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Mechanismatic

@ mechanismatic @lemmy.world

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Joined
8 mo. ago

Michael W. Moss | michaelwmoss.com

Writer, maker, and designer. Writer of fantasy, cyberpunk, science fiction, steampunk, horror, and hardboiled noir fiction. Typeface/font designer. Maker of 3D printed, laser cut, and microelectronics projects. Friend of cats and crows.

  • Living language

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  • But, you're just one person. You won't be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you'll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you'd be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don't even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.

  • Living language

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  • You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.

  • Living language

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  • But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word "incorrectly" but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you'd just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

    I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

    The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn't sufficient.

    But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.

  • Living language

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  • This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it's so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don't know any better.

    Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren't up to the standards they claim.

  • Living language

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  • Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

  • Living language

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  • Living language

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  • Yeah, I'm prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It's great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

    Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don't make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem "through faith" but its meaning is from the larger phrase "deceiving through faith."

  • Living language

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  • My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it's more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

  • Filament splicing? Do any of you guys do it?

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  • In my makerspace, we've printed using the ends of rolls just to make random multicolor prints. I also recently bought a cheap 3D printing pen for repairing prints or other random purposes, so that's also a good use for the ends of a roll.

  • Just your typical...

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  • This was one of my bad jokes at the ren faire. I'd walk up to other people with staves and say, "so, you're also here for the staff meeting?"

  • STL vs Modifier quality

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  • My natural inclination would be to make the body in a single color filament and then use a stencil to paint on the logos. It would print a lot easier and look more natural and authentic. The logos were painted on the planes historically. And if you use stencils to paint them on, the logos could be customized for individual prints.

  • I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETG

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  • To do process of elimination, I'd recommend trying a different brand of filament and a different type of filament (i.e. PLA), preferably freshly opened rolls. I'd also generally be wary of AliExpress, but that's just been my experience of seeing multiple people be disappointed with what they get. If you're looking for discounts on filament, there are a bunch of Black Friday deals going on right now.

    That testing will at least tell you if it's the brand or the type of filament that's causing the issue. If you eliminate those by seeing no change, then you know it's the printer itself and can start troubleshooting that next.

  • STL vs Modifier quality

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  • It looks like you're printing it with the right side of the model in the picture angled down from the left, so you're getting more layers to the left, which is giving you some unfortunate border and infill lines. Is it possible to print this all flat so it's one smooth layer? If it's the top layer, you might play with ironing as well. It's hard to tell without seeing the whole model in context though.

  • what do you use to add weight?

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  • When wanting more weight, but not wanting to add anything extra to the print, I use modifiers in Prusaslicer to add an internal shape that I set to 100% infill in contrast to the rest of the print. So if I want a weighted bottom to prevent a printed object from tipping over, just throw the modifier in with 100% infill at the bottom of the model before printing.

  • Do you guys know how awesome a printer is that is just working?

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  • It's especially nice to eliminate machine issues so you know that subsequent print issues are due to modeling problems or orientation while slicing or something else.

  • Your task is to blow a job interview in the first 30 seconds. What do you do?

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  • That one depends on the job. Some managers will love to exploit your inclination to hyper focus on solving problems and following the rules. They won't ask you to work unpaid after hours but if you want to they won't protest... Doing a third of the work for a team of six people? That's great, but your next performance review will include the criticism that you're not as social as your coworkers because you're too busy doing the job.

  • [OC] A snippet from a Historical Scifi/Fantasy story I'm writing about the Witch Trials.

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  • The fragments can be a stylistic choice. Ultimately all writing "rules" are arbitrary and often decided by consensus, often based on "what we've always done" as much as based on a specific reason for better communication or possibly a reason that is moot now. It's good to know what your potential readers are likely to prefer and it's good to know what an editor or agent will want if you're hoping to get published in a traditional manner.

    That being said, I'm a fan of breaking "rules" when you have a good reason to and know why you're doing it. If the narrative is reflecting the fragmented thoughts of a character, fragments might thematically work really well.

    That said there are also ways of rephrasing the fragments to make them flow better. Some readers might find them abrupt because they're looking for the noun and the verb with some kind of active action.

    For the heavy chain, some readers won't think of it as a grade or gauge of chains. Sometimes technically accurate isn't better than stylistically smooth. But it isn't a significant difference, so definitely keep it if you like it. You should write for yourself first of all.

    I liked it in general. It was an interesting glimpse into a world where there are implications of greater detail I'd be curious to know more about, such as how the main character's age and knowledge of magic works. Some of the characters are necessarily one dimensional in such a short peic of writing. Scared and concerned victims of witch trials and puritanical patriarchal male authoritarians is what I'd expect because that's what's been depicted before, in the Crucible, in the Sleepy Hollow movie, and other fictional depictions.

  • [OC] A snippet from a Historical Scifi/Fantasy story I'm writing about the Witch Trials.

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  • If you share a Google doc link instead of a PDF, people can make comments in the document itself, so it's easier to provide direct feedback to specific text.

    You have some tense issues. "Behind him, sat a woman." (past tense) then "...she stares down..." (present tense).

    Some of the sentences are incomplete sentences. "Her posture, in direct contrast to that of the Good Reverend."

    "A red mark wraps around her neck, and a heavy chains secure her delicate wrists." Wraps is odd as an active verb unless the mark is appearing in the moment. Usually an inanimate thing is wrapped around rather than wraps. I'd suggest something like "stretches around." "Heavy" is redundant with chains. Chains are rarely light. "a heavy chains" has an agreement problem. A is singular, chains is plural.

    "and the Reverend’s clearly dire distress," It hasn't seemed like he's in dire distress prior to this descriptor. Earlier he was described as having a "posture proud with authority..." "full of fire and fury, but steady and deliberate."

    Some of the narration seems to be Colette's internal monologue and should probably be in italics to distinguish it from just third person omniscient narration.

    For example: "This poor girl has not a speck of magic in her – And the vegetables from Reinette’s garden aside, neither does anyone else within a thousand kilometers."

    But then the next paragraph mentions Colette in the third person again.

  • Looking to buy a cheap but best first 3d printer. Ender3 V3, CR-10 SE, or something else?

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  • You can get a new Sovol SV06 for less than $200. That worked very well out of the box compared to my older Ender 3. Prusaslicer also has a good profile for it. I don't care for Cura slicer as much. Enders are of an older generation of printers that I will personally avoid just because of the legacy of having to tinker with them just to get them to work. The opposite end is the Bambu where "it just works" except it doesn't always and it's not as easy to fix and it doesn't play well with third parties. Sovol is a good starter printer that I'd had even better bed adhesion with over Prusa MK4Ss at work.

  • What are some less known or underused open source fonts?

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  • There are too many to mention since there's so much out there.

    You can go to a font website like dafont and perform a search for a font or browse different themes/styles and specify in the results that you want Public domain / GPL / OFL fonts.

    Almost all of my fonts are released under an attribution license, so they're free for commercial use and remixing.

    https://michaelwmoss.com/typefaces