Changing Things Around
In something of an experiment this evening, I'm writing this post on the old Apple iMac perched on the spare desk in the junk room at home. The last time it was used “in anger” was for NaNoWriMo last year. Following in the footsteps of several notable writers, writing on the iMac divorces me from the distractions of the internet, on account of it not supporting the newer SSL protocols (the magic that causes the padlock to appear in your web browser).
Granted, this isn't quite as extreme as George R R Martin writing Game of Thrones in Wordstar on a DOS PC entirely disconnected from anything and everything, but it's pretty close.
Did I mention that the iMac uses ZIP disks to save backups ? I had a look through the collection of ZIP disks earlier, and came across a backup of the writing site I started in the autumn of 2000 – 19 years ago. After grinning at my own writing (some of which I may re-surface here at some point), I found a number of posts by my future wife – we would have been going out for about five months at the date of the backup. I wonder what has happened to the other writers? I'm tempted to search their names on the internet, and see what I turn up.
The method by which this post will make it from the Mac to the internet is perhaps worth a few words. I'll save the text file to the Mac, then scoot across to the PC (running Linux), open a command line, and connect to it via SSH – which will give me access to the text file. After retrieving the file, I'll open Firefox, past the words into Wordpress, and voila – you're reading them now.
In other news, I shuttered Substack this morning – the email subscription thing I have been playing with for a while. I figure it makes sense to have one version of my words in existence, rather than many. I've also stopped cross-posting these long, rambling posts to Tumblr too. If nothing else, it means I only have one version of a post to fix when I notice a typo, or grammatical error (usually immediately after posting, then again a few minutes later, then again a day or so later). I really should try to get into the habit of proof-reading posts before dumping them onto the internet.
Anyway. I'm tired. I always seem to be tired at the moment. I'm not sure why. Another early night beckons, and a few minutes reading before I inevitably conk out, and wake up in the early hours with my face in the pages of a book.