Bard’s Tale, “Summer/Winter/World Olympic Games” (so old that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page for this series), “Sid Meier’s Pirates!,” and Strat-o-Matic baseball games (I had played the 1983 season with my father on paper, then got the 1985 season and input all the data by hand into the C64 program).
Having used my mom’s (and grandfather’s) manual typewriter for junior high school essays, I found it much easier to use the C64 to typed all my high school essays, which were printed out on my dad’s dot-matrix printer with the connected paper sheets. (I had a lot of fun separating the sheets and tearing off the hole feed strips on either side of the papers.)
I later got a C128 in college before borrowing a friend’s Mac Plus to write my senior project (our version of an undergraduate thesis).
And of course wasted hours and hours on the first version of Civilization (any Civ fans out there?).
See, back then, people like me were endlessly mocked as “computer nerds” and “geeks.”
And now you all have a tiny handheld computer that you carry around and play with 24/7.
Welcome, fellow nerds! We took over the world! Hah!
Dear Diary – August 19, 2004
September 23, 2023
[Note to self – it’s probably not a coincidence that so many of my better diary entries were written in August. I obviously have more time to think and write at that time of year!]
What strange turns my life has taken. Never would I have in a million years expected to be here, now, in this apartment, typing on an extended keyboard into a Japanese computer, in a Japanese city, listening to the same Cure tape I was listening to back in 1996. Has it actually been 8 years?
Ten years ago I was playing role playing games and drinking in Robbins lounge, getting ready to pack everything I owned into a moving van to move to Ann Arbor. A city I didn’t know, with no money for deposit or rent, or a job. Without a clue. Totally hopeless. Instead of exploring the city, I stayed in my bedroom and played games or typed. What was I thinking? I can’t even get in touch with the few people I met there. Even the ones I knew at ND are either gone back where they came from or no longer answer my emails.
I can still picture them all in my mind. I can still see the rooms I lived in, all the way back home. Even the freshman dorm room which no longer exists, since they tore the building down. How can that be?
It must be this which makes us human; the ability to take the visual and turn it into mental. The capacity to make emotional connections between the world outside and the world inside. The belief that there are two worlds. This makes us human, and at the same time it makes us separate. It is a false belief, that we are not of the outside. Yet there is no returning. Once we start, we can never stop. Even changing languages doesn’t help. We merely start over again from a new perspective, still outside the outside.
Dear Diary – May 19, 2001
September 15, 2023
A story must be more than merely a story. It must be an examination, of the human heart, of the mind, of the spirit. Of experience and existence. A simple recapitulation of one’s personal past or the delusional suffering of a dysfunctional suburban American family have no merit. Overcoming the reality we believe we live in, debunking fiction and elevating the truth, that is worthwhile.
On beauty
September 14, 2023
“Ad pulchritudinem tria requirunter:
integritas, consonantia, claritas”
“Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony, radiance.”
(as translated by “Stephen,” i.e., James Joyce.)
Or more simply integrity, consonance, clarity.
Note that the original is a bit longer, in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica:
Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: Primo quidem integritas sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas.
Language = Power; Censorship = Fragile Ego
September 9, 2023
The short story accused of violating the national security law, “Our Time,” is set in a dystopian 2050. It tells of an authoritarian future in which vast swaths of Hong Kong history have been erased from both the city’s structures and the public consciousness, and all aspects of life are subsumed under the Chinese Communist Party.
https://qz.com/hong-kong-s-new-public-enemy-the-cantonese-language-1850780591
I’m not sure this is science fiction. Seems more like reality.
Every political entity wants power. When people resist being controlled, and they use a dialect or another form of the “official” language, those in charge try to eliminate the language of resistance.
When people write about a dystopian future in which they have no right to their own language, customs, ways of thinking and behaving, and political representation — and those in charge respond by banning the fiction — it really only shows the reality. And the reality is this:
Those in charge have small, frail, male egos that need constant stroking. Poor frail eggshell minds.
Language is power, because language is identity. Those in charge are always afraid of losing control over all three. And whenever they respond this way, they always get exactly the opposite of what they want.
Dear Diary – August 2, 1996
September 8, 2023
The lecture about Irish folk songs [note: at the time, I was in the Gaeltacht, west of Galway, learning Irish language] last night, two nights ago, whichever (time has no meaning in this place), was wrong. Why do we write, the léachtóir asked; to communicate; the poet wants to communicate.
No.
That is not why I write. Sometimes I write for fun, to play at words, to play with feelings. Sometimes I try to work out my problems myself in writing (I can’t). Sometimes I write just to relieve tension. Sometimes I write because I have to, because if I don’t get these words out of me and onto paper they’ll rip their way out.
Dear Diary – October 5, 2003
September 5, 2023
Today I talked to virtually no one for the first time in quite a while. It’s almost like meditation. Reminds me of what L said when we were out drinking Friday night (as usual). She and G were talking about scuba diving, about how being underwater hearing only your own breath and hardly being able to see anything unless it’s right in front of you gives you a feeling of being alone in the universe, a feeling of vulnerability and isolation, of insignificance. I commented, “That’s just like meditation.” No reaction.
I don’t need to go scuba diving in the Philippines to experience such a feeling.
Dear Diary – January 4, 2019
August 31, 2023
It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
When you believe in a lie, you fool yourself. When you say it with conviction, you fool others.
Get enough people fooled, and you got yourself a new religion.
M Thomas Apple Author Page 