Location: Toronto, Canada
Remote: Only
Willing to relocate: Not at this time
Technologies: Technical writer, editor, business writer
Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/torontowriter
Email: jonathan a cohen@gmail.com
I'm surprised there's only a single mention of RCA's Select-A-Vision. Basically a video record encased in a hard plastic sleeve that used a needle to read the analog data.
Clever concept, but doomed to failure by digital formats.
Location: Toronto, Canada
Remote: Only
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Writing, editing (if you want someone who doesn't sound like or use ChatGPT)
Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/torontowriter
Email: jonathanacohen@gmail.com
You sacrifice things - video games, TV, doomscrolling. There just isn't enough time to do all that and write. That's what most would-be writers are unwilling to give up.
I use Blogtrottr to get RSS clips for feeds by email. It's great for sites that are updated very infrequently, and you can choose the frequency of emails for a feed, from a daily digest to as-it-happens. Yes, there are ads in the free plan.
I agree that one shouldn't base one's self-worth on others, but often enough we rely on others for things that we want or need.
A job, friends, dating, a relationship - all of these are contingent on 'approval' from others in a sense. So being concerned about how employers, potential friends or partners view you is a natural thing. Unless you plan to live entirely separate from society, somehow.
If you find yourself an outlier to what others typically seek out, then it becomes a matter of whether you can find people and situations that accept your own offbeat, unique nature.
One of the reasons I get immediately turned off as soon as I see a service (VPNs, etc.) being offered with a "one-time lifetime subscription cost." Nope. Not going to happen. Either they'll change the terms down the line, shut down, or be acquired by someone else who'll change the terms.
With a monthly or yearly subscription, at least you can calculate how much you're spending per unit of time. For a 'lifetime' you have no idea how long that single purchase will be spread across.
Lifetime is easily calculated against the equivalent periodic subscription cost if both are offered. I don’t buy a lifetime subscription thinking I’ll be using it in 10 years. I purchase it thinking I’ll still be using it in 3 years, at which point it starts being free compared to the monthly.
Of course that’s not really relevant for digital assets like movies or anime, which I want to own, not rent.
BoingBoing frequently has sponsored offers for lifetime subscriptions to products. At this point I won't even click through and check out the periodic subscription cost. Any company offering a lifetime subscription ought to know by now the chances of such a thing lasting is small.
OK, so the things you don't like about it are effable rather than ineffable, but none of what you say changes that I do, in fact, like it[1].
To me, it's fine that it has no named characters, no dialog. One of the most grating things in plots with aliens is the names, no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky, or the Star Trek pattern giving us random apostrophes and internal capitalisation, where "Q'ting'pAh" could easily be either Klingon or Vulcan.
[1] Not all of the output of 4, like I said it's mostly bad, but that I like this particular result.
> no matter if they're American names like the spiders in A Deepness in the Sky
This is a bit of a tangent, but: you missed an important point in that book with some broad implications. Those weren't the spiders' names, those were the translators' deliberately humanized names for the spiders.
(And, to bring the discussion back home: no language model would have ever come up with a clever narrative trick like this.)
