I didn't expect to write you another letter so soon, but my mind kept piling up phrases which I could tell were destined only for you.
I have continued to spelunk your wiki. Your turns of phrase give me unceasing enjoyment; it would be clear from your diction alone - if it were not already clear from all of the philosophy that wrestle with - that you are deeply immersed in language. I must also note that I adore your term of art "Fireman Time." I often wake up to find I have unconsciously summoned a monster into attack mode. Yu-Gi-Ohhhhhh...
Your handle always reminds me of the robot character "Peace" in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. It's not much of a movie, but somehow I've seen it twice.
I'd been meaning to write you a letter for a while now, but took longer than expected. Why? Carpal tunnel. My couple years of on-and-off hand pain, once ignorable, evolved last November (2020) into numbing of the fingers after mere minutes of typing. In January I was diagnosed, and given a steroid shot for temporary relief.
An email to Aaron Strick, intended only to pay a compliment and secure a Sith holocron, so touched him that he wrote a blog post about how happy he was to receive it. This is why I spend so much time on the Web; why I employ technology to run social projects like The Drongo and the SLC; why most weeks I take on hosting duties for Homebrew Website Club Americas.
Aaron, you're a drongo and a half, and a magnificent mellow, too. I laid down these stanzas in your name, for your pleasure.
Thank you for sharing Mike Hoye's "Citation Needed" (which documents the strange-but-true origin of the programming-language convention of array indices starting at zero, instead of one.)
A piece of writing born of someone's realization that nobody else has investigated this,as with "Citation Needed." Part of that magicalness comes from the novelty of the discovery, which, in the hands of a good writer, will be unfolded for the reader so that it feels like they could have discovered it, too. Another part of the magicalness is the same feeling one gets when one reads about an archaelogical or historical find from the unlikeliest of places: you mean we didn't know?! As you said in your reply, so much of computing history is being lost to time every day.
Deng Guida then used a wad of ¥4000 cash to hit her face while yelling, "Didn't you want money? I bet you have not seen any money before. How much money do you want? Just say it. Believe me or not, I shall smack you to death with money."
Deng Yujiao retorted, "Yes, I have never seen any money before. If you have the guts, today you smack me to death."
Deng Guida then replied, "I am going to smack you to death with money. I'm going to get a truckload of money to squash you to death."
I'm hanging in there. I've felt flooded, but I have little room to say anything. Given the [degree or kind] to which you [publicly self-model], it's difficult to see how well you are doing from over here, but I hope you are safe and well as well.
I am indeed safe and well: interviewing for jobs; learning to run my own servers to host this site and add more IndieWeb tools; writing poems. I have several drafts to type up today.
I hope you are well. I was delighted, really actually delighted, to see that you are now collecting Chinese phrases on the "中国语录" page. I want to help you improve and expand this page's classification scheme and its contents. I've begun taking notes and will use the tiddler editor to add them when I can (unless there's a better way.)
Since I don't know how often you read my website, I thought I'd bring my website to you.
Linguary: further thinking and design toward the "linguist's working environment" application I mused about in my last letter to you.
I hope you'll be able to forgive me for being so slow. I am thinking about you and many others. Even though I am somewhat manic, I'm socially glacial and autistic.
No problem. You need never apologize to me for communication speed or length. When I need a particularly timely response, I send a follow-up email.
Hell yeah! I'm really glad you took the time to hit me up. It's my honor to meet you, nomad.
You too, you big drongo. (What's a drongo? Answer Number 1, Answer Number 2.)