Going off half-cocked on aesthetics over function in keyboards. Also updated photos.

I haven’t gone on WordPress in a while to update this. The back end of the platform appears to have changed significantly, and seems to be worse, but it might be more powerful now and I just don’t know how to use it.

Before, the website had a new blog post tool with a WYSIWYG editor with buttons for inputting media and formatting text. This was Word 97 style. Now, formatting occurs through pop up menus and and hierarchical sidebar menus. The main part of the page is simply blank and you type shit. I consider this to be typical of modern UX design for computers and things like it. They don’t want to overwhelm the normies, as the kids are saying, and so make tools with the minimum possible options and features available. See iPhone camera. When they do have features, they’re buried through series and series of menus. Fuck that shit. Give me the options as buttons.

This is particularly pronounced, in my opinion, in the modern keyboard enthusiast community. People say things like “well, I don’t usually use the nav cluster, so I don’t need it.” Or “I don’t usually use the numpad, so I don’t need it.” You’re inconveniencing yourself for the sake of design aesthetics. Here, let’s look.

This is one of the most highly upvoted posts of a guy’s actual collections of keyboards on the mechanicalkeyboards subreddit which he “worked on.” Most of the highly upvoted posts are essentially exercises in product photography, and you can see that influence on his keyboard collection here, designed primarily for aesthetics. There’s not a single full sized keyboard in sight. Not a single one. Most of these things don’t even have function keys. They all have the same switches (derived from the Cherry MX type), and are designed to look cool. What if the guy wants to hit F5? He has to go into a function layer to do so. I know.

I understand shaving space off one’s desk, but they’re not really doing that much either, though arguably the numpadless keyboards with the nav cluster replaced by four buttons and the arrows aren’t terrible, as that’s a meaningful reduction and redesign based on use, but a fucking tenkeyless format is dumb as shit. “We’re getting rid of the numpad because nobody uses it, but we are keeping highly important buttons like Scroll Lock and Break.” Fuck right off.

And again, they’re all using the same switches. Many people use a bunch of different switches, but they all have the same fundamental design. Some people like switches that are heavier, so they put in a heavier spring. Or they want a bigger bump, so they put in a bigger bump in the slide mechanism, but it’s the same mechanism. They all feel samey, like how every internet browser except Firefox is running a webkit derived rendering engine right now. RIP Opera 12.

My keyboard I use is a variation on the old IBM Model F. Here it is at my office.

So, as you can see I’m no stranger to elimination of extra keys. This board has 83, and a tenkeyless has 87. I have had to make a few comprimises, but they’re not vast. The nav cluster is on the numpad, as it has always been. Ctrl, Alt, and Caps lock are around, and I have Scroll Lock remapped to plus and plus remapped to enter, as I use numpad enter more than normal enter.

In using this keyboard, I have realized a few things: it’s actually fantastic and didn’t need to change the layout for the AT model. The numpad is fine with that fat plus because the way the enter is positioned, it’s usable for both typists on the alphameric cluster and the numpad, with the pinky and pointer respectively. The backspace and shift keys are fine, and the function keys on the far left are excellent. Since I literally never use some of those keys, and I mean like literally never, I have a few remapped. F1, F4, F5, F6, and F8 retain their original functionality, but I have macros set up for the others F2 is CAD, F3 is a string I type frequently in emails and such, F9 is Windows, F7 is context menu, and I don’t have anything for F10.

So anyway, I understand small form factor. But there’s no way you get through life without using fucking home, or F1 or something. I refuse to banish to a function layer any key I will potentially use once or twice any given day.

In much the same way, this WordPress post redesign is irritating.

I also updated some photos on the photo page. That is all.

I bought a comic book

It’s about the game Life is Strange.

Somehow, in the years I’ve been a nerd, I’ve never been a comic book nerd. I read comic books when I was a kid, most kids do, and I liked Spider-Man. He talked through the action and had kid problems. My friends liked Deadpool when I was in highschool, so I was vaguely aware of the B-list superheroes of the nineties and 2000s at that time. I just never bought the books. When I was a kid and they were cheap, I didn’t have the money to blow on them. Now that I’m an adult, each one costs like $4-$5 and they provide like 20 minutes of entertainment at most. Honestly who the heck would bother.

Well me, now.

However, I picked this up as a ‘graphic novel’, which is really just a collection of a 4 book arc. It’s about 100 pages and it talks about what happens to the main characters of this video game, Life is Strange, after the events of the game. It cost me $10 for the whole book which just about puts it at a palatable level considering I am so starved for events featuring the protagonists, who are slightly, but only slightly, rounded characters, but with personality traits I see in myself and my friends,

Life is Strange is a choose-your-own-adventure type game, a genre on the upswing the last time I wrote something here, which has now, a short five years later, already reached its peak and is on the turndown. One company in particular, Telltale Games, was associated with the genre, throwing it into the mainstream with a 2012 release of The Walking Dead. They continued to release high profile games based on existing IPs like Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, and Batman, but recently, halfway through another Walking Dead Game, they went bankrupt, effectively annihilating the choose your own adventure type game genre, as they were still the major developers.

Life is Strange was not created by Telltale, but a French developer called Dontnod, a bunch of 40 year old dudes with an obsession with Americana and what they presume life was like for teenage girls in the USA in the late 2000s.

They were weirdly correct.

While as far as I know, I was not a teenage girl, I was friends with many, especially during that time. We did so much of the same stuff the protagonists of the game did, it’s eerie to me.

For example, there’s a scene where Max and Chloe, the protagonists, had just gotten done trespassing and having fun all night, doing drugs and stuff and breaking and entering. They woke up and listened to Bright Eyes. Bright Eyes. I cannot tell you how many times that very thing occurred to me as a young adult. Here’s the highly boring scene.

 

Max and Chloe dodge the problems of popular girls, being caught doing drugs, getting around without a car or money, dealing with adults who don’t care about you, smashing stuff in a junkyard, and meeting up at cheap diners. All standard teenager crap, and it seems and sounds boring, except, it isn’t.

Max has been given the power to time travel, that is, change her decisions in the past to improve the story (like holding your finger on a page in a choose your own adventure story), and she and Chloe are investigating the disappearance and likely murder of a girl from the city. This gives everything they do, from talking to people in school, to breaking and entering for fun, a usefulness and a purpose in the context of the game that gives you the reasons to do them, and it plays out much like it always felt like it did in real life.

As a teenager, everything feels like it matters and it’s intense, and you just don’t realize it isn’t and that it’s all, by and large, stupid. Hence, you see the dumb stuff teenagers do and you don’t get it. By putting their actions in the context of weird time travelling murder stuff, you feel that necessity and importance in their actions that teenagers do.

 

 

Here’s a video Blackstar, Narcogen, Jillybean and I did. We played through the whole game and talked about it and why we felt it was good or bad, and what we liked.

I liked it because so many of the situations they were put in were those I myself was in, and the way they felt was the way I used to feel as a young adult.  The games continue to promote that feeling within me. It feels like teens feel. It doesn’t of course, it’s the reality of being a teenager turned up to the max, but that’s the only way to make it feel right.

It’s the same reason I like Twilight, but that’s for another time.

Anyway, that perfectly constructed atmosphere is why I actually bought, with my own money, my first actual comic book. I’ve even pre-ordered the next one.

Identifying Borgil.

Mentioned previously, Aldebaran was called Borgil by Tolkien. But, it’s not so easy to figure that out just by reading the book.

Here’s what the text looks like.

Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then, by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt. The Elves all burst into song.

This was from Chapter 3 of The Fellowship of the Ring. This, as far as I know, is the only reference to Borgil. Now, Remmirath is easy to figure out, it’s probably the Pleiades. That makes sense. And Menelvagor with his shining belt also is clearly Orion, as he also has a shining belt made of Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, which are interesting stars themselves. Menelvagor is also mentioned quite a bit elsewhere in the legendarium, for example in The Lost Tales and the Silmarillion.

But Borgil is a bit of a mystery. It appears that it rises before Menelvagor, as it was above the mists, and Menelvagor only showed up after the mists had cleared. This may not sound like a mystery, as there is a bright orange star called Aldebaran with which we are now familiar in Taurus that rises between them. However, in that proximity of the sky there is also a much much brighter star, one of the brightest in the sky, and it glows with a distinct red colour. That star is called Betelgeuse, and it’s on Menelvagor’s left shoulder.

Under almost every circumstance if a student were to describe netted stars and then a big ass red one rising later, I’d say it was Betelgeuse. Even if the student says it was different from Orion, I’d assume a mistake. But, in a published work like LOTR, and its cosmology, I don’t think we can assume a mistake here.

There is another option, though, and that is Mars. Mars was actually identified, though, as Karnil. Borgil vs. Karnil. So it’s clear it’s not Mars. Or is it?

Karnil comes from Quenya, one of the Elvish languages, carn for red, and nil from ngil, which is a variation of gil, which we all know to be star. And Borgil, as proven in a letter from Tolkien, comes from Sindarin, another Elvish language, where bor means red, and gil still means star. So now we’re looking at red star in Quenya and red star in Sindarin. These could, in fact, be the exact same star, just with a different language. This is not unprecedented in Tolkien’s cosmology, as Remmirath is known in Westron as The Netted Stars, which is simply a literal translation of the Sindarin. Rem meaning mesh, mir, of course, meaning jewel (often interchangeable with star), and ath, which is a collective plural. So, why couldn’t Karnil be Borgil? No reason, but few suggest it, and I believe I am the only one who has suggested the linguistic connection between them.

It also explains why it’s notable. Mars, of course, wanders about in the sky, as it’s a planet, and spends time in many constellations, one of which is Taurus, the container of much of the celestial area we are discussing. We don’t know how far away in time LOTR occurred. The years aren’t clear. All we know is that it’s in the past, so we can’t confirm the position of Karnil for this, but we can confirm the plausibility, as shown.

Here we have Menelvagor rising, with the Remmirath high in the sky, arbitrarily defined by me at above 45 degrees. We also have our three Borgils, Mars, Aldebaran, and Betelgeuse. Mars can be stupid bright, multiple times brighter than Betelgeuse or Aldebaran, so this could be our Borgil…but this doesn’t happen very often, and maybe Tolkien would have mentioned its status as a wanderer.

So let’s look back at Betelgeuse. I said I’d almost always suggest this as a candidate, but I don’t think it works here. Let’s look at the text. Borgil is above the mist, Menelvagor is below. Betelgeuse can’t work like that. The head stars of Menelvagor and his shoulder star, known today as Bellatrix, rise well before Betelgeuse, as seen.

Bellatrix is indicated here during Orion’s rising. Hence, I think Tolkien wouldn’t say that Menelvagor is revealed when quite a few parts of him were up BEFORE Borgil, with no mention of any stars in between Remmirath and Betelgeuse. I don’t buy it.

Now Aldebaran is plausible as a red star that would be above the mist and still hold Menelvagor below it. Like this.

Now we have the whole of Menelvagor: Saiph, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, and so on. So maybe it was Aldebaran. It’s a bright orangey star, but it’s not as bright as Betelgeuse or Mars, though it fits the other characteristics, and is always there, which is why I call it Borgil, but it’s up for debate.

So, I think we can conclusively say that Betelgeuse isn’t Borgil, despite what dozens of websites say, some linked at the bottom, and we can definitely say that Aldebaran could be, and so could Mars.

Pros and cons of Aldebaran:

Pros: 1. Orange. 2. Right place.
Cons: 1. Not AS notable as others in the area.

Pros and cons of Mars:

Pros: 1. Red. 2. Right place. 3. Ultra notable. 4. Language link.
Cons: 1. Transient. 2. Possibly exclusively named Karnil.

So, is Borgil Mars or Aldebaran? I like to say it’s Aldebaran to students who are trying to learn the sky, since Mars is noticeable enough. But, as we can see by my totally scientific pros and cons list, they’re about dead even in the plausibility. If there is a Tolkien scholar better than me out there who is more familiar with his writings on the subjects, I’d quite enjoy knowing if Mars can be conclusively proven to not be Borgil.

TL;DR. Aldebaran. Maybe Mars. But Aldebaran.

Again, if you look for more info on this online, you likely won’t find much about the plausibility of Mars. I think I am the only one who came up with the idea Mars could work here.

Tolkien related bibliography (some of these have bad information, which made me write this article up):
http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/m/menelvagor.html
http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/b/borgil.html
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Menelvagor
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Borgil
http://thainsbook.net/stars.html
http://www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/borgil1.pdf
http://www.physics.ccsu.edu/larsen/borgil2.pdf
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Three_is_Company
http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Borgil
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Remmirath

Alnath

I like stars. I even like weird, insignificant stars.

There’s this star called Alnath, or Beta Tauri. It’s a boring star, pretty much only notable for being first magnitude. Except for one thing: It’s shared between two constellations, like Alpheratz, but a little less obvious to early viewers of the night sky.

This is actually a very useful characteristic, as it’s now easy to define the border between the constellations Taurus the bull and Auriga, the circle. I mean Auriga the charioteer with his two kids. As in goats. Yeah, that’s a topic for later. So, when people say that a planet is in a constellation, like Jupiter was in Taurus for a while, people know where to look. But, how can a person find Alnath? Easy, for I have drawn a chart.

So, start at Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, but beware of Jupiter or Venus, and go to Orion’s belt. Continue through at virtually the same angle to the bright orange star Aldebaran, called Borgil by Tolkien but that’s neither here nor there.

Turn left at a ninety degree angle and the next bright star is Alnath. It’s in a circle of stars with a very bright yellow one called Capella, as labeled. Also featured are some fun things to look at with binoculars or a small telescope, though Triangulum might be hard to find!

There you go. Now you can find the border between Taurus the bull and Auriga the circle.

I’ve gone full nerd.

I’ve got a bunch of domains that are slightly irrelevant. Who needs timfletcher.de?

I think this qualifies as an e/n site.

I don’t think anyone uses the term anymore, but I recently heard it again, and I think it is. My old favourite was imovaherenow.com. I think it was run by  guy called Adam Cernese, who I just tried to look up, to no avail. Anyway, he was fantastic.

 

He just linked to cool stuff he found on the internet, and it didn’t matter what it was, pornographic, insensitive, or otherwise. Back in those days, boy I sound old. Back in those days we all used online aliases, hence Funkmon. I’m still regularly reluctant to use my actual name online. But because of that, we didn’t have to worry about what was posted, and our jobs would never found out. The only way I found out Adam’s name was looking up the whois details provided, by the way, by networksolutions.

 

Anyway, an e/n site was a site that meant everything to the poster, nothing to the reader. A lot of it was ranting, a lot of it was dumb links, and a lot of the sites turned exclusively into pornography. Eugh. But still, there was good content there, and they were fun to read. This was before the term blog entered popular usage to describe the sites, iirc, though blogger was around. Many of us called them ezines or e/n sites. Blogs were more personal.

Now, the internet is trying very hard to be professional, with real journalism and whatnot, and e/n sites and personal blogs aren’t around much anymore. Even when people try to talk about subjects like terrorism, racism, and stuff like that on their blogs, they lexigraphically put on their asbestos underwear. Screw that, just talk about it, guys.

 

But, anyway, I think my blog, consisting entirely of stuff that nobody cares about but me, qualifies.

Chemistry

The mechanisms behind chemistry are physics. Whether it’s Schroedinger equations or more classical stuff (rare), it’s all physics. However, the way chemistry is taught, it’s all magic.

It’s like knowing how to use Windows but having no way of knowing how it interfaces with the hardware, but being able to program. It’s terrible. How does a hydrogen bond work? Why is an octet in the outer shell stable? All of these answers are basically “magic” in chemistry.

Sitting alone listening to love songs.

It’s what I do. Paramore don’t get much crap from people for some reason. They hit it big with Misery Business, Decode and The Only Exception, and they’re not getting the kind of bullshit that Avril Lavigne gets. Whenever Avril gets brought up, people say “I liked her early stuff, but she sucks now. She sold out.” Bull. Avril writes every bit as well as she always has, and her last record, Goodbye Lullaby, was an exercise in not selling out. Whatever. I just hate the double standard. Hayley sings worse than Avril, and writes music that’s no better than Avril’s, and her band is objectively less talented than Avril’s. I think the only difference is that Avril writes conventional songs, you know, like, with chords and normal progressions, whereas Hayley writes weird ass songs in drop C# that will stick out like a sore thumb as being very 2010 in about 10 years. That being said, I love Paramore, and I have a large print of a photo I took of Hayley Williams on my wall as we speak, which was a hit on Reddit, back when Reddit had only been uncool for about a year. 3200 views y’all.

Anyway, the love song. It’s probably the best rocking love song I’ve heard, and would appreciate any suggestions to the contrary. Still Into You.

Note to angry Paramore fans:

I know Paramore is a “band” and I try to keep that in my head, sometimes, except Hayley is the one signed to the contract, and she pays her bandmates from that. She also writes the songs, though Taylor has been helping her since Riot!, with help from Josh Farro for their first three records, and I think Jeremy has a credit on one of the new songs. We must note also that due to Paramore keeping a cohesive style in all four of their records and inter record singles despite the addition of York on Riot! and the departure of Josh Farro on the singles club, there is only one constant in the band’s writing and production process, and it must be significant to have kept all the other variables at a minimum. And, as Jeremy left the band just before AWKIF, Taylor joined just before BNE, and the Farros left before Singles, there is only one band member who has been there the whole time. And we know who that is. Hayley Williams. “Paramore is a band,” she says, but that’s only because she says so. The rest of us know what it really is. Hayley Williams.

The street of two Luxembourgs.

This is the terminus of Rue Des Deux Luxembourg in Athus. It goes on, obviously, into Rodange, but Google Street View hasn’t published its Luxembourg data. The two Luxembourgs are Luxembourg, the grand duchy, and Luxembourg, the province in Wallonia. The two were once one, but were separated in 1839 with the Third Partition of Luxembourg, Luxembourg’s largest loss of land in a long history of losses of land.

This region of Belgium has been particularly fond of Luxembourgish, or as we normal people call it “weird ass German” but since world war two, the fondness for the German dialect has dropped sharply. I wonder why. Regardless, in Pays d’Arlon, basically the area around the Arlon arrondissement, though I would also put Virton and Bastogne in here, Luxembourgish is still used commonly, and some street signs are even bilingual! This in itself is another challenge since Luxembourgish has no standard written form, and tends to just be spelled phonetically.

The official flag of the province is also based in the neighbouring country, with the same colours in the same position, though this is rarely used. I wonder if it’s not used for the same reason that Luxembourgish is falling out of favour. National pride, perhaps? Here’s the one I’ve seen.

Interesting, no? I do wonder where this comes from, as it’s also on Esch sur Alzette’s coat of arms.

The one on the Luxembourg coat of arms is actually pretty different. I’ll look more into this. And by the way, look at that coat of arms of Esch sur Alzette. How literal can you get?  There is this tower that Esch sur Alzette represents itself with, which, by the way, I’ve never seen, and I’ve looked, and it’s on top of water, presumably the Alzette. If you didn’t know, you could assume as much from the big Luxembourg things to either side of the tower. There wouldn’t be a tower like that on the Moselle or the Petrusse…though, admittedly, it could be on the Sure, which, coincidentally has a massive castle in a city called Esch sur Sure. The coat of arms of that city includes a pig hiding underneath a dildo tree. Not a joke.

I don’t even know what I wanted to point out here anymore.

You know, one day I’ll tell the exceptionally boring story of how I came to be such a big fan of Luxembourg. Here’s me and my dad in the capital like a billion years ago. I’m really attractive.

Call me old fashioned.

This is not a blog. This is some kind of website with news articles powered by a content management system that is optimized for blogs. Sorry, Skepchick, you’re just the best example.

This is a blog. It’s got an archive on the right, no blogroll, but that’s not that important, though I do like them, and it has a title, then a headline followed by the text. Then, you know what happens when you scroll down? More headlines and more text.

And another thing!

How have we let blogs be taken over by corporations and large companies? Even “new” internet companies like Gawker and Cnet and stuff are bloated and shit. Blogs should be personal. And some personal blogs, like Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy, are now run by magazines! Eugh! Internet, what’s happened to you?

Come on, dudes.