noise."State of the author: November? · 2:16am Nov 14th, 2020
Maybe it’s post-election jitters, maybe it’s the time change, maybe it’s the seasonal change, something else . . .
Point is that I’ve been sleeping more than I usually do and writing less than I usually do.
I’ve also been slower on comment replies than I usually am; I’ve got like a billion tabs open on Chrome and I’ll get to ‘em sooner or later, I promise.
Also, fair warning, since I made a sideways mention of politics above, remember the disapproving batpony and comport yourselves appropriately. *
I am still working on projects. Maybe not the one you’re waiting for, but work is progressing apace. Likely no new stories in the immediate future, but other in-progress works are being worked on in a byzantine manner.
I also seem to have missed my FimFic anniversary, so to catch up on that it’s the eight-year celebration of me going live, yay! That was on my to-do list, but I slept through it. 
Such is life.
Hard to believe after a hundred years of 2020 we’re nearing the end. At the shop, things dropped off in the last couple weeks, but in terms of our yearly production it hardly matters. Numbers-wise, we’ve got to do an oil change or two in the next few weeks and we’ll have our best year ever--in fact, if we decided to not show up for the rest of 2020 (which, I have been reliably informed, is only three more years), we’d be in our top five years in terms of sales. And that’s assuming that the village doesn’t pay for the new hydraulic lines and brake lines on their dump truck . . . if they do, we’re already at the number 2 spot, I think.
Earlier I said that I’d been thinking, and I’ve got some new ideas as we go forward, but they’ll involve teaching an old dog (me) new tricks. . . .
MSPiper mentioned on one of my fics (in the editing bay) that maybe I could program a keyboard shortcut or use alt+number pad combos to put proper em dashes in a story that he’s proofing, and he’s not wrong, I could, but the way I’m doing it now has been working for me thus far so why should I change?
[FWIW, I’ve got an autofill shortcut in gDocs, but I don’t use gDocs to compose; I typically use FocusWriter which comes with all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a free word-processor (and blog posts are often composed in FimFic’s ‘editor’); back in Ye Olde Times I did know most of the alt+ codes for weird characters but that was the 90s and I also know how to put in proper em dashes with an actual typewriter . . . point is, I could maybe use some remedial education (and I know at least one of my readers’ll either know it at the drop of a hat or be able to google it faster than I can, so. . . .)
[I should also mention that while I got out of the habit of indenting new paragraphs, double-space after a period is too ingrained, and I usually ctrl+f ‘em out before publication.]
At the same time that I’m grumbling about changing the way I write (not gonna learn Devorak, sorry Trick Question), I work in an industry where I’m learning or doing something new practically every week, and I have watched any number of techs drive themselves to employment extinction by refusing to learn about computer-controlled engines or CAN busses or any of the other things that real-world automobiles now come with. Technology evolves at a rapidly-increasing pace . . . when I penned my first novel, I couldn’t have imagined how in the not-so-distant future, updates would be practically instant, and feedback would not come by USPS.
Going back to school and hunting season are kinda slow times for us some years. Manager takes off early so he can go out in the woods and not shoot Bambi**, and many of our customers are doing the same. Some days are boring; some days I pace the shop in search of work and there’s only so many gallons of coolant one pony can mix. I got out of work early today and frittered away most of the extra time I had watching Among Us playthroughs instead of doing something really productive, like writing a new chapter of <fic you wish was updating> or taking the wheels off my Impala in preparation for scrapping it.
Wanna buy an Impala? Cheap, it might even still run. Dunno, haven’t tried in a couple years, but it ran when it was parked.
Going back to where I led, I’ve often said that I’ve never had writer’s block, and this vague null period is no exception. I’ve got plenty of ideas, and all of y’all sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for updates know that I’m not lacking in projects. It’s just that my current mood is ‘who moved my cheese,’ and I’m scrambling to get back to normal mode.
So I will hold off on predicting what I’ll update/publish next, ‘cause at this moment in time I legit have no idea. Fear not, though, dear readers; I’ve got a couple cheese-shifting ideas in my head, and I’ve thought to the future enough that I’ve got a fresh new toner cartridge for my printer on standby.
Source
___________________________
*I can paste that in the comments for days.
**My own technique for ‘hunting’ is hit them from the comfort of my van. It’s super-effective.
Also forgot to put in the blog post; any of y’all got a recommendation for cheap/free video editing software for a luddite?
When I saw that sentence, I was mildly surprised not to see the word "people" after the word "village", especially considering the things I've read in your prior blogs.
I don't recall the alt-code with perfect certainty,
but I think you're looking for alt+2014(ctrl+shift+u+2014 works as unicode input) for an em dash, with the en dash being ±1 most likely. I remapped capslock to be a compose key for this purpose (and to disable capslock), so what I type is Caps+--- for an em dash and Caps+--. for an en dash. (And Caps+:) for a ☺. It's usually somewhat intuitive.)Edit: As pointed out in the responses to this comment, it's actually alt+0150 for en dashes and alt+0151 for em dashes.
5397784
I know a bunch of people who use Blender (best known for its 3D modelling and animation capabilities), of all things, as a video editor. I have never had the need so I do not know how. It is free, though.
Turns out the SMS text prediction engine on my cheap smartphone uses double space to automatically enter full stop, change to upper case. Its even managed to predict some next words. Correctly as well.
I always enjoy the pictures in your blog posts, but today’s were especially cute.
I used to use Shotcut, because it worked on my potato laptop, but I had to save after every change.
Seasonal depression and DST ending. Wanting to sleep more is natural for creatures of the north.
Exercise, take some cod oil and maybe blue light.
5397784
Windows movie maker. It does the basics well enough if your not after anything super fancy. Its "discontinued" but still seems to be available.
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For simple transformations like cropping and transcoding, Avidemux or Handbrake work fine.
For more advanced stuff, one of the Cinelerra forks.
With how busy your 2020 has been you do deserve some time for yourself. May 2021 not be a repeat of 2020.
NO LOWBALLERS. I KNOW WHAT I HAVE.
...Speaking of writing, I ended up starting work on a PoE story. Me, who fairly recently was rolling his eyes at the whole genre! I blame this entirely on you and your stories and will let everyone know who to
blamethank if I end up publishing the darned thing.Harlan Ellison said "Asimov had writer's block once. It was the worst 2 hours of his life."
For those too young to remember
Asimov had over 500 books published. (Depending on who you ask.) He had at least 1 book published in every major category of the Dewey Decimal system .His works included Science Popularizations, a Biochemistry textbook, annotations of several books of the Bible, poetry, mysteries, Sci-fi (invented the Three Laws of Robotics & psychohistory (the Foundation novels)), a novelization of the movie Fantastic Voyage, an autobiography, and edited numerous anthologies.
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Handbreak is fine for very simple stuff, but if you're planning on editing on a regular/continuing basis, go for Blender. It's primarily 3D software, but it has a very good video editor as well. It's not exactly intuitive and has a steep learning curve, but there are tons of instructional videos out there.
Several years back, Significant Other and I had a deer "hunt" itself, jumping off an embankment and whacking right down into the passenger side of our truck. A metre or so further forward and it probably would have done me an injury. Left a nasty dent in the side and broke a window.
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ffmpeg is a very powerful tool but it entirely depends upon command line scripting for all of its effects; it has no GUI. It is still incredibly fast for the more simple operations such as crops, mutes, adding music or joining stuff tho, since unlike most editors you can program it to push the media bytes around without doing any encoding/rendering.
I use kdenlive when I don't have time to mess around with scripting in ffmpeg. It has most of your basic video editor features and it's "free and open source" community made.
Blender, which is ALSO "free and open source" community made, is for more powerful configurations and is capable of both the simple stuff such as cropping, cutting and aligning, as well as more advanced stuff such as 2D animations, 3D effects, overlays. It can even be configured to offload all the heavy lifting to a server cluster. It's downside is that it is more of a graphics engine with a ton of different "interface profiles" (for different workloads) bolted on the side than a program purpose made for editing from the ground up, but they have improved the UI a lot in recent years.
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I use Option+Shift+- for the em-dash (AltR+shift+- on Linux).
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What OS do you use?
you reply to more comments than anyone I know on this site, don't worry about it.
same. I'm not changing either. I've had people tell me I should stop, I tell them I'm not doing it.
That last picture is adorable by the way. I've never mentioned it, but I love the pictures you always put in your blogs. It really hits the spot after a tough day when I get them.
5397864 My brother did that with a dog and his precious Mustang. Dumb dog decided to chase the car and can barreling out at maximum velocity through an area where he could not see the car. My brother had slowed down because he saw the dog earlier. Dog rams into the passenger side of the car hard enough to cave in the door and break its neck. Neighbor blamed my brother. Brother asked him to explain how he was driving his car sideways down the gravel road. Nothing came of it.
5397833 I think I own about a third of them, in various boxes.
5397797 I had to dig through about three bogus websites before I found a valid copy, because I wanted to do an extremely simple video, and the software available was either A) Pay us a bazillion bucks or B) Free and doesn't do anything.
For typing special characters, on my Win 10 PC I've been using the "emoji keyboard" which has a symbol section (denoted by an Ω) with "recently used" symbols up front in the section. It is brought up with the win+. (Windows key and period key) keyboard shortcut.
Admittedly, at that point you're gonna have to switch to the mouse, so maybe not the best option. And it may not be available on earlier windows versions.
It’s me. I’m the disapproving batpony.
Are we talking about the animal, or some sort of vehicle? If it's the former yes I'd buy one, although if you've not let it run about for several years then you are a very cruel man.
I mean, you don't have to, but given how many dashes you use it seems like it wouldn't hurt. For example, as it currently stands the section that prompted that question has 9 dashes in a span of 1300 words, and while that's higher than your usual average it's not that much higher. Multiply that by your usual authorial output and that's a lot of chances for typos that are easy to make but not so easy to catch. While I suppose it could be different in your case, my personal experience has been that putting the proper dashes in during the initial writing process is a pretty painless way to eliminate that risk.
...And also, it would guarantee that the final dashes are present before the first prereading pass, so I wouldn't be compelled to mark them all for fixing and could focus more on the actual prereading. Admittedly that could also be accomplished by using find&replace first, but given that the subject's up for discussion in the first place that's obviously not always going to actually happen.
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The requisite combination does appear to vary with the computer setup in use. For Windows 10 (and I'm pretty sure at least the previous few versions?) it's alt+0151 for em dashes and alt +0150 for en dashes.
5397884
Yeah, given how many dashes tend to show up in Admiral Biscuit stories, having to slow down by using the mouse every time probably wouldn't work out well. However, that is an excellent way to find symbols that you only need on rare occasion (especially if you can't remember what they're called) and I didn't remember the shortcut, so I appreciate the reminder!
5397784
Lightworks is worth taking a look at. They have some nice tutorials on their website. I'd recommend to keep the 19th century English textile workers away from it, though.
Blender is great and all, but unless you've taken an interest in 3d modelling, don't use it for this.
If it works, and in your estimations as a mechanic doesn’t have any major issues, possibly. How far from Chicago are you?
5397784
Hmmm. A really good one is DaVinci Resolve, but it's definitely not for Luddites! High end pro stuff. The company behind it is mainly pro hardware (video mixer boards and cameras) and I think Resolve is their gateway drug.
Kdenlive is popular for open source. Tried it a few years ago and it was kinda buggy but maybe it's improved now. Not sure if there's a Windows version.
Probably not helpful right now, but Humble Bundle often has a bundle with a couple versions old Vegas Pro. That's what I use. Pretty powerful but not too steep of a learning curve. Don't think they have that bundle right now tho.
I really miss Serif Software's Movie Plus. Fairly cheap, easy to use. They had a whole suite of great stuff, but they dropped it all to focus on a single drawing program. Not sure if you can still find it anywhere but if so I'd really recommend it.
Oh, sorry about the missed anniversary; happy belated one!
Glad work's going well for you.
"double-space after a period is too ingrained, and I usually ctrl+f ‘em out before publication"
...Why? What's wrong with two spaces after a period?
(Though, er. I'm pretty sure FIMFiction automatically removes or doesn't display them as double spaces whether they're there in the initial text or not. I suppose I could be wrong?)
...Who moved my cheese? I think I'm missing a reference there, sorry. Unless I'm supposed to just be confused? That seems like it'd potentially make sense in context...
Anyway, thanks for the update, and good luck with things in general. :)
Why bother remembering numbers?
If you're on Windows as something like 95% of people are, do the Windows version of what I do. Install something like WinCompose which gives typewriter-like composition. (I'm on Linux where Compose key support comes built-in and I mapped RightCtrl to Compose so I can type → as [Compose][-][>].)
If you're on Mac, this post was mentioned on Wikipedia.
5397789
Nah, man. It's Alt+0150 and Alt+0151 for the Windows alt-codes for the em- and en-dashes (though it's a little hard to remember which is which when I'm not at-keyboard).
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https://xkcd.com/1209/
https://xkcd.com/1137/
https://xkcd.com/2109/
5397919
I've never seriously used alt codes because I left Windows behind a while ago.
5398040
So, yeah, I find it a lot easier to remember correctly once I've been corrected.
5397985 shares my solution basically exactly aside from which key we chose to remap. (And now I don't have to dig up a link to WinCompose.)
- yeah, you tend to be very reliable pony, and not just on this front!
On video editors - I mostly monkeying around with CinelerraGG (but we sadly lost our main and ~only developer lately :( ) BUT this is basically Linux-only software (it may run on FreeBSD, and just for laughs GG once compiled and run it on Windows 10. But it was one-time trick).
Few other editors (cross-platform):
Shotcut
Openshot
Flowblade
Video formats tend to vary wildly, so while one editor may work best for some files it may fail for others.
There is also Olive but it seems to be in state of total rewrite .....
It is good to read that other businesses are thriving as well. 2020 will be our best year since the founding around 10 years ago. The company got 4 new employees in 2020 (now we are around 20 people).
Covid wise Austria really messed up badly over the summer and we currently have a huge second wave. So starting tuesday we will be in a hard lock down again. Businesses will be closed again. Schools are closed. Meh ... Our 1st full lockdown in March went so well, that we really got the numbers down and had a nice summer - but people got cocky and dumb - now we are paying the price. I think currently we are "world-leader" in new cases per 100.000 people per 7 days :(
From "yeah!" to "fuck!" in just some weeks. People really don't understand what exponential growth really means.
excited for 2020 to be over and for 2021 to be even worse. i dont have high hopes for this decade. shits absolutely fucked in britain atm lol
honestly dont know any business that is doing well where i am aside from maybe amazon lol but. it is nice to know that its not just megacorps that are raking in money
free/cheap decent video editing programs? good question, one i want to know the answer to myself lol. adobe premiere/after effects are nice but uh. yeah
5397786
Ah, man, that was a missed opportunity; I could have called them that.
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I’m not sure that any of them work for one of my writing programs--Focuswriter (it also doesn’t translate across formatting into gDocs.) I don’t have a mappable keyboard AFAIK--my old one was, but I wore it out.
That does work in FimFic’s editor, so as long as I remember, I can put proper em dashes in my blog posts.
I also know some people who use it for 3D stuff. I figure it’s going to be a learning curve no matter what I wind up using.
5397790
Mine does that, too. Which is sometimes great and sometimes not, depends on what I’m trying to write. It also autocorrects lots of words, which isn’t so great for some things I use it for.
5397791
Thank you!
Yeah, I’ve got an underpowered machine, too, so something that’s not processor heavy would be better.
5397795
Yeah, I’m sure those are factors.
Blue light, I’ve got. Plenty of it, in fact.
5397797
Huh, I might give that a go. It might even be on my machine, and Windows programs tend to be pretty intuitive.
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It would totally have to be simple, I’m approaching this with the skill level of knowing what a movie is, and that said movies can be put on YouTube.
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I really, really, hope 2021 isn’t a repeat of 2020.
At least I’ve got a few days off to rest up and recharge.
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Hey, it can be a good genre, that was kind of the idea of the contest. And I’m willing to accept the blame, and look forward to it!
5397831
Yeah, pretty much.
5397833
That sounds about right. Asimov wrote a lot.
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The steep learning curve scares me, to be honest. (And if this machine is up to the task, or if I’ll have to replace it.)
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I had two of them crash into the side of my van one time. Luckily, they hadn’t gotten up much speed yet, so they didn’t do any damage. Maybe some fresh dents, but the van already had so many, it was unnoticeable.
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Those sound like programs I’d struggle with (I’m still struggling with keyboard shortcuts to put em dashes in, and I use those a lot.)
Blender certainly might be worth a try, though; a lot of ya’ll are recommending it.
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Windows 10
The alt + 0151 works in FimFic’s native editor, but I don’t think it works in my preferred word-processing program . . . it might, it looks too short but I haven’t tried transferring it across to a gDoc or to FimFic yet.
I’ve got it programmed as an autocorrect in gDocs, which at least works when I compose there. And OpenOffice puts them in automatically, IIRC.