Nate Dickson Thinks...

Glen Philips is often listed as the “front man” for California rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket. and, sure, he can be the front man.

RimWorld , for those who don't know isn't a game, according to the creator. It's a “Story Generator”. And it's quite good at that! But yes, you play it like a game. You are managing a little colony who is trying to survive on a moderately merciless world, and there is a “storyteller” AI who decides what to throw against you.

I want to share a lesson I’ve been learning over the past twenty years, slowly and poorly. It fits alongside my motto, which I’ll get to near the end. But first this disclaimer. I didn't write this about anyone else. I wrote this because I’ve been using it so much recently, and so people can help me stick to it.

Okay, enough burying the lede . Here’s the thesis statement:

Nobody else needs to endure my negative thoughts.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about Gemini, the new, intentionally limited internet protocol. Except that it feels right, it feels like a system whose time has come. It's the confluence and culmination of a lot of movements that have been swirling around the internet as of late.

Let's start from the beginning. Gemini is intentionally bare-bones. According to their homepage, the gemini project is meant to be halfway between gopher and the web. Thus it was named after a short-lived mid-point space program.

I thought I'd reminisce a little about an album I just barely bought. Also I might do this once a month for a while, just to add my tiny voice to the signal that boosts the joys of Bandcamp Friday.

For those who don't know, Bandcamp is a great way to buy music more-or-less directly from the creators. The site takes their percentage for running a storefront and handling all the downloads and streaming and whatnot.

But once a month, pretty much throughout the pandemic, they have had a Friday where they don't take their percentage from your purchase price. You can see when that will happen here. They call it “Bandcamp Friday”. Catchy, no?

So I try to buy an album or two on Bandcamp Friday, and I figured I'd write about the albums I pick up each month.

The Tot icon

I have wanted to love Drafts for years now. I like the idea of Drafts; a place where you input text and then you process it later, letting you capture the ideas before they run away, like a digital scratch pad.

But Drafts has become a little too intimidating for me. I love it, I really do, but I don’t use it, because I’m afraid I’m using it wrong. There are so many options, so many ways I can “process” my text when I’m done writing.

I love statistics. Stats are a way to tell stories with numbers. But in this case they're a way to tell you the numbers about a story.

Specifically they're telling you about my current NaNoWriMo novel, Exchange Magic.

I don't remember the exact conversation, because it was a long time ago now. But the circumstances were something like this:

My best friend and I were in tenth grade, our first year in high school. It was mid autumn, it was cold, it was rainy, and frankly going to school had lost that sparkle. We decided there should be one day every school year where you're allowed to wear your pajamas to school and have a big comfy blanket as well. And we decided it should be “the first Friday after the first cold, miserable day of each fall.” So we told our friends that next Friday was the first Annual Blanket Day. We were heavily involved in choir which gave us an advantage; the choir program in our school ran to almost three hundred people, a goodly portion of the entire school.

Note: Transcriptions are below.

I've been thinking about all the ways I write things down, why I write things down, and how thought collection methods change the thoughts collected.