A confession: I still have not yet read any Joyce. Or at least, had not until I decided to write this post, at which point I read the first episode of Ulysses rather too fast, but still found it surprisingly easy to make sense of (on a surface level, at least).

But maybe that was because of this—

Great art and English-professor-style analysis make the impenetrable, not-so-rough.

(Also, I’ve now another decade under my belt! FYI?)

The newly nearly-memeified website IWL.me compares samples of your writing to the works of famous authors by analyzing sentence structure, word choice, and things like that.  It’s not always accurate,¹ but it’s nifty.

Anyways, I fed a bunch of short stories I’ve written into it, and a good 50% of the time it claims that I write like James Joyce! Not, of course, that I’m as brilliant as he — it’s probably just that we us a similar amount of semicolons. Hopefully at least I’m not as confusing as the Irish genius!

But maybe it’s all wrong.  After all, IWL.me is an initialism for “I Write Like . . . me.”

Now I gotta go read some Joyce.

1. Digital analysis of intangibles often tends toward mistake, though: Typealyzer gets my first three type preferences dead wrong. [↩]

Ever since I first read the DVZine, an online comic about the Dvorak keyboard layout, I’ve been meaning to make the switch.  Patented by August Dvorak in 1936, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is based on research and logic, rather than designed as a kludge to prevent jamming on primitive typewriters (QWERTY, I’m looking at you!).  With Dvorak, 70% of your keystrokes are on the home row, as opposed to a mere 31% on the completely random Sholes-QWERTY layout.  This makes Dvorak easier on a typist’s hands and ultimately allows you to type faster and more accurately—important for someone like me, who types a ridiculous lot.

But I’m a lazy bum, so for the past three years I’ve been a Dvorak advocate who can’t even use the thing.  My younger brother recently mastered it, however, and is now forcing me to put my fingers where my mouth is and— . . . excuse me, gotta go suck my thumb.

. . . Okay, back!  Anyway, I’ve decided it’s now or never, and have made a resolution: Henceforward,¹ I shall type all posts on this site in Dvorak, even if it kills me.  And it just might—while you can learn Dvorak faster than you can QWERTY, even as a second layout, it does take time.  Meanwhile, I look like a finger-pecking Mavis Beacon middle-schooler again—this post has taken me over an hour to type.  But I feel faster already!

1. An odd word, henceforward.  A word whose interpretation has even sparked controversy in the Hare Krishna movement.  Weird, the things you find on the internet, no? [↩]

So a week or two ago I was rooting through my hard drive in preparation for leaving for college (which event explains and half-way excuses the recent blogular hibernation in these parts), and I encountered a great host of files I had forgotten about long ago.  Amongst them were this mp3 file and this image:

. . . captured in the wilds of the internet and raised in captivity.  Zoological research has confirmed that they originally resided on these two websites, respectively, though the former homeland has ceased to be as hospitable as it once was.

Best enjoyed in tandem.

Also, yesterday (or does it count as today?  2 AM is an ambiguous time to classify), after seven hundred and twenty-six digital deaths over the course of the summer, on the 727th descent into the caverns, I completed Spelunky!

What’s that, you ask?  A devilishly difficult cavern-exploration/gold-collecting/troglodyte-killing/trying-to-stay-alive game, that is in a way a homage to both Indiana Jones and NetHack (which, incidentally, homages Indy itself).  With randomly generated levels, bullwhips, well-armed shopkeepers, golden heads that defy abduction, and permanent death, Spelunky‘s a blast — but hard!

I think I can truthfully (and mostly unashamedly) say that this is my second-greatest accomplishment of 2009.

(Oh, and I see Spelunky also apparently is modeled on a game called La-Mulana, which in turn is a tribute to the games that ran on MSX computers in the Greatest Decade.  Hmm, I’ll have to look into this . . .)

To me!  . . . Yesterday.  (And Smokey Bear, the day before that!)

I decided I’d celebrate in the good ol’ Hobbit tradition, of giving gifts to other folk rather than the other way around. And in looking for ideas, I came across the Hobbit Happy Birthday website: a green little corner of the web with party suggestions and music by the Brobdingnagian Bards.

And I gotta say, this inverse gifting is great.  For as a wise little boy once said:

It is more blessed to give than to receive, for the givers do not have to write thank-you cards.

I bought a Peruvian quena several years ago at a flea market, but never really learned to play it. The biggest difficulty was actually producing a tone — the quena is reportedly one of the hardest flutes to play. Unless your mouth is lined up just right: nothing but a breathy hiss (and in my case, a faint smell of woodsmoke). I only managed to get a toot or two from time to time, and so I didn’t do much of anything with it. Until this morning!

I picked it up and tried playing — and it worked! No matter how many or few holes I covered, the quena sounded (though I might mention I’ve only got the first octave figured out so far). I thought perhaps I just got lucky, so I put it down and tried again — and it worked again!  And again!  And again!  And — well, not that time.  But the next, and the subsequent, and the one after that!

(“Big deal,” many of you are saying to yourselves. Seriously, folks: this is a Very Big Deal.)

The only difficulty is finding music for the poor thing. Rare ethnic instruments have rare ethnic sheet music, I guess.  But I did find this one site with MIDIs of Peruvian tunes, which I was able to convert into a fairly reasonable score.  So we’ll see!

I spent a good deal of the last couple weeks finishing up my entries for the quarterly L. Ron Hubbard’s Illustrators of the Future contest, and got them mailed eight minutes before the post-office closed on the day of the deadline (very characteristic of me, unfortunately).  These are they: