One Typed Page

The typewriter is the most unforgiving writing device known to man. There is no erasing, like on the computer. You can't just try out sentences willy-nilly and Backspace your way to something decent. When you inevitably make a mistake, a typo, or a bad turn of phrase, it's there, and even if you type something else over it, it'll always be there.

Paper has dimensions, which means paper has edges. Edges which your typewriter is happy to ignore until the moment when, looking up from your small black sailboat, you find them looming over you like the god-damn Cliffs of Dover. On the computer, whenever you find yourself playing margin chicken, your words get automatically teleported to safety. The machine does it every single time, magically, perfectly, trivially. Not so, with the typewriter. If you fail to ensure that the last word on a line really and truly fits there, or if you discover, too late, that a line break would've been real nice about two words in the past, well, there ain't no magic coming to kiss it all better. The responsibility, and the blame, is all on you.

What about the pen or pencil? You've got edges there too, and even worse, you have to draw all the letters using your knobbly, callused old fingers. You might think that writing with pen or pencil is primitive, repetitive, and exhausting, which is all true---but it also represents a form of writing that's nearly entirely free from constraints. It's so easy to write in whatever size letters you want. Whatever font. Whatever spacing. Even whatever color. Switch it up, or around, or back, according to your whims, your audience, or just the time of day. Draw diagrams. Make notes. Sign names. Use cursive, drop caps, small caps, big caps, triple underlines, and weird foreign accents. Anything you can imagine, dude. You're free.

In this day and age, anyone who writes on a typewriter is taking a stand. They're saying: Shackle me. I want to hear the chains clatter and feel the metal bite. I want to think, think, think about my words, and then I want to stamp them onto dead trees for the rest of living memory. I want to remember the old rituals, and commune with the ghosts of the past, and the present. I want to call back the remnants of the Golden Age and I want to hold them in my hands for just a moment. I want to do the hard thing, because it is hard, because I am hard.

There's something about the rawness of the medium and the predominance of text, that feels like sitting down on a typewriter to write.

I've read the most random, weird, and wonderful things on gemini lately, which I would: a) not expect to find on the web anymore, or b) even if I did, I think I would have somehow walked past it completely. This is despite the fact that some of the content is mirrored in the normal web as well!

The last thing I read was this: gemini://jsreed5.org/math/20210922-the-geometry-of-the-trigonometric-maclaurin-series/index.gmi (ironically, it features images and math, so less of the 'typewriter feel' ... but still.)

Great stuff!

> Send us your page. Snap a picture with your phone. Each day I’ll post what I get. Send as often you want. But don’t just stop at one. If not for your benefit, then perhaps your page will inspire others to say yes to life. I won’t post your name. You can include it on the typed page if you want, but otherwise you’ll be anonymous.