divvyry

I assert that facts are objectively-provable statements, regardless of whether they are objectively true or objectively false.

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For rules and discussion of sonnet formats, pop over to this introduction.

This week’s sonnet is autobiographical, about a decision to buy a typewriter with gift money when I was a teenager, juuuust before computers really became mainstream.

A ways back when, my grams gave me a Ben,
and next a long discussion then we mused:

How should I spend this sum I’ve been given?
What won: a typerwriter is how it’d best be used.

I liked to write, to type, and Uni foists
A solid rule that papers must be turned

In with a certain unhandwritten choice
Of legiblity for which profs yearned.

But turned out that computers won that race.
It now, alone, sits near, but far outpaced.

Many years ago, when I was still a teenager and never really bought anything ‘big’ with my own money, I was given a $100 bill (called a ‘Ben’ above, as the person shown on the USD$100 is Benjamin Franklin) by my father’s mother.

After some discussion, my mother and I decided together that it would be used to buy me a typewriter, which I would need for college one day. In my father’s era of college, papers could still be handed in in cursive, and in elementary school teachers told us all of our college papers would need to be written in cursive as rationale for us to learn it. My mother proposed that college papers would probably all need to be typed given how less and less expensive typewriters were becoming, and she ended up being right, in a way.

I used it to type several things, including, memorably, a Top Gun fan-fic starring my schoolmates and a favorite teacher as the leader. It was a Brother AX-450, which had a neat feature where you could type out a whole line of text on a little one-line LCD screen that had a character limit, and you could edit that single line before you entered it to be typed, and the machine would type that single line for you and carriage return.

Shortly thereafter, however, the family got a hand-me-down 8088 IBM-compatible desktop PC, upon which I could type stories on word-processing software called Symphony, which even had password protection so no one could “steal my ideas” and I kept most of my stories on a 5-1/4″ floppy.. but, alas, the Brother typewriter rarely even ever got used after that. I still have it, too, and am not sure when I’ll ever part with it.

Dear all players of Iron Banner everywhere:

If you ever play the Leviathan map, please, for the love of all things, you —

~~ M-U-S-T ~~ A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E-L-Y ~~

1. Capture A as highest possible priority.

If A is not captured, focus ALL players on A and defense of A capturers until it is captured. Keep at least one guardian crouch-camping near A.

2. NEVER capture C — NEVER EVER.

Don’t even go past the pit area near it, just let them run to you so you can get the first shot off. Deny the temptation to power-play.

3. Capture B if, and only if, if A is already captured.

If you put all of your team into capturing A, even if you start on C, you will flip spawns and some dope will capture C, at which point you’ll easily win, even with rando players that you can’t communicate with.

I decided to start off on an Olympics theme, given the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang will soon begin.
See this introduction for concerns about sonnet form =)

The winter games will shortly come to pass;
I have no way to see them on TV.

The house I own lands in a kind of class,
of home where certain signals can’t reach me.

I’m not the type to do much outside work,
much less climb up onto my house’s crest.

Desire to see the games presents this quirk,
to push ME to a physical strength test.

The challenge is my own event to face,
To stream the games, I think is more my pace..

I nearly went with an alternate final pair, of..

The roof, with a new tow’r, I could anoint,
Or I could just go stream them for less point.

because I really like the idea of “anointing” a roof with a new tower, but I couldn’t rig a way for it to rhyme just right to my tastes.

My final version’s ending being ambiguous speaks a lot toward my preferences in fiction generally. My personally favorite kinds of endings of anything in general, is that the adventures continue onward.

A good example of this is the series finale of the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode “All Good Things…” which is simultaneously a final-episode of the entire TV series, but suggests that their lives and adventures still continue onward as they naturally would, and that we were allowed to treasure of of their experiences along the way, just as good friends pass in and out of our lives just as the way things turn out.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of people use “apart” to appear to mean “together.” For example, “I have wanted to be apart of this group for a long time,” to which I would snicker and ask them if they’d wanted to leave the group but couldn’t for some reason.

However, upon looking up the etymology of it and the way dictionaries describe people most commonly using it, I was intrigued to discover that I could have been thinking about that particular usage a little backwards myself.

Instead of thinking of the a- as a prefix to mean “not” as one might with “astandard,” etyonline offers a possibility that it may actually be more akin to abroad, ahead, or well, akin, and actually closer to with than separated or distinct-from.

The concept of living apart to me still suggests a definite connection between two portions, or persons in a relationship momentarily distanced for some reason, but itself distinct from a more official severance of connection, maintaining-by-technicality the original connection, but at the same time, distanced. In that way, ‘apart’ could indicate an it’s-complicated, or a simultaneous together-yet-diverged sense kind of paradox-like complexity.

Overall, however, I think I would still ask, teasingly, whether they wished to remain with the group or separate themselves from it, even knowing what they probably meant.. but not from a sense of “you’re using it wrong.”

Comments? Please tender your pronouncements on this Facebook post =)

This is a fanfic of the Bungie Update, a kind of web-log of various fixes and additions to the game Destiny 2. The thehomeland build is a dream-build of the D2 game, that XB1 gamertag thehomeland wishes could happen to pull it out of the ashes..

THIS WEEK AT BUNGIE – THE ONE ABOUT THEHOMELAND BUILD 1.0 – 02.14.2018

We here at Bungie have been hard at work implementing a massive rebuild of the Destiny 2 game architecture, to suit the whims of one particular gamer that we all know and love, gamertag ‘thehomeland’ who has been playing our games since before Halo. His valuable input has been instrumental in showing us just how high the flames go of the pile of hot garbage we created in ignorance of his profound wisdom, and we here at Bungie are thankful for his input about the new direction we’ve begun to take Destiny 2 for the betterment of the community.

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This is a fanfic of the Bungie Update, a kind of web-log of various fixes and additions to the game Destiny 2. The thehomeland build is a dream-build of the D2 game, that XB1 gamertag thehomeland wishes could happen to pull it out of the ashes..

THIS WEEK AT BUNGIE – THE ONE ABOUT THEHOMELAND BUILD 1.0 – 02.14.2018

We here at Bungie have been hard at work implementing a massive rebuild of the Destiny 2 game architecture, to suit the whims of one particular gamer that we all know and love, gamertag ‘thehomeland’ who has been playing our games since before Halo. His valuable input has been instrumental in showing us just how high the flames go of the pile of hot garbage we created in ignorance of his profound wisdom, and we here at Bungie are thankful for his input about the new direction we’ve begun to take Destiny 2 for the betterment of the community.

Continue reading →

Making the YT pre-roll rounds lately has been a Squarespace ad, “Should You Make A Website? Here’s Why Keanu Reeves Did.” The ad stars KR as a motorcyclist debating with himself about whether to create a motorcycling website for a motorcycle building business.

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