I grow tired of having to write about the puzzle piece. Here is why.

As the title of this post implies, I honestly have no idea what to make of the fact that I have had to write about this topic yet again. Yes, the time has come to write about that puzzle piece symbol for what seems like the millionth time. People will recall that early in this journal’s history, I wrote several articles concerning the puzzle piece symbol that Autism Speaks (For Ignorant Normies) use in their propaganda. Here is one. Here is another.

Real outsider to “geek culture”: up yours. Again.

It has been a while since I have written specifically about the “everything has to be online and not paid for even when the people who have made something unique and masterful are starving” culture. You already know my general mood about it: I hate it. But just recently, I became aware of a graphic that is doing the rounds on what I like to refer to as Fudgebook.

Our language: context, tone, and intent all mean something

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. In my previous post, I began to speak about an event that Lydia Brown shared with us on her Fudgebook page in which she was told what words she means. As often happens, writing about this topic caused me to descend into a rage, so I decided to abandon the subject for the time being and instead begin an essay about some of the basics of our language. It is in the hope that some normalistic assholes out there can read it and learn that maybe they do not know everything, and do not deserve to be the sole arbiters of right or wrong.

Symbols, flags, and meanings… one of many musings

Not too long ago, I posted an entry that divided its time semi-equally between the injustice of a vigilantist idea of justice and my agreement with another author about how much the puzzle piece symbol sucks. This, to my pleasant surprise, brought about a visit from its author and some commentary about the symbol issue. In my own reply (I am compulsive about replying to everything, with some exceptions), I promised that I would explore symbols and their meanings a little bit further in a future entry. Or rather, I thanked him for giving me that idea, because to be brutally honest, when you churn out three or four entries a day at peak times, your stock of new ideas does sometimes run a tiny bit dry.

Well, two things I feel a need to speak about now

Before I say anything else, I want to make something clear to the reading public out there. Whilst most, if not all, of my posts have been written with the offline journal writing program called Qumana, I have started to find it a most unsatisfactory editor for my purposes. This is not to say that I do not recommend it to people who are looking for a cheap (ie free) editor for their posts, but several problems with the interface have made me decide to look elsewhere. Even for a solution that I must pay money for. Probably the straw that broke my proverbial camel’s back is that on the iMac that I use for all my computing needs, the almost-universal keyboard combination to move back and forth in text on a word by word basis is to hold down the Alt/Option key and press the left or right arrow keys. But for reasons best known to its programmers, Qumana seems to feel that users should hold down the Command key and use the left and right arrow keys to achieve the same effect. This inconsistency with the standard (and yes, I know how that sounds coming from me) has caused me confusion not only when attempting to use Qumana, but also when trying to carry out tasks in other programs. The Command key usually has all of the most powerful and important keyboard commands of the OS X user interface associated with it. Save, Load, Cut, Copy, Paste, and most importantly of all, the Quit command. In OS X, quitting most programs involves holding down Command and pressing Q. When migrating over from Windoze, this can present some confusion at first, but now that I have gotten used to it, I have to say that it is a far better system for closing programs. Qumana threatened to create confusion in that, so I am going to phase it out.