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New word!
I learned a new word today! "Nothingburger!"
My husband sent me a link to a Guild Wars 2 fanfic that someone posted on Reddit and asked me what I thought of it. I'm not going to link it. I read it and thought, I'm not really sure what the point of it was. Most of it was the character's thoughts about his current situation, written passively, and then the ending seemed to be a punchline but I couldn't figure out what the author intended it to mean.
I said this to my husband, and he said, "It's a nothingburger." And though I'd never heard the word before, I knew exactly what he meant: the story looked fine but there's no substance, no real meaning. And now I'm mentally making a list of the nothingburgers I've posted on AO3. :P
Apparently the word is long-established, having been coined in the 50s, so I guess I'm catching up seventy years later, but I love it.
In other news...
It's funny that my last post was about being too busy to enjoy my unemployment/retirement, because I'm also feeling that I'm accomplishing nothing. Everything I'm doing is rather transient, though necessary. I'm not getting the house clean or producing anything (writing or whatever) or accomplishing anything meaningful. I'd say it's depressing but I'm not depressive so that word would just be an exaggeration to get sympathy. I think "discouraging" is a better word. Or perhaps I should just say I've been grumpy about it for the past couple of days.
Today I have a couple of transient tasks to do, but one of them at least will lead to something more fun - I need to clean off the music keyboard (which had stuff stacked on it before the trip) so that I can work on something I learned in jazz class on Wednesday. Our teacher, Daniel, showed us a way to figure out the chords behind a melody (other than listening to a band performing it and guessing at them) and I really want to try it out.
I also saw someone in![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ushobwri mention a game they're playing called 4theWords, which is supposed to encourage you to write and establish good habits, so I tried it out yesterday. Basically, you have a combat character and you select monsters to fight. Then you type in their editor and you deal damage to the monsters with your word count, and you try to defeat them within the given time limit.
The idea of this is novel, but I'm not sure I like the implementation. I do like that you have a choice of different sized monsters, such as 50 words in 10 minutes up to 600 words in 60 minutes, and you can chain them together, so that if you want to write for 20 minutes, you can choose two 10-minute monsters or one 12-minute monster and one 7-minute monster. (You might do this because you need loot from specific monsters.) However, there's no indication that you've beaten a monster, which is as designed, because the game is all about supporting your writing, so they don't want to interrupt your flow, but I'm both a writer and a gamer, and it's confusing to me when I've written a bunch and I have no idea if I'm progressing in the game.
I'm also not fond of the website design and am having trouble navigating and finding what I want there. The thing that I'm mostly concerned about, though, is the editor and the file system. I'm on a free account which allows you one file to save your writing. This is difficult for me because I work on multiple WIPs simultaneously, but, hey, I'm not paying so that's my fault.
The problem with the editor, though, is that while it has some WYSIWYG editing, it's limited, and the basic formatting is not what I use when I write in Google docs. This means that when I transfer the text into my real document, I then have to reformat the entire thing by hand - I've experimented but I can't find a way in Google docs to change some of the formatting differences across the entire section with a menu option.
I did a bit of research and found someone who solved this by writing in Google docs, finding their word count, selecting a chain of monster that add up to that, starting the fight, then copy/pasting the writing into the editor. This works and kills off the monster right away. "But that's cheating!" you might say, but it's not. Again, the point of the game is to get you to write, so however you do it is fine. They make a point of stating this clearly.
However, it strikes me as not really playing the game, you know? It's just a feeling, but if you're not actually in the game, playing it with their interface, then it feels like you're not playing it. I don't know. I'm going to keep going with it for a little bit (using the copy/paste method above), finish a few quests, get some loot, customize my avatar, etc. and see if it helps.
My husband sent me a link to a Guild Wars 2 fanfic that someone posted on Reddit and asked me what I thought of it. I'm not going to link it. I read it and thought, I'm not really sure what the point of it was. Most of it was the character's thoughts about his current situation, written passively, and then the ending seemed to be a punchline but I couldn't figure out what the author intended it to mean.
I said this to my husband, and he said, "It's a nothingburger." And though I'd never heard the word before, I knew exactly what he meant: the story looked fine but there's no substance, no real meaning. And now I'm mentally making a list of the nothingburgers I've posted on AO3. :P
Apparently the word is long-established, having been coined in the 50s, so I guess I'm catching up seventy years later, but I love it.
In other news...
It's funny that my last post was about being too busy to enjoy my unemployment/retirement, because I'm also feeling that I'm accomplishing nothing. Everything I'm doing is rather transient, though necessary. I'm not getting the house clean or producing anything (writing or whatever) or accomplishing anything meaningful. I'd say it's depressing but I'm not depressive so that word would just be an exaggeration to get sympathy. I think "discouraging" is a better word. Or perhaps I should just say I've been grumpy about it for the past couple of days.
Today I have a couple of transient tasks to do, but one of them at least will lead to something more fun - I need to clean off the music keyboard (which had stuff stacked on it before the trip) so that I can work on something I learned in jazz class on Wednesday. Our teacher, Daniel, showed us a way to figure out the chords behind a melody (other than listening to a band performing it and guessing at them) and I really want to try it out.
I also saw someone in
ushobwri mention a game they're playing called 4theWords, which is supposed to encourage you to write and establish good habits, so I tried it out yesterday. Basically, you have a combat character and you select monsters to fight. Then you type in their editor and you deal damage to the monsters with your word count, and you try to defeat them within the given time limit.The idea of this is novel, but I'm not sure I like the implementation. I do like that you have a choice of different sized monsters, such as 50 words in 10 minutes up to 600 words in 60 minutes, and you can chain them together, so that if you want to write for 20 minutes, you can choose two 10-minute monsters or one 12-minute monster and one 7-minute monster. (You might do this because you need loot from specific monsters.) However, there's no indication that you've beaten a monster, which is as designed, because the game is all about supporting your writing, so they don't want to interrupt your flow, but I'm both a writer and a gamer, and it's confusing to me when I've written a bunch and I have no idea if I'm progressing in the game.
I'm also not fond of the website design and am having trouble navigating and finding what I want there. The thing that I'm mostly concerned about, though, is the editor and the file system. I'm on a free account which allows you one file to save your writing. This is difficult for me because I work on multiple WIPs simultaneously, but, hey, I'm not paying so that's my fault.
The problem with the editor, though, is that while it has some WYSIWYG editing, it's limited, and the basic formatting is not what I use when I write in Google docs. This means that when I transfer the text into my real document, I then have to reformat the entire thing by hand - I've experimented but I can't find a way in Google docs to change some of the formatting differences across the entire section with a menu option.
I did a bit of research and found someone who solved this by writing in Google docs, finding their word count, selecting a chain of monster that add up to that, starting the fight, then copy/pasting the writing into the editor. This works and kills off the monster right away. "But that's cheating!" you might say, but it's not. Again, the point of the game is to get you to write, so however you do it is fine. They make a point of stating this clearly.
However, it strikes me as not really playing the game, you know? It's just a feeling, but if you're not actually in the game, playing it with their interface, then it feels like you're not playing it. I don't know. I'm going to keep going with it for a little bit (using the copy/paste method above), finish a few quests, get some loot, customize my avatar, etc. and see if it helps.