What I've learned about spacing between sentences

I have been getting the side-eye recently for using 2-spaces after the period that ends a sentence.  An inference, a subtle hint, that the cool kids don't do it this way anymore.  Here's the thing:  if you want to get me to change my habits, you need to give me a good reason why, and "it's not currently fashionable" is typically not a good reason why for me.

After my typically ignorant and unsubtle inquiries on twitter, @mattthomas gave me a link to this Slate article (which I recommend you read), which lead me to this rebuttal (which I also suggest you read). The comments in the Slate article were also helpful.

So what's my conclusion so far?  It's an aesthetic choice, a minor culture war blip amongst writing nerds, and it doesn't truly matter whether you use one or two spaces in your writing.  To hear it told from the Slate article, there is a conclave of typesetters who have determined the purity of the single space and there are rogue english teachers leading people astray due to a love of former teachers and a too-great attachment to mid-centure typewriter aesthetics. 

 Given the rebuttal and some other facts, I'm not sure this is an accurate assessment.  For one, I have not seen real compelling evidence that all typesetters believe in one space between sentences and for another there are plenty of style guides who ask for 2-spaces (the current APA style guides for instance) and others that don't have much to say on the matter.  I am sure there are typesetters and publications that prefer 1-space, but I see little proof that this is an industry-wide standard and I've seen little documentation to back up the insistence on 1-space as anything more than a fashionable aesthetic choice.  Even Manjoo admits that is exactly what it all boils down to, he's just arguing your aesthetic choice is bad because you aren't him and the typesetters he knows, whose opinion should be deferred to because of expertise. This is not the most compelling argument for an industry standard.

It may be possible that 1-space is more suitable for certain fonts and publications types and 2-spaces may be more appropriate for others.  This might be an okay scenario that we can all live with in harmony.

My advice, based on the evidence so far, is if you're looking to publish for a certain community or publication, simply look up and follow the style guides they have provided (and if they haven't provided a style guide they have no right to complain about style).  If it calls for one-space, use that.  If it calls for 2, use that.  CTRL-F (or command-F for you mac users) is your friend in either scenario.  Beyond that?  Use whichever spacing style seems most readable to you and doesn't get in the way of your writing flow. 

If advocates for either style want to enshrine either practice as a universal standard, they're going to need to make better arguments to more people (especially people who write style guides) than they have so far.

Starting to Take Stock

Careening out of coming out of the closet and the concomitant mid-life crisis, I have yet to right myself entirely. There has been progress, to be sure, but I still operate far too much on a fuzzy-headed  getting by in the day-to-day, rather than action with a clear purpose with even a short-term plan in mind. And frankly, I'm not quite where I want to be professionally and socially so simply getting by is increasingly intolerable.

So I'm entering the phase of feeling stuck in the mud when I'm sitting back, splashing a little, entering  a sort of radical acceptance of the situation.  "So, you're stuck.  What's this like then?" I'm asking myself. I'm taking stock in other words.

"So this is the situation you've created for yourself, what would you like to do now?"

I'm not sure.  I've been trying to organize myself with limited results, both professionally and personally.  I increasingly despise living in digital environments for so much of my day (work and then home and then eventually in my sleep once we have the technology I guess).  Plus, I just have a hard time of feeling attached and motivated by organizing file folders on a desktop or in an app?  So I bought a bunch of paper notebooks because writing with a pen, even if it's just kind of simple statements about the structure I want the day to have, has been very helpful to me.  Still, I haven't been able to devise a system on paper that feels sufficient to me. I have a "triage" journal where I go to write out what I need to do to salvage the day after generally procrastinating for the first half of it. I  have a work "to-do" to help me get through the priority work tasks for the day.  And I have a general journal for "I need some paper to write or draw some shit out so I can think about it more clearly."

For now these suffice, but ideally I'd have several notebooks organizing my work projects (because there are many happening simultaneously usually) and several organizing and detailing my writing projects, of which there are many ideas but few actualities.  Why I can't make the leap from my current system to a more organized system I can almost visualize, I don't know.

I want to blame ADD, but I feel like anyone willing to confirm that diagnosis is just going to throw pills at me like I should fuck with my brain chemistry as an ongoing experiment with a shrug and a "yes, thank you doctor."

I am currently very stubborn about reasoning and feeling my way to the psycho-emotional knot that holds me captive and unraveling it.  In other words I want to work through the source of my depression and dissociation and solve it rather than medicating the symptoms simply to function properly in capitalism. But sometimes, I feel like I'm just thinking myself in circles instead of accomplishing anything productive.  Is this madness?  Sometimes it feels like it.

To this end, group therapy has been an amazingly positive choice.  I can't recommend it highly enough. But there is more to do, especially with regards to exercise and some sort of disciplined mental/spiritual practice, which is a subject for a future post.

I definitely look back at where I was in Reno and where I am now and see progress I am happy with. But a side-effect about allowing yourself to know who you really want to be, is noticing you aren't quite there yet.

Ask your doctor is knowing yourself is right for you.

Template Changes

So this dynamic view is interesting.  I like the classic view a lot, but I'm not sure why it has a nav bar that's just looking at various modes of look at the same stuff?  Timeline is kind of interesting, but the rest, meh.  I might remove them manually.  I think I'd rather the nav bar be links to different kinds of content than different ways of looking at the same stuff.

This is approaching the simplicity I want though. Feels less like a geocities webpage and a little cleaner and less cluttered.  I like it so far, although I'm still planning to play around with wordpress and/or another blogging platform. Except Medium, because I'm not an earnest start-up entrepreneur in California.

Unbearably Vinyl

I started collecting records this year, against my better judgement. Not wanting to be another unbearable hipster in Portland, I had avoided it for some time. Of course, hating hipsters can be its own version of unbearable, and I eventually realized obnoxiousness is generally an attitude thing. I can enjoy records, and as long as I don't get all pretentious about the sound or otherwise be a dick to people who don't give a shit about records, it would probably be okay. As it turns out, giving less of a shit what people think about my hobbies is generally a good life choice.

The hobby has been more fun that I really could have possible imagined. Not because the sound is just so superior, although I quite like it. Not because the album artwork is large and pleasing. Not because the entire process, from bin searches, to handling the record to using the turntable is so pleasingly tactile in an age of touch screens (which are tactile, but only ever in one limited fashion as you're always just touching glowing glass).  Really, it's been fun just because I've discovered so much music I have never come across before.

Aside from a bunch of rock and roll favorites from the 70s and 80s, and re-buying Devin Townsend's stuff because I am a hopeless groupie as far as he is concerned, I've really been enjoying just browsing the large used record store distressingly near my apartment and finding gems from the past. Of particular note to me are Alan Parson's Project, Tomita, Electric Light Orchestra right now.  Although they are far from my only new favorites. I'm listening to full albums from old favorites I've never heard before (David Bowie and Elton John), I'm listening to albums I never got around to buying on itunes (Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here) and I'm finally diving into classical music and getting to know Bach, Strauss, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Mozart in ways I never really bothered to before.

So is this a passing phase? I don't know, I heard someone say that people who did vinyl the first time around are skipping this phase the second. I think for me a key to longevity will be letting go of records that I didn't end up enjoying that much or when I've simply listened to it as much as I'm going to. In other words, I don't want this to be just another pile of crap I lug around so maybe only keep the keepers.

In short, I've found a bunch of new music to love, I've found depth in artists I already loved, I listen to more of my music more often and I'm enjoying music overall much more than I was a year ago. What's not to love about vinyl?

thoughts in flux

I keep thinking about what I want to do with this blog. Well, about all my online presences really. I think my tumblr blog will be exclusively devoted to curating "things that are emotionally important to me for some reason." So not a lot of original content there, but a way to get a sense of the stuff that resonates with me.

 Twitter is where I'm most academic, although, notably, not about the things I'm professionally paid to be academic about. I tend to do most of my tech and anti-tech philosophy retweeting there. I try to stay away from the outrage of the day but occasionally get sucked in. More rarely over time I hope. I may conscious restrict the topics I talk about there in order to foster more conversational depth, but we'll see.

 This blog, I don't know. I could try and build a following but a) I'm a little embarrassed by the apparent age of the blogspot format, and b) I'm not sure my thoughts, such as they are, are really ready for prime time. I do like some of the new blog formats and I do want to create a new blog I maintain. The only question here is am I going to just switch to a more modern, flexible platform, or am I going to try and make one myself, for myself? The latter is less dubious, given my history of focus and discipline, but it's my ideal. The kind of blog I want to make, both in appearance and functionality is probably one I'd have to make myself. The existing social media platforms all have their strengths, but none are quite what I really want, and some are outright obnoxious. I just want and online presence that's not bullshit.

All that said, the writing topics have continued to pile up, overflow and fall down the memory hole. There is lots I want to write about but haven't been writing about. There's really only a limited window to do so before the thoughts that want to be expressed are stale and no longer emotionally resonant. So that sucks. I may try and knock out a few simple ones tonight. I am in the middle of another "taking stock" phase, which is important and usually leads to a big post, but which is also my least interesting writing as it is largely glorified navel-gazing. Although I suppose that's true of most of the internet right now.  I'm not sure the pizza rat topic from yesterday had much of deep importance about it but it still summoned a lot of words from people.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I ever want this blog to get "famous" unless I actually start producing some actually notable works of art or writing that would lead people to want to hear what I have to say. That seems like the proper route to me, in any case. And as always, I am all about proprietary.

In any case, dear reader who has no name, I hope you are well. And I sincerely hope to shape this blog, or something like it, into something worth reading in the near future.