Tuesday, September 01, 2020

INTERNET GRUMBLES

I used "WriteNow" for manuscripts for years.  It was convenient, lean, and sensible.  Then it became part of the MacOS system, now called "Pages," and was soon burdened with a lot of useless stuff that just got in the way.  I stayed with it but discovered with dismay that part of the program had been moved to Mac so that I couldn't take the essay or whatever to a different computer using an older OS.  I starting printing out what I really wanted to save.  Luckily most things were on blogs, which MAC couldn't get at.

This little game continued for a few years.  Now recently I tried Catalina OS which was a disaster, which everyone agreed.  Steve Jobs is gone and it's obvious.  The company wants to move to an entirely new system that requires new hard drives and that will make our old Mac's obsolete.

Catalina was a disaster.  Backing off from it -- uninstalling -- was just as much a disaster.  Now they want to force us to accept it -- the bait is a new version of Pages.  To get to it, you must accept Catalina.

I resent the whole damned mess.  It has undermined my whole trust in Macintosh.  I wish I'd learned Linux, but at 80 years old it's probably too late.  I'll look for an equivalent to the original "WriteNow."
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Some time ago the techies, enamored of design and page appearance and unable to grasp content, kept making their programs fainter and more slender.  Harder and harder to see even with my focused and blue-tinted glasses.  I read long pieces in print, not splash titles.  Maybe I should give up blogging and just write a book.   With a pencil on paper. 

When Bob Scriver wrote his self-published books, which had many photos, he was in constant battles with the (female) layout techies who wanted to change his words to fit their designs.  In the process they would change vocabulary to make words shorter or whatever to fit the space they had.  This meant changing facts, like the species of a tree or the kind of leather used in an original.  Their experience was so limited that they didn't see the difference, but the writing was technical and specific -- the bronze sculpture was apparent by looking, but the real world from which each was drawn from a context that mattered in small details.

I'm also bugged that writers assume that Scriver didn't write those books because their head-space categories don't allow for anyone to be both a sculptor and a writer, let alone his own publisher.
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School in its Germanic lockstep has taught us to believe only what we are deliberately taught by people who are supposed to be experts.  Now we begin to understand we'd be better off to believe our own experience, even if it's on video.  And I realize that my own internal picture of people is much changed by the many People of Color with foreign names who appear in hospitals as doctors and nurses.  They are graceful, honorable people serving others while being in danger themselves.

The other side of the coin is watching the Repub senators make childish fools of themselves.
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I keep getting impassioned messages begging me to "Vote Democrat" and say so in various question/answer formats.  I will not vote Demo because I am Independent and that doesn't automatically include Dems.  It's a separate category.  In fact, part of the reason I distanced from the UUA hierarchy was being hustled into blurring Dem with UU.  I will vote for Biden.
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I know Trump has no consciousness of how his smiles now more than ever shows a kind of fiendish glee at hurting someone.

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