jmenn · HackerTrans

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

He was, by all modern standards, a rather terrible writer, though _Pelham_ is rather interesting if read as throwback eighteenth-century fiction or a precursor to detective novels. If nothing else, 'his mouth full of truth and turbot' is a rather brilliant phrase.

jmenn

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

My university went through an accessibility remediation process recently, and it was a rather nightmarish undertaking. Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a time, and I've always wondered if these would be targeted by people looking to bring a complaint.

Our HTML was more or less fine (though we found and fixed a few bugs), but the unbelievable number of PDFs and un-captioned videos nearly broke us. The culture shift has been difficult, particularly with people who want to post videos or PDFs but don't have the resources or training to make those pieces of content accessible.

jmenn

قبل 8 سنواتdiscuss

Apologies if this is mentioned and I missed it, but does this account for changes in word meaning or context over time? Earlier literature, such as Austen, could be considered “not-vivid” unless you’re clued in for particular hints/phrases. I’m thinking of, perhaps, the use of “Et cetera” for pudenda.

jmenn

قبل 8 سنواتdiscuss

After reading Sloan's _Sourdough_, I ended up buying FWSY and have been making sourdough for about 6-9 months. I find the entire process remarkably fun, relaxing, and exciting. Unfortunately, I still can't get that real "sour" taste from my breads.

jmenn

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

They're probably a lot worse inside academia for those fields. That said, everyone I know with an MA in English is doing really well for themselves, both inside and outside the academy. Maybe it's my small sample size though.

jmenn

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

I've taken up woodworking. Though I'm still remarkably terrible at it, it's nice to feel something material that I built. At first it was mentally exhausting but still rewarding, and as I'm getting more used to the various tools, the mental load is relaxing a bit. It does, however, require at least a little bit of space where one can handle producing a bit of sawdust.

jmenn

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

I work at a university so getting books hasn't been too big an issue for me, but the public libraries near me have been pretty good about offering classes to a broad group of people, and pushing their makerspace & 3-D printers. I know my craftier friends are there frequently for the 3-D printers.

jmenn

قبل 9 سنواتdiscuss

Not sure if this counts as engineering or a war story, but in my first job as an undergrad, I was hired as a "web intern" to setup a CMS for a non-profit. They offered me two CMSs from which to choose, Drupal or Joomla, a list of functionalities they wanted, and let me run loose. I was making progress, right up until the Executive Director told me I wasn't allowed to write "custom code" due to the possibility that I may one day leave. No HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc. that wasn't by default output from the CMS. The ED didn't believe I could write modules, so I ended up doing that, saying "look it's a default from this module in the CMS," and somehow that got the okay. A year later, when the ED retired, they hired me as a freelancer to redo everything in a more sensible way.

jmenn

قبل 10 سنواتdiscuss

I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.

jmenn

قبل 11 سنةdiscuss

You may be interested in Matthew Kirschenbaum's work on the literary history of word processing and, well, archiving software. He gave a talk, "Software, It's a Thing," at a conference at the Library of Congress in 2014: https://medium.com/@mkirschenbaum/software-its-a-thing-a5504...

comments