Where Oh Where Should I Write?

What app should I use when I want to write.

This is a recurring thought (and topic on this blog) that continues to baffle me. For now, I’m writing this post in MarsEdit, which is the app most of my blogs flow through to publication on Carrying Stones. Writing apps? I have plenty. These are the main ones right now.

  • BBEdit
  • Ulysses
  • Drafts
  • Scrivener
  • Word Processor (Word, Mellel, Pages, etc.), which aren’t really an option for this type of writing

I tried creating a BBEdit project, but file management got a little weird for me. I enjoy Ulysses for focusing on writing in full-screen mode, but it still doesn’t quite do it for me. Drafts seems perfect for starting text docs, but I still struggle to build it into my workflow. I feel like Scrivener is meant for sprawling projects; novels and what-not. Word processors are overkill for so many reasons.

What do you people do? Any bloggers out there using macOS with a perfect solution? Email me!

Kiss My Grass!

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You may be high if you think this grass is high!

Expecting a package, I eagerly trotted to answer a knock at the door where a county codes enforcement officer greeted me.

It turns out, we have a nosy “Karen” in the neighborhood who complained about several yards in the neighborhood with so-called high grass.

The enforcement officer seemed a little embarrassed to tell me about the report and quickly affirmed I was in no violation of county ordinance.

Mind your own business Karen!

Scripting News: I want Bluesky to go away

Scripting News: I want Bluesky to go away:

I definitely want Bluesky to just go away. I don’t like it because if it gains traction it has potential of replacing Twitter as the festering turd in the middle of what should have been a vibrant growing market that keeps anything else from rising in competition with it.

Just leave it at Mastodon. It’s nerdy enough to keep the masses out (for now) and just delightful right now.

Dark Thoughts for a Tuesday

Reading some dark thoughts from The Atlantic this Tuesday morning in re the possibility of a second Trump presidency in the face of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

These two battles are inextricably linked. If America stumbles even deeper into authoritarian darkness than it already has, Ukraine is lost. If Ukraine is lost, Europe and the West face an existential threat not only to our physical security but also to our democratic civilization.

Please America. Please be collectively rational and don’t let this nightmare come true!

Expulsion Hearings for the Tennessee Three

From my catbird seat in Georgia just south of Chattanooga, Tenn., I watched agape on April 6, 2023, while racist Tennessee legislators kicked fellow elected officials out of their club.

Democratic legislators Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson, and Justin Pearson sat through hours of “debate” about their offenses. What did they do to garner what may be the ultimate punishment in a legislative body? They calmly walked to the front of the chamber and joined in chants of support for sane gun laws with protesters in the gallery.

This was simply too much for rule-abiding Republicans that hold a supermajority. They decried this horrible breach of decorum led three Republicans to immediately file three separate resolutions to oust their colleagues.

The Nation, in an article titled “The Tennessee GOP’s Shameful Expulsion of 2 Black Legislators” touched on some precedents.

It’s worth noting that [former House Speaker Glen] Casada, the GOP leader at the center of that episode, was forced to resign after he was arrested on 20 federal counts stemming from a bribery and kickback scheme. As Jones noted in his eloquent speech before the assembly yesterday, Casada never came up for an expulsion vote, nor did members who had committed child molestation, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. Indeed, a member who had urinated on another member’s seat—a textbook example of the “poor decorum” charge that Jones and Pearson were railroaded out of the legislature on—suffered no expulsion vote. There have been just three expulsion votes in the legislature’s history. The most recent, in 2016, resulted in the expulsion of Jeremy Durham, who was investigated for months after more than 20 women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment.

After three lengthy dog and pony shows, legislators gathered the necessary votes to expel two black men from the statehouse; however, they could not muster enough votes to expel their white colleague from office. From my seat, it reeks of the racist fascism rumbling through our democracy. This note in The New Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition reminds us what fascism looks like.

Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.

The people of their respective districts knew who they voted for and that’s why they sent them to Nashville. Those representatives are able to run again for the same seats. My hope is their constituents will reward their bravery by returning them to Nashville.

On Working from Home

At my previous job, I spent some time working from home in 2020–2021 after the COVID pandemic really hooked its tendrils into the globe. My current job doesn’t even have an office so working from home is the only option. Overall, it’s been terrific.

If employees have no need to meet directly with each other, greet the public, or produce something that requires them to be on site (manufacturing and retail come to mind), I see no reason anyone should not work from home.

I have been more productive and more willing to work flexibly to get work done. That also means I can work in a load of dishes or laundry and it doesn’t subtract from the quality of my work on the job. Tragic overlords including the likes of Phony Stark requiring butts in seats are holding on to a 1950s way of thinking that is slipping away. I say good riddance.