Zen Master: Blog

Wow! People really pay attention to blogs! I have not posted a single thing for several months, but put up all these blog entries and I already have three feedback emails today.

Um, one of them suggested that I learn to use unicode so that I could do fancy things like long dash and the copyright symbol. He even gave me a short tutorial on how to do it using the ALT key and the numeric keypad on the right side of my keyboard. Very helpful, really, if it was in any way a good thing to do on a public forum like SoL.
I started to write a polite "are you fucking kidding?" reply, but no, this kind of thing belongs in my shiny new blog where everyone can see the answer.
His suggestion is useful in a single horrible situation: where you, and everyone you know, is hopelessly mired in Windows(*) and uses Word(*) to the exclusion of all else. I mean, Ford makes good vehicles, but what would the world be like if Ford was the only vehicle manufacturer in the whole world? Detroit is in the fix it's in right now because they sat on their fat asses and raked in the profits while the rest of the world innovated until they built better vehicles.
Two of my favorite authors argue publicly about emacs and vi. Frankly, I think they are just doing it for the attention, but it's a data point. Not everyone uses Word. Really? Emacs?
Not even talking about different word processors, editors, or publishing tools (the three are NOT the same), there are many different platforms. Neither my linux box nor Win7 laptop implement that old BIOS shortcut the same way my Win98-SE game machine do. The laptop _might_, if I plugged in a normal keyboard, but I don't always do that. Certainly, the built-in keyboard doesn't support that BIOS feature "correctly", and it was designed with a Microsoft OS in mind.
Let's move on to non IBM PC computers. Has anyone ever heard of Apple? They are a new and growing company that has started to build computers. One of their claims is that their computers _don't_ act just like IBM's computers. Who knows, maybe they are better. Kinda like a lot of people would trust a Corolla from Toyota before they would trust a Lincoln from Ford. Similarly, I hear that someday someone will invent some kind of electronic book reader that you can load documents in and read just like a paper book. Who knows what hardware, OS, or reader software those things will have?
The bottom line here is that there are a lot of hardware platforms, there are a lot of operating systems, there are a lot of document formats, and there are a lot of programs that claim to render your document the way the author intended. Hell, a lot of people even use their web browser program to read documents. Every combination fails, except one: Any platform, any OS, any program, will properly render an ASCII text file, usually identified by a ".txt" extension. No other file format can be expected to be properly rendered across all platforms, OSes, and viewers. If the file contains anything other than a simple stream of one-byte characters with values between d001 and d127, it isn't ASCII text, and it is useless to anyone without the same platform as the author.
Isn't this public knowledge? It's _why_ SoL expects all files uploaded to be in raw .txt format. They will take simple html (and I think RTF), but they will refuse to take anything else. It's just too certain that it won't come out right. Save your unicode for your next PowerPoint(*) presentation.

(*)All three copyright that ICBM target in Redmond, WA.

Update the next day: I have gotten quite a few emails about this particular 'rant', split about evenly between "Right on, ASCII isn't only the lowest-common denominator, it is still the _highest_ common denominator" and "You moron, the whole world except you uses Unicode. What the fuck is YOUR problem?"
Apparently, mentioning "StoriesonLine" several times wasn't enough to clue many readers that this 'rant' is specific to stories written for, uploaded to, and read on or downloaded from this website, so advice on how to use it in other places really isn't applicable.
The problem is that on the one hand Unicode is pretty much in universal use anywhere that "Word Processors" or "Desktop Publishing" is done but that there is still considerable confusion about different character sets, and this particular website chooses to minimize problems caused by this (among several other problems) by saying "text only". It _does_ allow some formatting and special characters, but since no two readers will see the same thing if you go very far down that road, I choose to stay at the highest level that ensures that all readers everywhere will see the same thing. Simple ASCII, or as close as I can get to it with modern software.
I have tried several different options. At the moment, I am encoding my files in "UTF-8" and making the strongest possible attempt to not use any characters with a value higher than 0x7F, with my Linux box set to use "DOS/Windows"-style end of line markers. If anything I publish like this comes out looking squirrely on any reader's platform, I would really appreciate hearing about it. Some older files were published before I realized how important this was, so if you see anything in the older files, please tell me about that, too.

Finally, I have decided that there's no good answer to my refusal to deal with a blog at first. I've been keeping everything that _should_ have gone on the blog in a file until I figured out how to deal with them. I give up, I've gotta just accept I was wrong and start a blog. All the previous entries are up now, and from this point forward this blog should be live.
If it matters, the paying project I've been working on for the last half-year is done. I got paid a lot, and we spent almost all of it catching up on bills. I have returned to being retired and that means that I not only have time to write but have no money to do anything else. My wife doesn't care about the first and is freaking out about the second, so I don't think I'll get to stay retired for long. I'll do everything I can to finish First Command and Independent Command before I go back to work.

(This should have been posted in September, 2013)

This isn't working. The various authors have absolutely no incentive for compromise. Do I need to point out that we do this for free, as a hobby? None of us get paid to write. Okay, some of us get paid to write -I'm writing technical instructions for my employer right now- but none of us are getting paid to write Swarm stories. There is no supervisor holding a paycheck saying "get along or else".
Many of the authors are willing to work towards a group concensus, but every one of them is an author in his own right, and every one of them has their own sacred cow which must be worshipped. This is not a difficult task, it is by definition impossible. It is not even theoretically possible to get group concensus on everything we need. As I put in a FAQ for the author's list, there is an arbiter available, but we don't want to go there if we can avoid it. The Thinking Horndog owns this story system, and he is the last word on how we do things. However, we want to be big boys here. We don't want to annoy him without good reason. He can use tweezers, but he can also use an axe....

(This should have been posted in May, 2013)

What I'm trying to do is write a "background" story, that shows how this whole Swarm Universe mess started. Using that as a framework, I want to describe various things like how the two-caste system got started, what the ships look like, how a replicator works, etc.
Most of the author's group are very supportive. This isn't a story I'm writing. It is really more like a committee that is deciding things. I'm just the scribe that write it all down and maybe pretties it up a bit so people will read it.
My working title is "First Command", as I'm trying to tell it from the viewpoint of the guy who gets chosen to be Earth's first starship commander. He is learning all this stuff, so I have an excuse to write about figuring out how it all works.

(This should have been posted in April, 2013. At this point I was positive that I should have started a blog earlier. This stuff would have been a lot easier.)

There is too much story-series background, what we call the "Swarm Cycle Canon", that is unknown for me to finish this story right now. When I ask the author's group about something, I often get a useful reply that I can put to work, and I move on.
Unfortunately, this is not always true. More and more, when I ask how something works or _should_ work, I get three different answers, any one of which is usable, and the discussion devolves into an argument. Every viewpoint is supported by previously-published stories. No matter what I write, I will violate something said in a previous story.
Not that the reader cares what my problem is, you just want to know when chapter 4 is coming out. The straight answer is "I don't know. I am putting IC on hold while we figure out what is going to be canon."

Did anyone notice that my previous blog entry said 2012 instead of 2013? I have this stuff written, I'm just trying to figure out a way to post it all on a continuing blog without looking like an idiot for not doing it when I should have.