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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3315 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've taken the plunge and created a Substack. I've done it under my real name and will be writing about NON CW things I generally find interesting mainly to divert my tendency to write thousands of words into the void of the Internet towards something marginally more "productive" than forum posting and to have a corpus of writing associated to my name that I can use later for career/social status (One of my MEDIUM posts was quite well received by my past colleagues). In light of my previous post on too much forum posting. Now I am not a prolific Motte poster by any means, but I still post too much according to my personal cost/benefit analysis of how I should allocate my time.

Now is an easier time than ever to become a writer, you don't even have to try to make a website (substack does most of the work for you), language models can do some if not almost all your grunt work of writing for you, and you can create artwork/images to supplement your text at no cost using txt2img... This doesn't mean it's easier to make it as a writer, just doing the writing.

Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.

Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?

I miss the open web. *sigh*

Using github for things it was never designed to do is really obnoxious, I've been wanting to rant about that.

Hard agree. It's a source control system FFS, not for hosting a website, or a journal, or any of the other asinine things people do on github.

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