mjrbrennan

The first two are fine though as long as there is room for interpretation, but if the person is pushing back every single time that’s just obnoxious.

    Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Still really need to read Child of God.

That being said I have started collecting vinyl, which I do enjoy, but don’t often have the extra money laying around each month to buy more. One day I hope to have a nice dedicated setup for it :)

> - ex: taking small side roads to a left turn onto a busy road with poor visibility and no light rather than right turns to the main road and signaled lefts

This one irks me the most, so often it will take me a way where I need to get across a busy 4 lane road instead of taking me on a slightly different route where I will end up on that road instead, or at traffic lights where I can actually turn properly. I feel like it waaaayy over-optimizes for time "saved" to the point where it takes you a bone-headed way just to "save" you twenty seconds out of your whole trip, but _only_ if you are incredibly lucky with lights or breaks in traffic.

After reading this thread I am going to try out Apple Maps again and see whether it's any better.

It's fun to read about this fancy and nicely designed stuff as you say, but the less fussiness around writing for me, the better.

I recently gave it an overhaul to turn it into more of a "digital garden" which I go into a little here https://writing.martin-brennan.com/renewal/. I write fiction, so I want more of a place where I can store backstory about my worlds and characters as well as having a regular blog. I am pretty happy with it, but I need to fill it out more, there are a lot of page stubs that are crying out to be filled with worldbuilding.

The film shots I've taken I consider to be 100x better than anything I've ever taken on digital cameras, and they feel a lot more alive to me.

> I've learned a huge amount about various topics, including empathy for the characters I write about, and it has given me more appreciation for the skill of the writers I love.

I've learned tons about this kind of thing over time, and as I've gotten more experience I've drawn on my interactions with others IRL and thinking more about human experiences, how characters would react realistically, and such. There is so much to learn. It really does make you appreciate the great fiction that you love, and it gives you something to work towards, a greatness to emulate.

LMK if you ever want to exchange writing with someone, it can be a lonely road sometimes.

_Before_ I get into Word I process the words from my brain either by writing in longhand, or by using my typewriter. I use the step from these analogue methods to digital as an initial cleanup phase.

Much better to just loop others in early and often so things are done right the first time, and in the most effective way possible.

Perhaps the Discourse forum you visited had Top as the default view? Usually it's Latest which is the topics which most recently had a reply. When you create an account on the forum you should have the New and Unread views available as well, which are tailored to your user account.

Tried As I Lay Dying recently, maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace for it but I really couldn't make head nor tails of it. I was looking forward to reading Faulkner too, and this has soured me for a little bit.

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts defeated me. I was finding it interesting but I guess the sheer size put me off. I don't often read non-fiction so I find those a lot more difficult to get through, I want to work on that.